Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy Read Free Page A

wishing for a Starbucks, had just returned from a convenience store five miles away with cups of a generic brew. Ahead of us a small crossroads overflowed with even more media trucks. Dozens of journalists carrying notepads, microphones, and cameras milled around the area. “Where is Nickel Mines?” we asked one reporter as we approached. “This is it!” was his simple reply.
     
    This was it? Only a few houses and a crossroads? An auction building squats on one corner of the intersection. There are no stores, gas stations, or coffee shops. The closest store, bank, and firehouse are located in Georgetown, about a mile and a half to the south. Overnight the parking lot of the auction house had turned into a media bazaar with satellite dishes, bright lights, the hum of diesel generators, and inquisitive reporters everywhere. This humble crossroads, barely a hamlet, had captured the world’s attention for a long day that would stretch into a week.
     
    We stood at a soda machine beside the auction building, trying to get our bearings. Only seventeen hours earlier Charles Carl Roberts IV had bought a soda at this very spot, just four hundred yards from the West Nickel Mines School. He had waited while the twenty-six children played softball during their morning recess. An Amish member of the school board had seen him here but thought nothing of it because Roberts often hung out around the auction house. “Charlie could have done the shooting at the Georgetown School closer to his home,” said an Amish man, “but he probably thought it was too close to some houses.”
     

    The Lancaster Amish settlement has more than 180 local congregations called church districts, each led by a team of ordained men—a bishop, a deacon, and two or three ministers. The men, selected from within their district, serve as religious leaders in addition to their regular employment. They serve for life, without compensation or formal theological training.
     
    Streams and roads mark the borders of each district, which serves as the social and religious home for twenty-five to forty families. Each Amish family worships with the other families who live within the boundaries of their district.When a district’s membership grows too large for families to accommodate worship services at their homes, the district is divided. Because the families live so close and engage in many activities together outside church services, they know each other very well.
     
    The Nickel Mines crossroads divides three districts: West Nickel Mines, East Nickel Mines, and Northeast Georgetown. Children from all three districts attended the West Nickel Mines School. “It was fortunate that the children came from three different districts,” said an Amish man in retrospect, “so the grief and funeral preparations didn’t fall on the members of just one district.”
     
    This is dense Amish country, where Amish farms and businesses nestle alongside those of their English neighbors. Bart Township, the municipal home of the Nickel Mines area, boasts a population of three thousand Amish and English who live in some eight hundred houses within sixteen square miles. As in many other Amish communities in North America, the Amish here have many friends among their English neighbors, and a lot of neighborly activity occurs across the cultural fences. About 75 percent of the firefighters in the Bart Township Fire Company are Amish, and some hold leadership positions. They do not drive the trucks, but they help to fight fires and organize fund-raisers for the company.
     
    The willingness of Amish men to ride in the fire trucks they refuse to drive mirrors the Amish relationship to motor vehicles in general. In the early twentieth century, Amish leaders forbade car ownership for fear the car would unravel their communities, making it easier for members to drive off to cities and blend in with the larger world. Horse-and-buggy transportation helps to tether members to their local