A young girl, barely 15, wakes up shaking from a nightmare intruding into her San Diego bedroom.  Her friends lay dead at her feet.  She sits up in bed and stares at the wall for a moment, breathes deep, trying to collect her thoughts.  Was it a just a nightmare or was it a warning?  She wanders down to the kitchen for breakfast and tells her dad the dream.  A deeply spiritual man, a former pastor, he notes her distress, ponders the dream, then talks it over with his daughter.  They pray for peace to comfort the girl, for her friends, and most of all, for his daughter’s protection.  They discuss whether she should go to school and conclude, together, that she should go.

 The mother of two children in a high school named Santana, an Episcopalian given to prayer, senses something like premonitions over the last two weeks, forebodings resting heavily on her shoulders then lifting as mysteriously as they came, concern for her children.  The weekend felt particularly unsettling. 

 Another teenager, a tall giant of a boy, who sees angels from time to time, spends a Sunday somewhat depressed.  His faith makes him feel like an alien to his peers.  That and the fact that he has no father at home.  He eats his way to comfort, takes to the couch and wonders how the weekend disappeared so quickly into the television set.  Tomorrow, he sighs, is another Monday, the first day of a long and lonely week at school.

 A woman worshipping during a conference in Kansas City on a Saturday night suddenly finds herself caught up in a vision and sees what appears to be the San Diego news broadcast, her hometown, teenagers weeping, chaos.  Enough.  She falls to her knees and weeps and prays.  Later that night in her hotel room tears leak from the corners of her eyes as she says to her traveling companion, I am going home to a major violent incidence.  I think it will happen at my school in San Diego.

 Exhausted from the conference, the woman returns home in time for a good Sunday afternoon nap to recharge before facing another workweek as a Safe and Drug Free Schools specialist and sometimes counselor.  Monday morning, she drives to work in north San Diego County and walks into the administrator’s meeting with the principal, vice principal, counselors and lead teacher.  The meeting is interrupted as the secretary pops her head in the door.  There has been a shooting at Santana High School in East County.  Someone from the County Office of Education was calling to alert all the county schools that there may be some fallout from parents and students. 

 The meeting ends and the woman drives over to the district office to turn on the news.  But she knows already that she had watched that broadcast on the Saturday night prior during the conference.  A mixture of relief and grief wash over her - relief that it did not happen on her campus, and grief not because she knows what the students are experiencing, but because she did not take time to pray and intercede after seeing the vision.  She had taken a nap instead.

 Two days later, the woman arrives on the Santana High School campus in anticipation of assisting with the campus adjustment to the first day back.  She is one of the many mental health counselors called to the school to debrief staff and students on their first day back.  It is also her second critical incidence response involving a school situation of national significance.  She knows how to help the parents…a population the school often overlooks when dealing with the kids…and asks God to schedule the divine appointments with parents and staff for the day.  She doesn’t know how to help the kids.  No one does.  

 The high school gym is full of counselors from various schools in the district, county mental health staff, Red Cross trained clergy in disaster response, federal office of education bigwigs, Los Angeles County Office of Education experts in critical incident response.  They prep the counselors for what’s to come.  The students will arrive and go to their first period class.  A counselor will stand with every teacher in every classroom and take the students through a debriefing exercise which will hopefully, help mitigate the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and give some initial structure to the school day as everyone struggles to process the event.  Other counselors will stand near the areas where students lay wounded or dead only 48 hours ago and watch out for severely traumatized kids, then steer them towards the library where trauma specialists will talk with them.  Yet other counselors will watch for parents who need to talk. 

the unmistakable presence of 

angels seem close at hand

 The woman leaves the gym and takes up her counseling station near the front of the school.  She watches the students file onto campus almost silently, fearfully as if waking up from a nightmare, stunned to find that daylight has washed the blood away.  They go quickly to their classes and glance furtively at the invasion of counselors standing around like sentinels guarding their emotions.  Over an hour later, they emerge from their classes and descend on the quad.  Boys point out the spots where a friend had fallen dead or wounded.  Girls collapse into the arms of boys sobbing into their sweatshirts. Girls cling to one another weeping as they walk near the bathroom the shooter used as his bunker, their imaginations registering the shooters’ motions as he ducked inside to reload then emerged again to fire, their eyes resting on the flowers stacked outside the restroom.  Girls crying.  Boys bewildered.  Flowers everywhere as if the campus had been converted to a funeral home.  They will heal one another.  The counselors are only in their way for now.

