We Never Said "I Love You" After a Beating — We Said "Let Us Pray" (Amish Documentary)

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:01]The bedroom door is closed. I am 9 years old. My father's hands still warm from the barn are on my shoulders. The strap hangs from his grip like a dark question. I have already bent over the bed. I have already felt the leather land four, five, six times. Now I am sitting on the edge of the quilt, tears sliding down my chin. And my father takes my hands. He bows his head. He says, "Let us pray." Not I love you. Not I'm sorry. Not are you okay? Just those three words. Let us pray. And I whisper amen because I have no other word to say. That prayer was the only love language I knew for 18 years. This is what it sounds like when thankfulness and terror share the same breath. I want you to imagine a house where the most intimate words spoken between a parent and a child happen immediately after a beating. Not before, not during, after.

[00:01:00]The physical punishment is the transaction. The prayer is the receipt.

[00:01:05]And in that prayer, everything is reframed. Pain becomes correction. Fear becomes humility. A child's trembling becomes answered prayer. My father never once told me he loved me while tucking me into bed. He never said it over breakfast or while fixing my bike chain.

[00:01:23]But on a Sunday afternoon, with the welts rising under my dress and my nose running from crying, he would hold my hands and say, "Dear God, thank you for this child. Thank you for the privilege of raising her in your fear. Soften her heart. Break her will. Let her learn obedience as your own son learned obedience through suffering." That last phrase, learned obedience through suffering, comes from the book of Hebrews. My father quoted it often. He believed that Jesus himself was made perfect through pain. So how could a child expect anything less? The logic was seamless. God the father allowed his son to suffer. Therefore, a father on earth must allow his child to suffer not out of cruelty, out of love. The same love that sent Christ to the cross sent me to my knees beside that bed. What does it do to a child's mind to hear suffering called love? I can tell you exactly what it does. It creates a split. One part of you knows the truth in your body. The sting, the burning, the way you cannot sit comfortably for two days. Another part of you, the part that wants to survive, agrees with the prayer. Yes, this is good for me. Yes, I needed this. Yes, thank you, God. You learn to say thank you while your back still throbs. And after enough Sundays, you don't even feel the split anymore.

[00:02:47]You become one person who believes two opposite things at the same time. The phrase I love you never came easily in our house. It was too English, too soft, too close to the sentimental world my parents distrusted. But let us pray.

[00:03:02]That was safe. That was holy. That was the bridge between the leather and the forgiveness that was required of me. I had to forgive my father immediately.

[00:03:12]Not because he asked for forgiveness. He never did. But because the prayer itself was the forgiveness, the fact that we were kneeling together meant the matter was settled. He had done his duty. I had received my correction. Now we would thank God together. And anything less than full-hearted gratitude would be a second sin. The sin of pride, of holding a grudge, of refusing to accept God's loving discipline. I remember one Sunday when I was 11. I had been punished for talking back to my mother. The strap landed seven times. I was crying harder than usual, not because it hurt more, but because I was exhausted. I had not slept well the night before. When my father took my hands to pray, I could not bring myself to say amen. I just sat there breathing shallow, my eyes on the floor. My father stopped mid prayer. He opened his eyes. He looked at me and said very quietly, "Miriam, do you not thank God for your correction?" I said nothing, he said. Then we will stay here until you do. We sat on the edge of that bed for 20 minutes. I do not know how long exactly. Long enough for my tears to dry. Long enough for my legs to fall asleep. Finally, I whispered and then just to be released. And my father smiled. He patted my hand. He said, "That's my good girl. That was the closest I ever got to hearing. I love you." a pat, a smile, a release from a prayer that had become a prison. Let me tell you about the prayer's grammar because the words mattered. My father never prayed, "Lord, forgive me for losing my temper." He never prayed, "Help me find another way." The prayer was always directed at me and at God about me. Thank you for this correction.

[00:05:05]Soften this child's heart. Break her pride. I was the object of the prayer.

[00:05:10]the problem, the one who needed fixing.

[00:05:13]My father was the instrument of that fixing and God was the one who had ordained the entire system. So the prayer did three things at once. First, it absolved my father of any guilt. He was not hurting me. He was helping me.

[00:05:29]Second, it placed the blame entirely on me. I was prideful. I was disobedient.

[00:05:35]My will was dangerous. Third, it made God the silent partner in every beating.

