“I give thanks for all things.”
—AMISH FATHER OF NINE
Between raising our family and being with the people who have made up the churches we’ve served, there are few life experiences my husband and I have not been intimately involved with. He has always been a hands-on preacher—the kind who visited the hospitals and shut-ins as well as working hard to try to keep people and families from falling apart. Life can be very hard, and I’ve watched him try to absorb at least some of the emotional pain people have brought to him.
I’ve also watched him become more and more a man of prayer as he realized that he could not take care of everyone’s needs, no matter how hard or how long he worked. Because of his work, we have spent most of our lives being intimately connected to a large network of good people—just like our Amish friends.
What we’ve seen over the years is that some people seem much better able to overcome emotional and physical challenges than others. Some are whipped by circumstances that sometimes seem almost laughable in comparison to what others are going through.
When our county in southern Ohio went through the devastating flood of 1997, we mobilized our church to help the local people as best we could. The damage was so extensive that even the Red Cross and FEMA were overwhelmed, and so we did what we could to at least take care of our own local people’s needs. Our church gave sacrificially and the work we did went on for months. One of the first things we did was pass out emergency food boxes to those who had lost everything.
The food boxes, which included enough food for a family of four for a week, were packed by volunteers in a facility in Nashville and then trucked, by volunteer truck drivers, through the night to our church parking lot where our men and women who owned pickup trucks distributed them to everyone we could find who was in need. We also had teams going out to help muck out houses and anything else we could do to help.
It wasn’t easy because our area has a lot of hollows and winding dirt roads and we had no way of knowing exactly where the needs were. We just did the best we could. It was satisfying work because the people we helped were grateful and appreciative.
Except for one able-bodied young man who had been overlooked. He showed up at my doorstep absolutely livid because the water had come into his trailer and we hadn’t brought him anything. He demanded to know why. He said he had a right to the food boxes we were delivering and a right to receive anything else we were handing out.
I remember being exhausted to the point of tears from days of nonstop work, and I said something about how we were just a little church trying to help the best we could—we weren’t some big government agency. He didn’t calm down until I dragged a heavy food box to the door and gave it to him.
This was before the Amish people began to move into our area, but I know absolutely that had he been an Amish man, he would not have been at my doorstep demanding his rights. It would never occur to him that he had rights. If an Amish man had come to my door, it would have been to ask how he and his people could help . . . and, more than likely, he would have had a child or two with him so they could learn the importance of helping neighbors.
When the Amish are baptized, in addition to confessing their faith in Jesus, they will kneel and denounce three things: the world, the devil, and . . . self. A denunciation of “self” is a promise to rid oneself of pride and disobedience.
One minister described this as a “death” to self, and explained that “dead people don’t have rights.”
In other words, the Amish are hardwired by example and solemn vow to believe that even suffering can have purpose in the larger picture of God’s will. This, again, is the concept of gelassenheit—or fully surrendering to God’s will, even if it means suffering.
The belief in gelassenheit makes for a stoic and enduring people.
I wasn’t aware of just how stoic the Amish could be until our friend Henry was diagnosed with throat cancer. We received a letter from him while he was undergoing treatment. He wrote:
I am staying here at the Best Western while doing Radiation at the Lutheran Hospital. I go in once a day, have had 12 now with 17 to go. Feel fine except a sore throat. Dr. said that is normal. When I asked him about my voice in the long term, he just said ‘God only knows.’ So I felt that was a good way to feel about it overall. I’m just glad God is in control of it all and will reveal his perfect will in due time.
Three months later, we received another letter. Henry said that his prognosis was very hopeful after all the radiation. The doctors believed they might have gotten all of the tumor, but they didn’t yet know for sure.
Then he wrote something that I found quite inspiring . . . and typically Amish.
I thank God for my cancer. Not because I’m happy that I have it, but because it is a command for me to do so. 1 Thessalonians 5:18 says, “In everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”
God doesn’t say to give thanks only for the good things in our lives. He says to give thanks in ALL things, and so I give thanks daily not only for the good things in my life, but for the things that are hard to accept, like my throat cancer, and it helps me.
I received this letter only two days after getting some devastating news about a loved one’s health. I had tossed and turned and lost sleep for both nights, but after receiving Henry’s letter, I took his commitment to obedience to heart. At least, I went through the motions of saying the words of thanksgiving. Instead of simply begging for healing, I took the time to give thanks for the bad news—even though it made no earthly sense to do so. That small act of obedience somehow lightened the emotional panic for that day and the next as I continued to give thanks for something that at first overwhelmed me with fear. With each prayer of thanks, the worry and fear lessened and the thankfulness grew.
Gelassenheit. My Amish friends tell me that it means that God has a plan. God is in control. We don’t have to carry everything around on our shoulders. Someone bigger than us is taking care of us even when we don’t understand.
One of the many scriptures upon which gelassenheit is founded is I Peter 5:7: “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”
An Amish grandmother tells me that she believes this is one of the most important things she can think of when it comes to raising happy and contented children. She believes that having faith that someone bigger than all of us is taking care of us even when we don’t understand why things are happening leads to a healing and comforting environment in which both children and adults can thrive.
I realize that not everyone reading this will be on board with the faith aspect of Amish parenting, but it is impossible to separate the two. The Amish simply would not be Amish were it not for the tenets of their faith. As Paul Stutzman has pointed out to me multiple times, Amish parenting is not a method, it is a way of life. Right or wrong, that way of life is built on their reverence for God, their interpretation of the Bible, and their attempt to apply the scriptures to their lives. And no matter what one believes, I think there are things we can all learn—and apply to our lives—about parenting by observing how faith guides everything the Amish do.
One of the most fascinating things about the Amish is, in spite of their strong beliefs, they do not attempt to cajole or force anyone to accept their brand of Christianity. Except for teaching their own children, most of them do not engage in any form of evangelism. By the same token, my observations about the impact of their faith on their children and marriages are not given with the intention to convert anyone to Amish beliefs, but simply to explain who they are and why that might lead to them having the results that they do.