After school last Friday, I wasn’t expecting someone to check on me.  The bell had rung; most of the students were gone, and I was headed to my classroom.  As I walked across the hall, Carlos was standing by my door.  He’s a Social Studies teacher and a good friend.

“How you doing?” he asked.  The question caught me a little off guard.

I thought for a second, and at first, just gave him the easy, drive-by answer.

“Pretty good,” I said.  “How about you?”

When he started talking about Evergreen High School and Charlie Kirk, I realized he wasn’t looking for shallow “drive-by” answers.  He was really checking to see if I was okay.

He told me about how difficult the week had been for his students.  They had seen images they couldn’t unsee, and they’d heard about school shootings.  As he talked, I could hear in his voice the week was hard on him too.

“This is a broken world,” I said, looking down at the floor.

“And it doesn’t seem to be getting better,” he added.

We both lingered there, talking about division and people who stand by without offering to help, and then we talked about darkness—a topic we had discussed before.  Like one of JRR Tolkien’s terrifying faceless riders, it screams for our attention, and it’s hard to avoid the fear and despair it stirs up with all that noise.

“On top of everything else happening,” he said, “I’ve been covering September 11th.”

I shook my head, feeling for him, and he paused, wading through the heaviness of his thoughts.

“I showed my students pictures of what happened that day,” he said, looking me right in the eyes, “and most of them don’t really get to me except one.”

I waited there, leaning against the wall, eager to hear what he was going to say.

“There’s a picture of an abandoned fire truck,” he said, his voice slowing to hold back emotion.  “It’s surrounded by rubble, and all I can think about are the firemen who left it there.  They never came back.”

“They were brothers,” I whispered, and he nodded.

“I guess I’m used to covering September 11th,” he said, “but something kinda cool happened in one of my classes.”

That’s when he told me about his student approaching him.

She asked a simple question—“Mr. Cruz, you doing okay?”

She knew he’d been covering the terrorist attacks all day, so she thought she’d check on him—kind of like Carlos was checking on me.

He smiled at the memory of his student, and I smiled with him.

“It doesn’t seem like much,” he said, “but for some reason, it meant a lot.”

I walked away from that conversation, thinking through the week we just faced and honestly still trying to figure out how I was really doing.

I felt okay, but why?  Maybe it was because, like Carlos, I’d been given little moments of hope.  They had come in the nick of time, like Carlos’ student, and had settled my heart when the darkness screamed the loudest.

Emily Dickinson compares hope to birds.  She calls it “a thing with feathers that perches in the soul” and says it just keeps singing, even in the storms.

The storm raged all week, but that didn’t stop the subtle chirping of hope from breaking through all the noise.

I’m sure I heard it Monday morning during first period.

Two days before all the violence, I was reading student nominations for who should sit on the classroom couch, and when I read Fayth’s nomination, I was totally caught off guard.

“I pick Diana,” she wrote.  “Even though she isn’t as loud as everyone else, her ideas are amazing. . .”

Diana doesn’t try to get attention, so she doesn’t get the pats on the back and high-fives when people walk into class.  She’s an introvert among extroverts.

But Fayth wrote a nomination that made her feel seen, and every line lifted me up like the sweet sound of a songbird.

My heart heard that chirping again on Wednesday.

The same day guns were fired in Evergreen and Utah, a senior named Danica asked her peers to circle up their desks at lunch.  In between bites of their sandwiches and chips, they opened their Bibles and talked about the Spirit of God.  I had no idea about the hurricane of bad news about to hit, but I did know when I left that circle of desks, something made me want to dance.

Their hunger to know God exploded in that room like a chorus of birds welcoming the day.

And Friday, as my 8th period class was leaving the library, Sophia walked up to me.

“Mr. Ahnfeldt,” she said, “would you pray for my sister.”  Tears started to form in her eyes as she described the storm crushing her family.  She was another quiet girl, but the two of us acknowledged—right there in front of the circulation desk—the power of prayer.

The storm was raging, but when I saw Sophia’s faith, I knew hope was still alive, perched in her soul, and its music would lead us through.

Romans 15:13 says, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

That’s it!

Even when the darkness screamed like the faceless riders, the “thing with feathers” never stopped singing.  That whole difficult week, the thoughtfulness of students, a public school Bible study and a desperate prayer continued to bring their own kind of music in the face of all that was wrong in the world.  Hope was there, like birds sent from a father who loved me, and as my heart began to hear them sing, the screaming darkness lost its power and I found peace.

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