Ruby Ridge survivor learns to forgive

CALEB SOPTELEAN/Daily Inter Lake 

| Posted: September 3, 2010

Sara Weaver-Balter

Sara Weaver-Balter of Kalispell at the Redneck Chic store south of town on Tuesday.

Sara Weaver-Balter has forgiven the federal agents who shot and killed her mother and brother 18 years ago on Idaho’s Ruby Ridge.

That’s the message she wants to impart to the nation and especially the people who did the shooting.

An interview with Weaver-Balter was broadcast on the Biography Channel’s “Aftermath with William Shatner” on Monday night.

But for those who didn’t see it, Weaver has a story to tell.

“I’ve prayed that on a national scale I’d be able to effect the healing of Ruby Ridge,” she said. “There’s a huge sore on our country. [But] there’s hope.” 

Weaver-Balter, who has lived in the Marion area since 1996, was 16 when federal agents swarmed her parents’ property west of Bonner’s Ferry in August 1992.

What followed was gunfire and a long standoff that left three people dead and prompted a national furor over the use of force by the federal government.

Weaver-Balter’s brother Sam, 14, was the first to die, followed by a U.S. marshal and then her mother, Vicki. Weaver-Balter was standing next to her mom when Vicki — holding her 10-month-old baby — was shot in the head.

After the shootings the surviving Weavers were under siege in their house for 11 days.

“This was hell on earth, and we were living it,” Weaver-Balter wrote in a book, “The Federal Siege at Ruby Ridge,” that she co-authored with her father, Randy Weaver, in 1998.

[See story below for details of the Ruby Ridge incident.]

The standoff was followed by years of investigations and court cases.

Weaver-Balter and her sisters lived in Iowa with relatives after the shootings and moved to Montana when their dad was released after an 18-month prison sentence.

Randy Weaver, who now lives in Kalispell, also lived in Arkansas for a while. Weaver-Balter’s sister Rachel lives in Kalispell. Elisheba — the baby Vicki was holding — recently enrolled as a freshman in college in Arkansas.

For 10 years, Weaver-Balter lived in darkness and sadness, she said. “I was afraid to laugh because you’re betraying their memory. I lived as a prisoner of depression for a long time.”

The Weaver girls eventually got a $3.2 million settlement from the federal government for the killing of their mother.

Randy Weaver said he has only forgiven those who have admitted the truth, including four or five public officials who testified in court and a few others who later asked for forgiveness. That group, Weaver said, doesn’t include FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi or U.S. Marshal Larry Cooper and Art Roderick — the men responsible for the shootings.

“Remember Ruby Ridge” became the rallying cry for numerous groups, including Timothy McVeigh, who later bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Weaver-Balter regrets this.

“Don’t take life in my name and think you’re doing something good,” she said.

Weaver-Balter said the reason she allowed Shatner to interview her was because she wanted to let the nation know about forgiveness and freedom.

“The anger you hold for someone else imprisons you and keeps you from helping others,” she said.

What made the difference for Weaver-Balter? A passage of Scripture that she memorized as a child: “God loved the world so very, very much that he gave his only Son. Because he did that, everyone who believes in Him will not lose his life, but will live for ever [John 3:16].”

“I hit rock bottom,” she said. “I opened up my Bible and read John 3:16. Jesus made himself very real to me. He started healing me of all my pain. No one drug me to a church and started hitting with the Bible. It was more real to me even than Ruby Ridge. I feel like a huge weight’s come off my shoulders.”

Weaver-Balter said she memorized the verse only because she was given candy at age 7. Her family had been attending a Baptist church at that time. 

Her healing took place in 2003.

Weaver-Balter, who attends Kila Country Church with her husband, Marc, and 9-year-old son Dawson, prayed for the opportunity to tell her story ever since then.

Seven years later, she got the chance.

She added one more thing: “I want to reach my generation that’s going into the FBI, ATF and Marshal’s Service with this story so the mistakes are never repeated.” 

