Darrell Scott is tired. Since his daughter Rachel was murdered at Columbine High eight months ago, Darrell, 50, has left his job as a sales manager for a food company, and now lives on the road, speaking at churches, stadiums and high school gyms from Dallas to Bismarck. He takes Dramamine for motion sickness and eats in Cracker Barrel restaurants. It might seem like a dreary existence, reliving your daughter's death over and over. But while others in Littleton still seethe with anger, Darrell and his family have found deliverance from despair. To them Rachel's death was a Christian martyrdom--an act of God meant to spark a spiritual revolution in young people.
This conviction has brought Darrell's family, including his ex-wife, together in a ministry they call the Columbine Redemption. The message is powerful: in London, Ky., a town of 7,000, fully 5,500 people showed up to hear Darrell speak. That was a jaw dropper, but he regularly draws crowds of more than 3,000. "God is using this tragedy to wake up not only America but also the world," Darrell told a Christian group in Little Rock in November. "God is using Rachel as a vehicle. If I believed for one second that God had forsaken my daughter or that he had gone to sleep or that he wasn't aware, I would be one of the angriest men in America."
Instead, Darrell believes Rachel's death was meant to be. He believes this because of the eerily prophetic journals Rachel kept, as well as a number of "visions" experienced by others that prove, say the Scotts, that the killings at Columbine were "a spiritual event."
The voluminous journals, which her parents discovered only after her death, and which contain poetry, letters to God and drawings, convey Rachel's belief that she was not going to live to see adulthood, and that God was going to use her for some purpose. On May 2, 1998, she wrote, "This will be my last year, Lord. I have gotten what I can. Thank you." On another occasion she wrote, "God is going to use me to reach the young people, I don't know how, I don't know when." Her last diary entry, written 20 minutes before she died, was a drawing of a pair of eyes crying; from the eyes fell 13 drops onto a rose--images Darrell says had been described to him in an earlier phone call from a man he did not know.
Among the many stories about Rachel was one that first appeared in a local Christian newspaper, saying she had been asked if she believed in God and had answered yes before Eric Harris shot her. The account was credited to Richard Castaldo, the now paralyzed boy who was having lunch with Rachel when she died. The Scott family believes this account. But in an interview with TIME last week, Castaldo denied telling the story. Darrell, who agrees that Castaldo would be the only plausible source of such a story, says, "I'm surprised. If he said that, then either it didn't happen or he changed his story."