Think No Evil: Inside the Story of the Amish Schoolhouse Shooting...and Beyond Read online

  “There are some stories that need to be told and never forgotten. The events that began on October 2, 2006, when a lone shooter started firing his shotgun at ten innocent Amish schoolgirls in a one-room schoolhouse is one of those stories. It could have ended there and forever transformed a tight-knit Amish community from one of love and trust to fear and hate—instead it changed the way the world would think about forgiveness, family, and community.

  In an era of nonstop litigation and in which people demand their ‘pound of flesh’ for any real or perceived offense, Think No Evil is a timely reminder that there is a better way that the world has forgotten. The author’s Amish background gave him unique access and special insight into how the Amish were able to extend absolute forgiveness to the man who killed their children and embrace that man’s family as one of their own.

  You will not be able to look at life the same way after reading this book.”

  —Glenn Beck, radio and television host and number one New York Times bestselling author

  “In the pages of this book Jonas tells the painful events that hit the Amish community in October 2006. You share their shock as he explains how the event unfolded and rocked their community in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, the outlying areas, and the entire nation as it spread throughout the media. Being raised Amish, Jonas has a special way of sharing with us how forgiveness is taught from childhood. This is the story of forgiveness. How the community forgave and how Jonas himself in his personal life has forgiven without blame or vengeance and how it has brought healing personally and in the entire community.”

  —Dr. Richard D. Dobbins, pastor, psychologist, author, and founder of EMERGE Ministries

  “We were shocked by the heinous crime. It was beyond belief. But when the Amish community quickly forgave, we were mystified. How could they do that? Why would they do that?

  How can we forgive those that have wounded us? What about the reoccurring emotions? What about ‘forgive and forget’? Forgiveness is hard yet we all have people in our lives we need to forgive. What can we learn from this story?

  Jonas Beiler lifts the curtain and lets us see behind the scenes. It is an amazing story of God’s grace and forgiveness as a way of life working through shattered lives to heal and restore. And he courageously lifts the curtain on his own life and tragic events that lends authenticity to the truth so vividly portrayed by the Amish families. We cannot dismiss this story as irrelevant to us.”

  —Ruth Graham, daughter of Rev. Billy Graham

  “A clear road map for achieving the relative peace and contentment that many seek! Jonas’s deep understanding of forgiveness and its freeing power provides a window into the discipline and courage the Amish community has taught and modeled for numerous generations. You are left contemplating what a different world we could create if more of us would be willing to choose a personal path of peace through forgiveness.”

  —Samuel R. Beiler, president/CEO of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels

  “This is a dramatic story of the most unthinkable evil and the triumph over it through forgiveness—a story portraying the very lowest and highest of human conduct. Jonas Beiler captures the gut-wrenching experience of a community having to come to terms with an episode of homegrown violence that will never be understood or explained. He portrays the Amish, who are at the center of this drama, as real people who struggle with grief and anger like the rest of us, yet who rose above it through faith to offer a healing forgiveness. There is much in Think No Evil to inspire a new approach to conflict and violence around the world.”

  —Don Eberly, two-time White House presidential aide, award-winning author, and advocate for community solutions

  “If there’s anybody who has lived a life of forgiveness, it is Jonas Beiler. This forgiveness grew out of the theology of growing up in an Amish home. He and Anne have been dear friends for several years now, and it is great to see them live out the theology of forgiveness in their everyday lives.”

  —Bill Gaither, songwriter

  “Many accuse our Amish neighbors of being strange and unusual. In the immediate aftermath of the Nickel Mines school shootings, the world found that to be true. The deeply hurting Amish community showed a strange and unusual commitment to show deep grace, mercy, and forgiveness ... of the type that should be normal and usual for us all. Jonas Beiler takes us into the story of the Nickel Mines shootings, offering readers deep insights into how the world should be. This is a compelling story that will not only make you think but just might change your life.”

  —Dr. Walt Mueller, president of Center for Parent/Youth Understanding, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and author of Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture

  Think No Evil

  INSIDE THE STORY OF THE AMISH SCHOOLHOUSE SHOOTING... AND BEYOND

  JONAS BEILER WITH SHAWN SMUCKER

  Our purpose at Howard Books is to:

  • Increase faith in the hearts of growing Christians

  • Inspire holiness in the lives of believers

  • Instill hope in the hearts of struggling people everywhere

  Because He’s coming again!