Biography will re-broadcast Weaver-Balter’s interview at 9 p.m. today, 1 a.m. Saturday and 9 p.m. Monday, Mountain Time. It should be available online at bio.com/aftermath next week.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2010/sep/09/woman-forgives-federal-agents/

http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/kalispell-woman-whose-mother-brother-died-at-ruby-ridge-forgives/article_b03ddc7e-be12-11df-a241-001cc4c03286.html

http://mtstandard.com/special-section/local/woman-caught-up-in-ruby-ridge-forgives/article_9ce155da-c398-11df-9b13-001cc4c03286.html

http://helenair.com/lifestyles/woman-caught-up-in-ruby-ridge-shows-forgiveness/article_e62cdf40-c7a6-11df-bacf-001cc4c03286.html

http://www.cdapress.com/news/idaho_news/article_bfa95f08-f0a5-5dd9-9e2e-539648a15c54.html

http://wcfcourier.com/news/local/woman-caught-up-in-ruby-ridge-shows-forgiveness/article_cd84ebe6-bbb6-11df-935e-001cc4c002e0.html

40 Years Of Faith And Freedom

Daily News-Record May 27, 2014

• CALEB M. SOPTELEAN

HARRISONBURG - If "the miracle in Romania" wasn't the highlight of Steve Wingfield's 40-year ministerial career - one filled with more than a few memorable moments - it comes close.

The Rev. Ed Scearce told those gathered at a dinner Sunday night honoring Wingfield's 40 years in ministry about how he and Wingfield witnessed the aftermath of the fall of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989. The two men, who Scearce joked were "two country bumpkins from Virginia," arrived in Bucharest on Dec. 28 of that year, three days after Ceausescu's execution.

The dictator's regime had killed hundreds of Romanian Christians in Timisoara, Scearce said. The bloodbath had sparked a nationwide march that resulted in some Romanian Army soldiers refusing to fire on Romanian citizens, Scearce said, and ultimately brought the end of Ceausescu, one of several Eastern European communist leaders to fall that year.

Scearce and Wingfield ministered in Romania for three weeks following Ceausescu's execution.

"The Book of Acts [of the Apostles] was wide open," Scearce said as he described those harrowing days. The men heard residual mortar fire during a National Day of Mourning event on Jan. 12, 1990, he said.

Prior to Wingfield's sermon, the crowd shouted, "Liberty, liberty; Ceausescu down, Ceausescu down," Scearce said.

"There were 10 to 15 minutes when we didn't know what was going to happen," Wingfield said Monday.

"God gave us the privilege of seeing something phenomenal," Scearce said. "Then the storm came!"

A storm that was headed toward them from nearby mountains returned to the mountains. That happened three times, enough time for Wingfield to invite thousands of Romanians to commit their lives to Jesus Christ.

"They say I'm an American with a Romanian heart," Wingfield said in an interview on Monday.

Wingfield lobbied for aid for the fledgling Romanian democracy when he returned to the U.S., Scearce said. By his own admission, Wingfield has made at least 28 trips to the southeastern European nation.

1974 A Good Year

Sunday's dinner at Harrisonburg's First Church of the Nazarene and hosted by the Steve Wingfield Evangelistic Association, honored Wingfield, 66, and his wife, Barbara, 62. The event, which drew close to 200 well-wishers, also served as a celebration of the Mount Crawford couple's 40-year wedding anniversary. They were married June 8, 1974, at Conestoga Mennonite Church in Morgantown, Pa. The couple's six grandchildren feted "Pops and Grandma" in recorded videos.

Wingfield grew up in the Lynchburg area and was the son of a United Methodist pastor, he said.

After getting married, Wingfield pastored a Wesleyan church in Roanoke for eight years before attending Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago for two years before returning to the Harrisonburg area in 1985, when he began his long career as an evangelist.

