A Letter About My Ailments [And A Request for Menu Ideas]

 I'm actually looking for ideas about what to eat, but first this post will sound like the letters my Yoder aunts would send in the family circle letter. "Was to the dr. yest. to talk about my aches and pains ha."

The "ha" was a frequent insertion in their letters, telling you this was an attempt at humor. I guess you might not pick up on that otherwise.

If you've been around me for over an hour, you know I'm afflicted with the Yoder Cough, a soft persistent hacking that becomes easily-ignored background noise.

The cough comes from the Yoder Lungs, fragile organs which struggle to do their job even on their best days and also catch every respiratory virus in the wind. At that point, the gentle coughing transitions to a deep gasping and rasping, sort of like a choking German Shepherd, that cannot be ignored and causes great worry to any  listeners.

Actually, Yoders have a family tradition of being sickly and frail but also living a long time. Dad's mom, "Kansas Mommi", wasn't expected to reach adulthood but lived to 103 years old.

Dad was always thin and forever coughing and also had the Yoder Stomach, [de Yeddah schwache Mahwa] but he lived to 102.

So I coughed a lot for many years, inhaled lots of asthma medications, fought bronchitis and Covid and other recurring  respiratory ills, and assumed I'd live a long time despite all this. I am committed to family tradition, after all.

Of course, I have also tried to take care of myself and eat well and get enough sleep and never ever get cold feet. I avoid artificial scents, especially Glade plug-ins, because they are plastic death, probably invented by the devil himself, ha. In addition to prescription meds, I have tried multiple supplements from vitamins to CBD to various MLM products.

The inhaled steroids keep me alive. The CBD cream has helped the most of any potion I've tried. Both took the edge off the cough. Neither stopped it.

In the last month, for the first time, I  had an alarming  sense that if nothing changed, I would not keep up the family tradition of living a long time.

In late summer, my friend and neighbor Simone said, “You are always sick!” She was right. I cycled through illnesses and in early October came down with a nasty sore throat and what felt like laryngitis. Soon, the sore throat descended into my lungs and turned deep and liquid.

Unfortunately, we needed to travel, and traveling and sickness go together for me like moving to a different house and having a baby always happened at the same time when I was a young mom. I get sick every time I fly. Or if I'm already sick, it gets a lot worse.

I wore a mask to avoid spraying pneumonia particles on my seatmates.
I was comforted in this ordeal by having a mask that matched my jacket, only a few shades lighter.

Not only was the cough beyond horrible, but I was so tired that I had to gather my courage to climb a flight of stairs. But I didn't pursue seeing a dr. on our week-long trip because we were away from home, I didn't have a fever, and I figured if I found a doctor he or she would dismiss it as just a virus:  get lots of rest and push fluids, goodbye.

We came home. I felt terrible, like a python was squeezing my chest, and like I just wanted to sleep if I could muster the strength to walk to bed.  I began to question whether I'd survive to 65, let alone 100. The doctor told me it’s “walking pneumonia exacerbated by asthma” and put me on antibiotics and oral steroids. It took me the rest of October to sort of recover.

This is the thing with modern American medicine: It’s amazing when your husband shatters his wrists and lots of other bones, and they piece him back together and help him survive. It’s frustratingly insufficient with anything vague and chronic.

Asthma is technically not an autoimmune disease, but it’s in the same neighborhood. It’s connected to inflammation and to the body going a little crazy overreacting to irritants.

No one could ever tell me why this was happening.

If you Google causes and treatment of asthma, every major medical site says, “Avoid irritants such as mold,” and “Increase your dose of inhaled steroids.” That’s all my doctor could offer me as well.

So there you are, coughing wretchedly and knowing you need steroids to keep breathing, but also knowing that something is completely and deeply wrong with this picture. The medical world offers zero help for getting to the root causes of your breathing difficulties, so you go wandering among YouTube and Instagram “natural” practitioners who might or might not have the credentials they say they do.

A recurring theme in my research was food sensitivities causing inflammation which then causes asthma and lots of other ills. It mostly made sense.

Dr. Josh Redd, whose qualifications I had no way of checking, offered a free printable guide to an elimination diet to test which foods I might be reacting to. The simplest one, cutting out dairy products, sugar, and wheat, seemed the most logical for my situation. Impulsively, I decided to go for it on a random Friday morning, of course right after I’d bought lots of ravioli and bread sticks at Costco and a big bag of string cheese at Grocery Depot.

That was one week ago. I eat oatmeal in various iterations, cook enough rice at one time for three dinners, and fry eggs and vegetables and meat to go with the rice. I made apple crisp when we had guests for supper, and I didn’t eat any of it.

I am going to get tired of this menu very soon.

However. I am coughing noticeably less. I can hardly believe it. For the last month, I’d been taking cough syrup at night so I could get a few hours of sleep. I quit doing that and slept without waking up in paroxysms of wheezing and gagging. I haven’t used a rescue inhaler in a week.

Today I spoke at a women’s event at a church and embarrassingly coughed a lot, again, and right before I left I suddenly realized there were candles, probably scented, burning on every table. No wonder.

I would say, over all, I’m coughing 65% less than before. It is astonishing. I wonder who I am now. I’m not sure I recognize this person, ha.

