What started with a few flowers has blossomed into dozens of bouquets, notes, books, candles and more outside Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, two days after a mass shooting changed the community forever. 

Hundreds came to pay their respects on Friday for the victims, including two children who were killed and 21 others — students and three adult parishioners in their 80s — who were wounded when a shooter opened fire during school Mass Wednesday morning. 

Among the visitors to the church was Beth Zenisek, who said she can't get these words out of her head: When you pray, move your feet. It's an African proverb that Annunciation Catholic School principal quoted in a statement in the immediate hours after the tragedy. 

"That saying rings in my head, like these church bells, and that's kind of the mantra I'm going to move forward with," Zenisek said. "I can pray, but when you're praying about something, take action on it as well."

She has deep familial ties to the church. It's where her parents met in the choir, where she attended as a child and where her children went to school. 

"It's everything. It's raised my mom. It raised my siblings and I. They helped raise my children. And you just can't find anything more meaningful in life than a supportive, spiritual family to support you through the good and the bad," Zenisek said.

She made a fast friend visiting the church on Friday in Marianne Rother, who was married there and just recently celebrated her 50th class reunion with her former eighth-grade classmates. 

"When I thought about it, what hit me is somebody had invaded my home," Rother described learning of the shooting. "It's just a form of a memory home, that somebody had come in and tragically destroyed part of that memory."

Both women said that only on Friday did they feel the strength to come visit the church and pay their respects. They're both thinking about how to move forward amid insurmountable grief. 

"I'm kind of at the what-can-I do point, and I just thought coming up and just paying my respects and saying some prayers is the right thing to do," Zenisek said.