Twist of Faith Read online

  It took me awhile to get over that feeling (I didn’t leave my house for two days), but eventually I was able to sort through all the emotions and begin my new life. After all the negative things we had gone through as a family, still managing to come back together every time, this one last event was not going to divide us. Forgiveness is one of the most powerful forces in the world, able to completely turn the tide of events.

  I sat staring at the phone with determination. December in Texas was about as cold as it got, and sometimes if we got a frost on the ground, my mind would go back to Pennsylvania and my family and Angie. But at that moment I wasn’t thinking about Pennsylvania. I was thinking about Pastor’s wife.

  At that point, in the winter of 1981, I had been free of Pastor for over six months. I felt a freedom I barely recognized. Happiness came back slowly, one notch at a time, but I made progress. Then suddenly the rumors started to fly around the church, the same rumors we heard when we were back home at our church. Pastor was doing this, Pastor was involved with that—and finally Jonas; Fi’s husband, Mike, and Becky’s husband, Aaron, started to wonder. What was going on? Could it be that the trouble hounding Pastor from church to church was of his own making? Were the rumors true?

  Something came over me in those days, a feeling of terrible remorse for what I did during those six years. For some reason I felt compelled to apologize to Pastor’s wife for the things I did—my conscious wouldn’t let me off the hook. This feeling of remorse is what led me to that moment, that sitting by the phone waiting for the strength to make the call.

  Finally the strength came.

  “Hello?” she answered.

  I knew she’d heard the rumors. I knew the whispers of his infidelity had reached her ears. I explained to her that the things she had heard were true, and finally I told her that I was one of those women.

  Silence.

  “Have you told Jonas?” she asked me.

  I felt as though she’d kicked me in the stomach: the wind went out of me, and a startled feeling crept up from my insides.

  “No,” I said slowly. The notion of telling Jonas pressed in on me in those days, but I didn’t want to do anything to break our happiness—I carried it around like a glass bubble, protecting it from anything and everything. Telling Jonas would be like throwing that bubble up in the air, to him, and praying he could catch it.

  “No,” I repeated, “I haven’t told Jonas.”

  “Are you planning to?”

  “No, I wasn’t planning to.”

  “Well,” she said evenly but without malice, “if you don’t, I will.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Then I’ll tell him. I’d rather tell him myself.”

  I hung up.

  For a moment I sat there, not knowing what to say or do. “If you don’t tell him, I will.” That sentence just kept ringing through my mind, and suddenly one thought took precedence: I had to tell Jonas, and immediately. No one else could tell him that horrible secret before I did. He had to hear it from me. I drove straight to his body shop, and when I got there, he was coming out of his office.

  “Hey,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Hi. Jonas? You know those things you’ve been hearing about all those women with Pastor?”

  He nodded.

  “I was one of those women.”

  A look came over Jonas’s face that I’d never seen before, a look of intense hurt and surprise and shock. I couldn’t bear to look at it. It wasn’t rage or anger but more along the lines of deep disappointment and confusion. Yet even those words cannot adequately describe the look on his face. And suddenly all of the guilt came rushing back. What had I done?

  “I’m sorry. And I’m a sorry person.” I choked the words out amid rising sobs.

  I didn’t touch him or walk up to him. I just blurted out those words through the tears that were coming, then turned and left because I could not look at his face, in his eyes. I ran from that look, went to work. During my lunch break I tried to call him three or four times. No one answered. The look on his face had been filled with such despair that I couldn’t imagine what he might do.

  Finally I got home, and he wasn’t there. I started panicking: Where would he be? Who should I call? Just when the fear rose and threatened to suffocate me, I heard his car pull into the driveway. Relief.

  He came in the door.

  “Honey, we need to talk. We need to talk,” he said.

  “About what?” I asked. About what? What a stupid thing to say! My state of mind at that time was completely short circuited. I felt that I had said all there was to say, and I didn’t want to talk about it anymore, especially with Jonas.

  “We have to talk,” he said again. “But we’ll wait until the girls are in bed tonight.”

  I felt more nervous than ever but went through my daily routine, preparing dinner and getting the girls to bed. Was he going to kick me out of the house? I had nowhere to go. Was he going to leave me? I couldn’t blame him if he did.

  Jonas worked out in his shed most of the afternoon and evening. I can only imagine the thoughts that raced through his head as he spent time out there alone. The night came all too quickly for my liking, and soon we stood across from one another in the kitchen. I didn’t want the discussion to go on for too long, and I figured if we stood up, it wouldn’t, so I leaned against the kitchen counter. Time to talk.

  Jonas broke the silence first.

  “It’s not so much that we have to talk about this issue,” he said slowly, deliberately. “It’s more that I have something I want to say to you.”

