Plain Wisdom (22 page)

I love my garden because it’s not just a place where vegetables grow. It’s where God meets with me on a personal, individual level.

If you invite Him, God will visit you anywhere. You don’t need a garden or even a yard. Any spot will work, even the bathroom if that’s the only private space you have. Light a candle and talk to God. He’s amazing.

No matter what was taking place in my life, I’d never been buried under anxiety. But when our oldest son got his driver’s license and left the house on his own that first time, fears assailed me like a hurricane hitting the shore of an unprepared town. Had I spent a lifetime raising him just to lose him as he was about to launch into a life of his own?

I smiled and waved as he drove away, saying yet one more prayer over him for safety before I went into my home. I tried to focus on other things, but my insides quaked, not just for this outing, but for all the others ahead of me. Within two years our second son would have his license too. The gale force winds of fear battered me, and I felt powerless to stop them.

As the evening wore on, I grew angry at myself. Worrying was ridiculous. Would my anxiety prevent an accident or keep my son safe? Yet I felt powerless to tame the storm raging inside me.

That’s when a twist of an old motto formed in my mind. If practice makes perfect, I didn’t want to practice worrying!

Every time a bad image came into my thoughts, I decided that I’d imagine myself throwing it to the ground and then snatching up a worthy thought. Whenever fear started whispering, I’d mentally shout back,
Shut up!
Then I’d refocus my thoughts.

At first I failed miserably at convincing myself not to worry. But having a teenager who drives gives a mother lots of practice time.

When school functions kept Justin out after midnight, I made myself go to bed at my usual time. While lying there, I had to pull my thoughts away from the realm of fear, over and over. When I did doze off, I’d jerk awake, longing to know if my son was home, but I refused to get up and look in his room. I felt like a horrible mother. But I stayed in bed, late night after late night. When I’d wake the next morning, my mind would scream,
Go look! Make sure he got home
. Instead, I fixed a pot of coffee, poured myself a cup, had my Bible and prayer time, and began my workday. When Justin came to the door of my home office, I’d bid him a good morning as if I’d never doubted he was home.

I went round after round with anxiety for several months. But I would not become its slave. It wouldn’t tell me what to do. I’d tell it.

If practice makes perfect, refuse to practice worrying.

The bedroom curtains swayed in the cool breeze at the end of another busy day. The clock ticked loudly as I pondered the day’s events. Sleep would be long in coming.

At that moment my husband and our six children were scattered across four states, and my weary mind was having a hard time keeping track of everyone. Daniel and two of our sons—Jacob, twenty-five, and Mark, eleven—were in Massachusetts on a job. Our oldest son, David Alan, twenty-seven, and his young family were visiting in Indiana. Two more sons—Mervin, twenty-one, and Michael, twenty—were in Wyoming,
working on separate ranches. That left only Jacob’s wife and small son, our daughter, Amanda, and me at home in Pennsylvania.

I had just spoken to each of them on the phone. Except for Michael, whom I hadn’t heard from in a week. With growing concern I tried to envision where he might be. He had talked about going to cow camp, where men herd cattle by horseback for miles to reach better grazing, camping out under the stars and in thunderstorms, among mountain lions and other wildlife. I tried not to worry but was not succeeding.

If only I could talk to him, maybe I could relax. But they didn’t have phone service in that remote area. So I worried … and prayed … and prayed some more.

I couldn’t be everywhere or do everything. But God could. I couldn’t reach my son by phone. But I could reach God through prayer. The thought that God could see my son at that very moment brought me peace.

I imagined God looking down on my son as the guys sat around the campfire looking up at the same moon that gave my darkened bedroom a comforting glow. A peaceful feeling washed over me, and trusting that He would watch over Michael, I fell into a restful sleep.

