Every day we pick up the newspaper and read stories of suffering and inhumanity that make you want to draw the curtains and sit quietly in the dark.
Though it easily could have been, this tale is not one of them.
On the afternoon of May 4, Jessica Johnson Palmer took her three children to a park to meet her former boyfriend. According to the East Baton Rouge Parish (Louisiana) Sheriff's Office, the boyfriend and his current girlfriend lured the family into the woods, beat Mrs. Palmer to death with a baseball bat, slit the throats of 4-year-old Lindsay and 3-year-old Juan. They left Robbyn, a 7-month-old, to die alone.
But the baby didn't die. And she didn't die because Lindsay didn't die.
In their haste, the killers' blade missed Lindsay's jugular. After the murderers left, the wounded girl huddled with her baby sister under a bush through the Louisiana night.
The next morning, park groundskeepers saw Lindsay stumbling out of the woods holding the baby. She collapsed. The children were bitten so badly by insects that sheriff's deputies thought they had been burned. In the hospital that night, a sheriff's spokeswoman told me, Lindsay refused to sleep until nurses brought her baby sister to cradle in her arms.
The information Lindsay gave police led to the arrest of two people, one of them allegedly her biological father. "G-d, you left the prophetess alive to tell the story," the family's pastor said at the funeral.
The Baton Rouge Advocate reported that Lindsay came to the funeral with a white scarf hiding her neck wound. Erin Manning, a Fort Worth writer, observed on my blog that the scarf conceals a profound mystery: "We can't bear to look at the sacrificial cost of love — a wound so bravely borne because at some level, this child's love for her tiny sister outweighed her terror and her pain."
This is why the lives of the saints are so much more important than moral exhortation. We need to see and to feel what goodness, especially heroic goodness, is like. Evil, even great evil, usually can be explained, but true goodness? That's more of a mystery. Mysteries, by definition, can never be fully explained, only revealed.
This is a revelation.
How must that child have felt that night, so tiny and abandoned, facing the crushing enormity of what she had seen and the blackness of the night in the swampy woods? I come from the next town over. I have been in those woods. They're infested with poisonous snakes, wildcats and other killers that prowl at night. All children growing up in south Louisiana know that.
She could have run deeper into the woods to flee the gruesome scene never to be seen again. She could have sat quietly, paralyzed by fear and trauma, until she and the baby perished from exposure or worse. Either would have been tragic, G-d knows, but unsurprising.
After all, she was only 4.
That's not what Lindsay did. After keeping vigil with the baby in the savage ruins of their family's life, that little girl picked up her sister and walked straight out of hell.
Witness the power of love. It was love, surely, that gave that child the courage and presence of mind to face down unimaginable terror. All the darkness in the hearts of the diabolical killers, and the darkness of a thousand million evil nights like that one, cannot overcome the light that young child kindled in her heart, hiding under the bush near the body of her dead mother and brother.
Long after the despicable deeds of the killers are forgotten, people will tell stories about what she did. How many of us face long odds and struggle with hardship, sickness and despair? Who hasn't been tempted to surrender to the thought that the hate and pain and sorrow of this life are too great to endure?
Let them think of Lindsay, who refused despair. For the rest of her life, the scar on her neck will be a luminous sign to the world: Love conquers all.
When Lindsay Paige Johnson, age 4, staggered bloody out of the darkness and into the light, she carried her baby sister. Baby Robbyn's life is Lindsay's gift to her.
But she also carried hope. This is her gift to us.
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