God Was Really Present!

"Barbie has been talking and she said Marian said, 'Shoot me first'...Apparently what she was trying to do was to save the younger girls."--Rita Rhoads

The story of these two little sisters is so unbearably sad. It reminds me of the stories about Christian martyrs.

Two of the little Amish girls who were shot in the massacre in their one-room Pennsylvania schoolhouse on Monday, October 2, 2006, appealed to the deranged killer, Charles Carl Roberts, to shoot them first so that the younger girls might survive the rampage.

Marian Fisher, 13, begged the killer, "Shoot me first."

Marian's little sister Barbie, 11, who survived, followed her sister's example and asked the killer to shoot her next.

Rita Rhoads, a nurse-midwife who delivered Marian, told Reuters:

"It was very courageous of the girls to offer themselves... God was really present to give the girls that kind of courage."

It take a lot of faith to believe that God is really present when innocent children are murdered, but I think that God is present when people try to help each other and think of the other person first.

John Hurdle of Reuters has the heartbreaking story here.

A fund for the community has been established and donations can be sent to this address:

The Nickel Mines School Victims Fund
c/o HomeTowne Heritage Bank
P.O. Box 337 Strasburg, PA 17579

A CNN story about how people are pitching in to help the Amish can be found here.