Search results for ""author shawn smucker""

"Smucker crafts beautiful sentences and haunting characters that immerse readers in a world where anything is possible but not everything is real. Recommended for fans of Ted Dekker or Tosca Lee."--Library Journal *** When Paul Elias receives a terminal diagnosis, he leaves his physician's office in a fog. Only one thing is clear to him: if he is going to die, he must find someone to watch over his granddaughter, Pearl, who has been in his charge since her drug-addicted father disappeared. Paul decides to take her back to Nysa--both the place where he grew up and the place where he lost his beloved wife under strange circumstances forty years earlier. But when he picks up Pearl from school, the little girl already seems to know of his plans, claiming a woman told her. In Nysa, Paul reconnects with an old friend but is not prepared for the onslaught of memory. And when Pearl starts vanishing at night and returning with increasingly bizarre tales, Paul begins to question her sanity, his own views on death, and the nature of reality itself. In this suspenseful and introspective story from award-winning author Shawn Smucker, the past and the present mingle like opposing breezes, teasing out the truth about life, death, and sacrifice. "A resonant allegory about forgiveness and faith. Fans of James Rubart will want to take a look."--Publishers Weekly

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An insider’s look into the events surrounding the Nickel Mines Amish schoolhouse shootings—told by the counselor who was called upon to come to the farmhouse where the families met on that fateful day.On October 2, 2006, Charles Roberts, a local milk-tank truck driver, bound and shot ten young girls in an Amish schoolhouse before committing suicide. Five girls died. Five others were severely injured and left in critical condition. In the aftermath of the massacre, the Amish community shunned the media. But they requested that Amish-raised counselor Jonas Beiler come to the scene to offer his moral and spiritual support. In Think No Evil, Beiler offers his first-person account of the events, as well as of those who were closest to the scene: the surviving children, the volunteer fireman Rob Beiler, the local counseling center director Brad Aldricha, and Vietta Zook, aboard the first ambulance to arrive. Beiler poignantly describes the Amish families’ responses to this horrific violence as they reached out to the shocked family members of the killer, offering unconditional forgiveness. The story didn’t end on that horrible day with the deaths of those five little girls. Think No Evil follows the ongoing story of this gentle community having faith in God’s design, of truly demonstrating Christian values, of responding with resilient love in the face of evil, of demolishing the scene of the murders and rebuilding the schoolhouse, and of determining to move forward in living out their faith in peace.

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