On Recent Events: Sadness, yet hope!

pettyfog · Oct 7, 2006

I'm not posting this in World News because I dont expect the byplay and snarkiness that is expected and encouraged (yes, even by me) on that forum.
If you want to discuss or debate the topic seriously, please reply... if you only want to fire potshots, dont bother reading the rest of this, and certainly DONT bother with snark because I'll kill it.

And I've never done that before.

* * *
This is posted in sadness, yet some hope:
NYTimes: An Old World Close to a New World Horror

Three days after a grisly attack on an Amish schoolhouse here, funerals were held Thursday for four of the five girls killed by a gunman who wrote of being forever changed by the death of his newborn daughter and driven over the edge by fantasies of sexually assaulting young girls. A truck driver, he was paid to collect the milk of local dairy farmers. Instead, he took their children.

The services were a somber close to a New World horror visited upon an Old World people. The first began at 9 a.m. in the woodworking shop of the father of a victim, Naomi Rose Ebersol, 7.

“We are here facing the unexpected,” said one of the two Amish pastors who spoke and whose remarks were relayed by a Mennonite minister who attended, David Nissley. “We know and believe that these girls are in heaven with the Lord Jesus Christ.” The man said the pastor read from the Book of Matthew about the importance of innocence.

“Unless you become like these little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven,” the pastor said, emphasizing the need for the faithful left behind to regain the purity and innocence threatened by the killings.

After the 90-minute service, about 300 men with long beards and women in white bonnets climbed into their black and gray buggies and clip-clopped in quiet procession to Bart Amish Cemetery. Along the way, they passed the house of Charles C. Roberts IV, the 32-year-old killer.

A few hours later, a similar ceremony was held in the barn of the family of the oldest victim, Marian Fisher, 13, who told Mr. Roberts during the attack on Monday to kill her and spare her classmates. And in late afternoon, the service for Mary Liz Miller, 8; and her sister Lena Miller, 7, started. Another victim, Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, is to be buried Friday.

Mr. Roberts shot a total of 10 young girls. One was taken off life support on Tuesday and brought home to die, officials said. Two others remained in critical condition and two in serious condition.

At times, the tragedy was overpowering. On Wednesday, a stone-faced deputy county coroner, Amanda Shelley, described for reporters the blood on the walls of the one-room schoolhouse where the rampage occurred. But her composure dissolved when she mentioned a sign hanging beneath the chalkboard. It read, “Visitors Brighten People’s Days.”
.......
The news media intrusion was only one element preventing even a semblance of closure for this insular community, whose members have been comforting the family of the girl expected to die and traveling to Philadelphia and Hershey to visit the four wounded girls who remain hospitalized.

“This is an awful time because it keeps coming,” said Philip W. Furman, an undertaker in Leola who serves the Amish community.

But the strain of having hundreds of reporters, photographers and their high-tech equipment descend on an area that often seems as if it is from an earlier century was apparent.

“I’d just as soon not give you any information about our culture to send out to the world,” said Ammon Fisher Jr., who helped his father carve tombstones for the girls. ‘What good does that do?”

Driving on Mine Road in Georgetown, an Amish man in his 20’s swerved his large mule-drawn hay cutter toward a crowd of reporters. “We all wish you would just pack up and leave,” he told one.

Yet, when asked about the killings, most people here seemed focused on forgiveness, faith and a determination to move forward.
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Why did the haunted fantasies of a self-described pervert have anything to do with the Amish? Why did he pick on these girls.. was it because their simple affected purity seemed to mock him?

While in a different faith community:
NYTimes: Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers

Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.

At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.

Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.

While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it “the 4 percent panic attack”), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.

“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”

The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”

Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking up” approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.

. . . . . . . . .
When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight students. “When we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,” he said. They got 12.

Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, “At school I don’t have a lot of friends who are Christians.”

Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire.

“A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex.

She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than she was, and added: “It’s scary sometimes. You get made fun of.”
Click to expand...

This explains the Amish way of life... it has ALWAYS been this way.

While the message of the Gospel is that of love your neighbor, the caution is given: "Be in the World, but not of the World".

Evangelicals interpret that differently than the Amish do. One figuratively, the other literally.

The middle ground are the Mennonites, who use modern technology but shun modern pop culture and dress plainly, and which allow or encourage outsiders to join them, though they arent 'fishers of men' in the 'Evangelical' sense.

I have to disagree, though, with these worries about christian teens permanently abandoning their faith. Some will, of course, but what they are at sixteen most will be at 32. And the 'some' will be replaced by teens brought up in Mainstream 'feel-good' churches who find them empty of substance.

And even the Amish lose their kids for a short time:
NPR: Amish Teens Tested in 'Devil's Playground'

The only thing that is worrisome is the attempt to remove from secular society any reminder of the faith these kids are brought up in... yeah, 'out of sight, out of mind applies'.

When the ACLU and Progressives succeed in removing the cross from every public venue, then mainstream churches remove the cross from their buildings so as 'not to offend' (already happening, visit Manhattan's Riverside Church) then it will be almost complete... the only thing left will be to remove the religious shows from cable and broadcast radio and tv.

But, even then, the kids that are raised in the faith and taught the core values will not lose them. This I, being what's described as a 'carnal Christian', know for a fact.

But what happens in that short time when the young adult is 'finding and testing' can indeed shape or scar him for life. This may be what happened to Roberts. We dont and may never know what his grounding was. If he had been brought up in faith, he might have tortured himself with the self-accusations based on what he had done.. and seen the outward innocence of the young Amish as mocking him.
Is this why there are so many that dont like to be reminded of our roots in faith?

Forum	Title	Date
Miscellaneous	More evidence recent college grads think we're all idiots..	Sep 15, 2006
Miscellaneous	Events and 'price-gouging'	Sep 13, 2008
Miscellaneous	Life altering events... or so you think	Sep 5, 2008

On Recent Events: Sadness, yet hope!

pettyfog Well-Known Member

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On Recent Events: Sadness, yet hope!

pettyfog Well-Known Member

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