The big question is: how will this affect my immune system? Will I keep getting sick? Will I still have to wear a medical mask when I fly or mingle in crowds so I don’t cough on everyone around me or get knocked flat with Covid or bronchitis three days later?

We will see. 

I was talking with my sister Rebecca, whose asthma has always been two levels worse than mine.  If I need a dose of Albuterol, she needs to be on a nebulizer.

Rebecca said she does best if she strictly follows the exact diet I’m on, which probably means that I’m stuck with this way of eating, because we are very much alike.

I said I don’t understand it. Here we are, needing to avoid the same foods, and we have no family history or anything of food allergies.

She said, “Well! Think about it! All those cakes and pies the Yoder relatives always served. Maybe they actually were sensitive to sugar and gluten, and that’s what was causing the Yoder cough, and no one put it together!”

What a brilliant connection.

I think diet and inflammation and family history are what the medical researchers at Johns Hopkins and WebMD ought to be looking into and testing and sharing. Instead, it’s those of us dealing with asthma every day who are doing the nitty-gritty testing and research, trying dozens of remedies because while we’d really like to follow the family tradition and live to 100, sometimes we just want to survive to see another day.

Before I end this lengthy circle letter, ha, I will put out a call for help from anyone who’s followed this diet. What are some things I can eat? Again, I’m avoiding gluten/wheat, dairy products, and sugar. Please comment your creative menu ideas, if you don't mind.

That would be terrible to decide it’s not worth living longer if it means another meal of oatmeal or rice.

And, as Dad closed every letter from love letters to Mom to Yoder circle letters:

Sincerely,

Dorcas

Some Monday Thoughts

We have a bumper crop of apples this year, most of which are still very green but they still turned into wonderful apple pies for Sunday dinner yesterday.

Today my mother-in-law, Anne, told me that her mother-in-law, Paul's Grandma Lena, taught her to add salt to applesauce to cut the tartness from green apples.

So now I need to be sure to tell my daughter-in-law Phoebe.

The world is a better place when these lessons are passed along and no one breaks the chain.

--

Many of us older authors and wanna-bes have been discouraged and dismayed by Christian publishers who won't take a peek at our stuff unless we have at least 30,000 followers on social media.

I was told yesterday that the recession of 2008 created a huge change in Christian fiction publishing because so many Christian bookstores closed. This meant that readers were no longer introduced to fiction books by browsing in the local bookstore.

I wonder if the latter led to the former, and publishers began to rely on the authors' online followers to drive exposure and sales.

I think this shows a serious laziness and lack of creativity in Christian publishing as well as a complete ignorance of how few people do well at both writing and social media marketing.

Thankfully, my informant said, publishers are finally realizing that followers aren't necessarily book buyers.

Let's hope the pendulum swings back to good writing getting the contracts.

--

Emily's friend Sydney Wiese is back in Oregon as a coach after playing for the WNBA for seven years. Emily invited her for Sunday dinner so I of course stressed out a little too much because she sounded like what my mother would call Feiny Leit [fancy people].

As it turned out, the apple pies were delicious [see first note] and Sydney was what my mother would call "usht so neiss un common" [just so friendly and ordinary]. I realized why she seemed so familiar when she said her parents were both from a little town in Minnesota maybe 60 miles from where I grew up. Sydney doesn't have a Minnesota accent, having grown up in Phoenix, but she sure has the vibe, and she reminded me of my friend Beth Reckdahl from high school, may she rest in peace.

--

We discovered recently that some of the underground pipes Paul's dad put in 45 years ago were leaking badly. This led to a good chunk of cash going to a plumber instead of our children's inheritance, but I'm so relieved to have it fixed.

Today the younger plumber was here to replace some decaying pipes around the water heater and also install a new faucet on the south side of the house.

I found out that he became a plumber kind of by accident. He was installing a floor for a friend and the friend's dad, a plumber, came by and offered him a job because he was impressed with his work ethic. And here he is.

I thought that story had life lessons in it.

The young plumber said that taking this job was the second best decision of his life. The first was getting married a year ago.

Awwwwwww!, I thought.

I said, "Good for you for committing."

Yeah, well, it wasn't that he was scared of commitment, but he dated for years and nothing clicked, and then he met his wife and that was it. He just knew.

Wow.

Paul is off hiking today but he had told the plumber to make sure I like the placement of the outside faucet. "Happy wife, happy life," said the plumber, adding, "I also say, happy house, happy spouse."

I told Emily about this exchange and she said, "That is such a Dorcas Smucker conversation."

I do have a gift for getting people to tell me their life story, and I would be more proud of that if it was something I tried to do.

--

I was out in my writing cabin today when I saw a pickup truck drive in and a vaguely familiar figure walk up to the house.

I scampered over to see what was going on, and here it was Trent Ruckert, here with his wife and children to visit his parents and also looking up a few old haunts because their flight was canceled today.

It was fun to catch up, and lots of points to young men who look up their old friends' moms.

I decided not to remind him of the time he came over late to see Steven and didn't want to bother us so he climbed into a random window upstairs which happened to be Emily's bedroom.

Trent asked about Paul, and I said that he's learned to do almost everything he did before his accident, and today he is out hiking.

