by Nancy Sleeth
Jesus asked, “Didn’t I heal ten men? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give glory to God except this foreigner?” And Jesus said to the man, “Stand up and go. Your faith has healed you.”
Luke 17:14-19
Clearly, all ten of these social outcasts have faith. All ten shout, “Hey, Doc!” All ten believe that Jesus, the Great Physician, can help them. And all ten follow the doctor’s orders, trusting that his prescription will work.
How, then, is the Samaritan’s faith different? What sets the Samaritan apart is his acknowledgment that everything good comes from God. Faith, in the case of the foreigner, flows from gratitude. The Samaritan has been restored from the inside out. In the process of healing his skin, Jesus has also healed his heart.
What does this parable have to do with giving? Generosity, like gratitude, heals from the inside out. It begins with an acknowledgment that all good comes from God. Every cent we have, everything we own, belongs to the Lord. It is a privilege to serve as his appointed agents. Our job is to look for giving opportunities. When such occasions come our way, we get back far more than we give.
The Amish understand this attitude of giving out of gratitude. In times of scarcity or misfortune, everyone pitches in. Those with more take care of those with less. The community becomes the face of God’s grace.
Make investments that reflect your values
So far we have covered spending, saving, and giving, but what about investing? Are there biblically based Amish principles for investing money?
Most of us are familiar with the parable of the three servants (Matthew 25:14-30), in which the servant who buries his money is rebuked, but the one who invests it wisely in the Kingdom is rewarded. People have interpreted this parable in many different ways, but nearly everyone agrees that God wants us to show that we are trustworthy in small ways before he entrusts us with bigger responsibilities.
One of the small ways that I can be a good steward of God’s gifts is by making investments that reflect my values. I have my brother to thank for introducing me to ethically motivated (also called “socially responsible”) investing—an investment strategy that seeks to maximize both financial return and social good. Richard, a Wharton School of Business graduate, opened a socially responsible investment fund when our first child was born. Over the years, we used that fund to save for Clark’s and Emma’s education. It felt good to know that the money we were investing reflected our values.
In the last decade, more and more socially responsible funds have opened. Some target specific issues, such as inhumane working conditions or respect for God’s creation, but most group together a number of corporate responsibility issues. With a little research or the help of a knowledgeable financial adviser, you can find options that align with your values while providing the return and level of risk that fit your investment profile.
Though Richard, who died when our children were still in grade school, did not live long enough to see his nephew and niece use that education fund, he did leave a legacy. Richard taught me that we should invest our money to do good.
In our experience, more often than not, doing good has also meant doing well. But even if Matthew and I have not always maximized a return on an investment, we are content. As the Amish will attest, some portfolios cannot be measured solely in dollars and cents.
Let’s Sum It Up
Amish attitudes toward money are based on biblical principles. Saving is encouraged; frivolous spending and coveting are not. The Amish stay out of debt, give generously, and make investments in keeping with their values. Amish businesses thrive when others fail because the goal is to make a living, not make a killing.
Think about where the US economy would be today if we applied Almost Amish principles to personal, corporate, and governmental finances. We would not spend money we did not have. We would restrain our tendencies toward greed. We would plan for the future, sacrificing immediate gratification for the long-term good. We might not have the mercurial highs, but we also would avoid the devastating crashes that have left so many homeless and hopeless in recent years. We would take care of the poor among us. Those with more would help those with less.
In the spirit of delayed gratification, I have saved the best, and perhaps best-known, biblically based financial advice for last: “Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be” (Matthew 6:20-21). From God’s lips to our ears. Amen and Amen!
Chapter 4
Nature
Time spent in God’s creation reveals the face of God.
It all started in a garden, as so many good things do.
Shortly after we moved to Kentucky, a new friend, Sharon, invited me to her house. Sharon lives in an economically challenged section of town alongside people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, including refugee families. Since we are both social exercisers, we decided to go for a walk. Two blocks from her house, Sharon stopped in front of a large empty lot wedged between the fire station and an old cemetery. The lot was filled with trash and broken bottles and had a well-deserved reputation as Drug Deal Central.
“Can’t you just see it? This is the perfect place for a community garden.”
Even at three in the afternoon, I did not feel comfortable entering the abandoned lot, so I was grateful that Sharon stayed on the sidewalk while she shared her vision. “I’ve already talked to the church that owns the land, and they’ve given me the tentative green light. The fire department says it will provide water. And since firefighters are coming and going around the clock, their presence will help prevent vandalism.”
In truth, I could not “see it,” but Sharon was so enthusiastic I tried to stay positive. “That cemetery is beautiful. What’s the history of this place?”
