Becky Sargent/The Falcon

Last year, April 16 served as a tragic wakeup call for colleges around the nation. The killings at Virginia Tech shocked a country, and universities quickly reevaluated their emergency plans. Last week, a chilling reminder of our humanity hit another college campus, this time in the form of a 27-year-old graduate student who killed five students before killing himself at Northern Illinois University (NIU).

As the aftermath settles, police are still trying to find out why the gunman did what he did, and NIU students and faculty are coping with the loss of peers and friends. Whatever motives lie behind such a terrible act, the necessity for genuine community should be a natural response.

The purpose of a university is to be a place where students can engage in the exchange of ideas, and be challenged to find their intellectual and spiritual centers. A university should be a place of safety.

I'm not suggesting that security is beefed up across the nation. That will only increase paranoia and unease when students walk to class. What I'm suggesting is that students invest in one another's lives to create an environment where everyone feels welcome.

I'm not arguing that a greater sense of community would have stopped either shooting, but it should be the response of our university, both for students here and at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois.

As removed as Seattle Pacific is from both Virginia and Illinois, we should not dismiss the events as something tragic but not worth thinking too much about. SPU students should realize that an event like this can happen anywhere, and in doing so, should strive to create the sort of welcoming community to which Christ calls us.

SPU needs to join together as a community, believers or not, to pray for those at Northern Illinois. We must be willing to share the heartbreak they feel, and to encourage them in a time of need. As a university that claims to represent Christ, we should be willing to present a formal response to NIU students that conveys the heartbreak we feel for them, and the commitment towards loving them and helping them rebuild their community.

As a Christian university, there is a lot of talk about community, but not a lot of action coming from the student body to generate it. Sure, there are groups, cadres, floors, majors or dorms, but oftentimes, students become too distracted with the details of their lives to know each other outside of those contexts. We need to be reaching out of those groups, cadres, floors, majors and dorms in order to find and welcome the strangers in our midst.

I don't want to discount the work that Peer Advisers or Student Ministry Coordinators do to generate community on their floors, but it should be important to also encourage students to live outside the SPU bubble, encountering and welcoming those outside the community to join our lives.

This could be as simple as having lunch next to someone you don't know, or buying coffee for the person behind you in line in the SUB. Our faith commands us to love. It's as simple and as incredibly difficult as that. As Christians, we are told to love our enemies. If we can claim to love our enemies, surely we can love those who are hurting around us?

We should love everyone who steps foot on our campus, and the rest of Seattle will begin to take notice. This needs to be the start of a larger response to the need for community on college campuses nationwide.

SPU must respond to the students at Northern Illinois University. What that looks like, I'm not sure. Maybe it looks like students talking about how the shootings impact them. Maybe it looks like prayer groups for victims. Maybe it looks like joining with the University of Washington and Seattle University to know the students on their campuses.

Whatever it is, something needs to change. SPU should be passionate about addressing issues that impact students in our nation. We must join together and deal with our world by loving it, not just stopping for a minute to think about it.

Let's love those who lost friends and peers in the NIU tragedy, and then figure out ways to love everyone on SPU's campus we don't know yet.

Chances are they're right next to you.