Book Review: Broken Roads

I never did like the man. I still don’t.

Eventually, though, I grew to respect him. And because I do, here is a book review, which is something I rarely do.

I grew up steeped in the writings of the elder Wagler, David.  Family Life and Young Companion, especially. My parents approved of this, in part because I always did better with learning good behavior from books than from parental scoldings.

Through Deep Waters is a simple hardback book, no longer in print. As a youngster, I read and reread this book, trying to understand the simple faith and deep pain of this Amish patriarch as he walked through a son’s near fatal and crippling accident, and the aftermath.

I left home in 2011, bound for nursing school, and still a devout Old Order Mennonite. (Interestingly, this was the same year that David’s son Ira published a book that took the Amish-related-book world by storm). Through the next years I gulped up every book and article I could find about the Old Orders, both Amish and Mennonite, driven to understand my heritage and find my place in it. Somewhere along the way, that included a book called, simply enough, Growing up Amish. The writer, Ira, was the son of the venerable David Wagler, and he inherited his father’s talent.

(Ira shows up in his father’s book, of course, but I didn’t really notice. He was just one of a string of other sons, sons whom the father mentioned only in passing.)

Growing up Amish, as I saw it, was a powerful, dangerous book, the keen words of a talented and bitter man. My younger brother, sensitive and seeking, read it too, and I wished he wouldn’t. I was afraid the bitterness would taint him, and I didn’t want that.

For some reason, I kept my copy, despite those deep reservations. It sat on my shelf, for a few years, one of those books that I didn’t lend out because I couldn’t endorse it’s message.

Meanwhile, my seeking for something of significance took me through some harsh, dark days. I lost myself in intellectualism and quietly rebelled, discovering that cell phones and mp3 players were easily hidden behind my obedient façade. Eventually, the hypocrisy and guilt caught up with me. I nearly threw off the Old Order life and ran away to the city, but in a series of events that I can only call grace, I changed my mind and stayed. Pitched all my forbidden electronics. Put my whole heart into being a good little Mennonite girl who was doing the unheard of thing of going to college.

It was then, in that period of my life, that I signed up for a sociology class about the Amish, and Ira Wagler’s book was assigned as a textbook. I read Growing up Amish again, and discussed it in class, trying to hide my distaste. And to my surprise, the book wasn’t as bitter as I remembered. In fact, I could identify with some of the pain, more than I wanted to admit. At the end of the semester, the book went back on my shelf, studded with sticky notes and underlining.

A few months later, like Ira, I knew that I could leave, and I did. It was hell, learning to walk free, but I’ve never truly wanted to go back. I met Ira in person, sometime shortly after leaving the Old Order, and he graciously gave his time and attention as we chatted. In that brief meeting, I took an intense dislike to him as a person, for reasons that probably had more to do with my hangups than his. But I kept reading his blogs and was grudgingly impressed. Enough to preorder the next book, when the announcement came.

Last week, Broken Roads showed up in my mailbox. I read it in two days, gulping down chapters in between the hours of work and socializing. I stayed up late, I read in the bathtub and while waiting for water to boil.

I found myself wiping tears, a few times. The pain of broken roads, the longing to connect with one’s father, and to make him proud. Excelling in college, scooping up full-ride scholarships, ignoring advisor’s advice about which school to transfer to, choosing an unconventional path by any and all standards; I did all those too. The gospel shows up clear in this book, not hidden and half ashamed like in the first one. I respect that, a lot.

And the bitterness that spoiled the first book? It rarely shows its head here. Instead, there is a quiet resignation and honesty and authentic forgiveness that won my respect.

I still don’t like Ira. But I respect him now. And I recommend this book, Broken Roads.

This one, I can recommend. This one, there is no doubt about whether it can stay on my overcrowded shelves.

Both books are on Amazon. Growing up Amish , and Broken Roads.

Note: These are affiliate links, which means I get a few cents if you click through to purchase and your price stays the same.

Photo from Unsplash

In Which I Talk About Money

I’m not quite sure how this happened… but grace and redemption are, for sure, part of the story.

My dad is a financial genius. He is a dedicated dairy farmer, so it’s not like he’s got a lucrative profession. But somehow, through thirty-plus years, there was always enough, even for the unrelenting medical bills (all but one of the family got chronic Lyme disease over a period of fifteen years, a grueling and expensive experience).

Unusual for that time and place, my parents openly discussed finances around us kids. We knew the kind of work and thought it took to manage a business with razor thin margins and high operating costs and absorbed many basic money principles just by overhearing discussions with accountants, consultants, and bankers.

Given that kind of foundation, you would think that “money stuff” would come easy for me. And for quite a few years, it seemed that it did. I had ten thousand in the bank when I enrolled in college, and I worked crazy hours all the way through to offset expenses as much as possible.  I collected impressive amounts of scholarship money, and graduated debt free. I thought, smugly, that my peers just didn’t have it quite as together. I felt sorry for them, without the advantages of a good solid Mennonite upbringing.

But then. I hit rock bottom, and in desperation, admitted that I couldn’t handle the emotional pain I’d been living with for decades.

Life fell apart. In the process of finally addressing unresolved trauma and abuse, I lost family relationships, friends, church, community, and my debt-free status.

It’s now over three years since the fateful day when I began to allow God to do the undoing and healing process. And of the many things I’ve learned in that time, perhaps the most unexpected has to do with finances.

My dad is a financial genius. The things he does, are intuitive. He loves to run his business account with cushion of a hundred dollars or less, but somehow he calculates so well that the debit card is never declined. And while he taught us kids a lot more than average, you can’t teach things that you can’t explain. It’s taken me a long time to understand some of what he was doing when he scribbled out an intricate and perfectly balanced budget on a sheet of lined notebook paper.

He taught me so much, and it’s been invaluable. One of the griefs that been hardest to grapple with, was realizing that he didn’t teach me enough. But one day, I stopped deluding myself, and looked the facts squarely in the face.

I had credit cards and had run a cumulative balance in the thousands for several years. Thanks to zero interest introductory offers, and low-cost balance transfers, it wasn’t costing me much. But the balance had stayed pretty much the same for months, and it seemed that I couldn’t make headway.

I finally admitted that I had a problem, and cautiously confessed these facts to a few trusted friends. Then I got serious about getting out of debt. Dave Ramsey’s videos, including the “Baby Steps” plan, filled in a few crucial pieces of practical knowledge that had been missing. I actually have a working budget, for the first time in my life. And the debt began to decrease. A hundred here, and five hundred there. Another balance transfer to keep from incurring interest.

Finally, I was down to the final thousand. Then the power steering went out on my car. The repair meant replacing the entire steering column and took out my emergency fund. The day after I put the car in the shop, the shutdown hit. My income abruptly dropped by more than half, with no emergency fund.

What happened next is sheer grace. A few days working in a farm store. A housecleaning job there. Babysitting. And generous, astounding, utterly unexpected financial gifts. A new client that is in all ways better than the ones I lost.

Two and half months later, and six weeks behind my carefully plotted schedule, that last thousand has been paid. My cumulative credit limit increased by approximately $1,500 (even during the pandemic skittishness), and my credit score topped 800 for the first time ever.

I’m less confident in my own abilities than perhaps I’ve ever been, and better equipped. And that, too, is grace.

Postscript: If you’d rather a book, one of the better known of Dave Ramsey’s books is The Total Money Makeover. (That is an affiliate link: If you use it, I get a few cents, and the cost to you stays the same.)