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 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. “God, 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.

It is, and then some. Read on for more of Rod’s thoughts on this remarkable incident.