Trent said, "That is very Paul Smucker of him."

I laughed too hard because it is way too true.

--

Have a good week.

Guest Post--Ben Smucker--1. Responses to Previous Post; 2. Ten Ways Being an Instructor is Like Being a Pastor

Ben points out the eagles' nest along the Back Way, by the sugar beets

The following guest post by Ben is the final installment of the Smuckers' April Blogging Challenge.

You can catch up with Emily's posts here and Phoebe's posts here.

If you haven't read Ben's previous post, this one will make substantially more sense if you read it first. You can find the link here.

Hitting “send” or “submit” on a piece of writing sometimes feels like the spin of a roulette wheel (or at least, what I imagine spinning a roulette feels like). You’re never quite sure how it is going to land with your audience. Previously when I’ve sent pieces of writing off into the ether, the responses I remember are usually a mountain of edits from my Ph.D. advisor or the scathing remarks from the enigmatic and anonymous “Reviewer 2”. 

It’s been really encouraging (and almost overwhelming) to see all the responses to my previous article. I would have loved to reply to all of them, but as I deal with emails from students all the time, there is only so much brain space for responding to messages, one reason I limit my social media usage. (If you actually want to ask me a question, email is a better way to get a response; bensmucker93@gmail.com).

If you’re expecting an article like the previous one, prepare to be disappointed (just like Reviewer 2). When you’re teaching two college classes (one with 100 students, the other with 85), are supervising seven TAs, have two midterms to give and grade, and are behind on two other side projects, writing a thoughtful blog post is nearly impossible. In the middle of all this, two of my sisters were in Oregon so we had a family vacation and I was trying to carve out as much time as possible for them, so there wasn’t a lot of time or brain-space for well-written blog posts1. Life comes at you fast.

So what do you do when you have no original ideas? You riff on old ones, and pull some other random bits you have lying around. This blog post will have two parts. Part 1 is my answers to questions I have received from people after my last post. Note that not all of these were asked directly, and some of these are just me wanting to write a bit more about things I didn’t have time and space to put in the first one. Part 2 is a list of ways being an instructor is like being a pastor. I wrote the initial draft out of boredom while administering a final.

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Q: Will you be writing more?

A: I hope to. I’ve considered starting a blog for a while, but did not have the time while in grad school (and who wants to write for fun when a good chunk of your job is writing?). I also did not know if there would be an audience for my writing. I’m still figuring out the rhythms of life in my current position as an instructor, but I’ll probably try to start it up over the summer after I wrap up some more of the research from my dissertation (I’m still working to submit them for peer review).

Q: What will you write about?

A: What I observe that I find interesting. I don’t think I can get my audience interested in something unless I am interested in it. This will be a side project, so I want to have fun with it. There will probably be some topics where only a fraction of the audience will have any interest, but I’ll write about them anyway and maybe we’ll both be surprised. There may be other topics that get a lot of cultural attention that I’m just not that interested in, and I probably won’t write about them (sorry British Royal Family, personality tests, and Taylor Swift), though I might write about why they are so popular.

Q: What exactly is your current academic position, and what are you hoping to do in the future?

A: Currently I am an instructor in the mechanical engineering department at Oregon State University. I teach classes (mostly 3rd-year), but I do not do research like a tenure-track professor at OSU would. While I am a faculty member, it is a year-to-year appointment. I do not intend to try to become tenure-track faculty at a school like OSU, because I don’t want to do that much research. I will probably look for tenure-track professor positions at smaller schools where the job would be mostly teaching, but I’m pretty happy where I’m at.

Q: How did you come up with that last line in your previous post?

A: In my younger days when I would venture into more mainstream Mennonite culture at Bible schools and BMA conventions, I would have people say “Oh, are you Dorcas Smucker’s son?” It kind of became a running family joke. So after my mom visited my church, I asked her (mostly) in jest, “How does it feel to be known as ‘Ben’s mom’ for a change?” Turns out, my attempt at humor encapsulated my story better than I initially intended.

Q: Why did you join an Anglican church?

A: Several reasons.

1. The strong intellectual tradition while remaining theologically evangelical; think of people like C.S. Lewis, John Stott, J.I. Packer, and N.T. Wright.2 

2. The liturgical worship style. 

3. Most importantly, my church is a group of dedicated Christ-followers who meet relatively close to where I live. 

When I left the Mennonite church I grew up in, I initially attended a more mainstream evangelical church for a couple of years (at that time the Anglican church I go to now was actually Presbyterian (PCA)). While there are definitely things I appreciated about that more mainstream evangelical church, the modern worship styles felt hollow to me. But when I read about more liturgical worship styles, they really resonated with me (I would highly recommend Tish Harrison Warren’s The Liturgy of the Ordinary or Prayer in the Night, whether or not you have any interest in Anglicanism). 

The church I had been a part of had become very large, and it was hard to get to know people. When I realized I was going to be in Corvallis after grad school, I realized that if I were just now deciding on a church in Corvallis, I would go to the Anglican church (some of my close friends were already going there). That’s when I decided to join my Anglican church.

Q: Should I leave if I feel like an outlier in my context? Should I become Anglican?

