Out for Blood

This section from Chapter 4 of my book, Nothing but the Blood: The Gospel According to Dexter, is especially poignant this morning:

On that horrific day, Charles C. Roberts, IV entered a schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania and murdered five Amish girls, aged 7-13, before taking his own life. Five other girls were wounded. Although the gunman’s motives were not totally clear, it appears he was plagued by fantasies of molesting young girls and was equipped to be in the schoolhouse for a long time, presumably to abuse his victims. Instead, under pressure from police surrounding the site, he rushed to the kill.

One thing, however, is clear: he was out for blood.

Janice Ballanger, Deputy Coroner for Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, said that “there was not one desk, not one chair, in the whole schoolroom that was not splattered with either blood or glass. There were bullet holes everywhere, everywhere.”

When we move from a fictional killer to a real-life killer, we are sobered by the heaviness of death. That is what blood symbolizes – death. Or more accurately, it symbolizes life. Its expulsion from the body, its coming out into plain sight, oozing dark red, is life leaving, going out, bringing on death. “You see, the life of the body is in the blood…” (Leviticus 17:11).

As shocked as we were to hear of this brutal intrusion into the life of a peaceful separatist community, we were more shocked by what came after.

Forgiveness.