You read stories like this and you cannot help but stirred by the human capacity to forgive.

It’s from the New York Times, with a big fat hat tip to Rod Dreher at Beliefnet:

For more than a quarter mile, Clifford Helm veered in his pickup truck through a grassy median and oncoming traffic. What finally stopped him was another pickup truck, the one carrying Jeffrey Schrock and his five children.

Carmen, 12, Jana, 10, Carinna, 8, Jerryl, 4 and Craig, 2, were killed in the collision. Mr. Schrock, who had been taking the children to join their mother on some errands, had multiple broken bones.

Now, more than two years after the accident, Mr. Helm has been acquitted on charges of vehicular homicide. Mr. Schrock says he has accepted that he may never know exactly what happened or why. He also says he has a friend he did not have before, Mr. Helm.

“The primary bond there is the accident,” Mr. Schrock said. “We’re both injured by that, physically and mentally.”

Last month, when Mr. Helm went to trial, members of Mr. Schrock’s extended family sat with members of Mr. Helm’s family in the courtroom. The Schrock family is Mennonite, and the head coverings some women wore stood out.

“Some people were praying for his acquittal,” said Mr. Schrock, 40.

He and his wife, Carolyn, made a different request. “We were praying that God’s will would be done,” Mr. Schrock said, “because we really didn’t know what God had in this whole thing.”

Friendship under such circumstances is complicated, Mr. Schrock said, like pretty much everything else that has happened since the accident. For him, the challenge has been to forgive Mr. Helm without expecting resolution, and to build a friendship regardless of the forces working against it.

“It’s what the Bible teaches,” Mr. Schrock said.

Yet he acknowledged that it was work. He and Mr. Helm are not so much close as they are connected. After the accident, they visited with each other in the hospital. Since then, they and their families have shared occasional meals and have spent time together now and then, deliberately trying to heal.

“They live a different lifestyle than us,” Mr. Schrock said. “They’re probably not people we would have been friends with, but we’ve come to like them and like their family.”

Read the rest.

This is more than Christian love.

This, in fact, is Christ.

Photo: by Stuart Isett for the New York Times.