Faith Works 10-14-06
Jeff Gill

Casseroles, Compassion, and Incomprehension

Head up to Utica and turn right, and before long you can expect to find yourself tailgating an Amish buggy if you aren’t careful, and you should be careful.
The yellow diamond signs with a black outline of a horsedrawn vehicle are not a tourist directional indicator, but a warning to fast-moving moderns. There are people living around here who move at a different pace, by other means – make adjustments, please.
But if you zoom around with a kick to the accelerator, and spray gravel into their horses’ faces, they will forgive you. They may even feel sorry for the forces which you let drive your life, and lead you to drive that way. Poor English, they may think, and likely say a prayer for you.
Aside from pumpkin pies and spiced candles, what has us thinking about the Amish these days is the tragedy in a one-room schoolhouse almost two weeks back now. And the forgiveness.
Many of us can relate to the scene of a warm casserole in hand, standing at a door where grief has visited. We’ve made those dishes, and stood in the doorway, offering condolences, and not a few of us have been the ones opening the door, saying thank you for your sorrow.
What many of us marvel at is the idea that before the day was done, there were people, people who had lost a child or grandchild themselves, standing casserole in hand at the door of the widow of the killer, offering their sorrow for her plight. We hear, we acknowledge, but we think "I could not do that."
And the fact is that most of us could not. It is too much of a stretch to forgive at that extension of self, to sincerely grieve along with the family of those who did us grievous wrong, and offer our broken heart for their sorrow along with our own.
We could not, because we have not practiced forgiveness, just as few of us could lift 500 pounds. But someone who often bench presses 250, and has done 450 recently: when that person raises 500 off the ground, we nod approvingly.
In forgiveness, most of us avoid the gym. The practice in daily life of forgiveness, the exercise of the muscles of compassion, is a discipline few of us maintain.
The Amish, on the other hand, for all their other particularities, if not peculiarities, are seasoned veterans at forgiveness. The odd stares, the passing cars, even rocks thrown for no reason out of the night at a peaceful buggy: Amish folk forgive us, called by most of them "English," most every day for our impatience, our pushiness, our rudeness.
The acts of the Amish community in Nickle Mines, PA are remarkable and worth our praise and reflection, but they are part and parcel of their everyday life as Christians. They read their New Testament, they see certain expectations God has of us in this life, and they practice that understanding as best as they are able. Modern American society helped to put another 50 pounds on the bar, but they lifted the extra weight without hardly a hitch. They’d been training for such a day all their lives.
The Amish are not exceptional people, really, but they are everyday people who have followed an exceptional discipline for nearly 400 years. What can we learn, aside from mashed potatoes and bigger slices of pie, from their example?
It will come step by step, slowly, plodding even, like the pace of a buggy on a blacktop road.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a tale through knapsack77@gmail.com.