For have you not retrieved from exile the desperate
lives of men who never found their home?

—Thomas Wolfe
_______________

Well, it’s that time again. Seems like not that long ago, when I last posted that last blog of the year. When one looks back and takes stock a bit. I guess that’s what one is expected to do. It’s what I’ve done, mostly, in the past. Look back, recount and reflect. And tab it out, all the stuff that happened. Good, bad, ugly. And I was figuring to do just that. But when I sat down to pound it out, there was one thing that kept surfacing in my head. One new realization, one new thing of wonder, that stood out above all the rest.

But first, sure it was a wild year, 2012. A year of wild, strange roads. It was the best of times, in many ways I could never have imagined. And it was something less than that, in a few ways I could have imagined. A whiplash of a year. So many things came down, so many things plunged this way and that. And it was a little weird, to keep navigating forward through the maze. All while trying to keep my head straight.

The year sure didn’t start out like I figured. In that sense, it seems so long ago, to look back to what I was thinking then. I was pretty confident. I could walk through any door I chose, I figured. Because I had just walked through one that seemed just flat out impossible. Bring it on, I wrote. Show me a new door. Push me through it. I have to be pushed.

A year ago, there were some noises about a sequel. Not from me, from the market. And I kind of eyed it up, the situation. Yeah, I’ll walk forward, see what happens. I did it once. I can do it again. And I wrote up some stuff, went under. I told you about that when it happened.

Amd 2012 was the year I found out I can’t just breeze my way along. Not by arbitrarily willing it so. You can’t force things. It’s a really strange place to be, because it is a place I least expected. And that’s always a thing of half-terror/half-wonder, like feeling your way out of a cave, maybe. Not that I ever did that. Just making a connection there, somehow.

So I told them, the Tyndale people and my agent. I’m pulling back. It’s not coming. I’m going off to live my life and write my blog for a while. I had no idea how long. Still don’t. It was just an instinctive thing. Go back to where it all started, and stay there until you step out again. It was pretty intense, for me to reach that conclusion. But it was the only thing I knew to do.

And right after I recoiled from that little effort, a strange thing came down. The book was listed on Amazon’s 100 discounted eBook list in March. It went haywire from the first day, and all through that month. When the dust had settled, Carol sent me the numbers. 44,000 eBooks sold in March. In thirty-one days. It was surreal, the whole thing. And it freaked me out a lot.

And that was all good, that March run, but it wasn’t the strangest thing I saw this year.

April brought its own beautiful little oddity. The honorary Doctorate from Vincennes University. And I wrote all that as it all came down, too. It was an extraordinary experience, the whole way through, from inception to presentation. Funny thing is, after it was over, I just went back to being who I was before. Sure, I have a real cool hood hanging in my living room. A pacemaker paddle, and a lot of memories and pictures. The honorary Doctorate was an honor, indeed, and I will always treasure it.

And that was all good, what happened in April. But it wasn’t the strangest thing I saw this year.

Through the summer, and right up til now, the book just kind of trundled along, held its own. Never waved into the ether again, after that March spike. But it’s held steady, right along. And right now, on Amazon, Growing Up Amish has an astounding 260 reviews. One star to five stars. (Nope, I’m not linking it. Find it yourself if you don’t believe me.) That’s big stuff, any way you look at it. It is, when you come from where I came from. All it needs is some little trigger, some famous person mentioning it, to make it take off and soar again. All that might yet come. And it might not. I want it to, of course, and will do what I can to shove it along. But I’m cool with whatever happens, either way. Ride the ride until it’s over. Then it’s done. Not before. You can’t make this stuff up, I figure.

And all that is good, all very wild and exciting, how the book’s hanging right in there. I’m astounded and grateful. But it wasn’t the strangest thing I saw this year.

It snuck up on me kind of slow in a dawning realization, the most startling thing I saw this year. I wasn’t looking for it. It wasn’t on my radar screen anywhere. But in the process of figuring out what was going on inside me, why I was making the choices I was making, of analyzing what makes me tick, it came to me. Took a while for it to sink in. But it did, over time. Over the last few months.

It’s a strange road that takes you back to the place you started from. Or a place you never knew you were before. The most startling thing I’ve realized this year was how much I am like my father. In many ways, but particularly when it comes to writing. That whole persona, of how you present your stuff, how you produce. I am him, because I do it like he did. Not in the obvious ways, as in how I live and what I write. We couldn’t be much more different there if we tried. But in the subconscious choices I make and have made, I am my Dad.

He wrote because he wanted to, not because he had to. Not to earn his living. I’m a little more sporadic than he was in his prime. He sat up late most nights, pounding away at his typewriter. I sit up late some nights, working at my computer. So I never produced anything remotely approaching his volume, but in this equation, that’s not that big a factor. He had plenty of things in life that kept him occupied, dozens of little businesses he launched and ran more or less haphazardly. I haven’t done that. His most successful business ever: Wagler Metals, where he sold metal roofing and siding. Today I work at a business that sells exactly the same stuff. He was well known in the Amish world. I have reached a broader audience outside the culture.

Dad didn’t care much what others thought. He just wrote. He wrote, and threw his stuff out there in his world. He never called himself a writer. And he didn’t write, to make his living. He just wrote. And he said it as he saw it. Well, within the confined boundaries of his culture, he did. Which was from a flawed perspective, of course. But whose perspectives aren’t flawed, now and then? Mine are. Because I’m human, as he was.

There are so many similarities that it’s freaky, when I think of it. And for me, it is also a strange and wonderful thing. I don’t care who you are. It’s pretty much a universal longing. You want the essence of the good things your father was to live inside you. Even if you couldn’t see those good things so much, way back.

