Enlarging the Future
Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.
—PAUL BOESE
There are a few times in our lives when pure, unadulterated evil shows itself—most of the time evil works its ways much more subtly. Yet those moments come once every so often, and what we are confronted with is pure fear, hatred, and destruction. Usually the temptation during these times is to run away, to shrink back, to retreat into a dark hole until the time passes. Our initial reaction is usually not forgiveness.
Even as I write this final chapter in my story, only a few weeks have passed since pure evil tried to shatter a small town. The story began with a family man, a hard worker by all accounts, a husband, the father of small children (in other words, someone who appeared to be entirely normal), yet he made horrible plans and carried them out, walking into a small Amish schoolhouse not five miles from my house and shooting ten small girls. Five of them were killed, two of them sisters, ages seven and eight.
Yet in the face of such evil and hatred, the Amish community’s first reaction was one of forgiveness! CNN reported that a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls said of the killer on the day of the murder: “We must not think evil of this man.” A member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County explained: “I don’t think there’s anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive, and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts.”
In fact, that’s exactly what happened: the Amish reportedly set up a fund for donations to go to the family of the man who shot their children; the Amish families invited that same family to one of the funerals, normally a private affair to which very few non-Amish are ever invited; there is even the story of one of the local Amish preachers finding the shooter’s wife and father-in- law, telling them he did not hold them responsible. He hugged them and they held each other, the three of them, weeping.
There will be no lawsuits. There will be no public statements of sadness. There will be no press conferences casting doubt on the performance of the police or the emergency services or the government. There will be only forgiveness.
That is not to say there will be no suffering. Do the families mourn for the children? Of course they do. Do the mothers feel sadness, loss? They must. Does the father of those two small girls buried side by side wake up in the morning and miss his little children? Of course he does. But when evil rose up in that small town and carried out its horrible atrocities, these families, this community, all of us in fact, were presented with a stark choice: do we react out of fear and hatred and allow evil to perpetuate its destructive self, or do we choose to allow the healing process to begin?
Forgiveness continues its healing process in our small town, something that began only a few hours after the event took place. A few short days later, I drove on some back roads close to the school where the shooting occurred. I approached a stop sign where I had to turn right or left. But then I paused—in front of me was a dirt lane that led back to another Amish school. How do they do it? I thought to myself. How do they go right back to school? That’s when I noticed: both the gate to the drive and the doors of the schoolhouse were flung wide open. They would not let hatred force them into a dark place of seclusion and fear. Their response to the atrocity was to open wide the doors.
Forgiveness also continues its healing process in my life. As others showed me love and encouragement and forgiveness, my life began gaining strength. I know of no other more powerful life force than forgiveness. When speaking about it, my husband loves to bring up the old Sunday school adage: forgive and forget. “Impossible,” he says. Forgive and forget is a saying we simply cannot apply to those events in our lives that most need forgiveness—usually these are events that have changed us, events we will never forget. Instead, Jonas adheres to another saying he has heard my sister Fi say: “Forgive because you cannot forget.”
When my extended family found out about the abusive situation that had occurred between Pastor and me, their initial reaction could have been one of disgust or surprise or, more appropriate to our conservative background, shame. They could have let me slip off the family radar; after all, we lived so far away that they easily could have just written me off.
Yet they chose grace and forgiveness. I informed my brothers of everything through a letter and waited for the fallout. You cannot imagine the roller coaster of emotions I felt when my oldest brother, Jake, and his wife showed up unexpectedly at our church one Sunday morning in 1982. He drove all those hundreds of miles from Pennsylvania to Texas just to be there with me, to show me his support, to tell me he loved me. I felt totally overwhelmed and forgiven!
“What are you guys doing here?” I asked, amazed.
“We just wanted to support you,” Jake said in his typically quiet way when talking about serious things. Jake would be the one to come by Downingtown over five years later on one of my first weekends as owner, just to offer the same encouragement and support. One by one my family members began showing me their love and forgiveness through letters or phone calls or visits. This amazing grace allowed me to continue my journey back to happiness and some sense of a normal life after six years of darkness and confusion.
My mom and dad also pounced on the opportunity to show me their love and support. Even during my dark years, they came down every winter for a month or so just to see how we were doing—they would pull a camper down and live in our driveway. Even though we’d rejected them so coldly when we left Pennsylvania, they kept trying to break down those walls, slowly picking away.
About a year after freedom returned into my life, doctors discovered that Dad needed open-heart surgery, so Becky, Fi, and I decided to drive from Texas to Pennsylvania to be there for the operation. Covering all of those miles together felt very therapeutic to me: the three of us girls were back together again, the first time in years! I thought about so much during that trek north, but I felt especially hopeful that I would get to talk to Dad about my abuse and apologize for not believing him when it came to Pastor.