[00:05:41]God wanted this. God was watching. God approved. That last part is the most damaging because if God approves of the strap, then there is no higher authority to appeal to. No court, no social worker, no grandmother who might intervene. God himself has signed off on the leather. And a 9-year-old cannot argue with God. A 9-year-old cannot say, "Actually, I think you're wrong." So, you swallow the theology along with your tears. You internalize the message that you deserve what you got. You begin to believe that the pain is not only necessary, but good. I have talked to other survivors of religiously sanctioned physical punishment, Catholics who were beaten with rulers by nuns, evangelicals who were spanked with wooden paddles while verses were recited, Pentecostals who were made to kneel on rice for hours. Almost all of them describe the same phenomenon. The prayer or the scripture or the blessing that comes after the punishment is worse than the punishment itself. The punishment hurts your body. The prayer hurts your soul because the punishment ends when the welts fade. But the prayer teaches you that you are fundamentally wrong. That your very nature is something that must be broken. I remember asking my mother once very quietly when I was 13. Does God really want dad to hit us? She was washing dishes. Her hands did not stop moving.

[00:07:08]She said, "The Bible says, "Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him." Do you think God would put that in his book if he didn't mean it? I had no answer. I still have no good answer to that question except to say that the Bible was written by human hands and interpreted by human minds, and my father's mind read it one way while other Amish fathers read it differently. But in my house there was only one reading and the prayer sealed it. What would have happened if after a beating my father had simply said nothing? If he had left me alone in the bedroom to cry by myself. I have thought about this often. I think silence would have been easier in some ways because silence leaves room for doubt. Silence leaves room for a child to think that was wrong. But the prayer leaves no room. The prayer fills the room with God. And when God is in a room, you cannot question anything. There is a specific phrase my father used in almost every prayer. Break the pride. Over and over. Break the pride, Lord. Break it completely. Leave nothing whole. I used to imagine my pride as a bone inside my chest. And I imagined God reaching down with a hammer and snapping it. That was the image I carried into my teenage years. A broken bone inside me. And that brokenness was holiness. I learned to seek that brokenness. I learned to feel ashamed when a punishment did not make me cry because that meant my pride was still intact. That meant I had not fully submitted. This is the secret theology of the strap. It is not really about behavior. It is about the will. My father did not care ultimately whether I swept the floor perfectly or whether I hit crumbs. He cared whether I would obey without question, without hesitation, without an internal voice that said, "That doesn't make sense."

[00:09:05]The purpose of the strap was to kill that voice. The purpose of the prayer was to bury it. And for 18 years, I let both happen. I have three siblings who received the strap as often as I did. We never talked about the prayers. That was the strangest part. We would hear each other through the walls, the thud of the leather, the muffled crying, then the low murmur of my father's voice praying.

[00:09:29]Afterward, we would sit at the supper table and say nothing, not a glance, not a word. The prayer followed us downstairs, but stayed locked inside each of our chests. I often wonder what my sister Anna thought when she heard my father praying over me. Did she think, "Good, Miriam needed that." Or did she think I'm next? Or did she think nothing at all? Because thinking was too dangerous. One evening when I was 15, Anna came back from the bedroom with her face wet. She sat down at the table and picked up her fork. My father said, "Anna, we haven't prayed." She put the fork down. My father reached across the table and took her hands. right there in front of everyone. He bowed his head and prayed, "Lord, thank you for this correction." Anna was dishonest about her chores. "You see her heart. Break the pride that made her lie. Help her to walk in truth as you are truth." My mother sat with her eyes closed. My younger brother stared at his plate. I stared at Anna's face. She was not crying anymore. She looked like a doll, empty, polished, waiting. That is what the prayer does over time. It empties you because you cannot cry and pray at the same time without something inside you dying. And eventually the crying stops altogether. Not because it doesn't hurt anymore. It always hurts, but because you have learned to go somewhere else during the prayer. A small gray room in your mind where there is no God, no father, no leather, just a blank wall and a white ceiling. You stay there until the amen and then you come back and eat your cold chicken and pretend you were present the whole time. I learned to dissociate during the prayers long before I learned the word dissociation. I thought everyone did that. I thought everyone left their body when their father thanked God for hitting them. It was not until I was 26 sitting in a therapist's office for the first time that I said when he prayed I would go to a room in my head. My therapist asked, "What color was the room?" I said, "There were no colors."

[00:11:42]She wrote something down. Later, she told me that dissociation is what children do when they cannot fight and cannot flee. They freeze. They leave.

[00:11:52]And the trigger for my leaving was not the strap itself. It was the prayer.

[00:11:56]Because the strap was over in a minute or two. The prayer lasted longer. And the prayer asked me to cooperate with my own eraser. There is a particular horror in being asked to say amen to your own harm. That little word amen means so be it or truly. It is an affirmation, a seal of agreement. When I said amen after my father's prayers, I was not just enduring the punishment. I was endorsing it. I was telling God, telling my father, telling myself that this was right, that I deserved it, that I was grateful. And the more I said amen, the more I believed it. That is the trap.

