Taking day by day, and step by step.
“it’s just little by little all these things are coming together,” says Zion Lutheran Church President John Winkler.
The cross once burned is now getting ready to be replaced, it lays in the front of the chapel.
Winkler says “we are right in the process now of getting the concrete work done around the cross, and then there’s a couple benches that will go in and hopefully we’ll have gates on the area.”
Just months ago, Winkler was standing in his church, shaking his head, trying to grasp what happened.
A burnt cross, charred walls, broken glass, sopping wet floors.
Now, he stands in a much different scene.
“All the three upper parts have been replaced, then the lower parts have been replaced. The support has been….just, I had no idea, that we’d have that kind of support,” he says.
The investigation as to who did this has essentially gone cold.
Lt. Mike Budreau of the Medford Police Department says “we’ve exhausted all of our leads, we’ve talked with all of our
witnesses that we can, at this point we are just waiting for new information to come in so we can maybe get this investigation restarted.”
But with the bad, comes the good for this church and it’s members.
Winkler says “from a church before, then the fire, then what we will end up with, we’ll end up with a nicer facility with what we had, only because we got to redo it.”
Redone, and almost ready to go.
The church will be having a rededication ceremony within the next 2 to 3 weeks.
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