Fi, Becky, and I hung out at the hospital for a week along with our brothers and in-laws, and it became a time of healing for our relationship. Daddy recovered from his surgery, but the opportunity never came up for me to tell him face-to-face about what I had gone through. I wasn’t too disappointed, though, just because of how well our family seemed to be healing. I never thought it would be possible, but suddenly we were supporting each other again, loving one another, staying in touch.
Dad recovered from his surgery, and the next winter he and Mom came down to see us again. At that point I still didn’t talk about my dark years with anyone—I felt that I had dealt with the situation and the time had come to move on. I guess I didn’t realize how many other issues still remained. But in any case, that winter was the best winter we had with my parents.
One day Dad came to see me at work—I worked at a steakhouse from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on most afternoons just to make a little extra money. When I got off work, I sat down with Dad at the far booth next to a window that looked out onto the street. That was the first time I ever remember spending one-on-one time with Dad—when you are part of a family with eight children, very few people get the chance to be alone with Dad! I felt special that day in the restaurant, just him and I talking together.
I also remember feeling like he was my daddy again, feeling that for some reason our father-daughter relationship was being restored. He never showed a lot of affection while we were growing up, but sitting there with him made me feel like a little girl again. It reminded me of the feeling I used to get when I was young and we would be driving to market—I always wanted to perch on that middle seat right beside him.
Sitting there with him, I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted to tell him that he had been right all along, I wanted to say sorry for all of the small injustices I had done him, I wanted to tell him I loved him so much. I wanted to tell him everything I had been through. But I couldn’t find the words.
In his own way, he talked around the subject, sometimes darting in terribly close to the unspoken things, then easing away. We didn’t talk directly about my past, but he said enough to bring peace to my heart. I could tell he knew about what had happened, and he still loved me. I knew I was forgiven.
As we got up to leave, I smiled. I felt grateful we’d had that time together, even if I hadn’t been able to verbalize all the things I had been through. As we walked out of the restaurant, Dad turned to me and grinned.
“I love you, Anne,” he said.
Now, I always knew my parents loved me. But in our culture we didn’t say it much, and that is the only time I remember my dad ever saying it to me like that. He couldn’t have said it at a better time.
After Daddy left the restaurant that day, he went to Jonas’s shop to have something on his car fixed. He and Mom were getting ready to drive to Atlanta for a quilt show. Jonas fixed whatever it was that needed to be fixed, so they packed up and left, their small trailer in tow. Less than a week later we got a call from Mom—she was in Atlanta.
“Anne, Dad fell over again, like he did before, and we’re in the hospital,” she said in a hollow voice.
“What?” I asked, shocked, looking at the clock—it was after 8:00 p.m. He had been fine the other day at the restaurant. “We’ll leave right away—we can be there in around twelve hours.”
“No, no. The doctors say he will be okay. Don’t drive through the night; just come in the morning.”
“Is he conscious?” I asked.
“No, well, he’s kind of in and out right now.”
“What? What do you mean in and out? Are you sure he’s going to be okay?”
“They’re saying he’ll be all right in the morning.”
So we made plans for the children and decided to leave in the morning. Carl, my youngest brother and future president of Auntie Anne’s, was visiting us and wanted to drive to the hospital in Atlanta with the three of us sisters.
But before we could even get out the door in the morning, Mom called again.
“Daddy’s dying,” she said in a choked voice.
“What do you mean?” I asked, panic filling my voice.
“The doctors didn’t realize it, but he has been hemorrhaging in his head through the night. He doesn’t have long.”
We left right away and proceeded to get a speeding ticket in every state from Texas to Georgia. The first cop who pulled us over said he would radio ahead. I guess that didn’t happen, because each time we got pulled over, no one knew what we were talking about. We raced along in that little brown Toyota station wagon, and it shimmied the whole way, shaking back and forth as soon as we got up over 55 miles per hour.
Every two hours we stopped for gas and called Mom to see how Daddy was doing.
“He’s not getting better,” she’d say. By the sound of her voice, she wasn’t doing very well, either.
“Mom, tell him we’re coming.”
“I’m not in the room with him,” she said quietly. “I feel so alone, and I don’t know what to do.”
When we got to the hospital, we raced inside. But he was gone. He’d died an hour before we got there, and we were devastated. Shocked. An awful numbness began setting in. Why hadn’t we come last night? Why hadn’t we gone faster? Why didn’t we leave earlier that morning? Why did Daddy have to die alone in a room in that strange hospital in a faraway city?
We all decided to just continue driving up to Pennsylvania for the funeral. Eventually everyone got there—we three sisters and Carl arrived from Atlanta, the rest of our families from Texas, and the three brothers who had been desperately driving from Pennsylvania to Atlanta, trying to get there before Daddy died.
