It's the text message that no parent ever wants to see:

“There’s a shooter at FSU.”

Last Thursday, those five words from my daughter Maggie stopped my entire world.

Thursdays are normally what I call a “Focus Day,” a day I shut everything out and work on my biggest projects for 12 hours straight without any interruptions. My phone is on "Do Not Disturb." Email closed. Slack turned off. No meetings. No distractions.

The only exemption from this blackout is my family.

So when our family group chat suddenly lit up around noon, I immediately knew something was wrong. My husband and teenagers aren’t normally that chatty. So I looked to see what was going on. And my heart stopped.

A school shooting, happening in real time, on my daughter’s campus.

Have you ever had one of those moments where time itself seems to freeze? Where your brain is frantically racing but your body feels eerily calm?

That was me.

With shaking hands, I texted back, telling her to lock her door. Stay away from windows. I hoped she couldn’t feel my panic and helplessness through the phone.

Then I did what every other FSU parent, including my husband Chuck, was also doing in that moment—frantically searched the internet and social media for information, for any scrap of news that could tell us what was happening. The early reports were chaos. Conflicting accounts. Rumors of multiple shooters. Nine students possibly killed. It was gut-wrenching.

And then we waited.

Every minute felt like an hour. Every hour felt like a lifetime. I couldn't tell you how long it actually was—time felt like it stood still.

When we finally got word that the situation was contained and Maggie was safe, I FaceTimed her immediately, just needing to SEE her, to KNOW she was really okay.

She answered, calm but shaken. No tears. No dramatics. That's my girl. Just stunned disbelief that something like this could happen at her school.

I felt exactly the same way.

These things happen to other people, right?

Until they happen to you.

It's crazy how a single moment can put everything into perspective. In an instant, all the things I'd been stressing about that morning—the big project I had been working on and the problems I was trying to solve that had felt so big—suddenly meant absolutely nothing.

The only thing that mattered was my daughter and knowing she was safe.

Maya Angelou once said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." Along those same lines, Anne Lamott reminds us that, "hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come."

In other words? Life can blindside you in an instant.

 No warning. No time to prepare. Just a moment that changes everything.

We spend so much of our lives chasing and striving and stressing over things that, in the end, don't actually matter. It's only when everything gets stripped away that we remember: nothing really matters but each other.

As it turns out, there was only one shooter. Two people were killed, and six additional students were injured but are expected to make a full recovery. Any incident like this is a tragedy, and in this case I’m grateful it wasn’t as bad as the initial reports made it out to be.

And life will go on at FSU. But for those kids and families it won’t ever be the same.

It’s all so fresh that I honestly don’t know if I’ve had time to process it just yet, but for me it felt like a sobering reminder to stop and recognize what truly matters. To hug your people a little tighter. To pick up the phone and call someone you love. To tell your kids you're proud of them. To write your spouse a note just because. 

Not to wait for a crisis to remind you what's important.

Because in the end, when everything else falls away, what matters most is the people you love.

Live with purpose, friend, and remember to hold your people close this week!

xoxo, Ruth

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