A: Probably not, but maybe. My previous blog post was intended to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. If you are having issues fitting into a Mennonite church or some other church, you will not solve all your issues simply by going to an Anglican church, or any other church for that matter. As I stated in my previous post, being the outlier can be really lonely. But it can also be an opportunity for substantial impact, so discernment is required. As Matthew 5:47 says, “If you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?” Be cautious about simply seeking out “your people” as a means of fulfillment.

However, if you are a Christian, you should be a part of a local body of Christ-followers that can speak into your life, and you into theirs. “You’ll never find the perfect church” can feel like a trite phrase, but it’s also true. Looking for a church can very easily become consumeristic (there’s a reason we call it church-shopping), and the idea of finding “the best church for me” can be deeply infused with consumerism and individualism. But at the same time some of us face certain challenges and have certain pains from our past that may mean that we’ll need to leave the tradition we grew up in to grow more Christ-like.

If you are in a phase where you are looking for a new church, my two pieces of advice would be: 1. Proximity matters; 2. Assuming they have the basic tenets of orthodox Christianity (note the lower-case “o”), how well they disagree (with you and with each other) is probably more important than how much you agree with them. A community that can disagree with each other and still love each other deeply is a beautiful thing.

Q: How do we integrate those who feel like outliers into our communities?

A: This is really the important question. I don’t really know, but two places to start: show that you value them as a person, and that you value the thing(s) that makes them feel like an outlier, or the perspective that comes with it; take an interest in their lives, even if you can’t fully understand their “other world”.

Churches can very easily become stratified along racial, cultural, or socio-economic lines. My own denomination is the most educated Christian denomination in the United States. To my understanding, all of the adult men (and most if not all of the adult women) in my church have at least a 4-year degree; more than half the men have an advanced degree of some sort. Yes, it is a college town, so the surrounding general populous has a pretty high level of education, but I imagine that someone who did not have much educational background could very easily feel out of place at my church. This highlights that integrating outliers isn’t a problem unique to Mennonites; every Christian community will face the challenge of integrating those who feel like outliers compared with the rest of the group.

—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At some point, I realized there are a surprising number of similarities between being an instructor at a university and being a full-time pastor of a small church. Here are ten of them:

1. You ramble on to a bunch of people who look like they don’t want to be there. When I was younger, my mom used to hint sometimes that she hoped I would become a pastor when I was older (while she also lamented the challenges my father faced as a pastor, ironically enough). So when I started teaching classes, I started telling my friends “when I was growing up, my mom wanted me to become a pastor. Sure enough, now I ramble on for over an hour to 30-80 adults who look kinda bored.”3 This served as the inspiration to come up with the rest of this list.

2. The people you lecture to are paying you to be there. It’s easy to worry that you’re not living up to the expectations people have for you, since you are being paid to be there.

3. You get concerned about the people who don’t show up. Sure, sometimes people have good reasons for not showing up. But there are some people you know would be doing better if they were showing up more.

4. People contact you at odd hours with existential crises. Granted, the existential crises I hear about all seem to occur right before exam day or when homeworks assignments are due, and they’re usually in the form of an email I see the next morning instead of some middle-of-the-night phone call.

5. You have a surprising amount of control over your schedule (sort of). There are certain times when you have to be in certain places (Sunday mornings for pastors, lecture times and office hours for instructors). But if it’s not one of those times? Sure, you can meet someone for coffee or go for a quick hike. Until you push off too many things and your procrastination comes back to bite you. 

6. You wish you could spend all your time reading or talking to people informally.4 Sure, the most visible part of your job is talking up front to a larger audience. But really, you’d rather be interacting with people in smaller settings or off reading a book somewhere.

7. You’re probably underpaid for the amount of education you have. You don’t work as an instructor for the money. While I have a very comfortable middle-class existence it is certainly less than I would be making if I was a tenure-track professor or working in industry as an engineer. If someone is the pastor of a relatively small church and has at least a Master’s degree, they are probably also making less than the average person with that level of education.

8. It’s easy to be judgemental towards your constituents. Sometimes, you just feel like saying “How do you people not get this?!? How many times do I have to repeat this?!?!” But then you remember that you need to be patient, because…

9. Seeing the growth in people makes it all worth it. Sometimes you wonder why you chose this line of work. Sometimes you wonder if all your efforts are worth it. But then you see the growth in people you spent so much time with, and it’s all worth it. Plus, your mom is proud of you.

10. Your longest-lasting effects will come from showing up. In a world where people are showing up less and less, your embodied presence will be what people ultimately remember the most (I recently read Drew Dyck’s book Just Show Up, which talks about this in more depth). 

1 Even as I’m writing this, I really should be grading my students’ midterm exams. Hopefully they don’t get too annoyed at me for getting them back a bit later.

2 Note that not all Anglicans would necessarily be theologically evangelical (by Bebbington’s definition), but the Anglican Church in North America (the denomination my church is a part of) is.

3 If any of my friends from the Christian Graduate Fellowship are reading this, I apologize for making you hear this joke for the 17th time.

4 I don’t know how true this is across the board; it’s probably just something I have in common with my pastor.

Ben grilling at his house.

Aunt Dorcas Advises: When Your Mennonite Child Wants to Go to College

No one asked this specifically, but Aunt Dorcas decided to dispense some advice. It seemed appropriate after her son Ben's guest post from April 18, which you might want to read now.