“Thanks for asking.” (I later learned that this is one of Sharon’s trademark responses, and it never fails to bring me joy.) “I’ve been doing some research. Here’s the short version: in the 1840s, there was a terrible cholera epidemic throughout Lexington. A saint of a man, London Ferrell, was an African American pastor in the area. He and the white pastor of the Episcopal church here went around visiting the sick and burying the dead together. Long after the epidemic passed, London Ferrell died and the city held a huge parade honoring him. He was the only African American ever allowed to be buried in this cemetery.”
When she gets going, Sharon’s eyes remind me of sparklers on the Fourth of July. This was shaping up to be more than the normal community garden. I was intrigued.
“How did you get the church interested in the garden project?”
“The elders have been looking for a way to show restitution to this now predominantly African American neighborhood. They see the community garden as an opportunity to bring about racial reconciliation, with people of all ethnic backgrounds working side by side in what is essentially a food desert.”
Ever the pragmatic, I asked, “Okay, I’m sold. What do we need to make it happen?”
“Volunteers, funding, and a whole lot of prayer. We’ll have to build a fence across the front, for security. And I’d like to plant a demonstration orchard with fruit and nut trees. It would be great if we could bring in a local artist to involve school kids in making colorful signs . . .”
God must have a thing for gardens. Within weeks of this conversation, a grant opportunity appeared in my in-box. Sharon’s vision and this funder were truly a match made in heaven. The dream became a reality.
Gardeners have a saying: the first year a seedling sleeps, the second year it creeps, and the third year it leaps. My, how this garden has leaped! With several dozen individual plots, a large community garden to provide fresh produce for a local homeless shelter and an after-school program, a meditation space and labyrinth with perennial flower gardens, and a demonstration orchard, the London Ferrell Community Garden is thriving. The project continues to expand with cooking c
lasses, experiential education in the local schools, and composting partnerships with local businesses.
Last Christmas, when Matthew and I downsized to our town house, the hardest thing for me to give up was my garden. Solution: contact the London Ferrell garden and sign up for a plot—just a short bike ride from our new home.
One early morning in June, I was watering and weeding in the garden. Thanks to the community compost bins and a mountain of aged manure, my vegetables were growing like gangbusters—which this garden has literally done (bust up drug gangs). I worked alone until an elderly woman arrived with her dog. The woman showed me around her plot. The tomatoes and peppers looked healthy, though a bit thirsty, so I offered to drag the hose over. We chatted for a bit, and then I asked if she could use some extra produce—we could barely keep up with our lettuce and peas. She gladly accepted a bundle, and I gratefully accepted her smile. What a perfect way to start my day, working in the garden with a new friend, as God intended.
A Bit of Amish History
Appreciation of nature is a core Christian value, and central to the Amish way of life. If we love the Creator, we should also love his creation. Living off the land serves as a daily reminder that everything we have depends on God.
Because of persecution in the Old World, the Amish fled from Switzerland to isolated regions where they taught themselves farming skills as a means of survival. When they came to North America, they sought and settled in rural areas with rich farmland.
For the Amish, God is manifested in the soil, the weather, the plants, and the animals that surround them. One of humanity’s highest callings is the care of this creation. The first chapter of Genesis repeatedly states that God believes his creation is “good.” One way we show our love for God is by loving what he loves. If God loves his creation, so should we.
Another key way the Amish show their love for God is through obedience. One of the first instructions in the Bible is for man to tend and protect the garden—abad and shamar in Hebrew. This is not a suggestion; it’s a command. As the Old Testament repeatedly demonstrates, bad things happen when we disobey God. Stewardship of the land is a tangible way for us to demonstrate our love for the Creator.
The Amish also understand that the earth does not belong to us; rather, it is on loan from God. Psalm 24:1 teaches us that “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it.” If we borrowed a horse and buggy from God, we would not want to return it with the mare unfed, dehydrated, and lame or the buggy full of beer bottles and cigarette butts.
While fewer Amish make their living entirely on the farm, nearly all live in rural areas and supplement their income with gardens and livestock. Feeding a horse is a far different activity than is feeding the gas tank of a car; cars and horses get us where we want to go, but the lessons we learn from birthing, grooming, feeding, mucking, and loving another of God’s creatures cannot be gained in driver’s ed.
Knowing God through Nature
The Amish are not the first to see earth stewardship as a Christian responsibility. From the beginning of church history, sages have told us we need to spend time in nature in order to see the face of God. The Amish, by sticking to a traditional way of life, have resisted the trends that these sages warned against. Here is a sampling of what some fathers of the faith have taught:
The initial step for a soul to come to knowledge of God is contemplation of nature.
Irenaeus (ca. 120–ca. 202)
Nature is schoolmistress, the soul the pupil; and whatever one has taught or the other has learned has come from God—the Teacher of the teacher.
Tertullian (160–ca.230), De Testimonio Animae
I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that wherever you go, the least plant may bring you the clear remembrance of the Creator.