  “Oh,” I said uncertainly. I expected anger. I expected accusations. And if Jonas wanted to say something, I thought he had that right, especially after what I’d done. But I didn’t think I could take any verbal beatings at that point. I had been tearing myself down for years, and I just wasn’t in any sort of state to handle heavy criticism. I knew I deserved it, but I couldn’t have handled it.

  Jonas continued.

  “I just want to tell you that I want you to be happy. If you want to leave me, then just promise me one thing. Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know if I can,” I said, amazed that he still concerned himself with my happiness. “I’ve broken many promises.”

  “Well,” he said, “just promise me that you won’t leave me in the middle of the night with a note on my dresser.”

  “Okay,” I said. The tears started to well up in my eyes, and I hoped he was nearly finished, because I didn’t want to lose it in front of him. But he pressed on.

  “If you decide to leave, just tell me about it. I’ll help you pack. I just want you to promise you’ll take the girls with you, because they need their mother.”

  Forgiveness can take your breath away.

  If Jonas had accused me at that moment, I would have run. Even though I had nowhere else to go, home still felt like the last safe haven, and if he would have charged me, I would have been forced out. Don’t get me wrong—at that time I thought I deserved to be accused! But it would have pushed me away.

  Instead, Jonas’s words made me feel safe, made me feel valued in an area of my life where I had always felt weak: my mothering. Nowhere else in the world offered a place for me at that moment in my life, yet Jonas told me I was valued. I was a good mother. He didn’t want me to leave.

  Forgiveness took my breath away.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Enlarging the Future

  Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.

  —PAUL BOESE

  There are a few times in our lives when pure, unadulterated evil shows itself—most of the time evil works its ways much more subtly. Yet those moments come once every so often, and what we are confronted with is pure fear, hatred, and destruction. Usually the temptation during these times is to run away, to shrink back, to retreat into a dark hole until the time passes. Our initial reaction is usually not forgiveness.

  Even as I
write this final chapter in my story, only a few weeks have passed since pure evil tried to shatter a small town. The story began with a family man, a hard worker by all accounts, a husband, the father of small children (in other words, someone who appeared to be entirely normal), yet he made horrible plans and carried them out, walking into a small Amish schoolhouse not five miles from my house and shooting ten small girls. Five of them were killed, two of them sisters, ages seven and eight.

  Yet in the face of such evil and hatred, the Amish community’s first reaction was one of forgiveness! CNN reported that a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls said of the killer on the day of the murder: “We must not think evil of this man.” A member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County explained: “I don’t think there’s anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive, and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts.”

  In fact, that’s exactly what happened: the Amish reportedly set up a fund for donations to go to the family of the man who shot their children; the Amish families invited that same family to one of the funerals, normally a private affair to which very few non-Amish are ever invited; there is even the story of one of the local Amish preachers finding the shooter’s wife and father-in- law, telling them he did not hold them responsible. He hugged them and they held each other, the three of them, weeping.

  There will be no lawsuits. There will be no public statements of sadness. There will be no press conferences casting doubt on the performance of the police or the emergency services or the government. There will be only forgiveness.

  That is not to say there will be no suffering. Do the families mourn for the children? Of course they do. Do the mothers feel sadness, loss? They must. Does the father of those two small girls buried side by side wake up in the morning and miss his little children? Of course he does. But when evil rose up in that small town and carried out its horrible atrocities, these families, this community, all of us in fact, were presented with a stark choice: do we react out of fear and hatred and allow evil to perpetuate its destructive self, or do we choose to allow the healing process to begin?

  Forgiveness continues its healing process in our small town, something that began only a few hours after the event took place. A few short days later, I drove on some back roads close to the school where the shooting occurred. I approached a stop sign where I had to turn right or left. But then I paused—in front of me was a dirt lane that led back to another Amish school. How do they do it? I thought to myself. How do they go right back to school? That’s when I noticed: both the gate to the drive and the doors of the schoolhouse were flung wide open. They would not let hatred force them into a dark place of seclusion and fear. Their response to the atrocity was to open wide the doors.

  Forgiveness also continues its healing process in my life. As others showed me love and encouragement and forgiveness, my life began gaining strength. I know of no other more powerful life force than forgiveness. When speaking about it, my husband loves to bring up the old Sunday school adage: forgive and forget. “Impossible,” he says. Forgive and forget is a saying we simply cannot apply to those events in our lives that most need forgiveness—usually these are events that have changed us, events we will never forget. Instead, Jonas adheres to another saying he has heard my sister Fi say: “Forgive because you cannot forget.”

  When my extended family found out about the abusive situation that had occurred between Pastor and me, their initial reaction could have been one of disgust or surprise or, more appropriate to our conservative background, shame. They could have let me slip off the family radar; after all, we lived so far away that they easily could have just written me off.

