The Barn Raising on Coldwater Road

In October 1987, a lightning strike burned Harold Keim's dairy barn to the ground in Holmes County, Ohio. Forty-two Amish families showed up before dawn the following Saturday. No one sent invitations. No one needed to be convinced. They simply came because a neighbor needed a barn and they had hands.

By 6:30 a.m., the first corner posts were set. By noon, the skeletal frame of a thirty-by-sixty-foot structure stood against the grey sky. Women laid out tables of bread, roasted chicken, and apple butter while children carried water buckets to the men on ladders. Elmer Troyer, seventy-three years old, couldn't swing a hammer anymore, so he sat on an overturned crate and sorted nails by size — every single one of them.

By sundown, Harold Keim had a barn. Not because one person performed something extraordinary, but because an entire community had a mind to work.

That phrase from Nehemiah 4:6 is easily passed over: "the people had a mind to work." No miracles. No angelic intervention. Just ordinary people who decided together that the wall mattered more than their fatigue, more than the mockery of Sanballat, more than the rubble at their feet. They rebuilt Jerusalem's wall to half its height not through superhuman effort but through shared, stubborn resolve. God honors that kind of collective determination — the kind that shows up before dawn and doesn't leave until the work is done.