What I Learned From The December 13th Brown University Shooting
June 2026
By: Justin Lim - Grace Harbor Church Member
On December 13th, 2025, a gunman walked into one of the largest auditoriums at Brown University and opened fire. A few days later, he rang the doorbell at a home in a quiet city neighborhood and opened fire yet again. In a collective matter of seconds, two students and a professor were dead, several more injured, and countless others devastated.
When the first shots were fired on that fateful Saturday afternoon, I was walking up the aisle to leave through the doors of a different auditorium on campus, having just turned in my last physics final as an undergraduate at Brown. Before I reached the building’s exit, a few students waiting in the atrium had heard rumors of an active shooter, so after locking the building doors, we sheltered in the basement. Eventually, over 150 of us would remain there until getting an armed escort out early the following morning.
In the hours and days following the shooting, I remember checking the news and campus media more regularly than I ever had before. With an ongoing manhunt and lots of online speculation, it was hard to separate the truth from fabrications, but even without all the specific details, I found myself ruminating far more deeply on this event than I had for previous ones further from home.
There was shock. Perhaps my youth and life circumstance shines through here, but this type of violence felt like something that happened in other places, and most certainly not on College Hill, where the main crimes you hear about are stolen bikes and scooters.
There was sorrow. Most of the students in the targeted auditorium were just beginning their college careers, many of them in their very first semester, just days from going home to see their families for winter break. Two of those students would never walk through the front doors of their family homes again.
There was confusion. We will never know the full rationale behind the shooter’s actions, but given his physics background and his desire for symbolic revenge, it did not escape me that I was in the largest undergraduate physics class, that my class was normally held in that room, that the class location and final time slot were publicly listed, and that I was walking up the aisle at the very moment of the shooting. Perhaps it was only because our final exam location happened to be in a different auditorium than usual that an economics review session was targeted rather than my physics final.
Regardless of the true nature of his decision making, what became particularly clear to me was that none of us can take our lives for granted and that we must live accordingly. Before you dismiss that as cliché, consider the lives and circumstances of those whom we lost. There were two students, in the prime of their lives, in a college lecture hall at one of the most prestigious institutions in the world, in a safe and wealthy neighborhood with its very own police department, in the most powerful and wealthy nation in human history. Likewise, there was a college physics professor, at the height of his career at MIT, preparing dinner for his young family in a similarly upscale neighborhood in that very same nation.
In other words, these are the people whom we would least expect to die, much less be deliberately shot and killed. We cannot count on our youth, health, wealth, nor anything else to spare us from death, and we cannot rely upon extra time to live as we believe we ought.
This truth was particularly impressed upon me by one of the students whose life was cut short. As word of her death spread throughout campus, tributes poured in from friends and classmates, speaking not merely of her kindness, but consistently mentioning how the brilliance of her faith shone through her entire life, even to those who disagreed with her. In less than two years at this school, she had faithfully lived in such a way that in her death, her love for Christ was what people remembered. And I am sure that this love was not in vain, not just because of what a testimony it was to people like me, but much more for her because of the incomparable joy she is experiencing in Christ as a reward for what she treasured.
But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves don’t break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Matthew 6:20-21
As a student, I was and often still am distracted by temporal concerns and ambitions. How am I to achieve what I want to achieve and be the person I want to be? At a university with bright and ambitious peers, this is heightened into a focus on what I hope to accomplish in the future, but I hardly think this is a human experience unique to starry-eyed college students. In a world where death is certain but its timing uncertain, we must take its consequences more seriously.
For the Christian, the hope and expectation of eternal life in heaven with Christ relieves us from a fearful dread of eternal death, but tragedies like this must drive us to action and courage to live in a manner worthy of the Gospel. We love God by glorifying him in loving our neighbors, which practically means having a primary concern for the final destination of their souls. Through this, we gain ever-increasing joy both now and for eternity. If there is truly life after death, and if the God of the Bible is who He says He is, then the way we live our everyday lives matters.
Pay careful attention, then, to how you walk—not as unwise people but as wise— making the most of the time, because the days are evil. Ephesians 5:15-16
Are you burying your proverbial talent in the ground by dividing your loyalties between heaven and earth, or are you using it to advance the kingdom that is yet to come?
More may hang in the balance than you think, for you do not want to be surprised at the hour you are brought to account. Instead, strive daily for those blessed words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
