Sunday Morning Meds--Two Stories

“May they be like grass on the roof, 

which withers before it can grow; 

with it the reaper cannot fill his hands, 

nor the one who gathers fill his arms.”

Psalm 129

I’m not sure what kind of measurement tools I use to read the depth and strength of stories, to choose one as being better or worse than another. Such criteria are themselves issues of the heart, which is why, I suppose, I don’t understand them. There is, after all, no accounting for taste.

A decade ago now, one story in two installments shook this country. The first was the story of a man who lost control of his life and his will, then entered a schoolhouse in Pennsylvania with the sole intent of injuring young girls and did just that, killing five, execution style. Five others, also shot, suffered significant wounds. 

Not long after, the community who lost all those young women razed the school, just tore it down. They were Amish, a peculiar people given by religious creed to work their farms by hand and horses, as if time had stopped somewhere mid-19^th century. None of them would think of owning a bulldozer, so they needed to hire someone who had one to do the demolition because it required work the community decided they wouldn’t do with their own hands. In just a few pre-dawn hours, the place was razed, the rubble buried.

Five children were murdered, and their madman killer was himself dead by his own hand, right there in the school. That’s one story. 

School shooting happen far too frequently, so perhaps the story is not particularly unusual—people even use a word, “Columbine,” the way we use “Watergate” for every political scandal.  But the nation was, once again, shocked and horrified by another school shooting, this one, amazingly, in Amish country. It was a big story for a week or so, maybe ten days.

The other story was bigger, and that story also took place in rural Pennsylvania, in the same place, in the same week. Members of that violated Amish community began visiting the wife of the murderer, bringing her into their love. 

With a commitment to social justice, their own history of persecution, a unyielding belief in God’s providence and his rule and in the life hereafter, the Amish, so sinned against by this madman, showed nothing but love for the murderer’s family. They couldn’t forget what had happened—that’s undoubtedly why the school house was razed; but they forgave, amazingly.

Two stories came out of a Pennsylvania hamlet few had ever heard of, a place called Quarryville.  One was about madness and murder—five children dead, five more badly hurt. Those things happen so often it seemed that, as short a time as a year later, the whole incident seemed ordinary.

What wasn’t ordinary—what was divine—was that community’s acceptance, their desire to forgive. 

The psalmist had a similar phenomenon in mind here in 129—may evil quickly pass away, he asks; may it wither before it can grow.  May the darkness be short-lived.  May the murder of those children be razed like the schoolhouse.

The great story from Quarryville, Pennsylvania, the story with legs, was the one that’ll grow, the one whose harvest seems limitless. That story is about acceptance and forgiveness. 

There’s nothing derivative there. It’s fresh as daisy and new every morning, shocking, always, to our humanness. It’s the story of grace.