I did not know him. He was not a close friend, not a next door neighbor, nobody close to me, no one I knew. Yet it seemed to hit me, I felt bad, down. The thought of it was horrifying, I could not accept it but it had happened. It was certainly something hard to wrap your mind around...
Yesterday was what looked like an ordinary day. I did not have school and so of course I slept, a lot. I woke up at around 2:00 pm, I did not even have breakfast, I basically woke up for lunch. I ate something, sat down on the computer screen, did some homework and continually texted someone quite some times. Time flew, and before I knew it, "it's 6:30pm!" Time for work. I entered at 7:00pm, and like everything ordinary expected on this day I sold some whoppers, made some people happy, and thought about a certain someone - plain old ordinary. However, on that day my boss received a strange phone call. This was no ordinary phone call for his faced blanked out, turned into a frown and made him leave to the back of the store in order to speak in peace. When he finished, half an hour later, he told me all about it.
His name was Solomon Jr. As stated before I did not know him, he was not related to me. That being said, his story still shook my world. He was influenced by his cousin to enter a house, the window was open and he jumped in. According to the information provided by my boss, he was not the kind of kid that would do something like this. Regardless, he did, and the outcome was the worst imaginable.
Solomon was shot twice as he was leaving the house, one shot on a leg, the other one on his lower back. He managed to run a couple of blocks but he soon collapsed on the floor, medics immediately arrived and he was rushed to the hospital. This all happened on Monday and he was in a comma since then. The mysterious call my boss had received was from his wife telling him that Taz (as his friends called him) had passed away. I was in shock, I did not know what to say, he was only sixteen years old.
I acknowledge that what he did was wrong, it was after all an attempted burglary, I don't believe however that he deserved to die. My boss asked for my phone so he could check Taz's Facebook, when he found it he called me and we read through some of the comments on his wall. It was heartbreakingly to read, so many comments telling how much he will be miss, how he is gone but "not forgotten," how he is now in a better place. As we scrolled down we noticed there were countless, and countless of comments from all friends and family. Ironic enough, the comments that hit me the most were the older ones, when people were praying for him to get better and to soon leave the hospital. This hit me the most because everyone was hoping for him to return, but he never did. One comment in particular broke my heart: "I still can't believe it; I am still waiting for the phone to ring and hear 'nana it’s not true, I'm still alive'."
As I reflected upon this I thought, he will never be able to read this. I am sure that he had received this kind of comments before, but not like this. Why do we wait until someone passes away to tell him/her how amazing of a person they are, or how much they meant to them? Why wait until they can't read or appreciate these kind of comments to post them? Why not tell them how much they are appreciated now that they are still here with us? Rather sad I thought.
Something else crossed my mind, I don't mean to be negative or pessimistic, but there were lots of comments about "you are in a better place," and so, I had to think...what if he is not? It is natural for anyone that loses a certain someone to address that they are in a better place, but it is not always the case. This gave me so many more reasons to preach the gospel, to let the world know the only way to that better place that everyone talks about is through Jesus Christ, THEN can you be certain that they are there.
I swear I write too much, I doubt anyone would waste their time to read this, but if you do I thank you. As a last statement, I have a challenge for everyone. Get off your couch, tell someone you love them and they mean the world to you. Go to Facebook and write to all your friends that you couldn't live without them. Tell them NOW while you still can, while they can still read and hear all of it. Don't wait until it's too late. Also, preach them about Christ, so that one day, we will all meet once again in "a better place." I will challenge myself to do this as well, and in time, I plan to write to everyone something special. But to all of you here reading this, I LOVE YOU ALL, YOU ARE AN AMAZING AND SPECIAL PERSON, DON'T EVER FORGET THAT, YOU MEAN THE WORLD TO A LOT OF PEOPLE, ME INCLUDED.
PS: This is a bit off topic but as this all happened, I thought of an Skillet song called Would It Matter, "if I wasn't here tomorrow, would anybody care?" I would like to have it answered; if tomorrow morning, I was not here, would you miss me?
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