We got to Mom and Dad’s house in Lancaster County around 11:30 that night. Mom’s sisters were all there, and they made dinner for us. We shared that meal together in a bonding sort of sadness, finished eating just after midnight, and then tried to get some sleep. For those who couldn’t sleep, there were extended family members visiting throughout the night, and I was reminded of how strong the family bonds were in our hometown. I felt such good closure just being there, having family around us, supporting us. And I felt very blessed to have had that time with Daddy at the steakhouse.
We buried Daddy right beside Angie. The cold felt bitter, and it was raining or sleeting or something wet and miserable. It was the first time we were all together in seven years, the first time since we had that blowup in Mom and Dad’s house with Pastor parked in the driveway. Our togetherness at that point brought me great hope for the future, even amid the sadness that came with Daddy’s passing.
I thought of our last meeting, and I felt so glad to know that he still loved me and forgave me. We all sang together the same song we’d sung at Angie’s burial: “Daddy won’t have to worry anymore.”
Daddy’s funeral represented many things to me and helped bring about a healing in our family that could have taken much longer. That togetherness also helped me to realize that I was truly forgiven—the more time we spent together, the more comfortable and accepted I felt because no one was condemning me; no one was trying to make me feel bad for my past.
But there was still one person who didn’t forgive me. One person who held me responsible for everything that had happened, one person who continued insisting that I would have to pay for everything I’d done. I couldn’t argue with that person, at least not successfully, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get that person to stop whispering to me, “You are a failure, you are a bad person, you have been a terrible mother.”
Of course, that person was me. I was the only person who refused to forgive.
And then another funeral. Another passing. And another revelation.
1995, 1996, 1997—those years challenged me as I tried to cope with a company expanding at an unbelievable rate, the guilt of my past, and two daughters with so many issues of their own for which I felt responsible. At the root of my insecurity was my relationship with them—I often felt that if only I would have been a better mother during their early years, perhaps they would not have gotten involved in the trouble they did. I felt like a complete failure and couldn’t even remember those years in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Those were such formative years for my little girls, and I couldn’t remember anything about them. But then God decided it was time for me to begin the final process of forgiving myself.
Jonas’s mother passed away in May 1998, the end of a long, long journey for her. There was the viewing, then the funeral, and after it all we came together as a family and supported one another. During the following days we would often congregate at Jonas’s father’s house, just hanging out with whoever came by, looking through his mother’s old things and reminiscing.
One day we went into her room to clean up and sort through some of the things that Jonas’s father wanted to give to the children. I opened a drawer and found a couple of boxes, the white, very thin cardboard clothing boxes used to gift-wrap things. When I opened the boxes, I found envelopes absolutely stuffed full, some nearly bursting. I pulled the boxes out onto her bed and looked a little closer.
The envelopes each had a year, or time period, written on the front in her handwriting, and as I started looking through them, I realized she had kept every single letter I wrote while we lived in Texas! All of the Christmas cards, birthday cards, letters from the girls, letters from me—everything sat there in those boxes.
“Dear Mom and Pop,” they all began, “greetings of love from all of us.”
“TO GRUSSMUMMY,” began a small plain postcard in a child’s all-capital writing, “HI. I LOVE YOU. HOW ARE YOU FEELING? I LIKE TEXAS. LAWONNA LYN.”
“Tell Grussdaddy,” said another one, “that I said hi. We like Texas. I love you.”
“On Tuesday,” I wrote in a letter dated October 25, 1977, “I made some soft sugar cookies and by the time I was finished I didn’t have many left. LaWonna was delivering cookies to all the neighbors and she was enjoying every minute of it. I was happy cause she was so happy giving those cookies away . . . She found some friends across the road that she plays with quite a bit . . .”
“LaVale is doing okay,” I wrote in another letter, “as active as ever and cute as a button these days. She is starting to say a lot of words and an awful lot of jabbering. LaWonna is doing fine and still loves school. It’s only four weeks until Christmas . . .”
“I got LaVale off the bottle and she didn’t hardly even miss it! I am so thankful. LaWonna was in a Christmas parade down here. She belongs to a group called the Bluebirds and their group marched in the parade. She was so tickled to be able to do that . . .”
“To Grusmommy, I love you. I am Getting Me ShotS On TueSday—Thank You For all The letters. LaWonna.”
And then in the early ’80s LaVale’s little letters started showing up.
“Dear Grussmommy, I’m at Loyd’s now and I’m sick with Viruse. How are you? I’m fine now. Have you been sick? What is Grussdouty doing? I’m hoping to get a letter from you. Love you. From LaVale.”
The letters went on and on, each one a snapshot of the years my mind had blocked out, so many little reminders that I’d been a good mother to my girls during those years, even when I had felt terrible about myself. I read through those letters and began to feel something changing inside of me. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but I was finding the grace to forgive myself.
