Radical faith and forgiveness
This is so odd. Early this morning, I was thinking about how impacted we are as a society by the big news of the moment, and how quickly we forget when the news cameras go away. I remembered some big, bracing stories over the past couple of years and wondered what’s happening with those people now. Like that Amish community struck by stunning violence last year. We haven’t heard a thing about them in a long time, and I thought about them.
Imagine my surprise when I saw this a couple of hours later, scanning the news.
In the most detailed statement yet on how the Amish have fared since the shootings that left five girls dead and five others injured, a committee overseeing donations said the community’s strength has helped the families cope but that the approaching one-year anniversary has also sharpened their pain.
“To the casual observer ‘life goes on’ in Nickel Mines, with its daily and seasonal demands of work, school, births, family and church,” the Nickel Mines Accountability Committee said in a four-page statement, “but for the families each day brings with it the pain, grief and questions that remind them of their loss.”
Look how they’re coping.
The committee said that reaching out to others who have endured similar tragedies has helped. West Nickel Mines Amish School family members recently traveled to Blacksburg, Va., to meet with Virginia Tech officials and families affected by that school shooting and to deliver a “comfort quilt.”
They heal better when they help heal others. And their own children were terribly wounded.
The most severely injured survivor, 7-year-old Rosanna King, is unable to talk, is confined to a reclining wheelchair and must be fed by a tube but has shown slow and steady progress…
A second girl injured in the attack, Sarah Ann Stoltzfus, 9, still suffers vision problems from a head wound, her family reported…”Her brain surgeon and therapists all said it’s a true miracle that she recovered as fully as she did, which we thank God for,” her family wrote. “We also know that healing is not always as complete as we would wish for everyone, but we do know that God is with us in all things.”
This humble, faithful community of people not ordinarily ever on the public radar has a lot to teach the public.
“Through shared suffering and pain, in shoulder-to-shoulder labors of love, in mutual respect despite differences, the people of Nickel Mines are ‘bearing each other’s burdens’ as they seek solace and healing in their terrible loss,” the community statement concluded.
That about says it all.