Almost Amish

by Nancy Sleeth

  The Almost Amish Way: Spend Time in Nature

  There is so much to be learned by choosing to spend more of life outdoors. In twenty-first-century terms, nature is tweeting and text messaging communications from God constantly, but we are too busy to tune in. Here are some ways we can block out distractions and abide with God in his natural world:

  Grow a garden

  I have a friend who is a master gardener. She believes that nearly every spiritual lesson can be taught by a garden. I agree, especially if those lessons are accompanied by fresh raspberries eaten straight from the bush.

  Some first steps: If you have never had a vegetable garden before, start small. Even a ten-by-ten space can grow a lot of produce, especially if you train your vines to grow vertically. If you do not have access to a yard, start with patio planters or investigate community gardens. Another option: join a CSA (community-supported agriculture) and barter labor for part of your “share.”

  Begin with vegetables you know your family likes—if they don’t like beets or radishes, don’t bother, even though they are easy to grow. When you get more experienced, you can try introducing some fun varieties, such as blue potatoes or sun-loving tomatillos, which mature in a paperlike husk. And don’t forget the herbs: they are simple to grow, don’t take up much space, and add color and flavor to almost every meal.

  Pack a picnic

  Picnics can make an ordinary meal anything but routine. Matthew and I picnicked on some of our first dates, and we’ve continued to dine alfresco regularly for three decades. Most meals have been simple but romantic—a blanket spread in the backyard makes even PLT (pickle, lettuce, and tomato) sandwiches taste special. I try to pack picnic meals when we’re on the road as a cheaper, healthier alternative to fast food. We’ve picnicked at the beach, in the woods, in fields, in cemeteries, at rest stops, in parks, and on playgrounds.

  For our thirtieth anniversary, we packed up homemade crab cakes (thanks to my mother) and ate them on the grounds of a local estate. The historic buildings are closed in the evening, but the grounds are left open. We had the gardens to ourselves—with extra ambience supplied by friendly fireflies.

  Since moving to downtown Lexington, we have been picnicking more than ever. Within easy walking distance we’ve discovered three parks with picnic tables. The park closest to us also has a gazebo, where we’ve enjoyed watermelon after our family Friday night dinners.

  In addition, we’ve found that picnics make for easy entertaining. A couple of weeks ago, we picnicked with friends and their three small children in the park behind our house. The kids played on the equipment while the grown-ups talked. My friend made a warm pasta and pesto salad, and I brought cheese, fruit, and carrot cake to round out the meal. Bonus: no clean-up. The birds ate all the crumbs.

  Picnics create a memorable oasis—a time set apart from everyday life—to be in nature and to enjoy God’s sustaining gifts. What could be more holy than saying grace and breaking bread together in the shade of a life-giving tree?

  Pick up trash

  Last Saturday, Matthew and I went for an early morning walk. We were pleasantly surprised when our son, Clark, and his wife, Val, approached us from behind. They had spied us leaving our courtyard and hurried to catch up with us. We wandered back to their place, through a hedgerow and a flat meadow near the university. Clark pointed to a mess of soda cans and discarded fast-food bags: “I just cleaned up this pathway a few weeks ago. Guess it’s time to come back out with some trash bags.”

  My mother’s heart swelled. Clark has received many awards in college and medical school, but this humble act gave me more joy than all his academic accolades put together. Why? Because it showed he has a servant’s heart. He was obeying the command to tend and care for the garden (Genesis 2:15) while showing his love for God and for his neighbors, with no expectation of thanks or recognition.

  Often on our morning walk through the park, I bring two bags—one for trash and one for recycling. The park is well used by little kids on swings, skateboarders with tattoos, basketball players in high-tops, and baseball teams young and old. One afternoon, we saw college students string a cord a few feet off the ground between two trees and try tightrope walking—far harder than it looks in the movies. A few days later, we watched a young man impressing his date—and us—by juggling bowling pins. With dozens of countries and ethnic groups represented, the park is a regular United Nations.

