{"id":3149,"date":"2008-05-18T19:12:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-18T19:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/deaconsbench\/2008\/05\/god-you-left-the-prophetess-alive-to-tell-the-story.html"},"modified":"2008-05-18T19:12:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-18T19:12:00","slug":"god-you-left-the-prophetess-alive-to-tell-the-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/05\/god-you-left-the-prophetess-alive-to-tell-the-story.html","title":{"rendered":"“God, you left the prophetess alive to tell the story”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Astonishing stories don’t get more astonishing than this one<\/a>, from Rod Dreher’s column in the Dallas Morning News: <\/p>\n

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 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.<\/p>\n

But the baby didn’t die. And she didn’t die because Lindsay didn’t die.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The information Lindsay gave police led to the arrest of two people, one of them allegedly her biological father. “God, you left the prophetess alive to tell the story,” the family’s pastor said at the funeral.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 a wound so bravely borne because at some level, this child’s love for her tiny sister outweighed her terror and her pain.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This is a revelation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is, and then some. Read on<\/a> for more of Rod’s thoughts on this remarkable incident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Astonishing stories don’t get more astonishing than this one, from Rod Dreher’s column in the Dallas Morning News: 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 Sheriff’s Office, the boyfriend and his current girlfriend lured…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":204,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inspiration"],"yoast_head":"\n"God, you left the prophetess alive to tell the story" - The Deacon's Bench<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/05\/god-you-left-the-prophetess-alive-to-tell-the-story.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""God, you left the prophetess alive to tell the story" - The Deacon's Bench\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Astonishing stories don’t get more astonishing than this one, from Rod Dreher’s column in the Dallas Morning News: On the afternoon of May 4, Jessica Johnson Palmer took her three children to a park to meet her former boyfriend. 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Prior to that, Deacon Greg worked for 26 years as a writer and producer for CBS News, where he contributed to \"The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,\" \"60 Minutes II,\" \"48 Hours,\" (Emmy Award, Writers Guild of America Award) and \"Sunday Morning.\" He was co-writer for the acclaimed documentary \"9\/11,\" hosted by Robert DeNiro. (Emmy Award, Christopher Award, Peabody Award, Writers Guild of America Award.) His radio essays were featured in the bestselling book \"Deadlines and Datelines\" by Dan Rather. He's also a two-time winner of the Catholic Press Association Award. Other places you may find him: AMERICA, U.S. CATHOLIC, CATHOLIC DIGEST, REALITY (Redemptorist Communications) and THE BROOKLYN TABLET. He also contributes homiletic reflections to the parish resource CONNECT!, published by Liturgical Publications. In November 2009, he began serving a three-year term as a consultant to the Communications Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Deacon Greg grew up in Maryland (Go Terps!) but he and his wife today live in the beautiful borough of Queens, New York. You can contact Deacon Greg at dcngreg@gmail.com.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/author\/gkandra"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/204"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3149\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}