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My friend Christian Abercrombie is in campus ministry, and regularly prays for students on GSW every Wednesday. A friend and I carpooled and met him and some students at Café Campisino before striking out onto the campus, offering to pray for anyone we bumped into.

The walk started out rather peacefully. Several students wanted prayer, with wisdom for finals a common request. The first notice we had that something was off was from one of the students checking a phone alert. A man with a gun had been spotted on campus. The campus still looked relatively peaceful, and there were no gun shots.

Gun fire is a pretty regular occurrence in Americus, leaving me cautious but somewhat jaded. We were already praying for another student, and decided to pray about that as well. A short while later we were told students were advised to take shelter, and we were ushered into Cannes Central.

The group was gathered around a table in a cinder-block room with a large bay window. Some contacted friends and family. Outside the window, we could see a few people strolling, still oblivious to the situation. Christian tried to warn them.

Something sounding very much like a machine gun made me fear things had suddenly become much more newsworthy than I was anticipating. Thankfully it turned out to the campus alert system. We cracked our window to try and make it out, and saw a few other windows opening across the building.

At that point, Christian decided to hold a Bible study. Half the time I run into Christian he’s hold a Bible study in one of the local coffee shops, so it came as no surprise. While I prefer the coffee shop Bible studies, I appreciated the peace in the midst of the storm.

A short while later we were let out, and I had to switch hats and begin gathering the information I could verify. I ran into Chief Scott and asked if anything else had been confirmed. He couldn’t give me anything further than what I had gathered from alerts, and his poker face was impeccable. I snapped a few pictures and did a few interviews with students about their experiences during the shelter in place alert. Afterward, my friend and I left to get pizza, thankful God had kept us safe and no one had been hurt on campus.