  Published by Howard Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.howardpublishing.com

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Think No Evil © 2009 Jonas Beiler

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Howard Subsidiary Rights Department,

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  Published in association with Ambassador Literary Agency, Nashville, Tennessee

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  ISBN 978-1-4165-6298-6

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4391-6838-7

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  HOWARD and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact:

  Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949

  or [email protected].

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event.

  For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers

  Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Edited by Cindy Lambert

  Interior design by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

  Photography by Tim Landis. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  I would like to dedicate this book to the community

  of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and the people who

  have been forever changed by such a horrific event,

  the families who lost precious children,

  the first responders, and the pastors

  and counselors who showed up

  immediately to support this community.

  To those who will continue to mourn

  and choose to forgive every day,

  my prayer is that you will find yourself

  on a path of recovery and that a new normal

  will bring with it some measure of redemption.

  May God’s grace be with all who struggle to forgive

  and those who long to be forgiven.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE: Gates Wide Open

  CHAPTER TWO: Nickel Mines, Asleep

  CHAPTER THREE: C
onverging on an Amish School

  CHAPTER FOUR: Point of No Return

  CHAPTER FIVE: “Shoot Me First”

  CHAPTER SIX: My Heavenly Home Is Bright and Fair

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Losing Angie

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Think No Evil

  CHAPTER NINE: Godly Examples

  CHAPTER TEN: “Maybe I Should Forgive, Too”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Contend Valiantly

  CHAPTER TWELVE: From Forgiveness to Friendship

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Why Forgive?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Edit Your History

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Let the New Grass Grow

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Nickel Mines Schoolhouse

  CHAPTER ONE

  Gates Wide Open

  IT HAS BECOME numbingly familiar: A man walks into a church, a store, a dormitory, a nursing home, or a school, and begins shooting. Sometimes there is panic, sometimes there is an eerie quietness. But always bodies fall, almost in unison, with the shell casings dropping from the gun. And always there is death. Senseless, inexplicable loss of innocent life. Within seconds we receive reports on our BlackBerries or iPhones. Within minutes the shooting is “Breaking News” on CNN, and by the end of the day it has seared a name in our memories. Columbine. Virginia Tech.

  Or for me, the Amish schoolhouse shooting.

  As I write this, it has been nearly three years since our community watched as ten little girls were carried out of their one-room school and laid on the grass where first responders desperately tried to save their lives. As a professional counselor and the founder of a counseling center that serves central Pennsylvania, I saw firsthand the effects this traumatic event had on our citizens. And as someone who grew up in an Amish household and suffered through my own share of tragedies, I found myself strangely drawn back into a culture that I once chose to leave. I know these people, who still travel by horse and buggy and light their homes with gas lanterns, yet as I moved among them during this tragedy I found myself asking questions: How were they able to cope so well with the loss of their children? What enables a father who lost two daughters in that schoolhouse to bear no malice toward the man who shot them? And what can I learn—what can we learn—to help us more gracefully carry our own life burdens?

  That last question is what prompted me to share what I have learned from the families who lost so much that day. The Amish will be the first to tell you they’re not perfect. But they do a lot of things right. Forgiveness is one of them. In my counseling I have seen how lesser tragedies destroy relationships, ruin marriages, and turn people’s hearts to stone. Life throws so much at us that seems unfair and undeserved, and certainly the shootings at the Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, were both. And yet not a word of anger or retribution from the Amish. Somehow they have learned that blame and vengeance are toxic, while forgiveness and reconciliation disarm their grief. Even in the valley of the shadow of death they know how to live well, and that is the story I want to share—how ordinary human beings ease their own pain by forgiving those who have hurt them.

  It is a story that began decades ago, when I knew it was time to choose.

  LITTLE HAS changed in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, from the time I was a young boy to that fateful October day when shots pierced the stillness of our countryside. Towns like Cedar Lane, New Holland, Gap, and Iva might have grown slightly, but as you drive through the hills and valleys along White Oak Road or Buck Hill Road, you’ll see the same quaint farms and patchwork fields that the Amish have worked for generations. Like most Amish boys, I learned to read in a little one-room schoolhouse and could hitch up a team of horses by the time I was twelve years old. I didn’t feel deprived by our lack of electricity or phones, and it didn’t really bother me to wear the plain clothes that set us apart from my non-Amish friends. As far as I was concerned, being Amish was fine with me, except for one thing: I loved cars. I mean, I really loved them. I couldn’t imagine never being able to drive one, but I knew that’s what was at stake if I remained Amish.

