Myth Six: The Brown Barn

The Postcard

While sorting through our possessions in the lead-up to our departure from Redding, I stumbled upon one of my earliest Bibles. As I held it, a wave of nostalgia washed over me. Hidden within its pages, I found a postcard that I had long forgotten. Instantly, my memories transported me back to that gas station in Ohio over two decades ago when I purchased it. It was just after my conversion to Christianity. The postcard caught my eye, depicting an Amish "barn raising," a communal event where hundreds converge to construct a barn, often within the span of a single day. This ceremony is not merely functional but deeply symbolic, embodying the Amish virtues of mutual aid, humility, and community cooperation. I recalled being so profoundly moved by this collective endeavor to erect a large brown barn that I quietly prayed to God to one day make me a part of such a community. Holding that postcard again, with the aged Bible splayed open in my hands, my eyes fell upon a passage from Isaiah 66, which read:

8

Who has heard such a thing?
    Who has seen such things?
Shall a land be born in one day?
    Shall a nation be brought forth in one moment?
For as soon as Zion was in labor
    she brought forth her children.

9 

Shall I bring to the point of birth and not cause to bring forth?”
    says the Lord;
“shall I, who cause to bring forth, shut the womb?”
    says your God.

10 

“Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her,
    all you who love her;
rejoice with her in joy,
    all you who mourn over her;

11 

that you may nurse and be satisfied
    from her consoling breast;
that you may drink deeply with delight
    from her glorious abundance.”[a]

12 

For thus says the Lord:
“Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river,
    and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream;
and you shall nurse, you shall be carried upon her hip,
    and bounced upon her knees.

13 

As one whom his mother comforts,
    so I will comfort you;
    you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

14 

You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice;
    your bones shall flourish like the grass;
and the hand of the Lord shall be known to his servants,”