[00:12:36]The prayer does not just follow the beating. The prayer completes the beating. Without the prayer, the beating is just violence. With the prayer, it becomes a sacrament. I remember one time when I was 16, I tried to refuse. After a punishment, I cannot even remember what for. My father took my hands to pray and I pulled them away. I said, "No, just one word. My father looked at me for a long time. Then he said very softly. You will say, "Amen, Miriam. You will thank God for this or I will call you back up here tonight and we will do it again until you are thankful." I gave him my hands. I bowed my head. I said, "Amen." And that night I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and hated myself more than I hated the strap because I had said yes. I had cooperated. I had made myself a participant in my own breaking. That is what the prayer steals from you in the end. It steals your right to say no. Not just to the strap, to the whole story. It makes you the one who agrees. And when you finally leave, as I did at 26, you carry that agreement with you like a second skin. You hear yourself say thank you. When someone hurts you, you say it's fine when it is not fine. You apologize for having needs. You apologize for having a will because somewhere inside you the prayer is still running. Break the pride, Lord.

[00:14:04]Break it completely. And you are still whispering. Let me tell you about the difference between my father's prayers and my mother's silence. My mother never led the prayer after a beating. That was not her role. Her role was to stand by the door. Sometimes to close it tighter, sometimes to bring a damp cloth afterward, sometimes to say nothing at all. But she was in the room. She heard every word. She watched me say, "Amen."

[00:14:30]And she never once in 18 years said, "That's enough." Or, "She's had enough."

[00:14:36]Or, "Let me pray instead." She was a witness. And her silence was its own kind of prayer, a prayer of complicity.

[00:14:44]I have wrestled with anger toward my mother for many years. It is a different kind of anger than I feel toward my father. My father was the actor, the theologian, the one who truly believed he was saving my soul. My mother, I think, knew something was wrong. I saw it in her face sometimes. When my father was not looking, she would glance at me with something soft and frightened in her eyes. Once, when I was 12, she brushed my hair after a Sunday punishment and said, "It hurts me more than it hurts you." I wanted to scream, "No, it doesn't. it hurts me more. But I didn't. I just sat there and let her brush my hair, and she never said another word about it. The prayer after the beating was always my father's domain. But my mother had her own quiet prayers. I would hear her sometimes late at night, murmuring in Pennsylvania Dutch, "Lord, give me strength. Lord, protect my children. Lord, show us the way." She never specified what she needed protection from. She never named the thing that needed changing. Her prayers were vague, soft, desperate, and nothing ever changed. The strap stayed on its peg. The Sunday prayers continued, and my mother kept her silence. I do not tell this story to condemn her. I tell it because silence is also a theology. My mother believed that a wife must submit to her husband, that his authority came from God, that if she questioned his discipline, she would be sinning against the order of creation. So, she swallowed her doubts the same way I swallowed my tears. She said her own private amens. And she taught me without ever using words that a woman's job is to endure, not to stop the pain, not to protect the vulnerable, just to endure and pray and hope that God will sort it out in the end. But here is what I have come to believe after 8 years outside the community.

[00:16:45]Prayer without action is not faith. It is abdication. My father used prayer to sanctify harm. My mother used prayer to excuse her own powerlessness. and I used prayer to survive. We were all praying.

[00:16:59]None of us was stopping the strap. I think about this when I hear people say, "I'll pray for you about something they could actually help with." I'm not against prayer. I still pray sometimes, though I don't know who I'm praying to anymore. But prayer becomes dangerous when it replaces action. When it lets you feel holy while a child is being hurt in the next room. My mother felt holy, I think, kneeling beside her bed at night. But she never knelt beside my father's feet and said, "Stop." And that is the difference between a prayer of faith and a prayer of cowardice. After I left, I wrote my mother a letter. I told her about the welts, the prayers, the way I learned to leave my body. I told her that I did not blame her entirely, but I needed her to know what her silence had cost me. She never wrote back. A year later, my sister told me that my mother had burned the letter.

[00:17:52]Then she had gone to her room and prayed for 3 hours. Lord, forgive Miriam for her pride. Soften her heart. Bring her back. Even now, my mother is praying for me to return to the place where I was broken. She cannot imagine that the prayer she thinks will save me is the same prayer that nearly destroyed me.

[00:18:12]That is the deepest tragedy of the strap and the prayer that follows it. The people who hurt you are often praying for you sincerely, desperately, with tears. They believe they are loving you.

[00:18:24]And you cannot convince them otherwise.