 Moms and dads loiter, waiting for their kids to get out of class so they can help, if necessary, gather up the emotional pieces of their young lives and whisk them safely back home.  The boy giant seems relieved that his mother is there despite telling her he was ok to go to school.  Big boys and girls regress into little children under duress. The boys are fine, of course.  They always are…until their emotions whither and die from lack of expression and they snap.  The girls are not fine.  Their emotions are allowed.  Our society allows them to console each other unlike the boys.  Some kids walk over to parents to reassure them and send them home.  They really seem to be coping well.  Their parents are not.  The counselor had already talked with several of the parents.  She feels like she knows them, is one of them, traumatized like the rest of them now that she has listened and watched the reliving of terror on their faces, in their gestures, through the voice tremors of children and adults.  It was like taking a peek through the doors of hell that some careless person had left ajar.

 Strangely, though, few on campus that first day back seem angry with the shooter, young Andy Williams.  Somehow, they understand.  We are all at fault.  We all loaded the bullets into the boy’s gun.  And our prayerlessness left the doors of hell ajar.

 Despite the grief, the little rivers of salt water spilling from the eyes of youth, purifying the campus, the unmistakable presence of angels seem close at hand.  Angels on the devil’s playground have begun reclaiming the campus.  A boy kneels to pray in the quad, unashamedly.  A group gathers by the flagpole for a prayer rally.  Being a Christian is suddenly cool.  Mothers talk about their premonitions and prayers, learn what signs to watch for in their children’s’ emotions that mean danger, express the shock they felt when they heard the news as their children called from cell phones while locked classrooms – Mom, there is a shooter on campus…and rushed into the scene in hopes of finding their children alive and well.  The counselor listens to their terror of not finding them for hours as some walked home or to others’ homes.  She hears of the yelling of parents to one another in the immediate aftermath – Your kid’s ok.  The other kids saw him walk home!  The sobbing of mother and child with relief or grief.  They replay their thoughts and scenes as if recalling a play that some director in poor taste had dared stage on this campus.  A play they would likely have titled “The Devil’s Playground” after the havoc wreaked on innocence.

 But there are angels on the devil’s playground.  They show up in response to prayer.  The counselor is certain of that for in the aftermath of disaster people across the nation tend to focus their prayers on the hotspot and God draws near to the brokenhearted, releasing ministering spirits in force.  She feels their presence containing the grief, blanketing the campus with peace and comfort.  But they arrived too late for Santana High.  The devil had already come onto the playground through one teenager whose heart had already withered and died, and destroyed the trust and innocence of over 1900 teens through repetitive gunfire, pools of blood, screams, all that Evil delights to accomplish.  Then he took his final bow with a sickening grin of satisfaction and wandered down the road a few miles to his next playground, the next closest high school, and his next teenage victim who would be his playmate in destruction.

 This shooting is a wake up call, the counselor thinks.  So many people she talked to on campus that first day back had sensed the impending doom before it happened.  She wonders:

What if…

they had all taken time to pray and their prayers had opened the windows of heaven and God released angels to guard the campus before the devil took his cue? 

What if…

every community made prayer for their local schools a daily activity?  Especially doubled in effort when the dreams and visions and premonitions first begin? 

What if …

we all took those spiritual warnings seriously and got on the phone to anyone who would listen and begin to pray?   Who would have control of the playground then?  Could prayer stop the wanderings of the Evil One from school to school?

It’s worth a try. 

Listen and heed the warnings of the Spirit.  Then pray.  Your life or the lives of others may depend on it.