Ben's post--22 Miles Down Peoria Road

Ben with his Doctorate

Traditionally, Mennonite young people finish eight, ten, or maybe 12 grades of school, then follow their parents into a construction trade or farming, or maybe pursue teaching. Many women work in retail or teaching before taking on marriage and homemaking.

College has been less forbidden than unnecessary. Why get an education when you can earn a fine living building houses or welding? Indeed, why even finish high school?

We are a practical and pragmatic culture. School is both required by law and necessary for basic skills of Bible study and running a business or household, but academia, with its detailed study of subjects with little relation to everyday tasks, seems frivolous. Mennonites love to tell stories of the lawyer or professor they worked for who couldn’t unclog his bathroom sink or change the oil in his car.

Culturally, we have almost no context for children who want to go to college, and little knowledge of majors, applications, credits, or financial aid. Even more, we don’t quite know what to do when one of our own pursues an education. Often, there is no place for them in the community, even when we and they want them to belong.

Here's Amy getting her Associate's

So, as a conservative Mennonite parent, how should you respond if your child or teenager says they want to go to college someday?

Ben, who wrote the post about living in two worlds, has a Ph.D.  Matt and Jenny have Master’s degrees, Amy and Emily have Bachelors, and Steven has two Associates. Matt’s wife Phoebe and my husband Paul also have Bachelor’s degrees, and I attended college for two years but don’t have a degree.

College kids in 2024 have a stereotype, especially among conservative people, as blue-haired snowflakes with six-figure student loans who lecture their parents about socialism and systemic oppression.

In contrast, our six all love Jesus and their parents and have retained the work ethic, frugality, and good sense of their Amish and Mennonite ancestors despite studying at secular universities. Their political views are nuanced rather than extreme in any direction, they all outwork me by a long way, and together they have less than $6,000 of student debt remaining despite paying for college themselves.

I share all this not only to brag shamelessly but also to establish my credentials. The truth is that Paul and I didn’t plan or orchestrate this outcome, and as with every good thing I’ve ever accomplished, it was accidental and unintentional. However, a few decisions seem significant, and our children have sometimes shared what they feel we did right, God bless them. I’m happy to pass that on as advice for others.

1.       Give your children a solid foundation: love them like crazy, believe in them, encourage, laugh, make your home a warm, safe place.
Get help if you have issues.
Model honesty, growth, repentance, sacrifice, and changing your mind now and then.
If they have a solid core and know who they are, they are far less likely to find the college alcohol culture a temptation, or to want to be like the cool people, or to change who they are so they can be accepted.
One daughter said it didn’t take long to figure out that most of the cool people were just pretending, and the partyers just wanted to escape real life.

Steven gets an Associate's in firefighting

2.       Choose a congregation that doesn’t outright forbid college. My dad, the first Amish person to get a Master’s degree and stay Amish, had his church’s permission to do so even though it was wildly outside the traditional box. I suspect his bishop in Oklahoma recognized his bright mind and endless curiosity as well as his love of being Amish.
The Beachy Amish church of my teen years didn’t forbid me or my sister from going to high school and college. They didn’t understand or relate in the slightest, which was unfortunate and made my faith crises worse than they needed to be, but I think they also recognized my giftings.
A church that forbids college classes of any kind, even online or at a local community college, has deeper issues that are likely to frustrate young people whether they are interested in college or not.
And, let’s be honest, anything totally forbidden can be secretly tempting. It’s counterintuitive, but absolutely insisting on one way is more likely to lead to them choosing another.

3.       At the same time, appreciate the Amish/Mennonite work ethic, and don’t elevate being a professor above cleaning grass seed or being a welder. Both can support a family. What are your child’s interests, giftings, and callings? How can they combine enjoyment, making a living, and serving God and others? The details aren’t as important.

4.       Encourage learning. We Mennonites already have a tradition of being self-taught, from farmers reading about fertilizer in Farm Journal to housewives watching YouTube videos on making the perfect cheesecake that doesn’t crack to preachers studying the Matthew Henry on Saturday night.
It’s not a huge leap from that kind of learning to taking college classes.

5.       Encourage reading. Go to the library. Read to your children. Talk about what they’re reading. Let them follow their interests. When Harry Potter was wildly controversial in the Christian world and Emily was a teenager, she borrowed the book, read it, and discussed it with me, analyzing the details as only she can. It was a great exercise for both of us.

6.       Let them ask questions. Lots of questions, on every subject. Discuss things. Look up answers in the dictionary and online and in the Bible. Ask people who know more. Admit it up front if you don’t know. Also admit that certain Mennonite practices are tradition more than Scripture.
Ask them questions right back. Make them think.
Some questions are terrifying for parents, but you can do hard things.
“Letting us ask hard questions” is the #1 answer I get when I ask my kids what we got right. Emily said, “I knew what I believed and why, and I could explain it, because of all the discussions we’d had.”
Amy said, “You let us ask questions and we regularly pushed back on things, so we knew what we believed by the time we got there.”

