Where were you at 830 on Monday night... When shots rang out over the campus of Michigan State University?

Did your phone ping with a news notification?

Did a friend text you?

Did you see it on a TV news bulletin?

Did you immediately think of friends you have on campus? Friends of friends?

Did you think of the last time you'd been in East Lansing, as a sports fan?

The parent or grandparent of a student?

Or a student yourself?

After all, we're not talking about Boise State or Cal State - this is our school, Michigan State...

Just 14 months after the same thing happened at Oxford High School, just up the road, you and I are plunged, yet again, into a miasma of stunning confusion, raw anger, gut-wrenching sadness,  and genuine surprise: how, why, what to do?

2,000 years ago a trio of the innocent watched in speechless awe as a similarly incomprehensible, life-altering event unfolded on a mountaintop in the Middle East - the Transfiguration, which we will hear more about on Sunday, was an event equally confusing, disabling, and void of any sort of immediate understanding.

And those who witnessed this event were forced to do what you and I are doing - to find some way down this mountain of serious emotional distress - and somehow make our way back into a dangerous and unpredictable world still in need of desperate reform.

Those early disciples used that event to inspire and fuel reform that brought remarkable change to the world - more vast, life-giving, permanent and positive than the world had ever seen.

In their confusion and pain, they resolved to follow the light, the light of God, who held them through the darkness, the pain, the loss - and guided them to places of action - of healing, restoration, and reform.

We all know we have a problem.

We are all looking for a solution.

Can we look to Jesus as an icon of hope - who shapes the stunned and confused into the bold and the brave - who turns pain into purpose, and just might, through this unspeakably evil act, be equipping you and me to be the change we want to see?

Mountain top moments don't come along very often.

Let's not waste them.