Amish Grace

A few years ago, I read the book Amish Grace.  It’s the story of the Amish response to a man who shot and killed several of their girls while they were in school.  Sunday night, Kim and I watched the movie by the same title, and I was once again moved to tears.  Let me encourage you to just read the book…it is a lot better than the movie!

In a world that seems to have forgotten kindness, grace, and forgiveness we need to be reminded of a biblical commitment to doing things the Jesus Way.  In a one-room Amish school in a community called Nickel Mines on Oct 2, 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV entered the room, sent the boys out, and took 10 young girls hostage.  At the end of the horrific event, five girls were dead and five were critically injured.  

Here is the thing that amazes me, within hours of the shooting, some of the Amish people were already reaching out to the killer’s family.  They comforted the killer’s wife, and they sought to comfort the killer’s father.  One man held the killer’s father in his arms and said, “We forgive you.”  They even stood with his wife at the killer’s funeral and gravesite.

Why?  Why would they respond like that?  The authors of the book said that every Amish person they spoke with agreed: “forgiveness for Roberts and grace for his family had begun as spontaneous expressions of faith, not as mandates from the church.”  One Amish man asked, “Why is everybody all surprised?  It’s just standard Christian forgiveness; it’s what everybody should be doing.”

The morning of the shooting, the teacher called the class to order, read Acts 4:32-33, and the children stood and repeated the Lord’s Prayer, and then they began their lessons.  The children memorized the words, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” and put that into practice before their parents knew what had happened to them.  

Roberts was angry at God because his daughter had died and he wanted to take it out on them, but as he prepared to shoot them, they were praying, and as he prepared to shoot, one said, “Shoot me first.”  They lived it even as they died.

The whole thing was horrible, but in the midst of the tragedy we saw the Sermon on the Mount lived out.  In a world that seeks to kill what it doesn’t understand and hate anything that disagrees we find humble obedience to Jesus’ command to love our enemies and to forgive those who persecute us.

This really isn’t an attempt to write about school shootings…they are horrible and I’m thankful that our city has officers at every school, but I wish it wasn’t needed.  What I am trying to say is that in a world that just seems angry and hateful…maybe we could step back and by the power of the Holy Spirit try to be more like Jesus…today.