Blood on the floor

There is blood on the floor of my church.

Five days ago, a man pulled into the parking lot of the chapel where the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church meets for worship. He sat in a pew during the 10AM service. He barely said a word to anyone.

After the service ended, he wandered the campus for while, aimless, looking lost. A lady from the front office spotted him and kindly asked if he needed help. He said he was just taking a look around, and he was okay.

At some point during his wandering, the man stashed several bags in dark corners of the church. Among other things, the bags contained multiple boxes of ammunition and at least four Molotov cocktail-style explosives.

Sometime after 12PM, the man casually entered Simpson Hall, where a luncheon was being held for a former ITPC pastor. He took a place at the table. He ate and drank with the forty or so people inside, mostly older residents of nearby retirement communities.

Nearly an hour later, he got up from the table, went over to the double doors and chained them shut. He put super glue on all the locks. Then he pulled out a 9mm handgun and began shooting.

For nearly a decade, ITPC has held their morning services in the chapel of my home church — Geneva Presbyterian Church. Some of their parishioners speak limited English, and almost none of our congregation knows Taiwanese (or Mandarin). Their service starts half an hour before Geneva’s, but frequently takes up to two hours to finish. The upshot of this is that our congregation rarely mixes with theirs. We’ve had at least one combined service with them in the past. I’ve said hello to them a few times and tried once to talk to someone, but they had no idea what I was trying to say.

There was one memorable instance from several years ago, when I was the sound tech for Geneva’s worship service. Somehow, one of the audio channels had picked up the Taiwanese pastor’s microphone. I was trying to find the channel for a handheld mic that wasn’t labeled on the board (I was not a very good sound guy). I saw sound coming through on that channel and decided to turn it up. The sanctuary was suddenly filled with the sound of animated preaching — in Taiwanese. The whole room got a good laugh out of it.

Now I can see that our congregations have been worlds apart for far too long. Language should not be a barrier between us. We worship the same God. We even use the same buildings. I got married in the chapel that ITPC uses for their morning service. I’ve been running around in Simpson Hall since I was a toddler.

And now there’s blood on the floor of Simpson Hall.

There was a body lying on that carpet just five days ago. The body belonged to a man who tackled the shooter, preventing him from hurting many others. This man’s name was Dr. John Cheng.

There were many heroes in the room that day. The heroes included Dr. Cheng, ITPC’s former pastor Billy Chang, and several other ITPC members who also leapt onto the gunman, pinned him down, and hogtied him with electrical cords. These people have been rightly praised for the courage they showed. I could not have asked for better people to represent my home church to the world. ITPC deserves all the credit for that.

There are so many things that can be said, so many ways that our churches need to heal. First and foremost, I can’t even pretend to understand what ITPC’s members or the families of the victims are going through this week. I’m grateful nobody I know was there, and deeply saddened by the losses they experienced. I hope they are greatly blessed and able to find peace. I am not trying to speak for them and I wouldn’t presume to do that.

But as a member of Geneva, for the past several days, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the blood on the floor. It feels… wrong. Like a violation of something that’s very close to my heart.

I have so many memories of that building from when I was a kid. We had several “lock-ins” in that room — where the youth group would all stay overnight, eat popcorn, watch movies and play games for hours. We used to do a Wednesday night meeting for kids of all grades, called Logos. Each grade would split into groups for their own mini-meetings. But before that happened, we would all have dinner together in Simpson Hall.

In later years, Simpson Hall became the place where the contemporary service (a typical modern church service) was held. I used to play drums in the band. My sister used to sing and lead worship. If she had been up on stage last Sunday, she would have stood only feet from a bag full of bullets and Molotov cocktails.

It does not feel right to say that Simpson Hall was the site of a murder; even worse, a mass shooting. It’s hard to even believe it’s true. Yet, it is true. The house where I’ve worshiped God so many times has become a crime scene.

Sin has very great power in this world. It can bring devastation to innocent lives in the blink of an eye. Even the places that we feel most at home can become scenes of appalling tragedy. This world is ruled by sin, and there is nowhere that is safe from its defiling touch.

Even in our deepest hearts — the place where God dwells within us — sin has left its horrible stains of death and destruction. Our hearts are full of blood and violence. We ourselves are temples that have been defiled. We can try to clean and scrub our own hearts, but the stains will not come out. It sometimes seems hopeless that they could ever be clean again.

Yet there is hope for our hearts. There is hope for Geneva. Our hope is that Jesus Christ is able to wash us and make us truly clean.

On the cross, Jesus became a curse for us. He willingly traded His spotless life for our hopelessly stained consciences. He became sin so that we could become righteousness. By faith in Jesus, our hearts are fully cleansed from death and decay.

And afterward, Jesus rose from the dead. This proved to the world that He has total and complete power over death. In His resurrected life, we are a brand new creation. There is no longer any trace of condemnation for us. Every day, our minds and souls are being renewed. Though our sins were like scarlet, they have been made white as snow.

So I pray that the life of Geneva from here on out will be transformed by the cleansing work of Jesus. I hope that as we look beyond the tragic events of this weekend, we will see grace on every horizon. Even as we struggle and grieve alongside ITPC, we should remember that this life is not the end of the story. Jesus is the Author of life, and He is not done writing yet. He conquered death once and for all, so that we can have eternal hope and joy with Him.

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“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:9

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” 2 Corinthians 5:17