[00:18:27]You can only leave. You can only burn the strap. You can only learn very slowly to say a different kind of prayer. One that does not ask you to thank God for your own destruction. That I want to describe a specific Sunday when I was 14. It was autumn. The leaves were turning. I remember because after church my father pointed out a red maple and said God's paintbrush. I thought that was cruel that he could admire beauty 20 minutes before he would close the bedroom door and thank God for breaking my will. But that is the nature of the prayer. It bleeds into everything. Nothing is separate. The same God who made the red maple also made the strap. The same father who admired the leaves would soon admire his own obedience to scripture. Everything was holy. Nothing was safe. That Sunday, my offense was small. I had rolled my eyes at my mother during the common meal. She had asked me to pass the pickles, and I had rolled my eyes. Not dramatically, just a flicker. But my mother saw it. She said nothing at the table. She waited until the men were talking about hay prices. Then she leaned over and whispered to my father.

[00:19:37]He glanced at me. I looked down at my plate. The rest of the meal passed normally. Cold ham, bread, pie. I ate without tasting. After the meal, my father said, "Miriam, help me with something in the barn." That was his code. He never announced a punishment directly in front of guests. He gave an errand. I followed him out the back door, across the yard, past the chicken coupe. The barn smelled of hay and manure and old wood. He stopped by the stalls. "No one else was there," he said. You rolled your eyes at your mother. That is disrespect. That is contempt. Do you understand? I said, "Yes," he said. "We will take care of this now. Bend over that hay bale." The hay bale was rough against my stomach. I gripped the twine. My father pulled the strap from his back pocket. He had brought it from the house without me seeing. That was new. Usually, the strap stayed on its peg until we were in the bedroom. But this time he had carried it with him, hidden, waiting. The first stroke landed across my thighs. I bit my lip. The second, the third. I counted to six. Then he stopped. Instead of sending me back to the house, he took my hand and led me to a corner of the barn where the hay was piled high. He sat down on a bail and pulled me down beside him. Then he took out a small New Testament from his coat pocket. He opened it to Hebrews 12. My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage when you are punished by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves. He read the whole passage. Then he said, "Do you see Miriam? God disciplines his children. That is how we know we belong to him. If he let you go your own way, that would mean you were not his child."

[00:21:31]He closed the Bible. He put his arm around me. He said, "Let us pray." We prayed in the barn. My father thanked God for the discipline, for the chance to raise a child in the fear of the Lord, for the humility that was being planted in my heart. I said, "Amen."

[00:21:48]Then he wiped a tear from my cheek, his finger rough and calloused, and said, "Go wash your face before anyone notices." I walked back to the house.

[00:21:58]The red maple was still beautiful. I hated that I could still see its beauty.

[00:22:03]I hated that my father could still be gentle. I hated that the prayer in the barn had felt for just a moment like love. That is the confusion I carried for years. How can the same man who hits you with a leather strap also read you scripture with tears in his eyes? How can the same moment hold both violence and tenderness? The answer is that it cannot. One of those things is real and the other is performance. But when you are 14 and your father is praying over you in a barn and the hay smells sweet and his arm is around your shoulders, you do not know which is which. You only know that you are crying and you are not sure why. Looking back, I think the barn prayer was worse than the bedroom prayers because the bedroom was familiar. The bedroom had rules, but the barn was unpredictable. The barn proved that the prayer could happen anywhere.

[00:22:54]That the strap could follow me even outside the house. that the holiness of the beating was not tied to a room or a ritual. It was tied to my father's authority. And that authority was everywhere. I never rolled my eyes at my mother again. The punishment worked if obedience was the goal. But something else happened, too. I stopped trusting beauty. I stopped trusting gentleness.

[00:23:18]Every soft word, every arm around my shoulder, every kind gesture became suspicious. Was this real? Or was this the preface to another prayer? I am 34 years old now and I still flinch when someone touches me with unexpected kindness because in my childhood kindness was the scent that preceded the strap. M younger brother Samuel was the one who fought the prayers longest. He would not say amen. He would sit on the edge of the bed with his jaw locked, tears running down his face, and he would refuse to open his mouth. My father would pray, then he would wait, then he would say, "Samuel, say," Amen.

[00:23:59]Samuel would shake his head. My father would pray again, louder, slower, as if the problem was Samuel's hearing and not his will. Still no amen. This could go on for 10, 15, 20 minutes. Once I heard it go on for nearly half an hour. Samuel did not break. Eventually, my father would sigh and say, "We will finish this later." and Samuel would be sent to his room without supper. Those nights I admired Samuel more than I could say. He was doing what I could not do. He was refusing to endorse his own harm. He was keeping his amen as a small piece of territory that the strap could not take.

[00:24:39]But I also worried about him because the refusal came with a cost. My father punished him more often, more severely, and with longer prayers. Samuel was not being stubborn. He was being honest. And honesty in our house was the highest form of pride. One winter night when Samuel was 13, my father called him upstairs. I do not remember the offense.