Basil the Great (329–379), Hexaemeron, Homily V, “The Germination of the Earth”
Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?
St. Augustine (354–430), De Civit. Dei, Book XVI
The whole earth is a living icon of the face of God.
St. John of Damascus (675–749), Treatise
Christ wears “two shoes” in the world: Scripture and nature. Both are necessary to understand the Lord, and at no stage can creation be seen as a separation of things from God.
John Scottus Eriugena (810–877)
I see You in the field of stars
I see You in the yield of the land
In every breath and sound, a blade of grass, a simple flower,
An echo of Your holy Name.
Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167)
In more modern terms, George Washington Carver captures the wisdom of these church fathers as follows: “I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.”
Love of Nature versus Love of Technology
Of course, spiritual writers are not the only ones to hold the natural world in high esteem. Many twenty-first-century biologists and social scientists are warning that our attraction to technology is separating us from nature. Here’s how I summarize their arguments: gardens grow vegetables; technology turns us into vegetables.
E. O. Wilson is a biologist at Harvard who believes that human beings have an innate attraction to nature. He calls this attraction biophilia. Oliver R. W. Pergams and Patricia A. Zaradic are two researchers who came up with a related word, videophilia. They use this term to describe our attraction to electronic media.
Pergams and Zaradic contend that our tendency to focus on sedentary activities involving electronic media is separating us from nature. We are spending less time in parks, less time camping and hiking, and less time in unstructured outdoor play because videophilia is replacing biophilia.
This research certainly seems to be borne out in daily observations, doesn’t it? Yet as valid as these premises are, they do not go far enough. They speak amply of the natural component, but they fail to take into account the spiritual one.
We do have an innate love of nature (biophilia): God loves his creation, and we love what God loves because he made us in his image. But there is ample evidence that green time is being replaced by screen time (videophilia). Four minutes of unstructured play outdoors versus more than six hours of screen time each day certainly does have a profound effect on our children—physically, mentally, and emotionally.
And what these researchers are not addressing is the spiritual illiteracy that results. Unlike the Amish, who are still connected to the outdoors, the rest of us are forgetting the language of God’s creation.
Gifts from the Garden
While relaxing on a friend’s back porch over a spicy vegetarian stew and homemade bread, the conversation turned, naturally, to food. Everyone around the table expressed concern over how much junk food kids eat and how little time children spend outdoors. Our host said that she watches every afternoon as a group of elementary schoolchildren head to the corner market to purchase their after-school snack. Each child comes out with a supersized soda and a bag of potato chips. Not a small bag—the family size, for each child, every day.
A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine tracking more than 120,000 people for a period of up to two decades identified potato-chip consumption as the number one culprit in weight gain. Two-thirds of American adults are now obese or overweight. Childhood obesity has tripled in the last three decades. If these children were harvesting potatoes after school instead of potato chips, their health would benefit.
I doubt that many of these schoolchildren connect the puffy fried wafers that come out of a cellophane bag with the spuds we buy from the produce section. Even fewer know that potatoes grow underground. With no backyard ga
rden, would they recognize potato “eyes”? Have they seen white potato flowers swaying in a summer breeze? Do they know that the visible part needs to die before full maturation takes place—just as parts of us need to die before we can grow in Christ?
These latchkey kids—as well as the average urban or suburban child—have never experienced the miracle of watching one seed potato produce a handful of Yukon Gold. They do not know the joy of unearthing a dozen small “new” potatoes for dinner. They have never experienced the springtime joy of stumbling upon stray potatoes that escaped last fall’s harvest.
Oh, if every church and school had a garden, how different this world might be! Caring for a garden provides something that cannot be purchased at the grocery store: the satisfaction of eating food planted, tended, and harvested with our own hands. A garden cultivates gratitude, reminding us that every ounce of food that passes our lips ultimately comes from God. And as any experienced gardener will attest, a garden keeps us humble—constantly aware that the enemy, entropy, is very much alive.
Since the beginning of time, God has been teaching humans in the garden. I am no master gardener, but here are a few lessons I’ve managed to glean:
1. Satan lives in the garden. His name is Cutworm.
2. There are good bugs and bad bugs. Wisdom comes in knowing the difference.
3. Good bugs eat bad bugs. But some good bugs, such as the praying (and preying!) mantis, also eat good bugs. That’s why God invented entomologists.
4. Planting and harvesting are exciting. Weeding and watering are not.
5. Three zucchini hills are two too many.
6. If we could invent a way to run power plants using overgrown zucchini, our energy woes would be over.
7. Humus is good for the garden. Hubris is not.
8. Tomatoes warm from the vine taste (at least) as good as candy.
9. Children who do not like vegetables will eat sugar peas from the shell.
10. When Mary mistook Jesus for the gardener, it was no mistake: Jesus is the new Adam, and the garden is God’s eternal classroom.