Growing Up Amish Read Online Free PDF

fascination.
    I approached my desk, feet dragging, and stood with a hanging head before my judge. She looked at me sternly.
    â€œWhat’s the meaning of this?” she demanded, motioning to the notebook spread open on my desk. The damning scribbles seemed to leap from the pages, screaming accusations at me before all the world.
    I stood mute and wide eyed. I’d get a whipping now for sure. Miss Eicher had her established methods for dealing with miscreants. The prisoner would be escorted outside to the woodshed and left there to ponder his or her fate while Miss Eicher came back into the classroom, slid open a desk drawer, pulled out a sturdy wooden ruler, and marched back to the woodshed, where swift and severe punishment would be administered.
    I had seen it. I had heard it. It had happened to my friends. Now my time had come, I knew. I swallowed, my brown eyes brimming with tears. But I didn’t cry.
    I feared Mom would find out. Oh, the shame. And Dad. Another whipping would follow at home. The seconds crawled by. Miss Eicher did not soften her stern, unrelenting gaze.
    Abruptly, she instructed my classmates to fetch their writing books so she could check their work. Jerry and Harold, the two swiftest writers, scrambled piously to comply. They gleefully showed her all their finished lessons. They cast scornful glances at me. They wouldn’t dream of doing what I had done.
    I stood hunched and silent, guilty before them all.
    Then Miss Eicher abruptly got up, rang the second bell, and afternoon classes resumed.
    That was it.
    She did not spank me, or even tell my parents (as far as I knew). But she did make me stay inside at recess and during lunch hour and finish every single abominable writing exercise I had avoided.
    It took several days.
    After I had laboriously completed the last dreadful assignment, she released me to join my classmates, and I ran outside gratefully.
    It was never mentioned again.
    Nor was it forgotten.
    While I might have struggled with the tediousness of writing drills, it was the bigger questions in life that really held my attention—even at such a young age.
    Twice a month, on Friday afternoons, we had art class, which consisted of the students’ drawing simple things like birds and a sun with cascading beams in the upper corner and short slogans like “God Is Love” or “Love” at the bottom.
    One day at recess my friends Willis, Jerry, and Philip and I stood examining the art displayed on the wall and trying to guess who drew what. One drawing had the usual “Love” slogan at the bottom.
    We stood there with our hands in our barn-door pants pockets, or with thumbs hooked on our galluses—as we’d seen our fathers do at church—and discussed whether we really should love everyone. Even our enemies.
    We agreed we should.
    â€œBut what about Satan?” Philip asked. “Should we love him, too?”
    We respected Philip. He was a year older and a grade above us. Next year he would graduate to the west school where the big students went.
    It was a startling thought. We grappled with the disturbing concept. Satan was wicked; that we knew from countless sermons. He’d tempted Eve in the Garden and even now lurked about trying to get little children to do bad things.
    But weren’t we supposed to love everyone? Even him? We could not imagine that we should hate anything or anyone.
    â€œSatan is bad. We shouldn’t love him,” I said tentatively. But I was unsure of my words.
    In the next few minutes, the four of us hashed it out with serious observations and solemn comments, balancing the sin of loving evil against the sin of not loving at all.
    We finally reached a consensus and agreed that perhaps we were obligated to love Satan just a little bit. Not much. Just enough so we wouldn’t hate him, because hating was wrong.
    Satisfied, we disbanded as the bell rang and returned to our desks.
    We told no one of our