Last night Flo and I had a chance to watch a movie about the Nickel Mines tragedy. In the first place, I must disclaim any ability to explain any of the events of that day; I only have my suspicions based on a very necessarily narrow ability to comprehend what is clearly beyond my experience and my ability to reason.

If the reader wants more information or is not familiar with this schoolhouse massacre of Amish girls, I would encourage a re-visit at least to the facts of the case and the facts re: the Amish response.

Columbine may have set the precedent; but I am reminded of an even earlier event which was the overt act of the son of a psychiatrist on a group of praying (on their own, and student-led,lest anyone be contemplating a late call to a lawyer) high school students in, I believe, Paducah KY. John and I were "on the road again" returning from Florida with the great gift of my parents' Camry. (thanks again, M + D, we really used that car to the max.) I was actually planning to stop in Pensacola because of a well-known revival at Brownsville, but this was not at all what I needed. My Mom was very concerned about my stopping there because of the recent murder of an abortionist in that area, by a "pastor" no less, not too long before. Probably that influenced my decision to go straight home.

But that was not to be either, and possibly my folks would have been even more appalled by our actual visit. On our way we heard about this strange attack on radio news, and it was my intention to stop somewhere overnight and go to church in the morning, as was our habit anyway when travelling as a larger group. Some would say this was a coincidence, but I am convinced to this day that the Holy Spirit had His say, and that John and I were privileged to see up close the response of a small church to a great tragedy. But I did stop and stayed Saturday night at a hotel in the vicinity. Curiosity? That may have been the initial draw--God can use our weirdest and most natural feelings which are in fact pre-designed/fabricated , for those who can accept the "hard sayings" of nature. But then...

We were allowed to go in--but the media was not; even though there were certainly plenty of them in the parking lot. I can't even begin to summarize or do justice to what went on in that closed service, nor even to my feelings about it, then or now. As I read this morning in Jeremiah 8 this AM, the pens of the scribes are useless and false in times like these.

My recollection however is that the response was almost identical to that of the Amish towards the perpetrator and his family...

We had a chance to personally talk to Ben Strong, the pastor's son who was the leader of the prayer group, and who actually not only knew but had previously tried, with some success, to befriend the shooter. (the shooter in Nickel Mines was a milkman known well by the Amish and attempts had been made to befriend him by the Amish prior to the massacre.) Ben was the person in the prayer group who did not run but actually came directly up to the boy with the gun and disarmed him not by force but by just the right sort of persuasion--and not only saved other students but probably prevented a suicide as well.

Ben later became a pastor; no surprise there; but as it turned out, John and I had a lot in common with him musically, and he plays a dynamite sax! And we talked more about the joys of music than about his actions or the event just a few days prior. He had said it all in his brief message, which I recall only in substance, not in any details.

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It is hard to write the right sort of commentary about this, but I consider these to be modern day parables in action that do, in fact, invite a personal response. Is genuine forgiveness of our trespassers-against-us emotionally or rationally possible? Probably unaided reason or flesh or family values would have to say, no; as the Amish father also said, at least in the movie, we have every right not to forgive. This of course, is largely what we have seen very clearly in our latest election cycles; hence I can say with confidence that such ensamples are not the province of religion qua politics either-- in fact it is so far beyond our capabilities that we have no power even of imagination to go beyond our daily fleshly and--dare I say-- "spiritual" lives to broach the essence of them.

But to see it played out in person and to see ordinary weak people guided "into all Truth" not by abstract principles but by God's Sovereign Spirit going beyond even His own Law that He set up--it is that which causes me to gasp--and to cry out like Jeremiah and Moses and Nicodemus, "How can such things be!!!???