I have been meaning to write a few words about the savage shooting on the campus of Northern Illinois University last week – but at first I had nothing helpful or insightful to say. I still don’t, but I recently learned that our good friends the Marcheses (Paul is a former student of mine, and I participated in his high school choir’s Christmas concert this past December) live a mile from where the shootings occurred. The thought of this violence erupting so close to them left me chilled right to the bone. In a recent email, Paul also shared an interesting story. In the immediate wake of the shooting, he was of course greatly relieved to know that his wife and two children were fine. . . but the next day at choir rehearsal, when one of his students came up to him for a run-of-the-mill hug, Paul emotionally went to pieces. Something about hugging this young person made him so potently aware of the preciousness of every life in that room and of how life can be so much more fragile and transient than we could ever imagine it to be. Paul is not at all inclined to emotional moments like that in front of his choir- and probably was a bit self-conscious to have revealed his pain in that way – so publicly and so unexpectedly. But what a statement to those young men and women in that room . . . that it’s okay to cry . . . and even more importantly, that he cares about them in a way that probably most of them would never have imagined. Incidents like the one in DeKalb have a way of making such things clear.