A Little Humor

The Wingfields' son, David, 34, shared a somewhat humorous memory of his parents from one winter day.

"They're both cheap," he said. "They wouldn't pay for the chimney to be cleaned," which led to occasional chimney fires. "Dad would take a bucket up on the roof and dump water down the chimney" to extinguish the fire, David said. One time, however, his father slipped on the icy roof and grabbed the gutter. His feet hit the ladder, knocking it over and into wife Barbara. She fell into the snow just as the water came raining down on her - as Steve landed safely on top of the doghouse.

When Steve asked Barbara if she was OK, she replied, "I'm not dead... ," David remembered. "Things were sometimes kind of crazy, but things always worked out," he said.

`Freedom ... To Preach The Gospel'

Romanian ex-patriate Petru Lulusa saluted Wingfield on Sunday, adding that he, "thank[s] God for the freedom Romania has to preach the gospel."

Lulusa, who escaped the former Communist nation in 1969, said nine members of his family came to know Jesus Christ in one of Wingfield's Romanian crusades.

Through four crusades Wingfield gave in 1990, some 11,000 Romanians came to know their Messiah, said Lulusa, who escaped his native country by riding more than nine hours beneath a train.

Lulusa was located beneath the train's toilet, which left him covered in excrement, Wingfield said Monday. That was his salvation because the smell helped him avoid detection by dogs, Wingfield said. Lulusa, who made it through Yugoslavia and on to Italy, where he stayed in a refugee camp for eight months, eventually made it to the U.S.

Lulusa prayed that if God would get him to the U.S., he would serve Him. He went on to become an opera singer and sings with the Steve Wingfield Evangelistic Association across the world.

NASCAR Next

In 2012, Wingfield began fulfilling what Scearce called "a lifelong dream" of evangelizing at NASCAR races through Victory Weekend events. This year has seen Wingfield at Daytona Speed Week in February and Bristol Motor Speedway in March, where he shared his faith in Jesus Christ at a somewhat unlikely venue. NASCAR crowds are known for their raucous behavior, but Wingfield has seen hundreds make the decision to follow Christ.

And the wheels keep on turnin' for Wingfield.

He plans to go to Dover, Del., this weekend, followed by Michigan in June and August, Dover again in September and Charlotte in October.

Anglican church branches out from Harrisonburg to Elkton

Valley Banner/Daily News-Record

ELKTON - A church that mixes the old with the new has sprouted in Elkton.

Church of the Lamb, an Anglican congregation that began meeting in December, has already doubled in size.

Although Church of the Lamb now averages 50 or more on Sundays, the goal of the congregation is not to be big.

The ministry grew out of Church of the Incarnation in Harrisonburg, which began in October 2010.

The Rev. Aubrey Spears started Church of the Incarnation with help from the Anglican Diocese of Rwanda. The church, which started as 27 people meeting in Spears' home, now holds services in a building at 292 N. Liberty St., Harrisonburg, and averages over 200 attendees.

The Elkton group is the Harrisonburg congregation's first church plant.

Although the Harrisonburg and Elkton congregations still maintain a connection with the African diocese, they are now in partnership with the Anglican Church in North America.

ACNA was founded in June 2009 by former members of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. They were dissatisfied with the increasingly liberal doctrinal teachings in their former churches, which they considered contradictory to traditional Anglican belief.

"Our goal is to become a small, healthy church deeply rooted in our neighborhood," Spears said. The churches also want to plant other small, healthy churches.

"Our strengths are hospitality and strong teaching," he said.

Home Groups Are Key

Even though its first service was as recent as Dec. 7, Church of the Lamb already has three home groups that meet in congregants' houses on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. The home groups are seemingly one of the keys to church growth.

The home groups' meetings usually consist of a meal, prayer, fellowship, a Bible or book study or video.

"If you want to know and be known, that's going to happen in a small group," said The Rev. Kevin Whitfield, a pastoral resident who travels from the Harrisonburg congregation to minister three times a month.