  The garden aspires to Eden, yet is marred by litter. Each morning, we are presented with new opportunities to pick up cans and bottles. Yes, our hands get dirty, and once I even negligently cut my finger on a broken bottle. But these are minuscule prices to pay for the joy of participating in God’s restoration.

  Survey your neighborhood. Do you have a ravine where old items have been dumped for years? A favorite teen hangout that gets trashed every Saturday night? A street (maybe your own) with garbage along the shoulders? Anyone can help clean up public spaces.

  Get in the habit of carrying a bag when you go on a walk and picking up trash along the way. Gather a bunch of kids from your church, school, or neighborhood to clean up a streambed. Ask your church or school to adopt a highway. Work with your neighborhood association to be sure there are trash and recycling barrels in convenient locations. Plant and tend a flower garden at a busy intersection. Make it a goal to leave every place you live more beautiful than when you arrived.

  Plant a tree

  One of the best investments you can make in the future is to plant a tree.

  I grew up Jewish, in a tradition that values tree planting. Here’s a story from the Talmud, the central text of mainstream Judaism:

  While the sage, Honi, was walking along a road, he saw a man planting a carob tree. Honi asked him, “How long will it take for this tree to bear fruit?”

  “Seventy years,” replied the man.

  Honi then asked, “Are you so healthy a man that you expect to live that length of time and eat its fruit?”

  The man answered, “I found a fruitful world because my ancestors planted it for me. Likewise I am planting for my children.” (Taanit 23a, third century or before)

  A couple of centuries later, the rabbis concurred: “Even if you are old, you must plant. Just as you found trees planted by others, you must plant them for your children” (Midrash Tanchuma, Kodashim 8, fourth to fifth centuries).

  When I was growing up, we commemorated special occasions by planting a tree in Israel. Deaths, births, anniversaries, marriages, bar mitzvahs—all were occasions for planting a tree. Send in a donation to the tree-planting Jewish National Fund in honor of Grandma’s birthday or Johnny’s graduation, and you will receive a beautiful certificate.

  Lots of small saplings add up. When the state of Israel was formed in 1948, it was a barren land. Now, lush belts of green cover 250,000 acres, providing green lungs around congested cities and recreation and respite for all Israelis. Trees indigenous to the Middle East such as native oaks, carob, redbud, almond, pear, hawthorn, cypress, and Atlantic cedar have brought the desert back to life.

  We can do the same here. If you take a walk in many well-off neighborhoods, you’ll notice that the streets are tree lined. Go to the poor sections of town, and they are barren. Trees give shade, increase home values, reduce crime, clean the air, add beauty, and glorify God. Just as the Jewish National Fund has planted 240 million trees in the barren land of Israel, churches can plant “trees of life” throughout blighted urban areas of the United States. (Shameless plug: If you want to help, visit www.blessedearth.org/treeplanting.) And poor areas are not the only areas that need trees. When a church plants trees in towns devastated by tornadoes, floods, and other weather-related disasters, they are also planting hope.

  Too often, Christians are known for what we are against. Tree planting offers a wholesome opportunity to be known by what we are for.

  Work outdoors

  Many of us parents are afraid to give our kids chores. Because both parents work or parent
s are divorced or there never were two parents in the picture, we feel guilty. So, instead of following scriptural principles that warn against spoiling children, we coddle them. But coddling is copping out. It circumvents the hard work of parenting. In our desire to sidestep sulking or hissy fits, we sedate kids with digital distractions.

  What we forget is that giving kids chores is exactly that: a gift. Does Junior really need to know how to rake leaves? Perhaps not, but raking leaves will teach him important lessons about staying on task, teamwork, and delayed satisfaction. Watering the garden encourages responsibility: if plants get too dry, they die. Mowing the lawn requires that safety procedures are followed; sticks and stones can break bones (or at least the lawn mower’s “bones”) if not picked up before mowing.

