When I was living in Pennsylvania, I met Ruth, who has become a dear friend. She is warm, loving, insightful, and brilliant. She is a wife, a mother of five, teacher of sign language, a grower of roses, builder of a “she-shack” (along with her mother) and an assembler of a vintage bubble Scotty mobile home.

As if that is not enough, she is managing to accomplish something I would have thought impossible. Living in two separate worlds — her Amish world and her academic one — she is earning a Masters Degree in Psychology. She describes to me what it is like to go between her two worlds. One day she is baking 25 pies for a church service, the next she is fulfilling an assignment for an accelerated course, and the day after that she is helping her daughter host an Amish church service.

In all of this, Ruth is guided by her faith that this is what God wants her to be doing. Hers is a lived faith that runs deep and manifests itself in her being and all that she does.

One day Ruth and I drove to her parents’ house for a visit. When I walked in her mother looked at me and said, “You look like my relatives!” I looked at her and said, “You look like my mother’s first cousins!” We soon figured out the community where our genealogies “met,” and then she pulled out the “Byler” book and discovered that five generations ago, our ancestors were siblings. So Ruth and her mother and I are distantly related. Had we not discovered this, I would have felt the kinship anyway because of their warm hearts.

That blog post Ruth recently wrote is up. To read it, you can follow this link. Please share it. And I’m sure she’ll appreciate your encouraging comments on her blog post. (You need to sign in with Medium. When you come to the page with the various paid plans, you can scroll down at the very bottom and click on the link to sign up for free.)

Happy reading!