I’ve seen forgiveness complete its healing work in the lives of my husband, Jonas, and our two daughters, LaWonna and LaVale. Both of our girls have discovered the power of grace and forgiveness through their own experiences with abuse. Despite all they went through when their innocence was taken away from them as children, the choices they made as a result of their pain and anger caused them to become women of great compassion. They don’t see themselves as victims but rather as conquorers, and they live their lives with purpose and meaning. Moreover, their experiences have given them an exceptional ability to forgive.
LaVale is the proud mom of Cristian, the little boy who was so honest with me about his unhappiness when I sold Auntie Anne’s. He is the love of her life and was our first grandchild. Cristian is a gift to our family. LaVale decided to further her education and is going to college to get her degree. God has redeemed her from a life of self-destruction, and she has discovered that God is in her corner and has a plan for her life. She has a passion to help those who have been used and abused and wants to make a difference in her world.
LaWonna also worked through her abuse and is not only a survivor but truly an overcomer. She now has a family of her own and lives a very full life with her husband, Russ, and their three children, Trinity, Ryan, and Mia. She has the capacity to be compassionate toward those who are suffering with issues of abuse. She loves deeply and forgives quickly.
During my years at Auntie Anne’s, when I started to slip back into feelings of guilt and depression and hopelessness, I bought a condo in Sarasota. I needed a place to escape to, a place where I could get away from the business and the worries and even my own family at times. Ironically, that place that gave me the isolation I craved has turned into a meeting place where every other year all of my brothers and sisters and all of our husbands and wives, as well as my mother, converge for a time just to hang out.
Sixteen of us, all sharing the common bonds of family, all having at some time or other worked at Auntie Anne’s or owned an Auntie Anne’s location. They say you should never work with family. Well, I can’t say we didn’t have our share of major disagreements and painful arguments. I can’t say we never hurt each other with our words or decisions, because we did, sometimes in a big way that left loads of frustration and disappointment in its wake. But I can say that we still get together every month for a sibling meeting and share our lives. I can say we take trips together and laugh until our bellies ache. I can say that we still support each other through everything. What else needs to be said?
About a year ago I went down to the condo to start this book, and at some point I found myself just walking the beach. The sun was almost invisible behind low gray clouds, and a strong wind whipped up the sand so it stung my legs and sometimes even my face. I carried my sandals, walking barefoot, leaning forward into the wind. Thinking back on my life, the twists and turns it had taken, I felt truly amazed that I was whole. Sometimes even now I cannot believe how high the highs were, or how low the lows—emotionally I went to the very brink of hell and back and felt the forces of evil pulling me, trying to force me over the edge, almost to the point of suicide. Yet somehow I am now thrilled to live this life, feeling that each day is one to be enjoyed. I feel like a new person.
God’s grace and forgiveness are what got me through it all. Today when I think about forgiveness, I wonder, Have I forgiven others as I have been forgiven? Sometimes my old hurts begin to throb and I feel the emotions of anger and depression. It’s during these moments that I think about Jesus and what he said while dying on the cross surrounded by his accusers and executioners. “Father, forgive them.”
This statement has become a lifestyle for me, and the benefit is a life of joy. Many times I even feel happy because I know now that “life is hard but God is good,” and I try not to confuse the two. Happiness is a choice I can make when life is hard, but the joy I have in my soul is permanent.
I have been forgiven much. In the past I would go to Angie’s grave and flash back to the pain and grief of her death and the life I was trapped in. I would feel paralyzed with anxiety and pain. Today when I visit her grave, I think back to my past and realize that the path I travelled made me who I am. I know I have conquered and I am free at last! I no longer feel the need to even the score or get revenge.
Forgiveness has transformed me: each time I visit Angie, I feel more and more at peace, appreciating the life God brought me through. Now I understand that “out of my pain, my passion was born.” Redemption could only complete its work when I began to forgive.
To describe the power of forgiveness and its effects on my life would require a book of its own, yet even then I couldn’t cover everything that forgiveness has done in my life. To forgive, and be forgiven, has given me the kind of life that I never could have imagined or thought was possible this side of heaven. Forgiveness has become my lifestyle, and the benefits for this life are many: health, happiness, and peace of mind, to name just a few.
There was a time when I thought I could never experience a healthy, happy marriage, but I have that now. There was a time when the idea of having fulfilling relationships with my daughters seemed impossible, but the three of us have never been closer. Confession, forgiveness, and a willingness to sort through my story gave me the keys to unlocking my past, giving me hope for my future with those I love most: my family.
As I stood in the wind and heard the waves that day in Florida, I reflected on my past, amazed at how different I felt compared to my first few visits to that beach in 1995. The waves crashed. The ocean stretched out farther than I could see, immense and unstoppable. I thought about how much bigger that ocean was than me and how, if I let it, it could just sweep right over me and carry me away. If I just threw myself in, I would not be able to resist it.
God’s forgiveness is an ocean.