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Last Thursday, I interviewed Nancy Sleeth, author of Almost Amish, on my radio show. I so enjoyed talking with her (listen to the full interview here or download the interview from iTunes). Here’s a guest post from Nancy:
“What are you, Amish or something?” a large man with a booming voice asked from the back of the church.
Open your eyes! I wanted to reply. Am I wearing a bonnet? We arrived in a Prius, not on a pony. The question should not have surprised me, especially after just discussing my family’s $50 solar dryer (two clothes lines and the sun). So why did this exchange stay with me, long after the workshop ended?
How we got here
Just a decade ago, my husband had been at the peak of his career—director of emergency services and chief of medical staff. He loved taking care of patients, and I loved caring for our two children. We were living out the American dream, enjoying the wealth and status of a successful physician’s family.
Matthew and I had been raised in different faith traditions, and when we got married, our families weren’t happy about it. So we said, “If that’s what religion is about, forget it!”
One February, we went on a family vacation to a barrier island off the coast of Florida. That’s when I asked Matthew two questions that would change our lives forever. First question: “What is the biggest problem facing the world today?”
His answer: “The world is dying.” And he wasn’t just talking about his patients. There are no elms left on Elm Street, no cod on Cape Cod. “If we don’t have a stage where we can play out the other issues, things like war and poverty and AIDS won’t really matter.”
Question number two was more difficult: “If the world is dying, what are we going to do about it?”
Matthew didn’t have an immediate answer. So, together we embarked on a faith and environmental journey. We read many of the world’s great sacred texts, finding much wisdom but not the answers we were seeking. Then one slow night in the ER, Matthew picked up an orange book. It was a Bible. We didn’t have one at home, so he stole it.
No worries: it was a Gideon’s Bible. Matthew read the Gospels and ran smack dab into a remarkable figure: Jesus. Suddenly my husband found the Truth he had been seeking.
One by one, our entire family followed. And that changed everything—the books we read, the music we listened to, the people we hung out with, and most of all how we learned to love God and love our neighbors by caring for his creation.
Eventually, Matthew got back to me about my second question. His answer: he would quit his job as a physician and spend the rest of his life trying to serve God and save the planet, even if he never earned another cent.
Hmmm. A job without a description. Or salary. Or benefits.
My response: “Honey, are you sure we need to do that much about it?”
After the shock dissipated, we turned to scripture. Jesus’ advice about getting the log out of our own eye seemed to speak directly to our family. We began cleaning up our own act before worrying about cleaning up the rest of the world. The transition—as much emotional and spiritual as physical—took a couple of years. Little changes added up. Eventually, we got rid of half our possessions and moved to a house the size of our old (doctor’s-sized) garage. We reduced our energy consumption by more than two-thirds and our trash production by nine-tenths.
Once we had our own house in better order, we felt called to share our journey. Matthew wrote a book called Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action. Using stories from our family’s life and his experience working in the ER, he explained why our family made these changes and inspired others to do the same.
People liked the book—a lot. It’s an easy book to read, but hard to ignore. We received letters from readers who felt called to change but didn’t know where to start. So I wrote Go Green, Save Green—sharing stories about what worked, what didn’t, and what our family learned in the process. To handle all the speaking and workshop requests, we started a nonprofit organization, Blessed Earth, and thus a ministry was born.
And that’s how a just-about-Jewish girl found herself in a Bible-belt church being asked by a man with a booming voice if she were Amish. Despite abundant physical evidence to the contrary, I can see where the question came from. We had just answered a series of questions about laundry.
“Is it true that you hang your clothes on the line?” Yes, we do—outside in summer and in the basement in winter.
“Does hanging your clothes really make a difference?” Each load saves five pounds of harmful gases from being emitted, so this is a tangible way I can show my love for our global neighbors and my respect for God’s creation.
“Will doing that save me money?” Nearly a hundred bucks a year: the clothes dryer consumes more electricity than any appliance in your home except the refrigerator. Plus your clothes will smell fresher and last longer—that lint in the dryer is made up of cloth fibers.
“Doesn’t it take more time?” Yes, and that’s what I love about it. It gives me a break from working at the computer, and I get to pray, or listen to birds, or talk with my husband and kids as they work beside me. Best of all, hanging up clothes gives me a chance to hang out with God.
So the question about whether I was Amish seemed glib to me—until I realized its significance. Most people equate drying clothes on a line with poverty—it’s what people do in the Third World, or only in the most economically depressed neighborhoods in the United States. To air dry clothes by choice is countercultural. And who, more than any other group in twenty-first-century America, has kept simplicity, service, and faith at the center of all they say and do? The Amish! Which led to my epiphany: few of us can become Amish, but all of us can become Almost Amish.
~~~
About Nancy Sleeth
After a spiritual and environmental conversion experience, Nancy Sleeth and her family radically altered their footprint, reducing their electricity use to one-tenth and their fossil fuel use to one-third the national averages. Along with her husband, Matthew, Nancy now travels throughout the U.S. speaking and writing about faith and the environment.
After a spiritual and environmental conversion experience, Nancy Sleeth and her family radically altered their footprint, reducing their electricity use to one-tenth and their fossil fuel use to one-third the national averages. Along with her husband, Matthew, Nancy now travels throughout the U.S. speaking and writing about faith and the environment.
Prior to heeding this environmental calling, Sleeth served as communications director for a Fortune 500 company and as a high school and college educator and administrator. Sleeth is a graduate of Georgetown University and holds a masters degree in journalism. She is the author of Go Green, Save Green: A Simple guide to saving time, money, and God’s green earth, the first-ever practical guide for going green from a faith perspective, and Almost Amish: One Woman’s Quest for a Slower, Simpler, More Sustainable Life. Nancy and Matthew are the parents of Clark, who is married and in his fourth year of medical school, and Emma, a graduate of Asbury College who also works for Blessed Earth speaking to youth and college students about creation care. Nancy is the Program Director of Blessed Earth, a faith-based nonprofit focusing on environmental stewardship. In 2012, Nancy was named one of “50 Women to Watch” by Christianity Today. Visit Nancy’s website here.
We too hang dry clothes as opposed to tumble dry. Not all of them, but over half anyway. In winter we put them outside first – there’s no nicer fresh clean scent when we bring them in!!