  In Amish culture, you may be born into an Amish family, but you must choose for yourself if you want to be Amish, and that usually happens somewhere between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. You may have seen documentaries about Amish teenagers sowing their wild oats for a year or so before deciding to leave or stay within the Amish faith. While it’s true that Amish young people are given their freedom, in reality few teenagers stray very far from the Amish way of life. But all eventually must choose, and once you decide to stay and become baptized as Amish you can never leave without serious consequences, including being shunned by other Amish, even your own parents and relatives. I couldn’t imagine leaving my loving family, but I also felt a tug to explore life beyond my Amish roots. I worried that it would hurt my father if I chose to leave. I remember once asking my dad why we did the things we did, and he told me it was all about choice. We choose to live the way we do. It is not forced upon us. So when I finally told him, at age fifteen, that I did not want to stay Amish, I know he was disappointed, but he was not harsh with me, nor did he try to talk me out of it. He respected my choice, which has profoundly shaped my thinking about the Amish.

  You can always trust the Amish. They live up to their word. If they say they will do something, they will do it. You may have heard the expression, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Well, you would never hear that from Amish parents. Whatever they teach their children, they back it up with their actions. My dad told me we had a choice, and when I made a choice that he obviously wished I hadn’t made, he did not turn his back on me. He taught me an important lesson the way most Amish teach their children: by example. Many years later, in the wake of the tragic shooting, I would see Amish mothers and fathers teach their children about forgiveness the same way.

  I left the Amish community, but I never left my family, nor did they abandon me. Because of that, I too would learn about forgiveness from my father’s example. Most of my brothers and sisters made the same decision to leave for their own reasons. But my parents remained Amish, and much of my worldview is still seen through the metaphorical front windscreen of an Amish buggy.

  DURING THOSE winter months after the shooting, so much of our community was covered in stillness. The shortened days felt somber and subdued as we were constantly reminded of the girls who had perished. Normally, the sights and sounds surrounding my home in Lancaster County filled me with a sense of nostalgia; the rhythm of horse and buggies clip-clopping their way down our backcountry roads, or the sight of children dashing home from school through a cold afternoon, had always been pleasant reminders to me of growing up as a young Amish boy. But that feeling of nostalgia had been replaced with a solemn feeling of remembrance.

  Lancaster County is a unique community, the kind which seems rarely to exist in America anymore. Many of my friends come from families that have lived in this same area for over two hundred years, some even from the time before our country was formed—often we are still connected by friendships held long ago by our parents, our grandparents, or our great-grandparents. You will find roadside stands selling produce or baked goods, and it is not unusual for them to be left unattended, the prices listed on a bucket or a box where you can leave payment for the goods you take. The vast majority of the county is farmland, and in the summer, various shades of green spread out to the horizon. Beautiful forests line the hills and drift down to waving fields of corn and tobacco and hay.

  In the fall months many of the small towns sponsor fairs or festivals, some established for seventy-five years or more. They were originally conceived for local farmers to bring and sell their harvested goods, but, like much of the commerce in this area, they were also social events—an opportunity to catch up with friends you hadn’t seen in a while. I can imagine that back in the day they were joyous times, the crops having been brought in, the community coming together to prepare for a long winter. Nowadays we still go to the fair every year and sit on the same stre
et corner with all of our friends, some of whom we haven’t seen all year but can count on seeing at the fair. The parade goes by, filled with local high school bands and hay wagons advertising local businesses. Our grandchildren vanish into the backstreets together, another generation of friendships created while riding the Ferris wheel or going through the haunted house. I like to think that in thirty years they will be sitting on that corner, with their children running off to ride the rides with my friends’ greatgrandchildren.

  The Amish people live easily among us: good neighbors, hard workers—a peaceful people. They attend the same fairs with their children. Their separateness goes only as far as their plain clothing, or their lack of modern conveniences such as telephones and electricity, or the fact that they have their own schools. I have many good friends who are Amish. While they choose to live their lives free of cell phones and computers, they still walk alongside us. They mourn with us when we lose loved ones, and we with them. We talk to them about world events. They volunteer for our local fire brigades and ambulance crews, and run businesses within our community.