[00:25:03]What I remember is the sound. The strap fell nine times. Then the prayer began.

[00:25:09]My father's voice calm and steady, thanking God for the privilege of correction. Then silence. Then my father's voice again. Samuel. Say amen.

[00:25:20]silence, then the strap again. Two more strokes, then the prayer again. This went on for what felt like an hour. I lay in my bed with my hands over my ears. Finally, I heard it. A tiny cracked whisper. Amen. Samuel had broken. He never refused again after that night. He became quiet, obedient, hollow. He stopped asking questions at the supper table. He stopped rolling his eyes. He stopped everything. He said amen every time quickly without being asked twice. And I watched him disappear, not physically. He was still there, still ate supper, still did his chores. But the Samuel who had fought the prayers was gone. In his place was a boy who had learned that his will was not his own. Samuel left the community at 19. He did not go to the English world. He joined a different Amish district, one that had abandoned physical discipline 10 years earlier. He wrote me a letter once after I had left.

[00:26:20]He said, "I still say amen in my head when I hear a loud noise. I don't know how to stop. I understood. The prayer becomes a reflex. Someone raises their voice and your brain finishes the sentence. Thank you for this correction." Someone criticizes you and you whisper, "Soften my heart. You are 30 years old, 40 years old, and you are still saying amen to people who have no right to discipline you." I saw Samuel 5 years ago at a gas station outside Millersburg. He was pumping gas into an English car. He saw me and froze. Then he walked over and hugged me. Neither of us spoke for a long time. Finally, he said, "Do you still pray?" I said, "Sometimes. I don't know who to." He nodded. He said, "I can't I can't say that word anymore. It tastes like leather." He got back in his car and drove away. I stood by the pump and cried. Not for Samuel, for both of us.

[00:27:23]For every child who learned to say amen to their own breaking. The word amen should mean so be it. A declaration of trust. But in our house, it meant I give up. It meant I am too tired to fight. It meant please stop. And the more we said it, the more my father believed he was right. Because our amens were proof.

[00:27:44]Proof that the discipline was working.

[00:27:46]Proof that our wills were broken. Proof that God was in that room. My father never saw our amens for what they were.

[00:27:54]The desperate surrender of children who had no other way to make the pain end.

[00:27:59]If you take nothing else from this story, take this. A child's yes is not consent when the alternative is more pain. A child's amen is not faith when it is extracted by a leather strap. And a parent who requires a child to thank them for their own punishment is not teaching obedience. They are teaching the child that love and violence are the same thing. That is a lesson I am still unlearning one small no at a time that I want to talk about the moment I stopped saying amen. Not the first time I refused. That came later on the day I left. But the moment inside myself when the word died, I was 23, married, a mother. The strap was already hanging behind my own bedroom door, though Jacob had not used it yet. One Sunday, Jacob came in from the barn and said something sharp to me about supper being late. I apologized. He softened. He took my hand. He said, "Let's pray about it."

[00:28:56]And in that instant, something in my chest slammed shut. I realized that Jacob had never heard me say I love you after a fight. He had never heard me say I'm sorry in a normal voice. What he had heard over and over was me asking to pray because that was the only script I knew. A conflict happens. Pain happens.

[00:29:18]Then you pray. The prayer wipes the slate clean. You say amen and you move on. No one apologizes. No one changes.

[00:29:28]No one says that hurt me and I don't want it to happen again. You just pray and the prayer becomes a wall between you and the truth. That Sunday I did not pray with Jacob. I said I don't want to pray right now. I want to talk. He looked confused. Talk about what? About why you spoke to me like that. About how it made me feel. Jacob stared at me as if I had spoken a foreign language.

[00:29:56]Because in our world, feelings were not something you talked about. Feelings were something you prayed away. You brought your frustration, your anger, your hurt to God, and God gave you grace to endure. You did not bring them to each other. That would be confrontation.

[00:30:12]That would be pride. I saw in Jacob's face the same theology that had raised me. He genuinely did not know how to have a conversation about harm without turning it into a prayer. The prayer was his tool, his shield, his way of saying, "This is not my fault and also not yours. It's God's business." And I realized, standing in my own kitchen, that I had married my father, not in cruelty. Jacob was gentler than my father. He was slower to anger, but he had the same vocabulary, the same reflex. When things got hard, he reached for prayer the way other men reach for a drink. and I had reached for it too my whole life because I had never learned any other way. That night I did not pray. I went to the bedroom and looked at the strap on its peg. Jacob had cut it himself from an old harness. It was new, still stiff, not yet softened by use. I touched it, then I walked away. I did not pray that night. I did not pray the next morning. And something began to loosen inside me. A small dangerous freedom. The freedom to be angry without asking God to take the anger away. The freedom to say, "That hurt me." without immediately adding, "But I know you did it because you love me." The freedom to let the pain be pain, not a sacrament.

