Starting Right
Starting Right is a 5 minute Day Starter to help keep you motivated, encouraged, and focused throughout your day. DannyMac is a pastor, teacher, motivational speaker, husband, and father. His years of leading and training people have given him vast experience in helping individuals to accomplish change in their lives and meet their goals. He can help you set the course for your day by offering practical advice from God's Word in a positive and fun way. There is no better way to begin your day than by Starting Right with DannyMac.
Starting Right
When Love Overcomes Hate: The Nickel Mines Story
What does it mean to truly forgive? Today's episode takes us to the heart of one of the most powerful examples of forgiveness in recent memory - the response of the Amish community to the 2006 Nickel Mines schoolhouse shooting.
When Charles Roberts walked into an Amish schoolhouse and fatally shot five young girls before taking his own life, the world expected outrage. Instead, within hours, an Amish man visited the gunman's mother with an astonishing message: "We do not see you as enemies. We see you as parents grieving the loss of your child too." As the story unfolds, we witness Amish parents forming a protective barrier around the shooter's family at his funeral, offering condolences to those related to the man who had just murdered their daughters.
This story challenges our conventional approach to healing. When we insist on emotional resolution before extending forgiveness, we often remain stuck. The Amish demonstrate a more biblical path - choosing forgiveness as an act of will, then allowing our emotions to follow. Their example prompts us to ask: Who might we need to forgive today? And what healing might begin if we made that decision first, rather than waiting until we feel ready?
Good morning and welcome to Starting Right with Danny Mac. I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great five-minute start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back, relax and let me help you start your day right. Today, I want to share with you a story about incredible forgiveness. It's a true story, one that I had forgotten about until I recently came across it. Let me preface the story with these two verses Proverbs 17,. Verse 9 says Love prospers when a fault is forgiven, and then down in Luke 6, 27,. But to you who are willing to listen, I say love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you and pray for those who hurt you.
Speaker 1:Nickel Mines is a small town in rural Pennsylvania. It's mostly an agricultural area, but very beautiful, with farmlands everywhere around. It's also a place where there's a large concentration of the Amish. These people of deep faith continue to live by the traditions of their forefathers of loving God, of peaceful living and hard work. On the morning of October 2nd 2006, charles Roberts walked into the one-room Amish schoolhouse. In his right hand was a gun. He ordered the adults and boys to leave, and then he tied up ten little girls between the ages of six and thirteen and he shot them, killing five and injuring the others before he killed himself.
Speaker 1:Terry Roberts is that man's mother. She was devastated at the news, completely overwrought and overrun by her emotions to think that her son could do such a horrible thing. She couldn't bear the thought of facing those families of those children that her son had just killed. But within hours after the massacre, as the Amish parents were still waiting at a nearby barn to find out whether their daughters had survived or not, an Amish man named Henry arrived at the Roberts' home with a message. He wanted the family to know that they did not see the Roberts as an enemy. Rather, they saw them as parents who were grieving the loss of their child too. Before he left, henry assured the Roberts that the Amish community considered them friends and that they would be praying for them in their loss of their son. On the day of Charles Roberts' funeral, the world watched in amazement as nearly 30 Amish men and women, some of them the parents of the victims of the shooting, they came to the cemetery and they formed a wall to block out the media cameras Parents of daughters who had died at the hand of their son, approached the Roberts after the funeral, offering them condolences for their loss. Then, just four weeks after the funeral, offering them condolences for their loss, then, just four weeks after the shooting, charles Roberts' parents were invited to meet with all the families in a local fire hall. Terry Roberts, with tears in her eyes, said One of the Amish mothers gazed into my eyes until we were both blurred with tears. We are all grieving, we're all struggling to make sense of the senseless. And the Roberts family began to feel forgiveness even as they were still struggling with the loss and what their son had done.
Speaker 1:Stephen Nolt is a professor of Amish studies at Elizabethtown College. He explained how the Amish process forgiveness. He says the Amish forgive first and then, every day, work through the emotions of it. This decisional forgiveness is what opened up the space for the Roberts family to feel and to find forgiveness and friendship from the Amish. The Amish are still friends with the Roberts family. In fact, that friendship is growing. They regularly meet for picnics and dinners together and this friendship has only grown stronger on the basis of forgiveness.
Speaker 1:I believe those Amish people have a perspective on forgiveness which is far more biblical than most of the rest of us who are Christians. The idea that you decide to forgive first and then work through the emotional part of it is If we say that we have got to work through our emotions before we can forgive. That's putting us before the other person. When we choose to forgive first and then work through our own emotions and our own struggles, we are prioritizing the other person and helping them to heal as well. It's not easy to do, and I can't imagine what those Amish families went through. It would be devastating, but they still knew and were able to say I will forgive first and I will show love to the family of this man who murdered my children. That takes a lot of strength and a lot of determination and a lot of character.
Speaker 1:I am humbled by their ability to forgive and the lessons that I can learn from them today. Maybe there's some people in your life that you need to forgive too and you have been waiting until you feel like forgiving them. Let's take this lesson today and learn that the decision to forgive has to come first, and then we work out what's going on inside of us. Until we make that decision to forgive, the healing cannot start, and we all need to be healed. Have a great day, my friends. We will talk again tomorrow. Thank you for listening today and I invite you to join me Monday to Friday, right here on Starting Right with Danny Mac.