  Yet they chose grace and forgiveness. I informed my brothers of everything through a letter and waited for the fallout. You cannot imagine the roller coaster of emotions I felt when my oldest brother, Jake, and his wife showed up unexpectedly at our church one Sunday morning in 1982. He drove all those hundreds of miles from Pennsylvania to Texas just to be there with me, to show me his support, to tell me he loved me. I felt totally overwhelmed and forgiven!

  “What are you guys doing here?” I asked, amazed.

  “We just wanted to support you,” Jake said in his typically quiet way when talking about serious things. Jake would be the one to come by Downingtown over five years later on one of my first weekends as owner, just to offer the same encouragement and support. One by one my family members began showing me their love and forgiveness through letters or phone calls or visits. This amazing grace allowed me to continue my journey back to happiness and some sense of a normal life after six years of darkness and confusion.

  My mom and dad also pounced on the opportunity to show me their love and support. Even during my dark years, they came down every winter for a month or so just to see how we were doing—they would pull a camper down and live in our driveway. Even though we’d rejected them so coldly when we left Pennsylvania, they kept trying to break down those walls, slowly picking away.

  About a year after freedom returned into my life, doctors discovered that Dad needed open-heart surgery, so Becky, Fi, and I decided to drive from Texas to Pennsylvania to be there for the operation. Covering all of those miles together felt very therapeutic to me: the three of us girls were back together again, the first time in years! I thought about so much during that trek north, but I felt especially hopeful that I would get to talk to Dad about my abuse and apologize for not believing him when it came to Pastor.

  Fi, Becky, and I hung out at the hospital for a week along with our brothers and in-laws, and it became a time of healing for our relationship. Daddy recovered from his surgery, but the opportunity never came up for me to tell him face-to-face about what I had gone through. I wasn’t too disappointed, though, just because of how well our family seemed to be healing. I never thought it would be possible, but suddenly we were supporting each other again, loving one another, staying in touch.

  Dad recovered from his surgery, and the next winter he and Mom came down to see us again. At that point I still didn’t talk about my dark years with anyone—I felt that I had dealt with the situation and the time had come to move on. I guess I didn’t realize how many other issues still remained. But in any case, that winter was the best winter we had with my parents.

  One day Dad came to see me at work—I worked at a steakhouse from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on most afternoons just to make a little extra money. When I got off work, I sat down with Dad at the far booth next to a window that looked out onto the street. That was the first time I ever remember spending one-on-one time with Dad—when you are part of a family with eight children, very few people get the chance to be alone with Dad! I felt special that day in the restaurant, just him and I talking together.

  I also remember feeling like he was my daddy again, feeling that for some reason our father-daughter relationship was being restored. He never showed a lot of affection while we were growing up, but sitting there with him made me feel like a little girl again. It reminded me of the feeling I used to get when I was young and we would be driving to market—I always wanted to perch on that middle seat right beside him.

  Sitting there with him, I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted to tell him that he had been right all along, I wanted to say sorry for all of the small injustices I had done him, I wanted to tell him I loved him so much. I wanted to tell him everything I had been through. But I couldn’t find the words.

  In his own way, he talked around the subject, sometimes darting in terribly close to the unspoken things, then easing away. We didn’t talk directly about my past, but he said enough to bring peace to my heart. I could tell he knew about what had happened, and he still loved me. I knew I was forgiven.

  As we got up to leave, I smiled. I felt grateful we’d had that time together, even if I hadn’t been able to verbalize all the things I had been through. As we walked out of
the restaurant, Dad turned to me and grinned.

  “I love you, Anne,” he said.

  Now, I always knew my parents loved me. But in our culture we didn’t say it much, and that is the only time I remember my dad ever saying it to me like that. He couldn’t have said it at a better time.

  After Daddy left the restaurant that day, he went to Jonas’s shop to have something on his car fixed. He and Mom were getting ready to drive to Atlanta for a quilt show. Jonas fixed whatever it was that needed to be fixed, so they packed up and left, their small trailer in tow. Less than a week later we got a call from Mom—she was in Atlanta.

  “Anne, Dad fell over again, like he did before, and we’re in the hospital,” she said in a hollow voice.

  “What?” I asked, shocked, looking at the clock—it was after 8:00 p.m. He had been fine the other day at the restaurant. “We’ll leave right away—we can be there in around twelve hours.”

  “No, no. The doctors say he will be okay. Don’t drive through the night; just come in the morning.”

  “Is he conscious?” I asked.

  “No, well, he’s kind of in and out right now.”

  “What? What do you mean in and out? Are you sure he’s going to be okay?”

  “They’re saying he’ll be all right in the morning.”

  So we made plans for the children and decided to leave in the morning. Carl, my youngest brother and future president of Auntie Anne’s, was visiting us and wanted to drive to the hospital in Atlanta with the three of us sisters.

  But before we could even get out the door in the morning, Mom called again.

  “Daddy’s dying,” she said in a choked voice.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, panic filling my voice.