[00:31:35]It took me three more years to leave.

[00:31:38]Three years of watching Jacob use that strap on our son. Three years of standing in hallways with my hand over my mouth. Three years of not praying, which was its own kind of prayer, a prayer of refusal. I stopped saying amen to my own harm. Then I stopped saying amen to my son's harm. Then I stopped saying amen to the whole system. And on a Sunday afternoon, while Jacob and the children were at his parents' house, I burned the strap. Not with a prayer, not with a ritual, just with a match and a wood stove and the sound of my own breathing. After the strap was ash, I stood in the kitchen and realized I had not said amen in three years. The word was gone, not forgotten. I still knew what it meant, but the reflex had died.

[00:32:25]When I felt pain now, I did not whisper, "So be it." I whispered, "No." That was my new prayer. A single syllable. No. No to the strap. No to the prayer. No to the theology that turned children into thank offerings. I am not saying that prayer is always bad. I am not saying that all Amish prayers are traps. There are beautiful prayers in that tradition.

[00:32:49]Prayers of gratitude for harvest.

[00:32:51]Prayers of blessing over sleeping children. Prayers that have nothing to do with punishment. But the prayer that follows a beating is not one of those.

[00:33:00]It is a weapon. It is a cage. And the only way out of the cage is to stop saying amen. If you are still inside a community or a family where you are asked to thank God for your own pain, hear me. You do not have to say amen.

[00:33:14]You can be silent. You can shake your head. You can walk away. The word no is also a prayer. It might be the most honest prayer you ever speak. I have been asked many times. Do you still believe in God? The question comes from strangers online, from my therapist, for myself at 3:00 a.m. when I cannot sleep.

[00:33:34]My answer changes depending on the day.

[00:33:37]Some days I think God is a story we tell ourselves to survive the unbearable.

[00:33:42]Other days I think God is real but silent, grieving alongside us, unable to stop the strap because God gave us free will and we used it to build a theology of violence. Most days I do not know and I have learned to be okay with not knowing. What I do know is that the prayer after the beating taught me a false picture of God. A God who requires suffering. A God who breaks children's wills. A God who watches a father whip his daughter and calls it love. That God I have rejected. That God is an idol made of leather and scripture and fear.

[00:34:17]If there is a real God, that God is not threatened by my questions. That God does not need me to say amen to abuse.

[00:34:25]that God I think would rather have my honest rage than my forced gratitude. I remember a conversation with my therapist about this. She asked, "What would you say to God if you knew God would not punish you for saying it?" I thought for a long time. Then I said, "I would say, why did you let them pray over me?" Not, "Why did you let them hit me? I have more anger about that, but it's simpler. The hitting I can understand as human evil. But the prayer, why did you let them use your name to make the hitting holy? Why did you let them turn Amen into a leash? My therapist did not answer. She does not answer those questions. She just sits with me in the silence. And that silence, unlike the silence of my childhood, feels safe. I have found a new way to pray. It is not pretty. It is not the prayer my father taught me. It is messy and angry and full of doubt.

[00:35:20]Sometimes it is just me sitting in my apartment looking out the window at the city lights and saying, "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." Sometimes it is me lighting a candle and crying.

[00:35:32]Sometimes it is me writing a letter to my younger self that I will never send.

[00:35:37]I do not know if God hears any of this, but I know that I hear myself. And that is enough for now. One thing I have stopped doing is praying for forgiveness. Not because I am unforgiven, but because I was taught to ask for forgiveness constantly, for existing, for having needs, for being angry, for asking questions. Every prayer after a beating included a request for God to forgive me. Forgive me for my pride. Forgive me for my disobedience. Forgive me for needing to be corrected. I was 9 years old. I had hidden crumbs under a rug. And I was begging God to forgive me as if I had committed murder. That is not prayer.

[00:36:17]That is spiritual abuse. Now, when I feel the urge to ask for forgiveness, I stop. I ask myself, did I actually do something wrong or did I just do something that displeased someone with power over me? Most of the time, the answer is the second one. And then I say out loud, "If I am alone, you do not need forgiveness for that. It feels strange. It feels arrogant." My father's voice whispers in my ear. Pride Hakmmet, you think you have no sin, but I am learning to answer that voice. I say, I have sin. Everyone does. But needing a boundary is not sin. Being angry about being hit is not sin. Saying no to a prayer that hurts me is not sin. I am not sure what I believe about the afterlife anymore. Heaven, hell, judgment. These were the walls of my childhood world. Now I think that if there is a hell, it is not a place of fire. It is a place where you are forced to say amen to your own destruction forever. And if there is a heaven, it is a place where you can finally say no. No to the strap. No to the prayer. No to the voice that tells you pain is love.

