Mandy Baker Johnson

Ira Wagler‘s memories of Growing up Amish provide a fascinating insight into Amish life and culture.  At times he comes across as slightly cynical, but he also writes with warmth and wit.  Ira has a very easy reading style, a little unpolished perhaps, but he keeps the reader’s interest effortlessly.  The book opens with Ira sneaking through the night, running away from home, his community and whole way of life at the age of seventeen.  From those opening words, he draws you in as he shares matter-of-factly about his birth.  As child number nine, his birth was apparently not a great event in the Wagler family.

Horses and buggies, bearded men (but not moustached because that would be unbiblical), and flowing homemade dresses provide an apparently idyllic setting.  As Ira’s account of his childhood and adolescence progresses, he gradually builds up suspense.  You know that he’s going to leave the community, but when?  And why?  What will tip him over the edge and force him to go?  The first time he leaves, sneaking away into the night with just a note for his parents, he is naive.  It’s not a well-planned move.  And before too long, he is forced to return home.  This happens another couple of times over the next nine or ten years, sometimes with his closest childhood friends, sometimes alone.  He shares honestly his struggle with trying to heed the constant advice to ‘just decide to do what’s right and then do it’, as one-by-one his friends have done.  Ira longed for true freedom.  He sought it in the Amish community, going through the arduous processes of baptism and church membership in a desperate bid for inner peace.  He didn’t find it.  He sought it by running away into the ‘world’ and living a relatively wild and rebellious life.  But that also produced more problems than it solved.

Ira seemed doomed to repeat the pattern of running away, feeling the need to return, screwing up his determination and returning.  Only to be overcome by oppression and and the need to run away again.  Eventually, heartsick and depressed, Ira cried out to God.  Not in the written, stilted prayers of his fathers, but in a desperate cry for help.  God answered his prayer by bringing Sam into his life.  Sam was not born Amish, but immersed himself into the community as an adult.  Ira and Sam developed a deep friendship.  Sam quietly showed Ira Christ’s love, and in doing so, lead him to the Source of love.  Ira finally realised that Jesus had died for him.  As he puts it:  ‘He who gives life to the lifeless gave life to me’.  From the moment he accepted Jesus as his saviour, he knew immediate, lasting peace and joy.  He gradually came to realise that the Amish way of life was not for him, but this time he was completely open about leaving.  No more sneaking away.

As I read this book, several words came to my mind about the Amish:  romantic, oppressive, community-minded, austere, simple, hospitable, welcoming, gracious.  At times I laughed over Ira’s funny insights and the crazy antics he and his friends got up to; at times I read of the heartbreak and tragedy through tears in my eyes.  I even put a hand over my mouth in horror a couple of times.  I appreciate Ira’s honesty in opening up this rather closed community through his story.  And for showing that only with Christ is it possible to live life to the full.

Reviewed for Tyndale House through NetGalley.

Feminine Threads: Women in the Tapestry of Christian History by Diana Lynn Severance is a brand-new release by Christian Focus Publications.  It looks at women from the time of Jesus through to the present day.  All kinds are mentioned, from queens and noblewomen to commoners and slaves.  Women from different denominations with varying views of the Bible all play their part.  There are 12 chapters covering 2,000 years of Church history.  Pace is good, the style is very readable, and the layout is clear with intriguing text boxes here and there with extra information and little titbits complementing the main text.  Each chapter heading shows the era being covered along with a relevant Bible verse.

The early chapters reveal the high opinion Jesus had of women.  They are mentioned many times (about one third) in the Gospels and New Testament.  With the birth of the Early Church, the status of women rose.  Often when a new region was being evangelised, it was the women who first embraced the good news of Jesus, becoming ‘the gateway [for the Gospel] into pagan families’.  They lived out the apostles’ teachings, and many pagan husbands – even kings and rulers – were won to Christ through the faithful prayers and godly example of their wives.  Women were no longer forced into marriage, becoming the property of their husbands.  They were allowed to serve God by remaining single if they wished, and widows (instead of being disgraced by their widowhood) were frequently encouraged to remain single.  Single women, and widows in particular, were given responsibilities within the Church of caring for the poor and sick, and sharing the Gospel with and discipling other women.

The Church suffered severe persecution in the early centuries, and a surprising number of its martyrs was female.  Some endured horrific deaths for the sake of Christ, and one can only admire these brave, faithful women.