Spears, who ministers at Church of the Lamb once a month, said that a group of folks in the Elkton area had wanted for years to worship in their community instead of traveling to Harrisonburg. Church of the Lamb fills that void, he said.

Worship includes formal Anglican liturgy with contemporary music.

Spears, who grew up a charismatic Baptist, migrated to the Anglican church after an eight-year journey. Whitfield also was raised Baptist and was recently ordained.

The men see a beauty in the traditional Anglican worship but enjoy modernizing the worship experience by using contemporary music.

Sunday services are held at 10 a.m. at 315 W. Spotswood Trail in a yellow building and are followed with locally-roasted coffee and a dessert.

More information on Church of the Lamb is on the congregation's Facebook page and on its website at elktonchurchofthelamb.org. For more information on Church of the Incarnation, call (540) 432-5533 or visit theincarnation.org.

From Secretary To CEO: Fiorina talks values at JMU

April 16, 2014 Daily News-Record

• By CALEB M. SOPTELEAN

HARRISONBURG - "What you are is God's gift to you; what you make of yourself is your gift to God."

With those words given to her by her mother when she was a teen, Carly Fiorina moved forward in life, a life that has seen her go from being a secretary to CEO of Hewlett-Packard, one of the largest technology companies in the world.

Fiorina, 60, who has been a member of James Madison University's board of visitors since 2012, spoke to a large audience last week at James Madison University's Wilson Hall.

Fiorina gave advice on the topic of "Foundations of Ethical Reasoning."

"No success story is without its setbacks," said the breast cancer survivor who ran for U.S. Senate in California in 2010 and lost. "I've had triumphs and tragedies."

Fiorina graduated from Stanford with a bachelor's degree in medieval history and philosophy and dropped out of law school after one semester because she hated it.

"It was the most difficult decision of my young life," she said. "I had no idea what I was going to do with my life." But she knew one thing: "If I didn't love it, I couldn't be good at it."

She started work in the middle of a recession in the 1970s. Her first full-time job was as a Kelly Girl working as a receptionist for a small commercial real estate company.

In that low-level job, she learned a lesson she never forgot: Anyone can make a difference. Just six months on the job, two men told Fiorina that they decided to hire the company because of how she did her job. She was surprised. "They saw possibilities in me that I hadn't imagined before," she said.

She then taught English in Italy for a year and later got a master's degree in business administration.

That led to a sales job with the Bell telephone system in Washington, D.C., in 1979. She worked as part of a two-person team. Her partner was a male co-worker who scheduled their first meeting with a client at a strip club. She didn't miss a beat, though, going to the meeting and holding her own, winning the respect of her co-worker in the process, she said.

At another meeting, she was introduced as the company's "token bimbo." In spite of that, she succeeded.

Times have changed and conditions are much improved for women in the workplace, she said, but along the way she learned she could work with anyone as long as they both focused on a common goal. Fiorina also learned that she liked challenges.

"I kept taking jobs people told me not to take," she said. "I learned how to overcome my own fear ... and there were people I could collaborate with who could help me figure it out."

In 1999, Fiorina became the first woman to lead a Fortune 100 company. She did that until 2005.

Overcoming fear is like exercise, Fiorina said.

"The more you do it, the more you want to do it," she explained.

Fiorina said she learned that everyone has potential.

"Find your gifts," she said. "Have the courage the use your potential. Find what work brings you joy because you will use all of your gifts. Define yourself. Don't let others do it."

She encourages leaders to seek diversity of opinion and collaboration.

"It is worth your time to understand others," she said. "Ask questions. Successful collaboration requires respectful questions. If you go into a setting and everyone thinks alike, you'll probably get the wrong answers. If you ask the right questions of the right people, you come up with the right answer.

"Leadership has nothing to do with title or position. Leadership is about unlocking potential in others."

