May 12, 2024
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It was 25 years ago that two gunmen killed 12 students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, a Denver suburb. The massacre was the deadliest K-12 shooting in U.S. history at the time, only to be surpassed by the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012.
One person whose life was changed forever by that massacre is Jenica Thornby. Although she was completely unharmed physically, what took place that day altered the course of her life forever – and I am not talking about the psychological trauma she had suffered. At the time of the shooting she was 16 years old. Throughout her freshman and sophomore years at Columbine High School, Jenica Thornby went to the library every single day. “Not one day went by that I did not go to the library,” Thornby recently told EWTN News reporter Catherine Hadro. “Except one day.” That day was April 20, 1999. “I was 16 years old, and I was sitting in my art class when all of a sudden I had this overwhelming urge to leave school,” she recalled. “I just over [and over] in my head kept repeating, ‘There’s no way I’m staying here. There’s no way that anyone’s going to talk me into staying.’”
According to her words to the reporter, Thornby convinced a friend to leave campus with her — they could go study at a local restaurant instead, she told her friend — and the two left school in Thornby’s new car that she had just driven to school for the first time that day. “The moment we turned on the car and started to leave the parking lot and drive away, I looked in my rearview mirror and noticed hundreds and hundreds of schoolmates of mine just running out of the school, and we had no idea what had happened,” she recalled. “We thought maybe it was a fire drill, but we didn’t understand.”
“Reflecting back, I knew that was something beyond me.” After leaving campus in her car that day, as the events unfolded, she learned that 10 of the 12 students killed were in the library. In the aftermath, she was constanclt haunted by the question: ‘Why did I survive?’” A year after the shootings, a friend invited Thornby, who grew up without any faith, to the local Catholic church. When she was 18, she was invited to Eucharistic adoration. She eventually attended Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, and was received into the Catholic Church when she was 19 years old, on March 30, 2002. After college she did missionary work and one day, she picked up a book by Father Benedict Groeschel. “He said, ‘Instead of asking God why something happened, ask God, what would you have me do?’ And so instead of reflecting on my life, why did this happen? … Why did the shootings happen? I started to pray and ask God, okay, what would you have me do?” Eventually Thornby discerned life as a religious sister and is now a member of the Disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ in Prayer Town, Texas.
When a tragedy happens to us, the question should be, "Lord, what do You want me to do now?" Never ask the Why question - it's the least unhelpful. Instead, in your heart, know that, ultimately, "The arc of God's plan for my life is long, but it always bends toward my own good!"
Padre