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Baker Publishing Group - Beverly Lewis

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149 pages

English

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It's the summer of 1951, and Maggie Esh is in need of some hope. Sweet-spirited and uncommonly pretty despite struggling with chronic illness, she is used to being treated kindly by the young men of her Old Order Amish church district. Yet Maggie wishes she were more like other courting-age girls so she could live a normal, healthy life.To make matters more complicated, Dat has recently remarried, less than a year after her mother died. And while her stepmother is kind, Rachel is much younger than Mamm, and she simply doesn't understand Maggie or her illness the way Mamm did.When tent revival meetings come to the area, Maggie is curious, and the words of the Mennonite preacher challenge her to reconsider what she knows about faith. Can she learn to trust God even when hope seems a distant dream?

Sujets

Love

Love (disambiguation)

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	04 septembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781493416011
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2018 by Beverly M. Lewis, Inc.
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-1601-1
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Dan Thornberg, Design Source Creative Services
Art direction by Paul Higdon
Dedication

To John and Cynthia Bachman, my delightfully encouraging cousins
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
Epilogue
Author’s Note
About the Author
Books by Beverly Lewis
Back Ads
Back Cover
Epigraph
A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
—Eudora Welty
Prologue
S UMMER 1998
S ometime in the wee hours, I was awakened by laughter against a background of trotting horses and clattering carriages—certainly Amish courting couples. The air was so still that the merriment seemed to waft in through the open upstairs window . . . straight into my foggy head.
Slowly, I raised myself in bed, and in my drowsiness, the room seemed to turn. I listened carefully, and except for the squeak of the bedsprings and a lone cricket outside, all was quiet now.
Just a dream, I thought. Yet it seemed so real.
I lay awake for a while, pondering the meaning as my thoughts sailed back to my own courting-age years, when life should have been filled with zest . . . and hope. Instead, I had been consumed with disappointment, grieving the loss of one I’d held so dear, and secretly fond of a young man who deserved someone who was whole.
The strength of my emotions caught me by surprise, and the rush of feelings was so unsettling, it was a long time before I could calm down enough to sleep.
My mind was still fixed on the past when the morning sunlight prodded me from the bed. Honestly, I couldn’t say just what had gotten into me. Could it be that my coming birthday had prompted a dream . . . and the memories?
It wasn’t that I was dreading this birthday, but it was nevertheless a milestone, one that firmly clinched my status as a senior citizen. Growing older wasn’t for cowards. Yet without God’s grace and goodness, where would any of us be?
I brushed aside thoughts of my frail and agonizing youth and sat down at the kitchen table near an open window. There, in the golden light of early summer, with a chorus of mockingbirds sounding like angelic flutes, I pushed the latch on my well-worn recipe box and thumbed through the handwritten recipes passed down by dearest Mamm so long ago.
Which favorite shall I cook today?
———
Birthdays were a gift from God above, my mother used to say, taking care to point out to my younger siblings and me the importance of gratitude in all things. “Gratitude for sickness?” I had once whispered to her when the others left to do barn chores and Dat headed off to work at the nearby gristmill. Mamm had looked at me so sweetly, my heart nearly broke in two.
“Ach, Maggie-bird,” she said as she opened her arms, and I limped into her embrace, letting her hold me while I cried.
“Will I ever be well again?” I whimpered.
Beginning when I was eleven, I struggled with what one doctor had called severe growing pains. In my teens, another doctor diagnosed the pain as something far worse—juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Whatever the cause, I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to walk without a cane. I wanted to scrub floors and weed gardens, and I wanted to be the kind of bride any Amishman would have been pleased to marry.
Dat often talked about God’s sovereignty, insisting that we not question His will. I tried to pay attention, I truly did. And although his words were intended for our entire family, my father emphasized this so frequently, I sensed it was particularly meant for me.
Being the eldest, I wished I might contribute more to my family . . . and to the community of the People. It was one of the deepest longings of my heart.
———
Presently, my eyes fell on a recipe for my favorite childhood meal, Amish meatloaf, made with cracker crumbs, onions, and catsup. It was one Mamm had first concocted back before I was born. Dear Mamm . . . I missed her clear to this day.
Sighing, I glanced up at the wooden wall plaque I’d helped make in the midst of the most trying time of my young life. A summer of questioning, to be sure.
I stared at the words my father had etched into the wood, words taken from First Timothy, chapter six, verse six: But godliness with contentment is great gain.
A devout and compassionate man, Dat had been mighty concerned over my seeking nature and how it might alter my plan to be baptized into the Amish church.
Jah , that was undeniably a difficult time, one that opened my eyes in countless ways. And my heart, most of all. It was a season of sorrow and searching, of questions and answers.
It was the summer of my first love.
1

