Ten years ago, today, high-school students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went to school and murdered 12 kids and one teacher before killing themselves.  And the world changed for a generation.

It was supposed to be so much more worse. They planted bombs in duffel bags placed strategically in the cafeteria. If the explosives had gone off as planned, hundreds would have perished The killers envisioned an even more spectacular, posthumous finale: their cars—wired with explosives—would explode into the news vans that assembled to cover the melee. Harris and Klebold’s diabolical aspirations, however, far exceeded their technical prowess.

That spring, at my kids’ middle school, a fire alarm was pulled or a bomb threat was called in every day for the remainder of the school year.  Each day, the student body would evacuate until an “all clear” was given.  Looking back on their generation, Columbine must seem to be prelude to higher body counts of 9/11 and Virginia Tech.

In the April 6th Newsweek, Ramin Setoodeh claimed “Columbine was a grisly milestone for my generation. It was the violent day that made Gen Y feel like victims, the first time that ’80s toddlers realized that their overprotective helicopter parents couldn’t protect them from everything.”

Back in the day, Jim Beckman, then youth minister at Saint Francis Cabrini Catholic Church (which buried three students from Columbine High School, more than any other church in Littleton) believed that he had the most important job in America. “Since the shooting happened at Columbine, I feel like I’ve just been validated so much in my job. And I feel like what I do is so important. Building relationships with kids and through them, their families, and through them, their circle of friends, it put us in a place where, when everything happened last April, kids came running to us.”

Newsweek also conducted a profile on the costs to those who ministered those days; those who attempted to serve “this tremendous barrage of very hurting people” he says.

Ten years ago, today, we began to understand the importance and value of Pastoral Care as a component of a comprehensive youth ministry. YouthWorker magazine this month attempted to address some of these concerns here.

Ten years later… what do you remember?  What have we learned?