Keeping the Dream

Do all you can with what you have, in the time you have, in the place you are.

Nkosi Johnson
Twelve-year-old Zulu boy, living with AIDS

From a list I’m on: www.gratefulness.org

This is a slightly revised version of a post I made yesterday on my local paper’s, York Daily Record, message board, but I really wanted to post it here, because I’m feeling I need to do something.

As we’re all sitting here stunned, what I’d like to know is what can we do to help?

I believe in prayer, I believe in holding all families involved in our thoughts. I believe in looking at the situation and engaging in discussion to ascertain how to address this both locally and as a society, as a whole. I think it’s important to assess whatever dynamics are involved that could create such a thing happening, from personal responsibility from the individual involved to our responsibility to one another as human beings.

But I also believe in moving our feet, and as the Amish come together in a time of crisis for each other, they not only look to their faith, they also pick up hammers and nails and wood and do whatever is needed to rebuild after a loss.

We can’t rebuild lost lives or put together traumatized souls as easily as we can raise a barn, but we can do something.

So, I ask, how can we help? Do the Amish have insurance? Maybe it wouldn’t be wise to have a hundred people descend upon families that value their privacy with bowls of soup and fruit baskets, but can we help them deal with aspects of this situation, that may not be on their priority list at this moment, as their children fight for their lives? Can we start to implement a gathering of resources to aleviate whatever financial burdens this may place on them, so they can go on with the process of healing without added financial stress?

Is there a way we can find out what would be most helpful to the familes at this time? I would invite each of us to look into would be truly helpful at this time. It’s important that those of us who are stunned move our feet. Perhaps in this way, we can, also, move through our own grief.

Demian,
~DreamSinger

A reporter asked a young Amish boy what the adults told him the afternoon of the shooting in the one room Amish school house in PA. That was his reply.

There’s no doubt that in the midst of the pain and grief, the Amish will be the first to extend comfort and condolences to the gunman’s family.

There is a tremendous sense of loss as a community that separates itself from the world, finds that world infringing upon them in the most evil of ways, and there is a sense of awe as I realize that these murders will not kill the essence of who the Amish are.

I don’t know that I would be ready to do that, to forgive, but I do know that that is the ideal the Amish hold and if they can, then how can I do less, but to hold that ideal for myself?

Perhaps I will have to travel a longer journey to arrive at forgiveness’ door, but tonight the Amish faith convicts me to hold to that commitment, no matter how long it takes.

I hold the children in my prayers. I hold every hurting soul in my prayers. I hold a society that feeds off of violence and does not understand when violence erupts in my prayers. And I ask that we, as a people, will be jolted out of complacency and be moved to assess and act to implement changes of significance, so that those little girls in Nickel Mines, PA will not have died in vain.

Demian,
~DreamSinger