  Teaching children the satisfaction of a job well done is a positive feedback loop. The more skills they develop, the more confidence they have. Greater confidence leads to more complex jobs, which expand their proficiencies even further.

  For better and for worse, children learn from our example. If we believe that outdoor work is beneath us, they will too. If we see it as a time to be with God while enjoying sunshine and fresh air, they will too. Inviting our children or a friend to work alongside us allows us to experience companionship and learn from each other. In order to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch God’s creation, we need to work alongside him.

  From an early age, Amish children are assigned outdoor chores. These responsibilities grow along with competencies. If you live in a rural area, as most Amish do, there will always be plenty of outdoor work—either on your land or a neighbor’s. If you live in a suburban setting, ask young children to help pick up twigs, sweep the walk, water plants, and spread mulch. As the children get older, they can mow grass, shovel driveways, and weed beds for you and for elderly neighbors.

  In urban areas, you can clean up a playground, start a children’s garden at the library, or begin a healthy soil for healthy food program. The goal is the same: to spend more time outdoors, so people can know the Creator through his creation.

  Play outdoors

  Physical work is necessary to keep us healthy in mind, body, and spirit. My husband prescribes an hour of physical work a day and a day of rest a week (Sabbath). But how do we get an hour of physical activity outdoors when machines and minimum-wage workers perform much of our labor?

  Outdoor play is one solution. By “play” I do not necessarily mean organized sports. I mean taking a walk around the neighborhood, climbing a tree, riding bikes, running around the playground, jumping on the rope swing, digging for archaeological treasures in the creek bed, picking dandelion bouquets, playing in the leaves, making fairy houses, constructing drip castles in the sand, building snow forts, ice-skating on the pond, flying kites. The possibilities are as big as all outdoors if we do not zap our imaginations with digital addictions.

  One deterrent to outdoor play is fear. Many parents, and their children, believe it is unsafe to play outside. I’m not advising parents to be foolish: you know your neighborhood and how safe or unsafe it is. But before ruling out fresh-air play altogether, we should consider whether we are succumbing to a proven danger—diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, which come with a sedentary lifestyle—because of exaggerated fears fueled by media sensationalism. For example, it is certainly a sad truth that children are abducted in our country, and since we bear the responsibility for our children both morally and legally, we do need to be careful. But it is also a sad truth that kidnapping stories sell magazines, plain and simple.

  In a Mayo Clinic study, nearly three-quarters of the parents worried that their children might be abducted. One-third of the parents said this was a frequent worry and that they worried more about kidnapping than any other concern, including car accidents, sports injuries, and drug addiction.

  Abductions by strangers are rare in the United States; the chances are about .000001 to 1 that your child will be involved in a kidnapping by a stranger. The chances of your child dying in a car accident are sixty times greater, and yet we do not banish our children from automobiles.

  If you are concerned about safety, be choosy about location. But set a goal that you and your children will spend at least an hour each day outdoors. It will change your physical, emotional, and mental health. It will change your relationship with God. With practice, it can shift your focus from “all about me” to “all about we.”

  Let’s Sum It Up

  Sometimes when Matthew is giving a talk, he pauses and asks folks to buddy up for a few minutes and discuss how God speaks to them. We’ve heard a wide range of answers: God speaks through Scripture, through events in our lives, through people we encounter, through dreams and visions, and in dozens of other ways. But one of the most frequent places where God speaks to us is in nature.

  I like to call these “Romans 1:20 moments.” In this verse Paul says, essentially, that we are without excuse for not knowing God if we simply take a stroll in our backyard. Romans 1:20 moments are when we stand on a beach watching the sun go down, or climb a mountain, or sit beside a stream; in the stillness, we hear God’s voice. Many of the pastors we work with say they heard God’s call not in a church, but in his other cathedral—in nature. Such exchanges are biblically based. As my husband likes to say, “Jesus mostly taught on field trips.”

  Once again, we can take a cue here from the Amish, who make the outdoors a central focus of life. The more time they spend in God’s creation, the more they come to know the Creator. But the opposite is also true. The less time we spend outdoors, the more alienated from God we can become.

