Amish Beslan

Its another sign of our times, that even the peaceable Amish communities, single room schoolhouses, can be horribly victimized by a guy with a very old grudge. Separation from society doesn't guarantee safety from the worst of it.

It seems the demons just haven't feasted on enough innocent blood yet.

The Amish community, being so self-sufficient, will fade back out of the larger society. and lick its terrible wounds the best it can. It can't take comfort in the things the rest of society does. Flowers, while nice, are no comfort to people who take no pleasure in luxury. They won't understand the undignified piles of stuffed animals that show up at sites of tragedy-a pathetic substitute for a rejected faith in the God they know LIVES.

Amish funerals will follow; affairs with no wake, no embalming, just a plain and simple church service and burial. They will offer their executed children to the grace and love of God, beg His mercy on the man who slaughtered them, pray for those whose lives are hanging on by a thread, pray for the families victimized this way.

Shock and Awe

Then they'll have to live with this trauma and wonder what else could come their way. They don't have the 'benefit' of having the daily diet of murder and horror the rest of us get. They can't even imagine, in the worst of the worst nightmares, things like this. All of it is 'shock and awe.'

The Evil Question

As always, we ask 'why?' of God, of the world around us, but 'why' is an evil question. 'Why' can never be answered to any satisfaction. The truth is- someone decided to do some serious damage, and do it to people who simply couldn't defend themselves. The Amish don't ask that question. The question heard from their lips is "who is responsible?"

It is an unimaginable horror, especially for those children. Society's children have heard about Columbine and other incidents on television. In some way, they're a little bit prepared. For these Amish children, who never watch television, who are completely innocent to the worst things in the world, it was a nightmare directly from hell. In their worst imaginings, this could never have occurred to them.

Amish Beslan

But even for us, the ones acclimated to the horror and bloodspilling of our age, were horrified by Beslan. We couldn't have imagined such a thing-that planning, which took place over months, came out 'without a hitch' leaving all of us with the shock of realization of how evil things really are becoming in the world. The children who survived Beslan will never get over that experience, and even experts in pediatric medicine have said they've never seen children so terrorized, never seen such effects in children. Those doctors and experts are powerless to really help those little ones in the face of raw evil terror. Experts won't be able to do anything for the Amish children either.

Amish Comfort

The only help for them is each other, and their faith. Their faith, thank God, is a strong one, stong enough for them to genuinely live as 'no part of the world'. The promise of God to people like them is that they won't share the penalty for the sins in the world around them.

I hope, and pray, that the promise comforts them. It scares me.