Nothing unusual happened, no red flags were flying. Business was slower than usual so after I did my closing duties, I clocked out. After work, I went home, turned on Netflix and ate a BLT sandwich. After being home an hour or two, I logged onto Facebook only to see a post from my manager mentioning that a gun was held to his head that night.
Pretty scary, right?
When I woke up this morning, my mother kindly informed me that I wouldn't be returning to work for the rest of the week. She believes my safety is in jeopardy and is worried about the possibilities that could occur if I choose to return.
After tragedies strike, it's natural to get scared. It's natural to want to avoid places of pain. It's scary when somewhere that we go everyday becomes the scene of the crime and you could have easily been a victim. It's easy to play the games of "What if I would have there?" "What if something could have happened to me or someone I know?"
After the Colorado movie theatre shooting, the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, and the Boston Marathon bombing, people began to freak out.
Should we stop sending children to school? College kids to work? Athletes to their dream race? Families to the movie theatres?
The real question is--should we let fear dictate the way we live our lives?
I believe that we should not intentionally put ourselves in compromising situations, but we cannot live life afraid. I'm not looking to debate gun control.
Mom, I just want you to know that I'm much more likely to have a car wreck on the way to work than for my store to be held at gunpoint.
Every second we are on this earth, we are dying. We are talking on our cell phones and lying out in the sun and subjecting ourselves to the possibility of cancer. We walk out to get the mail and risk our lives in oncoming traffic. No matter how safe we are, there will always be circumstances that are out of our control that could prove detrimental.
Don't let one bad event ruin anything for you. Don't let a tragedy keep you out of your own home or your former comfort zone. Of course, though, you should never do anything to cause your personal healing process to regress, but only seek experiences that will cause you to move on from whatever trauma you experienced.
Nothing is worse than when a safe place is no longer safe to us, but does that mean we hide away from society and live in an underground shelter as in Blast From the Past ? I don't think so.
We are called to live much greater lives than that. We are called to live lives not where we flirt with disaster, but where we face our fears and anxieties head on. We all must believe that the world is a good place even though there are bad people.
Eleanor Roosevelt said, "You must do the thing you think you cannot."
So tomorrow, I'm going back to work despite any anxiety my mother or I might have. I look back at the first time I went back to school in high school after receiving a concussion from a teammate. I look at all the times in life that I put on my big girl panties and did not let an uncomfortable situation ruin life for me.
And if I can do these things, I might as well go sky-diving, er, well, at least keep my summer job.
*Photo credit: http://www.waaytv.com/news/local/florence-sonic-robbed-at-gunpoint/article_ff3218f6-e7d9-11e2-a309-0019bb30f31a.html
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