For Desta Goehner, Samuelson Chapel is more than a chapel. It’s a place for comfort and coffee with a friend.  

The Director of Congregational Relations and Campus Pastor Scott Maxwell Doherty regularly check in on each other as they help the Cal Lutheran community, and one another, deal with the aftermath of the Borderline shooting.

“We’re not done with this,” Reverend Maxwell-Doherty says. “It’s not going to be done for a long time.”

Goehner went to the Borderline the night of the shooting, to help in any way she could.

“I needed to be there with them not even knowing who them was,” she explains.

She also spent time at the hospital, but she’s not ready to talk about that yet.

Her job in a way – and Reverend Maxwell-Doherty’s too – is to be the receiver.

“It doesn’t take more than two questions,” he explains, “and out of the gate they go with what this feels like.”

What’s important they say is that everyone be allowed to feel whatever they are feeling. And not just today.

“There will still be pain in a few months,” Goehner expects, “in six months, in a year, in four years.”

Comfort has been coming from off campus as well, in the form of more than 400 quilts that have arrived from church groups all over the country.  

“The smiles on the students’ and the community’s faces when they receive these quilts,” Goehner recalls, “I hadn’t seen those smiles for a few weeks.”

Receiving everyone’s grief can take its toll and Goehner has her own feelings about that night to work through. But even as more time passes, she knows she has people around her who will continue to listen and comfort her.

“And that’s what we’re going to do with each other. We’re going to keep showing up,” she says. “So I’m okay with not being okay right now.”