Rachel Scott was having lunch with a friend outside Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 when classmates Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris approached and fired several gunshots, wounding them. As Rachel tried to crawl away, Harris lifted her by her hair and asked, “Do you believe in God?”
“You know I do,” she answered.
“Then go be with him,” he said, and shot her in the head.
She was the first to die in the horror that was only beginning.
In the year before her murder, Rachel, 17, had gone deeper in her relationship with God. She struggled with the same temptations as other teens, but something had changed. She had become kinder to others, including students like Dylan and Eric, part of the “trench coat mafia” who dressed in black, listened to nihilistic music, played violent video games and hated Christ and Christians. In an Internet video, Klebold said, “Thank God they crucified that a______.”
Rachel suffered the pain of loneliness when friends at the school near Denver shunned her because of her faith, but she accepted the cost.
In one of her journal entries, dated exactly one year to the day before she died, she wrote: “I am not going to apologize for speaking the Name of Jesus, I am not going to justify my faith to them, and I am not going to hide the light that God has put into me. If I have to sacrifice everything . . . I will.” A few days later, she wrote: “This will be my last year, Lord. I have gotten what I can. Thank you.”
She often told friends she believed she wouldn’t live long enough to marry or have children.
Sometime after she died, her father, Darrell Scott, received a call from a stranger in Ohio. The man said, “You’ll probably think I’m crazy when I tell you why I called, but I have had a recurring dream about your daughter.”
In his dream, the man said, he had seen a stream of tears flowing from Rachel’s eyes, and they were watering something, but he couldn’t see what it was. Would that mean anything to him or his family?
No it wouldn’t, Darrell said, but he took down the man’s number and promised to call if it ever did.
He forgot about the call until seven days later when the sheriff’s office called to tell him he could pick up the contents of his daughter’s bullet-riddled backpack.
Sitting in his truck, Darrell sorted through her belongings and read her last diary. When he got to the last page, there was a picture she had drawn the morning she was murdered. It was of a pair of eyes crying, and the 13 tears turned to drops of blood as they watered a rose that grew out of a Columbine plant.
Thirteen was the number of victims that Harris and Klebold killed before taking their own lives.
The drawing is included in “Rachel’s Tears,” a book Darrell Scott and Rachel’s mother, Beth Nimmo, coauthored and published in 2000.
I heard Scott tell his story to a crowd of thousands at the Ichthus Festival in Wilmore in April 2002, days after a similar deadly rampage happened at a school in Germany.
He believed his daughter knew she would be used by God for something good. She had said she would touch millions of lives around the world. The day of her funeral, CNN had its largest audience ever.
Rachel believed little acts of kindness could make a big difference as others paid them forward.
“I have a theory that if one person will go out of their way to show compassion, it will start a chain reaction of the same,” she wrote.
Ironically, Harris had also used the phrase “chain reaction” in one of his hate-filled messages: “We need to start a revolution,” he said. “We need to get a chain reaction going here.”
Eric Harris’ revolution, though, leads to eternal perdition. Rachel chose to join a revolution of love that leads to eternal life.
Saturday, April 20, was the 25th anniversary of the Columbine massacre in Colorado. A version of this commentary was published several years ago by The Winchester Sun. Some of the photographs are from the website for Rachel’s Challenge.
