Posted October 16, 2026
Around 1:00 in the afternoon on Thursday, a sixteen-year-old shot through the locks on the doors to the Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon. He then proceeded to kill three students and one teacher before a local bystander who’d noticed him enter the building shot him. As of this writing, another student and teacher are alive but wounded from the attack.
Police responded quickly to the flood of 911 calls, arriving at the school only a few minutes after the shooter entered. However, by that point, he was already dead. The surviving students were then taken to a nearby church, where they were reunited with their families.
Officials have yet to release more information on the shooter, his potential motives, or the weapon used, though law enforcement sources suspect it was a shotgun.
Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler spoke for many when she told reporters,
A school should be a safe place where children can learn and feel secure. What happened today should never happen. Like so many in our community, I’m struggling to make sense of a loss that feels unimaginable.
Perhaps you’re feeling the same way. I know dropping my kids off at school will feel different today than it did yesterday, even though what happened in Oregon is unlikely to have any direct impact on our lives here in Texas. Still, I imagine the parents who are grieving the loss of their children, as well as those who will have to try and explain what happened to the ones who survived, thought much the same yesterday morning.
So, what do we do with those feelings?
The churchy answer—which also happens to be the correct one, in this case—is to take them to the Lord. But the truth is, tragedies like this can make it hard to seek comfort from a God who could have stopped them and didn’t. What do we do then?
In a previous article, I argued that suffering is not only redeemable but necessary in light of God’s goodness. I still believe that’s the case, but tragedies like yesterday’s shooting are among the most difficult to view through that lens, even if they are also when it’s most necessary to do so. As I’ve thought and prayed about how to do that, though, I felt like the Lord brought two thoughts to mind that I hadn’t considered before.
At the end of the day, God’s omniscience means that he knew this attack would happen, and his omnipotence means that he was more than capable of stopping it. As a result, it’s completely valid to ask why he didn’t. But the new thought—at least, new to me—was that if God bears any sense of responsibility for the lives that were lost, then he bears at least some responsibility for the lives that were saved as well.
The shooter managed to kill four people in under three minutes, and it could have been so much worse. While we don’t know much about the bystander who stopped him, what are the odds that someone who was not only armed but brave and capable enough to intervene would happen to be near the school as that sixteen-year-old broke in? How many more might have died if he hadn’t risked his own life to stop him?
Moreover, how many more would-be shooters are stopped by friends, family, or other people in their lives who notice them heading down that path and choose to intervene before they ever make it on campus? Thursday’s attack was the first mass shooting in a school since a fourteen-year-old killed four in Winder, Georgia, more than two years ago. It seems unlikely he was the first to consider it, though, and it is right to thank God that more haven’t done the same.
Again, that does not mean it’s wrong to have questions and doubts in the aftermath of a tragedy like this, but if we’re inclined to blame God for the four who died, then we should also thank him for the nearly five hundred who survived.
That said, it can still be difficult not to give the tragedy more weight than the blessing, though. And that basic impulse is important as well.
The second direction God took me as I reflected on the tragedy of this shooting is how strangely natural it seems for the negative to hold our attention rather than the positive. I think at least part of the reason why that’s the case is that enough of who God created us to be still exists in all of us to recognize that this world is broken.
If God weren’t real and this world was simply the result of random chance, then there would be no reason for us to be this shattered by something like a school shooting. That kind of tragedy would simply be an expected part of living in this fallen, depraved world.
But that’s not the case. Rather, being appalled at something like this is seen as a basic test of our humanity. And there’s no logical reason why that should be the case outside of the fact that a shred of that imago Dei with which we were all created still cries out against such violence and loss of life.
That someone was willing to shoot up an elementary school shows that it is possible for sin to break us so completely that the image of God in our lives is all but buried. But that’s the exception rather than the rule, and it’s important to recognize that fact.
Again, none of this is meant to keep us from asking the hard questions about why God would let something like this happen. Those are entirely fair and appropriate, and the Lord is not offended by our asking them. But that grief is also a reminder that we were created for so much more than this world can offer, and the desire for what only God can provide is still woven deep inside each of us.
Perhaps at least part of the way God will redeem the Silver Rail shooting is by using it to awaken those desires on the other side of the grief and fear endemic to this moment. So, with that possibility in mind, let’s conclude for today by taking some time to pray.
If this list is something you need to come back to throughout the day, that’s fine. Just don’t rush through it. After all, those who are hurting deserve more than empty thoughts and a quick prayer. Let’s make sure our prayers reflect that fact.
“The true wonder of human beings is not that we are sinners, but that even in our sin we are haunted by goodness, that even in the mud we can never wholly forget the stars.” —William Barclay
The post Searching for God in the Oregon school shooting appeared first on Denison Forum.