There are, of course, certain aspects of his personality and his nature that I have chosen not to claim. And there’s nothing wrong with that, either. I can still honor and respect him for what he was and who he was. It takes a lot of time, sometimes, for that clarity to reach your heart and head. Well, that’s how it was for me. I won’t speak for anyone else out there. But it does take time, because when you break away from all you have known, it’s pretty ingrained deep inside. You will never be like that, like the people who held you back. Especially your father. You won’t be like him. You won’t be that distant, that obstinate, that harsh and cold. And it’s OK to feel like that, too. It’s OK to grapple with those negatives.

That’s how it was for me. My guard was up, big time. I won’t be like he was. I won’t write to defend a lifestyle that’s indefensible. I won’t. It was hard, to break loose. It really was. It’s still so raw, sometimes, looking back.

And now I see how much like him I am.

Some of this stuff became clear to me as I was talking about it. Recently, on a radio interview, the host asked how I could write the book so respectfully. “You didn’t rip into those people back there in your life, the Amish,” he said. “How come not?”

And I thought about that. Ten years ago, I said, I probably couldn’t have written it like I did. Ten years ago, you would have read some bitterness, either openly or between the lines. Some claim you can read bitterness there, now. But I wrote it from a heart that wasn’t. And sure, there were places where my head may not have wanted to write sympathetically about the Amish. But overall, my heart did. And overall, the heart won. Because when your heart is calm and you write your heart, you don’t have to worry much about how it will all come out. It will come out right.

And now, I can see why it all came out as it did. I am my father, when it comes to defending what and who the Amish are. Not in apologetics, as he often wrote. And not the polemical stuff he cranked out right along. But in a broader sense, as an accurate portrayal to the world, I think our work is comparable. His view from inside. Mine from outside, having been there. The similarities are startling to me. All the way down to how I produce. All the way down to what I do for a living.

I am my father’s son. And, really, what’s not to celebrate about that?

A few weeks ago, I was telling my friend Shawn Smucker about all this over lunch one day. He listened and seemed a little amazed, as I was talking. But then he asked a simple question. Something I had not even considered. “Will you tell him? Will you tell your Dad these things?” And his question startled me.

I don’t know. Yeah, I guess I will, when I see him, I answered. He’s 91 years old. I don’t know if he’d grasp what I’m trying to say. But I’ll probably write it. He’ll read it. He likes to read my blogs, when he can. But yeah, you’re right. He does need to be told. I will in person, next time I see him.

In the meantime, though, I’m telling him here.

And that was 2012, a year of strange and wonderful roads. Roads I could not have imagined, roads that led through valleys and over mountains to places I could not have remotely conceived in my mind. All of which makes me one of the most optimistic people out there, when it comes to what 2013 might bring.

I don’t have to tell you that the world is in turmoil such as has not been seen in our lifetimes. It seethes and bubbles out there, the blackest evil in the darkest human hearts. We are sliding headlong into perdition, that’s pretty clear to those who are not deliberately blind. The forces close in tighter every day. You can see it, sense it, feel it.

I pay no attention to most of the noise. Like the annual dog and pony show of the “fiscal cliff” charade. The wealthy in this country had better prepare to get devoured. Because it’s coming, the ravenous insatiable beast of public envy, whipped to a mindless frenzy by Obama and his minions.

In areas that really matter, I do pay attention, though. The evil that is the state tightens the noose every day a little bit more. Encroaches, encroaches on our freedoms, all in the name of security. It lashes out in increasingly savage and destructive wars, murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents who have never done a thing to harm anyone. The boondoggle of ObamaCare is coming, soon to be followed by a real scarcity of quality medical care. And always the people cry “something must be done,” as one more unspeakable tragedy unleashes havoc in the land. The craven media march in lockstep, demonizing the common people for insisting on the right to self defense.

In Newtown, CT, those little innocent murdered children have been sacrificed over and over again on altars not made of stone, altars to the false god that is the state. Only in Orwellian doublespeak could a serious pitch be made for parents to disarm themselves to protect their children. The very concept goes against all we have learned in the long brutal slog through all of recorded history. Except we obviously haven’t learned, not as a society. Not these generations. We will, though, if this siren’s song is heard and heeded. One of the most cherished goals of any state is to disarm its citizens.

There are so many examples in history of the moment we’re in. I feel like some guy back in the mid 1930s, anywhere, who saw what was coming and said something to someone around him. And how nothing the guy could say had anything approaching a smidgen of hope to deflect onto a better path the march of history to wherever it will go. But with barely a smidgen of desperate faith that his words would make any difference to even a few persons, he still said it as he saw it, in his world. Because he had to.

I feel like that guy.

Through it all, though, I’m excited about the coming year. And no, I’m not making any resolutions. Most of those are futile, anyway. I might as well resolve for “world peace,” or some similarly vacuous slogan that is always safe to spout in polite company.

If one wish could be granted, though, my prayer would be that the Lord in His mercy would call my Mother home in 2013. She still remains in Aylmer, at my sister Rosemary’s home, still receding ever deeper into the confines of a dark cruel world that will not let her go. She curls up now in repose, they tell me, pulls her knees up to her chin. An instinctive returning to the womb, I think. We so yearn for her to be called home. Maybe this will be the year. I pray it will be.

And other than that, I’m excited about all that 2013 might hold. Eager and excited about all those strange and beautiful roads that will beckon. From just living, and from the book, and maybe from my writing. We’ll see what roads open up. I will walk them with gratitude and with joy. And, yeah, there will be a little grumbling, too, now and then, on those roads. That’s just how it is. But I will always walk with a heart that is free.

And that is my standing, year-round wish for everyone and anyone out there. That all would come to know what it is to be truly free.

Happy New Year to all my readers.