Greg Zanis left his home in Aurora, Ill., and drove to El Paso, Texas, where he delivered 22 handmade crosses—painted white with red hearts and the names of the shooting victims—to a memorial near the Walmart where they were gunned down while shopping on a Saturday morning. Then he headed to Dayton, Ohio, to deliver another nine crosses to mark the mass shooting there.
Two massacres in 13 hours on the heels of a rampage in Gilroy, Calif., the previous weekend are keeping Zanis busy. He has built a cross for every mass-shooting fatality in the U.S. for two decades. And at Christmastime in 2016, he installed on a donated vacant lot a cross for every person who died of gun violence in Chicago that year—more than 700.
It started in 1996 when a grieving mother asked this self-employed carpenter, the son of a pastor, to build a cross to memorialize her son. He had been killed by gunfire in Aurora. Since then, Zanis has delivered crosses to the sites whose names have become litany in the U.S.: Columbine, New Town, Orlando, Parkland, Sutherland Springs, and so many more.
Zanis knows what to do after these senseless episodes. He holds up the cross. But with such violence increasingly frequent, the church has to do more than invoke the cross after a tragedy. To those who Jesus called to be peacemakers, the urgent challenge is to know what to do beforehand.