7.       Teach them that that God’s Kingdom is bigger than our family, our neighborhood, our church, and our nation. This is how we understand and practice Scripture. Other people do it differently. Maybe they baptize babies or play drums in church. But if they also believe in Jesus, we are part of the same family, we can learn from them, and God has a role for all of us.

8.       Show them how to live with contradiction and nuance and tension.
Don’t throw them pat answers and expect them to be ok with that.
Look up Bible passages. Look up other passages that seem to say something different. God’s judgment and his mercy. Free will and being chosen. God’s goodness and human suffering. It is possible to live in this in-between place, to be honest about seeming contradictions, to learn as you go, to not know how it all works, to trust God to show you eventually.
The same is true for reconciling evidence for an old earth with the Biblical account of Creation. We don’t know everything yet. We can still learn about dinosaurs and rock layers, and it doesn’t have to destroy our faith. We can read Answers in Genesis periodicals, but they aren’t going to explain every possible situation. Be ok with uncertainty. This is God’s world. He has things well in hand. We don’t know that much, honestly. There is a lot left to learn.
I recognize that people and families are different, and some think a lot deeper than others or are more sensitive to suffering or have a greater need for certainty.
But you can set the example of loving God and others without absolute certainty about every possible question.

9.       Ben says “humility” in his family was a big influence on him. When the kids were very insistent with their opinions, I made them say, “But I could be wrong.”
I tried to say it myself.
I admit this was a reaction to an annoying person in my life who shut down every discussion or question with “Scripture makes it very clear that. . .”
Well. Sometimes Scripture didn’t make it very clear, but the real issue was that this guy was afraid of having his opinions examined and found wanting, so the conversations ended right there. I wanted to put a comic-strip balloon script over his head: “But I could be wrong.” Since I couldn’t do that, I made sure my family knew how to say it.

10.   Remember that having your children’s beliefs tested is not a bad thing. I’ve known parents who didn’t ever want their children in a situation where they were different from the people around them. One mom didn’t even want her child to attend an ACE [Christian curriculum] convention because the other girls might wear makeup and jewelry and wouldn’t wear head coverings. And their poor child would have to stand alone.
Obviously, you supervise appropriately and you don’t ever throw your young child to the wolves, but if your teachings are so fragile that you can’t send a teenager to an ACE convention for fear they’ll fall away, you have issues far worse than makeup and jewelry.
In the book, Circle of Love, a young Mennonite man leaves home for 1-W service and gradually spirals into the ways of the world around him, with heartbreaking results. How sad that he had to leave home and go out into the world, right? But what if he had always had such a weak faith but no one including himself ever knew, and he stayed in his home church and community all his life, and his faith was never tested and exposed? Would that really have been better?

Jenny giving her presentation for her Master's in Math

11.   “College is an adult decision and an adult responsibility, so they can pay for it themselves.” That’s what my husband used to say.
While we didn’t pay for college except for the tax write-offs their freshman years, we tried to help in other ways.
They were free to live at home as long as they wanted, either paying rent or helping around the house for half an hour a day.
We hired them to work at the warehouse or around the house, since Paul felt that it wasn’t fair to pay teen/adult  boys but not their sisters, just because they couldn’t sling 50-lb bags of seed.
We also helped them save money for their futures, whether college or cars or homes.
All the kids had summer jobs while in college, and some worked through the school year as well.
Most of them didn't get much for scholarships until grad school, when both Ben and Jenny got generous packages that paid for tuition plus a stipend to live on. Matt’s Master’s degree was covered by the Navy. Amy and Emily waited until after age 24, so they qualified for more financial aid.
We note that financial help is much more common in STEM fields [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math] than in the humanities.
[While she attended Oregon State, Emily noticed that the students who advocated for socialism were also the ones who were persuaded to sign up for huge student loans as naive 18-year-olds and had no feasible prospects for paying them off.]

Emily getting her Bachelor's

12.   Along with taking financial responsibility, let them be adults in other ways as well. They will likely make choices different from the ones you made. This is true whether they pursue an education or not.
They are now adults. They get to choose.
Pray a lot and be quiet unless they ask.
If they come home with blue hair and talking about equity and inclusion, remember that they might be practicing Micah6:8 better than the neighbor in the plain suit who won’t help his unmarried sister with housing costs and doesn’t pay his seed sackers what they deserve.

13.   Don’t pressure your children because of what others think and say. Your children are allowed to choose. Other people are allowed to choose their responses. That is part of the consequences of one’s choices.
Ben occasionally likes to grow his hair long. His grandma doesn’t like this and tells him so. That is how it should be. Grandma goes to him directly with her concern and doesn’t tell me to tell him. Ben can decide when to get a haircut.
People will also think and say things about you as the parents. They are allowed to do that. You will survive.

14.   “Recognize that you are choosing to enter their world, and you know it’s going to have a secular perspective, so be respectful and don’t be a crusader or sit in the front row and argue with professors about evolution or whether or not God exists. They have a job to do. It’s your job to learn and do a good job and show your faith by your life.” That’s what my cousin Truman’s wife Marietta told me her children decided when they went to nursing school. I thought that was awfully wise.
I don’t know that my kids articulated it like that, but they certainly lived it out.

