Incomprehensible
Since I don't watch TV anymore and don't read the newspaper I'm pretty disconnected from happenings around the world. I figure that I'll hear about anything that I need to know if it's important enough. I just heard about the shootings at the Amish school yesterday. At first I thought little of it. Shootings happen all the time, and sadly I've pretty much been desensitized. It's a terrible shame, but they happen so frequently, how can anyone care about all of them? It's just not possible. But this one is different. It's a terrible tragedy that these five little girls were killed and the community traumatized by such a gross offense, but really, far more people die every few hours in car accidents, there's nothing that remarkable about sudden and violent death these days. 28 American soldiers died in Iraq last week alone. That's 28 lives, full of almost infinite potential and value that will never be realized - most people neither know nor care. I won't pretend I do. The thing that caught the attention of the country about this particular shooting was that it happened in an Amish schoolhouse, it's new, it's different, it's tragic, it's news. That's not what interests me though. It's how the Amish handled it that I find simply incomprehensible.
Saturday morning at the funeral of Charles Roberts, the murder of 5 young children, almost half of the attendees were Amish. The man obviously had few friends and few people cared to pay their respects to a man who died killing children. Yet there were 30 people of the group that Roberts specifically targeted that went to publicly forgive the man. I can't even understand that. That's a picture of forgiveness: not the bastard sort of forgiveness we usually see, but real forgiveness. This forgiveness holds nothing back and goes even further. Forgiveness isn't just forgetting the offense, forgiveness moves on and loves the offender more than before. Healing involves growing.
The response of the Amish community has baffled everyone, not least the news media. (This stands in somewhat comic juxtaposition to Mark Foley's coming out. the news media knows exactly what to do with that.) I did a bit of looking around at the various news sources surrounding this story, and they are all trying to make sense of how it's possible that the Amish could forgive this awful offense. It's no secret, the Amish aren't trying to hide it. One spokesperson said it plainly, "We forgive him, how could we do otherwise? That is what our Lord does for us." That makes me want to be Amish. Their faith and forgiveness is so ingrained in their culture that their instinctive response was to forgive immediately. They were sending condolences to Roberts' widow before the blood was even dry on the floor of the school house. I know I couldn't forgive like that. I have trouble even forgiving people for stupid little things like ignoring me.
Saturday morning at the funeral of Charles Roberts, the murder of 5 young children, almost half of the attendees were Amish. The man obviously had few friends and few people cared to pay their respects to a man who died killing children. Yet there were 30 people of the group that Roberts specifically targeted that went to publicly forgive the man. I can't even understand that. That's a picture of forgiveness: not the bastard sort of forgiveness we usually see, but real forgiveness. This forgiveness holds nothing back and goes even further. Forgiveness isn't just forgetting the offense, forgiveness moves on and loves the offender more than before. Healing involves growing.
The response of the Amish community has baffled everyone, not least the news media. (This stands in somewhat comic juxtaposition to Mark Foley's coming out. the news media knows exactly what to do with that.) I did a bit of looking around at the various news sources surrounding this story, and they are all trying to make sense of how it's possible that the Amish could forgive this awful offense. It's no secret, the Amish aren't trying to hide it. One spokesperson said it plainly, "We forgive him, how could we do otherwise? That is what our Lord does for us." That makes me want to be Amish. Their faith and forgiveness is so ingrained in their culture that their instinctive response was to forgive immediately. They were sending condolences to Roberts' widow before the blood was even dry on the floor of the school house. I know I couldn't forgive like that. I have trouble even forgiving people for stupid little things like ignoring me.