J UNE 1951
T he morning was warm and oppressive that seventh day of June. Occasional breezes rippled over Joseph Esh’s field and up the gentle rise through a narrow swath of woodland to the sprawling house, which stood like a beacon over the farm on Olde Mill Road in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
In the past decade, a Dawdi Haus had been built onto the home’s east side, and in that smaller residence lived Joseph’s widowed aunt Nellie. Beyond the main house, below the rise, stood a modest white barn, as well as a woodshed and a rather run-down six-stall stable. Across the road and up a ways stood the gristmill where Joseph had worked all of his adult life.
His daughters, seventeen-year-old Maggie and her sister Grace, sixteen, sat on the wraparound porch, both hulling strawberries. Right after breakfast, Grace had gone to pick the day’s ripe yield, and since then, she and Maggie had been working together there in the sunshine. But as was often the case, Maggie’s fingers were beginning to feel cramped, and they already ached terribly.
Peering at Maggie just now, Grace asked, “Need a little break?” Grace’s light brown hair was pulled back into a tight bun pinned low at the back of her slender neck, a dark blue bandanna tied beneath her chin.
“Maybe so.” Maggie felt not just achy but weary. And to think the day was only getting started.
“I’ll help ya into the house.” Grace offered a smile. “ Kumme .” Ever kind and understanding, Grace’s usual caring nature had become nearly motherly the past year since Mamm had suffered heart failure.
“No need waitin’ till your hands are numb, Schweschder .” Grace reached to remove the stainless-steel bowl from Maggie’s lap. “I daresay you’d work your fingers to the bone if I didn’t speak up . . . sufferin’ in silence.”
Maggie realized that her sister was only trying to remind her to go easy when the pain became too great. It had been so hard to bear after Mamm’s funeral, and things had only worsened when Dat had decided to marry a young woman just seven short months later.
“ Jah , I’d best be stoppin’ for a while.” Maggie rose slowly. She struggled to live with the near-constant discomfort, despite the aspirin she sometimes took when it felt nearly intolerable.
“It’d make gut sense for Rachel to offer to finish up for ya, if you ask me.” Grace glanced toward the window. Then, offering a hand to Maggie, she added in a softer voice, “Ain’t like she’s busy with any little ones.”
Maggie almost said it was a good thing their siblings were all old enough to look after themselves, at least for the most part. “Well, she’s keepin’ the house tidy and making the noon meal,” she said, going around to the side door with Grace.
“That’s her responsibility, jah ?” Grace was grinning now.
“Not just hers,” Maggie said, gently correcting her sister. It wasn’t right to put all of that on their stepmother. Even when Mamm was alive, they had always worked together—cooking, cleaning, canning, sewing, and mending. They made at least two quilts every winter, too. Mamm had Grace and me sit on a bench near her to practice piecing together quilt squares, she recalled.
But Rachel was part of their family now, having caught their widower father’s eye. There wasn’t anything that Maggie or Grace could have said or done to change Dat’s mind—remarriage was expected of an Amishman with children, after all. And their father liked to say that Rachel was “a peach.” The thing that baffled Maggie was that Rachel had still been single at the age of thirty-two. Why was she passed over for so long, pretty as she is?
Grace had voiced this question a few weeks after their father and Rachel’s wedding, when the two sisters were alone for a walk. And Grace had admitted wanting to ask Rachel this very thing, but Maggie had intervened, insisting it was not at all proper. Who knew what had kept an attractive woman like Rachel Glick from marriage till now?
Maggie followed Grace into the kitchen, with its tan-and-white linoleum and green shades rolled up high at the window tops. “We did fairly well this mornin’,” Grace announced to Rachel as the