15.   Recognize that the challenges to your kids’ faith will not come from the sources you expect. Sometimes a Christian college mocks real faith more than a secular university will. Sometimes the abusers in the Mennonite church back home do more damage than the atheist professors in college. In my experience, literature classes introduce more bizarre anti-Christian ideas than biology classes. You never know. Prepare them with a solid foundation. Don’t raise your eyebrows or gasp when they come home and tell you what they’re facing.
Listen.
Ask questions.
Pray a lot.
Also: support and encouragement will come from unexpected sources. Ben’s supervisor during grad school was a supportive and understanding, but never proselytizing, Latter-Day Saints man who obviously was comfortable with both engineering and faith.

16.   As best you can, make peace with this: Anabaptist communities do not have a strong academic tradition, so your child will be something of an anomaly and may never fit in, either because there is no job for him or her in the community, or because no one understands their way of thinking. They may not find someone to date or marry.
You might think the obvious answer is for your child not to go to college. The truth is, we often don’t have room for a scholar of any kind.
My dad tried hard to fit into the Amish and Beachy communities, but it didn’t work well. Even without his degrees, he would have had a hard time fitting in. One of my brothers was much the same, with a brilliant mind and a somewhat frail body, neither one suited for the rigors of farming and the utterly practical mindset of the community.
The last 25 years of his life, Dad had a safe and accepting place at their Beachy church in Minnesota. God bless them.
But I remember as a child when people made mocking comments to me about how poor we were or how ineptly Dad farmed.
So your child might need to leave your community to find their own place in the world. It’s hard. It’s also ok. Most of the time. The alternative, of staying and never fitting in, is even harder. Better to use the gifts God gave you and find a place outside the community than forever be trying to fit in but not succeeding, forever dreaming of more than the community can offer, never valued for the gifts you bring but mocked for the ones you lack.

17.   Remember that you can’t control the outcome. These are things we tried to do, and we had a good outcome. But these are not recipes or guarantees. A thousand influences factor in, as well as luck and personality and the grace of God and the tides of history.
The only factor you control is yourself. So work on being the best and healthiest and humblest you.
These days, my enormous pride in my children is balanced by the humility of being the least-educated of the bunch. I used to know the most. Now I know the least. It’s good for me.

18.   Back to #1—keep providing a solid foundation, long after they’re grown and gone. They will always need a safe place to come home to.

That's what I think.

Aunt Dorcas

 

Guest Post-- 22 miles down Peoria Road: The challenge of living in disconnected worlds--by Ben Smucker

 

Ben Smucker

It seems strange to think of a stoplight as a portal between two worlds. Yet for the last decade of my life, the stoplight at Peoria Road and Highway 34 has been the invisible border between my Mennonite world and my academic world. 

From the small farming town of Harrisburg, Peoria Road runs 22 miles until it tees into Highway 34 just outside Corvallis, a college town of about 60,000 people and home to Oregon State University. The road itself is a beautiful drive. It gently weaves its way between fields, occasionally giving glimpses of the Willamette River, but mostly giving views of distant hills, cottonwood trees, and the greenest grass you ever saw. (It is also home to Country Bakery, which is the most common Mennonite reference point for many non-Mennonites in the lower Willamette Valley).

But metaphorically, Peoria Road is the portal between two
distinct worlds that I have spent a significant portion of my life in. I grew up just outside of Harrisburg as a part of the Mennonite community there. I have spent the last 10 years of my life at Oregon State, first as an undergraduate, then for seven years as a graduate student while I got my Ph.D., and for the last year as an instructor (a faculty member who teaches classes but does not do research) in the mechanical engineering department.  

Anecdotally, when most people think of the conflict between these two worlds (Mennonite and academic), it’s often thought of in theological terms, as a conflict between faith and science. While those tensions do exist, they are often overstated, particularly in the sciences (on a side note, in conversation with Christian professors older than me it seems that the sciences have become notably less hostile towards religion in the last several decades, but that’s a subject for another day).

Instead, the divide is much more cultural: these are worlds that are foreign to each other. They effectively speak different languages. They value different things. And as a result, few Mennonites know anything about academia, and few academics know anything about Mennonites (“They’re kinda like the Amish, right?”).

But like C.S. Lewis's Digory and Polly in the Wood Between the Worlds, there is an inherent tension that comes with trying to occupy two worlds that seem to have little to do with each other. Ultimately, there will come a point where we will need to resolve the tension. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in an increasingly lonely place, where you are never fully known or understood by either world.

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I highly doubt the idea is original to me (few good ones are, and I’m not even sure this is a good one), but I like to think of our social lives as a series of spheres. The number, size, and overlap of these spheres depends on the individual, but would include family, neighbors, church/religious community, work/school, social activities, etc.. Some spheres may be very interconnected (such as when your friends all go to church with you) or completely disconnected (like when you work with people you never see outside of work). 

As spheres increasingly overlap, they can become indistinguishable until they effectively meld into one single sphere. The Fellowship in Wendell Berry’s Port William is a classic example of this, where folks within the tight-knit community grow up and grow old together. They work, worship, and weep together. The Shire in Tolkien’s world is also representative of this, where everyone knows everyone, and where you explain who someone is by how they are related to you or to someone you know.