  Scripture tells us to live in the world, not of the world. The Almost Amish extension might be to live less in the man-made world and more in the God-made world. Adjusting the ratio can be the difference between a paradise imperiled and paradise restored—an abandoned lot or a community garden. The choice is ours. The time is now.

  Chapter 5

  Simplicity

  Small and local leads to saner lives.

  In Hollywood, it’s the Oscar. In television, it’s the Emmy. In journalism, it’s the Pulitzer. It seems like every creative endeavor sees fit to give out a pinnacle award. When I was asked to write the introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of the Mennonite classic Living More with Less, I felt as if I had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Simple Living. Talk about irony: the Mennonites are the living lightly experts, not me.

  For years, I’ve been using the More with Less Cookbook, the beloved companion to Living More with Less. The Mennonites are good cooks, but the book is not just about food; it’s about a way of life.

  The Mennonites, one of those groups that go back to the same Anabaptist roots as the Amish, value simplicity just as the Amish do. Less obviously distinguishable than the Amish, many Mennonites dress in regular—though not flashy—clothes, drive cars, and work normal jobs. The one quality that universally sets both the Amish and Mennonites apart from the world is their holistic approach to simplicity.

  What does a holistic approach to simplicity involve? Decluttering your home is a great starting point, but it’s also about building a less complicated life. It’s about supporting local farms and businesses, getting to know your neighbors, and building a relational faith community. Keeping things small and local leads to a saner life.

  What I like most about this approach to simplicity is how it shines a light on the human side of Jesus, for this is what simple living is all about: God made flesh—cooking, shopping, eating, walking, talking, working, and fellowshiping on this earth. It’s about God coming into our homes, businesses, schools, neighborhoods, and churches to show us how to live.

  Two Kinds of Clutter

  Simplicity involves cutting back on two major kinds of stuff—the kind that fills our houses and the kind that fills our calendars. Both, of course, are related. The more things we have, the more time we have to spend shopping, paying for, transporting, storing, caring for, and disposing of them. The Amish
avoid both kinds of clutter. They don’t fill their houses with lots of unnecessary things, and they don’t fill their calendars running around from activity to activity.

  In chapter 1, we discussed decluttering our homes. Here, we will focus on decluttering our lives. One way to do that is to aim for small and local—keeping our daily interactions within horse-and-buggy distance. Supporting small farms, patronizing small businesses, volunteering in local schools, getting to know our neighbors, and building a small faith community make our lives more simple and sane.

  The world is based on the false promise of infinite growth. Amish society is based on the sustainable truth of an infinite God. The path from a crazy-busy life to a saner and simpler life begins in knowing the difference.

  Amish Principles

  “Less is more” is a basic principle of Amish simplicity. The Amish have not bought into the modern myth that bigger is better and faster is first. Instead, they intentionally hold their farms, businesses, schools, friendships, and faith communities to a human scale. Contentment and simplicity are two sides of the same coin. The Amish do not complicate their lives unnecessarily in the insatiable quest for more; keeping things small and local contributes to Amish peace.

  Amish farming communities have a long tradition of small farms, carefully managed, with diversified crops. They farm to provide for their families, not to get rich. A homestead with a few well-tended cows, chickens, pigs, and horses along with a variety of vegetables in the garden and fruit trees in the orchard will feed a family without incurring debt, purchasing a lot of expensive machinery, or depleting the topsoil of nutrients.

  In a similar way, cottage industries succeed because the Amish are not out to “make a killing.” Typical Amish businesses include making high-quality wooden furniture, quilts, and specialty foods. The Amish run small restaurants, make leather saddles, and engage in many of the traditional—and nearly lost—arts. These mostly family-owned businesses are based on excellent workmanship, fulfilling real needs within the community. Fair wages for a fair day’s work—not climbing the corporate ladder—is the measure of success. Doing it God’s way, not doing it my way, is the Amish mission statement.