By Ashley Wiehe
Director of Advancement
The sawdust flies around the room. The cuts are careful and precise. No deviation from the blueprints. This project is too special; it means too much to the recipient.
In a few months or maybe a few days, it will stand at the site of a shooting or a fire. A place where the loss is heavy. But, a cross with a blue heart will remain as a reminder of the person who is now gone but never forgotten.
The Hearts of Mercy and Compassion is a ministry through Lutheran Church Charities. This ministry helps in times of grief such as with their Comfort Dog program.
These hearts and crosses are made by volunteer carpenters throughout the country. They are crafted based on a blueprint so that each are the same — a key testament to the life that was lost.
The Rev. Alex Duff helps to facilitate this ministry through Suburban Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Ind. (the home church of the Rev. William Mueller who serves on “Worship Anew”). He joins 22 other sites across the country providing this service.
Duff has been coordinating this ministry at the church for three years. He has a team of carpenters who craft the hearts and crosses and then a team of volunteers who help to deliver them to sites of tragic loss.
The volunteers that go out receive “Spiritual First Aid” training as they visit these sites and talk and pray with people who are grieving. They deliver the hearts and crosses but also share how people can write messages on them for the families who will be taking them home.
“I saw how the family was going to be taking this (cross) home,” Duff said. “It’s something that they now could take with them. It was (showing) the support that they had around them.”
Each cross is made for someone who has died. When floods took the lives of many men, women, and children in Texas, they put up 139 crosses in their memory. When fires broke out in Maui, they placed 103 crosses for those who had died. When a student died at a local high school or a shooting in a church took lives or a car crash brought tragedy at an aftercare program, the crosses were there.
“It gives you a canvas to support that person or that family that will be grieving the loss,” said Sarah Sekki, director of Hearts of Mercy and Compassion for Lutheran Church Charities. “It can be a very powerful thing.”
The program was started by Greg Zanis, who has since passed away, after the loss of his father-in-law in a murder. He saw that it could be made for comfort and to show God’s love. But then when Columbine happened, he saw it as an opportunity to help others on a large scale. When he was no longer able to continue to go to all of the sites, he gifted the ministry to Lutheran Church Charities, who continues it today.
“Over the course of 2020 and onward, many things have changed or upgraded,” Sekki said. “We now put the name in Cricut lettering right in the center of the Icthus (fish symbol for Jesus) to make the person’s life the focal point of the loss.”
At his church, Duff makes sure that his team is taking care with each of the 25 crosses that are made each year. He doesn’t know if the crosses will be used today or three years from now, but the crosses are ready because he knows the impact that they will have.
“With the crosses, it feels good to be able to leave a note, word of encouragement that you know they’re going to read, but at the same time, to be there and pray with people,” he said. “(We want to) bring that kind of comfort of faith.”
To learn more about this ministry, please visit www.lutheranchurchcharities.org. All crosses are deployed through local LCMS churches. If you know of a loss in your community, please contact your local Lutheran congregation who can work with Lutheran Church Charities for help.
Above photo by Ashley Wiehe: Suburban Bethlehem Lutheran Church, Fort Wayne, Ind., is one of the churches creating and delivering the Hearts of Mercy and Compassion.