Pastor: Words to Comfort Familes Would Be 'Trite'

April 17, 2007 — -- Since yesterday's shootings on the Virginia Tech campus, thousands of e-mails and messages from concerned "Good Morning America" viewers have been pouring into ABCNEWS.com.

Pastor Jim Pace, who is counseling students at the college, answered some of those viewer questions in an emotional exchange with anchors Robin Roberts and Diane Sawyer.

Here is a transcript of their conversation:

Question: I'm scared and I'm 15. Is this how it's supposed to be?
--Hannah

Pace: That's a really tough question because what we're seeing with the students that we're coming in contact with is they're still trying to see how close this blast is going to hit to their feet. We're still learning where are their friends, you know, they're checking Facebook and MySpace and everything just to see where they are. Right now it is more immediate -- can we find our friends and can we begin the process to sort through all the questions this is going to bring up.

Question: I'm just a 14-year-old girl from New Hampshire, but really… How many shootings like this is it going to take to make something happen for the better?
-- Nicole

Roberts: So what can students, especially young students all across the country that are getting up this morning about to head to school do?

Pace: You know, it's a tough one to process because it always seems to happen in places you never think it would happen.

I don't know that there is a thing we can do that's going to keep us safe from this. This is the kind of thing that seems to be happening more and more in our culture today. I think that we can certainly try to corral around each other and help each other when it does. I think there's certain things that we can do to try to take some of the pain from each other when we can.

But it is just a fact of our world now.

Sawyer: What is the message of faith, and I mean across all denominations, that you would tell parents to give their kids, though? Because so many parents wrote to us saying you don't think you'll send your children away to school and have something like this happen -- how do they then talk in families about something like this happening inside a faith?