[00:37:30]And someone maybe God, maybe just another human who understands says good, you are safe now. You do not have to pray anymore unless you want to. I do not pray every day. Some weeks I do not pray at all. But when I do, I never say thank you for this correction. I say thank you for this breath. I say help me be kind to myself. I say give me courage to tell the truth. And I never say amen at the end unless I mean it. Sometimes I just stop. The silence is okay. The silence is mine. Let me tell you about the first time someone said I love you to me after conflict without asking me to pray. I was 28, 2 years out of the community. I had a roommate, an English woman named Carrie, who worked at the bakery with me. One night, I came home from work exhausted and short-tempered.

[00:38:24]Carrie asked me to do the dishes. I snapped at her. She walked away. I sat on the couch, heart pounding, waiting for the ritual, the criticism, the prayer, the demand for forgiveness. None of it came. After 20 minutes, Carrie came back and sat down next to me. She said, "That really hurt my feelings when you snapped at me, but I know you're tired. Can we talk about it?" No prayer, no strap, no theology, just a woman telling me how she felt and inviting me to respond. I started crying. She looked alarmed. What's wrong? I said. You didn't make me pray. She had no idea what I meant. I had to explain it. The whole system, the bedroom door, the leather, the amen. She listened. Then she said, "That's not love, Miriam.

[00:39:17]That's control." And she hugged me. No prayer, just a hug. That was the moment I realized that the prayer after the beating had stolen something more than my childhood. It had stolen my ability to receive love without punishment.

[00:39:32]Every conflict in my adult life, I expected to be followed by a demand for gratitude. I expected to be hit, not physically, but with words, with withdrawal, with religious language. And when none of that happened, I did not feel relieved. I felt lost. I did not know how to be loved without the prayer.

[00:39:52]Carrie taught me slowly. She taught me that I'm sorry is enough. You do not need to thank God for the conflict. You do not need to pray for a broken will.

[00:40:01]You just say, "I'm sorry." And the other person says, "I forgive you or I need some time or let's figure this out." No amen required. No leather. No holy violence. Just two flawed humans trying to repair what broke between them. That was more grace than I had ever received in 18 years of Sunday prayers. I still struggle with this. When my boss criticizes my work, I have to fight the urge to thank her. When a friend is angry with me, I have to stop myself from saying, "Let us pray about it." as a way to skip the hard conversation. The reflex is deep. It was drilled into me for nearly two decades. But I am learning. Every time I resist the urge to turn conflict into a prayer, I am choosing a different way. A way that does not require me to break myself into pieces. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if after a beating my father had simply said, "I love you.

[00:41:00]I am sorry. How can I make this right?"

[00:41:03]Those words would have healed something in me. But he could not say them. He did not know how. All he knew was the prayer. And the prayer, for all its holy words, was just a cage with a golden door, beautiful on the outside, locked on the inside. I am not angry at my father anymore the way I used to be. I am sad for him. He was also raised with the strap. He also learned to say amen.

[00:41:29]He never had a carry to show him another way. He is 70 now, I think. Still in the community, still praying, still believing that he did the right thing. I will never go back. I will never say amen to his prayers again. But I have stopped hating him. Hate is too heavy. I would rather carry the truth. And the truth is simple. We never said I love you after a beating. We said let us pray. And that is not love. That is religion with a leather strap. I want to address the parents who might be watching this. Not the abusive parents.

[00:42:04]they are not here or if they are they will not recognize themselves. I am talking to the parents who were raised like me who have a strap or a paddle hanging somewhere in their house who say a prayer after they punish their children because that is what their parents did and their parents before them who genuinely believe that physical discipline is commanded by God. I am not here to shame you. I am here to ask you one question and I want you to sit with it before you answer. What would happen if for one month you did not use the strap? What would happen if you put it in a drawer and locked it? What would happen if after a conflict with your child, you did not pray for their broken will, but instead asked them, "What do you need from me right now?" What would happen if you said, "I love you first before any prayer, before any punishment, just as a fact." Would your children become monsters? Would they stop obeying? Would they lose their souls? Or would they just be children, ordinary, messy, beautiful children who need guidance, not leather? I know the fear that keeps the strap on its peg.

[00:43:10]You are afraid that without it, your children will run wild. You are afraid that the world is full of temptation and your children are full of pride and only the rod can drive the foolishness out.

[00:43:22]You have been told this by preachers you trust, by parents you respect, by a tradition that is 300 years old. But let me tell you something I have learned in the 8 years since I burned my strap.

