Plain Wisdom (18 page)

Amish women carry out the traditional roles of wife and mother—keeping the home and raising children—but most also have a small business venture to help bring in money. The money an Amish woman earns goes toward meeting the needs of her family, just as a husband’s money does, but both usually keep some of it to spend however they choose.

Our first stop was at the home of Miriam’s
Mamm
(her mom). It was hot outside, but I felt more heat pouring through the screen door as we approached. Miriam’s mother bakes a multitude of pies and pastries
for several bakeries, some belonging to non-Amish people, some to the Amish. Besides the family kitchen, Miriam’s mom has a separate room attached to her home where she bakes four days a week.

A stainless-steel gas oven with numerous shelves and doors stood five feet tall. Shelves on the walls held tall stacks of baking utensils. Long countertops were covered with uncooked piecrusts ready to be placed in a pan and filling added. A teenage girl stood at the sink, washing dishes.

Miriam’s eight-year-old daughter put on an apron and began helping. She earns money helping out her
Mammi
(grandmother) during the summer. I couldn’t believe Amanda wanted to spend a summer day inside a room with no air conditioning and ovens radiating heat. Amanda said she’d spent years waiting to be old enough to help make piecrusts. When she was younger, her job was washing dishes, sweeping, and getting the ingredients out of the pantry so her Mammi could keep baking.

After we visited for a few minutes, Miriam and I returned to our buggy. Along the “tour” route, we passed a woman with a roadside produce stand. A mile or so later, we saw an Amish woman getting out of her buggy at an Englischer woman’s home. Miriam waved to her, then told me she cleaned people’s homes for extra money. Other Amish wives bring in additional income by sewing quilts, working at a market, selling greenhouse-grown plants, or working once or twice a week in a restaurant.

Married Amish women don’t hold full-time jobs. If a young woman has a job before she marries, she’ll give up that job after marriage. However, there are two exceptions to that rule. If a couple can’t have children or if all the children are grown and out of the home, the wife can fill her days in any manner she and her husband choose, including full-time work.

While raising children, women can run small businesses that fit around the family’s schedule. Until we began writing together, Miriam had a craft business. It required long hours, but she often involved the whole family in making the items, and she was able to schedule her work hours around her family responsibilities … most of the time.

My home is filled with wall hangings and other crafts Miriam has made, and I love all of them. In addition to those items on display, I have several of her note cards. After her family helped her brainstorm ideas, she sketched several scenes on eight-by-ten-inch canvases and painted them. Then she took the originals to a graphics shop, where a man printed the images on four-by-five-inch note cards and provided the appropriate-size envelopes. Miriam and her family folded each one and placed small stacks of them in little boxes. She put them on consignment in various stores and sold them herself during craft shows. She sold crates of them to me, and I sold boxes of them through my Web site and gave them to people as thank-you gifts.

Single Amish women may work full-time in an Amish market or watch young children for an Englischer neighbor or teach school. Since wedding season is in the fall, schoolteachers know months before the school year starts whether they’ll be able to teach that year or not. If a wedding is planned, a new teacher will be hired, usually a month or so before the first day of school.

Most single men and women live at home until they marry. While living at home and working a full- or part-time job, they usually give their parents some or all of the money to keep for them for later or to spend as needed for the family. Young men or women who have joined the faith but haven’t married by the time they’re in their middle twenties may choose to get a place of their own. Occasionally a few friends will rent a place together, but that’s very unusual.

Few Amish women remain single, but I happen to be friends with one. She owns a very successful dry-goods store, and her parents’ home is attached to hers so she can help take care of them. (She has several sisters who live nearby, and they also help with their parents.) She helps cater meals for weddings, travels throughout the United States on purchasing trips (with a hired female driver), and never has enough hours in the day for all she’d like to do. During one of my trips to Pennsylvania, she cooked a wedding feast for me so I could ask questions and take
notes, and she also invited several Amish women. That whole evening is one of my most cherished memories. The next day I went to her store to discuss some book-related business, and she’d made me a Christmas salad.

Whenever I need a reminder of how to stay organized with a busy schedule, I spend a little time with her.