When I was a child, my mom or dad put the food on my plate, and all of it had to be eaten before I could leave the table. I gagged my way through many a meal, was sent to my room during mealtime, and often ended up sitting at the table by myself while everyone else went to watch television. The upside is that I learned to eat foods I didn’t like. The downside is that I still hate most of those same foods.

As a result of my experiences, when my children said they hated something after trying it, I gave them a choice of other items with similar nutritional value. One son disliked most fresh fruits, but he loved certain ones and almost all fruit juices—100 percent pineapple, orange, apple. He hated cooked carrots, broccoli, and English peas but would eat raw carrots and broccoli. He still doesn’t eat English peas.

Was my method helpful, or did I teach my children to expect to like what’s placed in front of them? Was my parents’ method better in the long run?

I don’t know.

But I do know that no parents are as right as they hope to be at the time the decisions are made. Our one redeeming grace for all the verdicts we must give—and the fruit they bear—is that God is fully capable of redeeming our children from our brilliance. First Peter 1:3–4 says,
“According to his abundant mercy [God] hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you.”

For that, we can all be extremely grateful.

The
clip, clop, clip, clop
of the horses’ hoofs pounded in perfect rhythm on the asphalt as my daughter and I drove slowly toward home. My day had started long before the sun rose. I had washed and hung laundry on the clothesline to dry, got Mark, my eleven-year-old, off to school, picked ten to fifteen dozen ears of sweet corn and loaded them onto our horse-drawn wagon to take to my sister’s—all before eight o’clock. After spending all day husking, washing, blanching, and then cutting the corn off the cobs and bagging it to freeze, Amanda and I were finally on our way home.

I had been tempted to call for a driver to take us that morning since we had such a busy day ahead of us. But as we drove home along the country road in the late-summer sunshine, I found the slow buggy ride enjoyable.

Being Amish isn’t always easy. Sometimes our rules and guidelines make life a little harder than I’d like. Yet doing without holds blessings too.

If I had a car, I’d whiz around in all my busyness instead of enjoying the slow pace of a relaxing buggy ride on a beautiful afternoon.

As much as I would like to use a dryer during bad weather, I’d miss the pleasure that comes from taking a basketful of clothes into the fresh morning air.

A microwave oven must be handy, but I’d never want to be without my faithful old wood-burning cookstove. I light a fire in it on cool autumn mornings to take the chill off my kitchen as my family gathers for breakfast. I love the faint smell of wood smoke, and the crackle and pop of the fire is music on a cold day.

The hot days of summer can be trying. But since I don’t have an air
conditioner, I try to work outdoors in the garden or yard in the coolest hours and stay inside where my brick home keeps me reasonably cool during the hottest part of the day. I open the windows and listen to the birds on bright sunny days, the gentle rains on cloudy days, and the sound of horses passing by my home. Open windows make it easier to hear the ringing of my telephone from the outdoor phone shanty, and that keeps me from missing important calls from one of my children or a sister or friend who needs to chat.

Leaving it all in God’s hands, I thank Him for the challenges as well as the blessings.

A few months ago I was by myself in unfamiliar territory, driving from one author event to another. My vehicle has a GPS system, which is great, but it isn’t much help without an address. So I pulled off the road, dug my BlackBerry out of my satchel, and looked for the address of the radio station where I was scheduled to give an interview. I quickly realized I hadn’t logged that into my list of contacts.

Then I remembered I’d received the info via an e-mail a few weeks back. I scrolled through my recent e-mails. Within two minutes I found what I was looking for. My laptop sat on the passenger seat next to me, so I opened it and jotted down notes I needed to think about before arriving, and I listed the phone number as well. I then turned off my XM radio, called the radio station, and asked for their street address. After ending the call, I put their address in my GPS, punched the reroute button, turned my XM station back on, and headed for the new destination.

As I drove, I thought that just fifteen years ago I didn’t own a cell
phone. I never traveled by myself. I spent my days homeschooling my children, tending to the wood stove in winter, and folding mounds of cloth diapers.