The day God froze Amarillo, Texas just for me was Black Friday, 2015.
I'd studied myself into a rather dark corner of mind. A mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon had caused the heated debate on gun control to wake from its troubled nap. Wanting to address the subject via YouTube video, I did research on several spree killers and mass shootings. I recorded the video and uploaded it to YouTube on October 15, 2015. But reading about all of these men who had slaughtered other people in public rampages caused my mind much grief and worry.
But I didn't have the nerve to be surprised.
I began analyzing every place I went, wondering if the next mass shooting would occur there, and how I could shield people with my own body. I eyed anyone who looked shifty or disturbed – though most of the gunmen were described as calm during their killing sprees, as if their rage, illness, and isolation was being weaned by the sound of death.
With Black Friday approaching the day after Thanksgiving, and knowing it to be the biggest and most chaotic shopping day of the year, traditionally, it instantly clicked in my mind to go to the Westgate Mall, where a mass shooting would take place. My mind had decided that someone was going to unleash horror with a semi-automatic rifle at the mall that day – it was an indisputable fact already, as if the event had already been recorded. All that was missing was my being there to try to disarm the shooter, or protect someone else from death by giving my own life. Then, in the trending news, with the callous irony the media loves, one story would read, “Amarillo Victim Posted YouTube Video About Gun Laws One Month Before Shooting.”
"Vanity, says the preacher."
November 27th would be the day I died. But as Thanksgiving wound to a close, a merciless slew of winter-like weather moved into the area. The next day, the city was frozen. Very few vehicles traveled over the ice-covered streets. No one was going shopping in this Goliath.
Slowly, less quickly as my mind had predicted the shooting and my death, it occurred to me that God had assigned this frigid weather for this city for this day, for me. He had frozen an entire city, rendered it to look like the barrenness of death, to show me what a mind that dwelt on death would look life if it were a place – activity and life everywhere, but all of it locked up for fear of the danger and the cold.
I don't know if a shooting would have occurred at the Westgate Mall on Black Friday. It certainly hasn't happened heretofore. I'm convinced that God predestined that day's weather for me, a troubled and unprofitable servant.
Why couldn't He? Why wouldn't He?
A couple of weeks later, a brother and sister in Christ gave me some money so that I could pay some bills and do some Christmas shopping. I walked that mall in peace as the city basked in the bright near-winter sunshine, made so much brighter by its reflection from the pure white snow of God.
I'd studied myself into a rather dark corner of mind. A mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon had caused the heated debate on gun control to wake from its troubled nap. Wanting to address the subject via YouTube video, I did research on several spree killers and mass shootings. I recorded the video and uploaded it to YouTube on October 15, 2015. But reading about all of these men who had slaughtered other people in public rampages caused my mind much grief and worry.
But I didn't have the nerve to be surprised.
I began analyzing every place I went, wondering if the next mass shooting would occur there, and how I could shield people with my own body. I eyed anyone who looked shifty or disturbed – though most of the gunmen were described as calm during their killing sprees, as if their rage, illness, and isolation was being weaned by the sound of death.
With Black Friday approaching the day after Thanksgiving, and knowing it to be the biggest and most chaotic shopping day of the year, traditionally, it instantly clicked in my mind to go to the Westgate Mall, where a mass shooting would take place. My mind had decided that someone was going to unleash horror with a semi-automatic rifle at the mall that day – it was an indisputable fact already, as if the event had already been recorded. All that was missing was my being there to try to disarm the shooter, or protect someone else from death by giving my own life. Then, in the trending news, with the callous irony the media loves, one story would read, “Amarillo Victim Posted YouTube Video About Gun Laws One Month Before Shooting.”
"Vanity, says the preacher."
November 27th would be the day I died. But as Thanksgiving wound to a close, a merciless slew of winter-like weather moved into the area. The next day, the city was frozen. Very few vehicles traveled over the ice-covered streets. No one was going shopping in this Goliath.
Slowly, less quickly as my mind had predicted the shooting and my death, it occurred to me that God had assigned this frigid weather for this city for this day, for me. He had frozen an entire city, rendered it to look like the barrenness of death, to show me what a mind that dwelt on death would look life if it were a place – activity and life everywhere, but all of it locked up for fear of the danger and the cold.
I don't know if a shooting would have occurred at the Westgate Mall on Black Friday. It certainly hasn't happened heretofore. I'm convinced that God predestined that day's weather for me, a troubled and unprofitable servant.
Why couldn't He? Why wouldn't He?
A couple of weeks later, a brother and sister in Christ gave me some money so that I could pay some bills and do some Christmas shopping. I walked that mall in peace as the city basked in the bright near-winter sunshine, made so much brighter by its reflection from the pure white snow of God.