Her Christmas Salad is beautiful and absolutely delicious! So I asked if she’d send me the recipe.

This is a handy dish I make for my family when I’m busy with my side business.

First Corinthians 15:55 used to frustrate me. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” Death has plenty of sting! Not for the believer who has died, but it sure hurts those who are left behind.

As I’ve matured, however, I’ve come to see the truth behind the painful reality of death.

In 2005 I belonged to an e-mail loop of about five hundred Christians, mostly aspiring authors. We were from all across the United States, and some were from other countries. One day a woman wrote, “Dear God, please don’t make me watch my only child die.”

When I read her e-mail, tears ran down my face. As I learned a little more about her, I found out that she lived in my area and that her son was a Marine. He had recently been diagnosed with cancer and was staying at a nearby hospital.

I bought a nice card and signed it from the group, gathered a few books she might enjoy reading while staying at the hospital, and went to visit her and her son. I didn’t know what she looked like, but I knew what floor she’d be on. The nurses directed me from there.

When I arrived, the young man was having a procedure done. I found his mom in a waiting room, and we fell into each other’s arms. The
raw pain reflected in her eyes made me physically hurt, but I could see she was holding on to hope.

Her son’s surgeon entered and invited me to visit the young man. That breach of standard protocol told me that he didn’t have much time.

I prayed with him, asking God to help him feel encouraged by the love and concern the online group had for him and his parents. He assured me he had God’s peace.

A few days later he died.

His parents mourned long and hard, but his mom told me that comfort surrounded her throughout every step of that journey. Healing their broken hearts came more slowly. Their grief will never completely cease, but I’m awed at the loving-kindness she exudes to everyone. She’s an encourager who radiates God’s love, and she willingly shares God’s goodness through her writing.

She stopped writing fiction for a while but never stopped writing of His great love in her diaries. At the bottom of each e-mail, she has this paraphrase of Lamentations 3:22–23: “The Lord’s mercies are new every morning; great is His faithfulness.” As time passed, she began writing fiction again, and Connie’s debut novel,
Leave Me Never
, was released a couple of months ago.
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In the fall of 2006, our community had to deal with the grief over the West Nickel Mines School shooting, in which five little girls were killed. The horror of it was thick in the air, and it showed on everyone’s face, was heard in each conversation, and made daily headlines for weeks.

The tragedy took place a hundred miles west of our home, so it wasn’t in our school district or church community, but three of my nephews were involved. Two were students in the school that day, and one worked as a volunteer fireman for a department that was dispatched to the school. So the pain and terror of that day stung our minds and hearts.

Nothing had ever shaken our world as fiercely as this did. As much
as we tried to reassure our two school-age children (and ourselves), sending them to school each morning became harder instead of easier.

Amish school boards across the state met to discuss ways to make our children safer. After one such meeting, I left disappointed that the elders weren’t doing more to protect the children and teachers in the local Amish and Mennonite schools.

I wrestled with frustration and fear. How could I help my children deal with their fear when I was struggling myself?

I remembered a window sticker I’d received about eight years earlier as a gift from
Guideposts
and had stuck on the glass of my front door. I went to the door and peeled off the sticker. Over the years the words had given my family and me a sense of security. Perhaps it could do the same for the children who attended our one-room schoolhouse.

Not sure how my two schoolchildren, Amanda and Mark, would feel about presenting the sticker to their teacher, I told them the original story. A would-be robber was armed with a gun and prepared to use it when he entered a store and threatened the owner. Then he read the sign above the door, which said, “God is our security guard, always on duty.”

I asked if they wanted to take the sticker to school for their door. Their smiles put to rest any misgivings I had.

To this day that sticker reminds all the students in that schoolhouse who is really in control and gives them peace.

There is nothing wrong with providing some measures of protection for ourselves and our loved ones. But true peace can only be found by realizing that our only real shelter is God. We know the “thief” comes to destroy, but no matter what happens on this fallen planet, God knows how to heal the brokenhearted and how to give beauty for ashes (see John 10:10; Luke 4:18; and Isaiah 61:3).