She related a question she asked an executive about why women were not using his company's smartphones. They weren't buying the early models because their fingers didn't generate enough heat on the touch screen as men's fingers, Fiorina said.

She asked him if any women were on the company's design team. There weren't. She suggested he add some. He added women to the team and sales improved, Fiorina said.

She defines judgment as "knowing the difference between what's important and what's not." Challenges, she explained, are not black and white.

"The tough times will come," she said. "Remember that in those tough times are the greatest blessings. It's often the tough times that make us what we are. We control nothing but our own choices."

Responding to a question about how she balances her work and personal time, Fiorina said it's hard because no matter what one chooses, someone is going to be unhappy.

"You have to own your choices. How you spend your time becomes your life," she said.

Values must trump results, she said. "The real test of ethics and values is: what do you do when no one is looking and you don't think anyone will ever find out?"

Chopra talks about plans for Elkton area

By Caleb M. Soptelean

Valley Banner 

ELKTON — Pham Chopra spoke before a crowd of 89 people on May 17, 2016

Pham Chopra, on left, introduced environmental designer Fred Oesch. 

at Elkton Area Community Center about his plans for the area.

Although he offered no new specifics at the meeting, which was hosted by the East Rockingham Business Council, Chopra introduced several members of his volunteer management team.

Chopra, who purchased some 16 area properties last year for more than $4.7 million, gave some of his personal history and noted his plans for converting Conrad’s Store into Conrad’s Pioneer Museum, renovating the Elkton Theatre, opening a restaurant at the former Kite Mansion and an art gallery somewhere in town, and building a greenway from behind the Kite Mansion to the South Fork of the Shenandoah River.

“One step at a time,” Chopra said. “I show you the tip of the iceberg,” adding that he doesn’t want to overpromise and underdeliver.

Chopra introduced several members of his management team, including Fred Oesch of Oesch Environmental Design of Schuyler, Steve Gyurisin, a land planner from Winchester, and Jack Rose, a realtor from Harrisonburg.

Gyurisin said he worked on a pre-annexation study in Shenandoah in 1979 and on a stormwater plan for Triad Engineering for Elkton’s Main Street project in the early 2000s.

Chopra also said that Steve Vento, former president of Angler Development LLC of Warrenton, and Rich Hine, a contractor who worked on the Preston Lakes development at U.S. 33 and Massanetta Springs Road, are involved in the volunteer group.

No clear-cutting of trees

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do, but we’re not going to do clear-cutting,” Oesch said.

Part of the plan is to tag all of the trees on Chopra’s properties, which encompass some 700 acres, in order to preserve them.

Oesch said he’s working on a master plan and will put together a design “charette” by summer, which will bring in additional professionals to help design the master plan. 

“This ‘charette’ is evolving,” said J.W. Gordon, a spokesman for Chopra’s non-profit Akal Institute.

Chopra answered some questions from the audience, and said he’s not doing “an experiment in a model community” and is not building only a transitional housing facility.

A man who said he’s visited Luray’s Hawksbill Greenway some 200 times asked about the plans for a greenway. “The amount of work to keep the greenway going is unreal. Where is the money going to come from to keep it going?” he asked.

“A lot of it is volunteers,” said Gordon, who’s on a task force that is working on the greenway.

“The artsy-fartsy crowd has saved the town of Luray,” Elkton resident Larry Aldrich said. “Do I dare say that Luray is more of a destination these days than Elkton? The same thing can happen to Elkton, if we allow it.”

Mayor Wayne Printz noted that the town retained 140 acres along Elk Run Creek when it sold 189 acres of former Kite property to Chopra last year.

“We have the resources. We’re getting people involved. We have all of the components,” Printz said.

Individual task forces have been formed involving the Elkton Theatre, Conrad’s Pioneer Museum, a greenway and an expanded sewer treatment plant.

Following the meeting, Gordon said those interested in serving on a task force can email him at volunteer@akalinstitute.org.