It’s no coincidence that both those communities are agrarian and either pre-industrial or not fully industrialized, where one is connected to the land and to each other in ways that seem foreign to the modern suburbanite. One’s identity is forged not so much by who they are individually, but by who they are relative to the rest of the community. While these communities may have some individualistic tendencies (particularly in the U.S.), they often operate much more as a collective.

In many ways, this describes the Mennonite community I grew up in. My dad was my boss, my pastor, and my high school teacher. My school friends were my church friends. And with a mother who was a famous Mennonite writer, to the broader Mennonite community I was “Dorcas Smucker’s son.”

On the other extreme, you can have the post-industrial suburban commuter who works in a large city 40 minutes away, lives in a cul-de-sac with a dozen other commuters who work at 12 different companies, and who attends church in another suburb 30 minutes away, if they attend church at all. This person’s social networks exist largely independent of each other, such that if they died or some tragedy occurred, people they see on a routine basis may not know about it for weeks or months.

However, the suburban commuter has an individualistic autonomy that is just not available to those within the tight-knit community. She can pursue whatever career she wants, choose whatever religious community she wants based on reasons that may range from very Biblical to very superficial. If she feels a calling towards a particular occupation, she can choose to do that without alienating the community.

Corvallis has many people in this mold. While they may live close enough to work to commute by bike, they probably don’t have deep roots here, though there are a pretty substantial number of people who have lived here for a decade or more. The number of people in Corvallis who are from Corvallis and the surrounding area is pretty small. Among faculty at Oregon State, it’s even smaller. And on the whole, it is highly individualistic, and people generally live pretty disparate lives where their spheres of life don’t overlap a lot.

There are beautiful things about the sense of belonging and identity that can come with a strongly collective community, but it can be really challenging and exhausting to be the outlier (or the outsider) within that community. In the individualistic group, being an outlier is seen as an inherent positive, a means of distinguishing yourself from the normies. Yet people often miss the sense of belonging to something greater than themselves.

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At its best, I believe the church has the opportunity to cut across the dichotomy posed by individualism and collectivism, valuing both the individual and the community. As we “go into all the world,” we will need to step out into spheres that seem disconnected from our tight-knit communities, yet we have the opportunity to forge close communal bonds with our fellow believers, even when they come from different ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Fully fleshing this out would probably be the subject of a book that I would be unqualified to write, but the following paragraphs describe how this tension has been working itself out in my own life.

For better or for worse, when I chose to pursue academia, I was largely guaranteeing that I would never live in some modern-day equivalent of The Shire. However, I did not understand that as a Mennonite in academia, I would increasingly feel like an outlier within my Mennonite community, and that it would become an increasingly lonely place. But when COVID came, I realized how disconnected I had become from my Mennonite church, and I ultimately left that church. 

By the grace of God, within my first few months of graduate school in the fall of 2016 (four years prior to leaving my Mennonite church), I got connected to a Christian grad student group on campus. It was (and is) a small student-led group of 5-10 grad students that met weekly for prayer and Bible study, while taking advantage of the fact that we were all young and childless to do fun things together on weekends. It has been among the most life-giving groups I have been a part of, and some of my strongest friendships have come from that group.

It also opened my eyes to the breadth of Christianity that existed beyond the tradition I grew up in, but it also made me realize just how important embodied Christian fellowship is. I now am a part of a small Anglican congregation of about 80 people, largely composed of younger families. They are an amazing group of Christ-followers that I am blessed to be a part of, and they make me feel included even if I am one of about 4 single people (me, my two roommates, and one other guy), and if I’m the only one who grew up Mennonite.

My present world feels less disconnected than it has in a long time, probably since high school. I live, work, and go to church in the same town for basically the first time in my life. Two of my roommates also attend the same church, and are also a part of the Christian grad student fellowship. Two of my best friends from the grad fellowship go to church with a colleague I will be working on a project with next year. The leader of the Christian Faculty group also goes to my church. I meet monthly with a retired professor from the Christian Faculty group who was in the mechanical engineering department for 30 years. If I meet a fellow Christian who has been in Corvallis for at least several years, I can probably find a mutual acquaintance.

But this level of connectedness has not come easy. It has come from being a faithful presence in the same place for an extended period of time. It has come from showing up every week to groups I am committed to. It has come from going out on a limb to talk to people (or more commonly in my case, from other people going out on a limb to talk to me). And sadly, it has come at the cost of leaving the community I grew up in, which I feel a twinge of guilt about every time I read Wendell Berry. Yet I believe this is where I am called to be, and those sacrifices are worth it.

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While I was working on this blog post, my parents and my sister Amy came and visited my little Anglican church in Corvallis. This was the first time any of my immediate family members had come to church with me there. When my worlds collide, I tend to have a (probably illogical) fear that both sides will find the other strange, and find me strange in the process.

Instead, we found how much we have in common. Most of the songs that Sunday were hymns that we sang growing up. We read the Lord’s Prayer together, just like we used to recite it prior to meals. We worshiped the same triune God I worshiped in my Mennonite church growing up; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Afterwards, the people at my church extended the same warm welcome to my family that I had received when I first started going there. 

But in a strange turn of the tables, I was no longer known as “Paul and Dorcas’s son.” This time, they were known as “Ben’s parents.”

Dr. Benjamin Smucker