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The Amish Voice 2
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have any promise of holding anything
new. As I grew older, I often scorned my
brother in front of my friends for
deserting the faith, but deep down I
wondered if perhaps he wasn’t closer to
answering the same questions that I was
being bothered with—questions like.
“How can I know that I am right with
God?” I was secretly jealous of him at
times, because he had the advantage of
searching for answers outside the box, an
advantage that I was told was sinful and
deceptive; but in the back of my mind, I
wondered if my brother was closer to
finding the answers than I was or my
parents were. At least for him there were
no limits to hold him back from
pursuing the answers. For me and
the rest of my family, there was a
barrier that loomed in front of
us, beyond which we were not
allowed to go. It felt like being
held in a fenced-in pen.
My brother often wrote letters to
us at home, which we read
eagerly. In them he stated his reasons
for leaving, pointing out areas where he
claimed the Amish church did not agree
with the Bible. Some of the letters had an
impact on my father, because my brother
asked that if being a member of the
church wasn’t able to give victory over
sin and peace with God, then why was
my father asking him to come back?
Five years after my oldest brother left
home, my second oldest brother left, as
well. His departure from the faith sent a
shockwave through the community, since
he had been a faithful and respected
young man. He was soon dismissed as
another deceived young man who wanted
to go out into the world to have fun, and
used the Bible as his excuse. Yet, those
of us who knew him and lived with him,
knew that he was in desperate pursuit of
the truth as he found it in the Bible. He
cared more about God and righteousness
now than he ever did before, but that
didn’t seem to matter to most in our
community. He had left the faith, and
there didn’t seem to be any hope for him.
They took it as a serious warning of how
deceiving it can be to listen to those
abgegangenie
(deserters)
who use the
Bible as an excuse to live like the world.
These dramatic changes, among others,
drove me to the Bible. I began
reading it in English, though that was
discouraged by the church I attended. I
started reading the familiar passages that
I had heard preached all my life in
church, and suddenly the words of the
Bible came alive with meaning, simply
because I was able to understand them. I
discovered that the Bible in English was
saying the same thing as it did in
German, only now I understood it better
because I understood the words in
English.
The new change in life, along with some
relationship problems between my
parents, made my home life confusing
and unstable. I longed more than ever to
have the answers to life, and more and
more I found myself going to the Bible
for those answers. I read it intensely,
hoping to find the answers I was looking
for. Gradually, I saw the Bible as what it
was actually saying, instead of what
someone else told me it said. The fierce
temptations of lust that all young men are
faced with drove me in desperation to
find some source of power and victory
that would help me overcome, and slowly
the Word of God became that source of
victory.
The question of where I was headed still
loomed before me, and I could not avoid
it. Simply belonging to a certain
culture seemed like an increasingly
fragile hope upon which to build
my eternity, but where else was
I supposed to turn to find peace
with God? What was it that I
needed to do to be born again?
As I read the Bible, I was faced
with a few questions. I had grown up
hearing that it was impossible to know
that you are born again. It was considered
prideful for a person to say that he knows
he will make it to heaven; but then why
did Jesus say,
“You must be born again,
or you cannot see the kingdom of God
”?
Why would the Bible tell us that we need
to be born again in order to see heaven,
and then turn around and say there is no
way we can know we are going there? It
would be like a father telling his son he
must go to the grocery store, but then
telling him there’s no way he can know if
he is on the right road to get there. Then I
would read verses like this in 1 John 3:
10 He that believeth on the Son of
God hath the witness in himself: he