It was a parade of black. Stoic and resolute, the Lancaster County, PA Amish community moved down the funeral route in a procession of horse drawn buggies.  Evil had assaulted what tradition had protected.  Yet history will never appropriately reflect the victor in this confrontation.

It was grace that was the weapon of retaliation. It was forgiveness that these people stockpiled in their arsenal. Their interdependence bolstered, comforted and served. As if reconstructing a barn from the ashes of destruction, this community came together in a demonstration of care that blasts across a selfish and private world.

The picture needed no embellishment.  The procession, long, steady and motorless, passed in front of the home of Charles Roberts, the shooter, the perpetrator of evil.  But darkness, no matter how personal and violent, could not extinguish this light. Isolation had met its match in the rolling hills of southeastern Pennsylvania. Never has black been so alive with color.

Evil deployed its most intense attack... on the defenseless… on the completely vulnerable… against all human sensibility, and it lost. It was hatred and bitterness that stagnated in the soul of this man, but it was extravagant love that emerged from the cesspool, in lavish proportion.

The human heart is capable of such evil, but it never has the last word. The explosion of hate was overcome with the deafening silence of mercy and hope. For it is hope that fuels the heart of love.  And in doing so it widened the circle of the victims. Love embraced the stunned and horrified family of the killer. Love wept for their pain.

You can dispute the philosophy of lifestyle, but you will never dispel the lesson of grace that echoed through the Lancaster County hills. You can question elements of theology, but we will forever learn from the classroom of their living. Arms of grief surrounded hearts of shame. From the well of tragedy came the quenching waters for the thirst of disgrace.

“Where there is hatred, let me sow love…” May we model what history will never completely record.

Ironically, it was technology that recorded what simplicity had birthed. Faith, hope and love… and love wins.