Diana Lynn Severance covers how the Canon of Scripture was put together, also dealing with later books claiming apostolic authority that were actually written in the second century and, therefore, not included in the Bible.  Traditions crept into the Church that are not biblical.  For example, the Gospels teach that Mary Magdalene was healed of seven demons; they say nothing of the tradition of her having been a prostitute.  Mary, Jesus’ mother, came to be exalted and eventually worshipped.  Every time the Church drifted into extremes and error, it was because it stopped following the Bible.

It was refreshing to read about the women, as well as the men, of the Reformation who were used in getting the Church back on track with Bible truths.

Throughout history, the pendulum has swung back and forth between truth and error, between Bible and tradition.  Whenever the Bible has been upheld, women have had God-given fulfilling roles, family life has been honoured and social injustices such as abortion and slavery have been stopped.  Whenever humans think they know best, women are very often downtrodden or frustrated, family life has broken down and social injustices have increased.

Feminine Threads is inspiring; I am part of a wonderful sisterhood that is driven by love for God, has been greatly used in building up the Church, has won husbands to Christ, and, often, just quietly gets on with whatever God has called us to.  I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

(And I am so much looking forward to one day having a good natter with the women mentioned in the pages of Feminine Threads!)

Christian Focus Publications provided me with a complimentary copy of this book for the purposes of review. 

When Tyndale House offered Two Wars by Nate Self as a free ebook recently, I very nearly did not bother to download it.  While vaguely grateful for the men and women of the Armed Forces in Afghanistan, I assumed Two Wars would be full of fighting, army jargon and just not my cup of tea.  But it kept playing on my mind until in the end I went to Tyndale’s website and downloaded it.  I am so glad I did.  Far from being boring and ‘jargony’, it gives a fascinating insight into the life of a soldier – Nate Self is open and honest, writing in a very descriptive, easy-to-read style.  Having begun to read, I found I could not put the book down.

In the first half of the book, Nate Self shares his growing passion for the army, in particular the US Rangers – a highly specialised unit and tight-knit team:

In our unit, we don’t wear markings or nametags.  We don’t need them, anyway, in such a tight team.  Despite our coverings of body armor, weapons, and gear, we recognize each other by the way we hold our rifles, by the way we dive for cover, by the way we move in the shadows.

Nate Self describes the unit’s excitement in being deployed to Afghanistan, a short time after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers.  He shares openly about frustration with postponed missions, and his own struggle with wrong attitudes.  He hated Al-Quaeda and was eager to kill in this war on terror.  But his close friendship with the unit’s chaplain enabled him, before God, to get ‘a good grasp on where [his] attitude should be for the rest of [his] deployment’.  He was able to see himself more clearly, not ‘eager to kill in anger’ but as an ‘instrument of justice in the United States goverment’.

The unit was clear about why they were there:

Just in time for the mission, one of the Rangers received a package from his grandmother in Brooklyn that made us all feel like we were destined to make history.  He opened a large cardboard box to find fifty navy blue T-shirts, half of them displaying the New York Police Department logo and half displaying the Fire Department of New York emblem.  That’s why we’re here….  We decided right then that we’d wear the shirts under our uniforms on every mission.

Nate Self takes the reader in imagination in the helicopter sent out on a rescue mission; one that was doomed, although the soldiers had no idea of what they would face when they set out.  As I read, I leapt out of the crashed helicopter with the unit, crouched in the snow, and fought for my life and my colleagues on that freezing cold, inhospitable mountain.  I cried as I read of him seeing his colleagues die, his utter helplessness as he called again and again for back-up on the two-way radio, only to be told a rescue unit could not be sent until nightfall.  It is graphic, descriptive, real.  His faith shines through strongly, partly evidenced by his knee-jerk reaction of cyring out ‘Jesus Christ’ when under unrelenting gunfire.

Nate Self shows the sacrifice that soldiers make when they fight for freedom.  In the second half of the book, he shares the terrible psychological impact that war had on his life.  For me ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ abruptly ceased to be words sometimes heard on the news.  It became real as I read of the terrible toll it takes on minds and lives.  As Stu Weber writes in the Afterword:  ‘The ‘journey back’ to life and living, after staring death and dying in the face, is a long one’.

This book is an eye-opener but, in a strange way, an intensely satisfying read.  It gave me a fresh respect for the men and women of the Armed Forces and the real – ongoing – sacrifice they make.  I am so glad that I chose to download it.