I Was Shunned at 19 for Asking One Question in Church Nobody Wanted to Answer

The candle had burned down to a nub by the time Bishop Mast looked at me. The wax had pooled on the wooden holder and gone still, the way things go still just before something changes. I could smell the smoke from the wick, sharp and sweet, and I could feel the bench beneath me — that familiar hard oak, worn smooth by decades of bodies sitting exactly where I sat, folding their hands exactly as I had folded mine. There were forty-three people in that room. I had delivered the babies of eleven of them. I knew which women had screamed and which had gone silent, which fathers had wept at the door and which had walked away before it was done. I knew things about every family in that room that they had never spoken aloud to each other. And in that moment, with Bishop Mast's eyes on me and the smoke from the dead candle still threading through the air, I asked the question. Nobody answered. #RachelTheAmishMidwife #AmishMidwife #AmishStories #AmishLife #AmishWomen #ExAmish #AmishSecrets #BehindThePrayerCap #PlainCommunity #AmishTruth