Their belief is if you left the church then your soul was headed for damnation. The pain of being shunned by everyone you know is hard enough. He subjected himself to this pain many times before leaving for good. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to once again make a decision to leave his Amish life. He tries, but still doesn’t seem to feel as if he is where he should be. He later returns, and must admit all of his sins to the congregation before he is allowed to join the church. At age 17 he left his Amish home in Iowa. He wanted to be a part of the Amish world he was born into, yet felt it was not for him. We find a man who has struggled to find where he truly belongs. Not the ones so often written about in romance novels, which make the Amish come across as a people who do, or think no wrong.

In this book we get a look at the “real” Amish. I was thrilled to read Ira Wagler’s book Growing Up Amish. It may be these memories that have always drawn me to Amish fiction. In the winter we filled a concrete tub in our ‘milk house’ up with snow and put perishables in it. I learned how to can and freeze fruits and vegetables.

When we moved to Florida I learned that what we called a garden the people down here called a truck patch or small farm.

I worked on the farm just as the Amish do. My mom’s first question whenever I told her about a new friend was, “Are they a Christian?” I had few friends growing up because they did not fit into my mom’s “category” of what a Christian was. My books and comic books were scrutinized. Show More kind, and most television shows became off limits or a sin.

Growing Up Amish by Ira Wagler