[00:43:33]Children do not need to be broken. They need to be taught. My son is 10 years old now. I have not seen him in 8 years because I left the community and could not take him. But I think about him every day. I think about whether Jacob has cut a new strap. I think about whether my son has learned to go to the small quiet room in his mind. And I think about what I would say to Jacob if I could. I would say put the strap away just for a month. See what happens. See if your children stop loving you. See if they become wild. See if God strikes you dead for disobeying proverbs. I do not believe God will. I believe God will breathe a sigh of relief. I have met English parents who do not spank. I have met Amish parents who do not use the strap. I have met Menanites, Catholics, atheists, Buddhists, all kinds of people who raise kind, obedient, thoughtful children without ever striking them. It is possible. It has always been possible. The reason you believe it is not possible is because your community has told you that the Bible requires the rod. But the Bible is not a parenting manual. The Bible is a library of ancient texts written by people who lived in a very different world. And the same Bible that says spare the rod, spoil the child, also says that slaves should obey their masters and women should be silent in church. We do not follow those verses anymore. We have learned that they were cultural, not divine. The rod verse is cultural, too.

[00:45:04]I am not asking you to leave your faith.

[00:45:07]I am asking you to examine it, to ask yourself, does God really need me to hit my child? Does God really need a two-year-old to say amen to their own punishment? Does God really live behind a closed bedroom door with a leather strap? Your heart knows the answer. Your heart has always known, but the prayer has silenced your heart. It is time to let your heart speak. If you're a parent watching this and you feel defensive, I understand. I would have felt defensive at 23. I would have said, "You don't understand our community. You don't understand our theology. You don't understand how hard these children can be. You are right. I do not understand your specific child, but I understand the strap. I understand what it feels like to hold it. I understand what it feels like to be on the other end. And I am telling you from the other side that there is a door. You can walk through it. You can hang the strap on a different peg. The one in the barn, the one in the trash, the one in the wood stove. You can say a different kind of prayer over your children. A prayer that does not ask God to break them. A prayer that asks God to help you love them without violence. Try it. One month, no strap. No prayer after punishment because no punishment that requires a prayer. Just conversation, boundaries, natural consequences, and the hardest thing of all, admitting that you might have been wrong. Your children will not thank you immediately. They might not thank you for years, but one day when they are adults, they will look back and say, "My parents stopped the cycle."

[00:46:43]That is a legacy worth more than obedience. That is the legacy of love without leather. I have not told you much about my children. It is too painful. But I will tell you this. When I left, my son was two and my daughters were four and six. They are older now, 10, 12, 14. I do not know if they remember me. I do not know what Jacob has told them. I do not know if there is a new strap on a new peg in a new house.

[00:47:10]Jacob moved after I left, remarried an Amish widow. I have no way to contact them. The community has shunned me completely. I am dead to them. That is the price of saying no. But I want my children to know somehow that I left because of the prayer, not because I stopped loving them. Because I could not bear to hear Jacob say, "Let us pray," over their broken bodies. Because I could not become my mother, standing by the door, holding it closed. Because I knew that if I stayed, I would teach them to say amen to their own harm. And I would rather be the mother who left than the mother who held the strap. Some people will read this and think I am a monster. How can a woman abandon her children? Those people have never lived in a closed community where a mother has no rights. Where leaving means losing everything, where the only way to protect your children from the strap is to take them with you, but the church will call the police. We'll take them back. We'll label you a kidnapper. I tried to take them. I called a lawyer from a pay phone. She told me that in Ohio, the Amish community has significant legal protections and that a judge would almost certainly return the children to their father because I was the one who left the faith. I had no chance. None. So I left alone and I have mourned every day for 8 years. I have mourned birthdays, first days of school, skin knees, bedtime stories. I have mourned the sound of their voices which I can barely remember now. I have mourned the chance to teach them that love does not require a strap. And I have prayed not the old prayers but new ones that somehow someday they will find their way to me or that they will at least find their way to the truth. That they were worth staying for. But staying would have destroyed us all. I do not tell you this for sympathy. I tell you this because the cost of leaving is real and you should not romanticize it. I live in a small apartment. I have a cat.

[00:49:11]I work at a bakery. I am in therapy. I have nightmares. I am lonely. I have not dated anyone since I left because I do not trust myself to choose a partner who does not remind me of my father. I am healing but healing is slow. It is not a straight line. Some days I feel almost whole. Other days I am 9 years old again, crying into a lavender quilt, whispering amen to a god I am not sure I believe in. But I am free. That is the other truth. I am free from the prayer.

[00:49:45]I am free from the strap. I am free from the expectation that I must thank God for my own destruction. And that freedom, even with all its loneliness and grief, is worth the cost. I would pay it again. I would pay it a 100 times because every morning I wake up and no one is going to call me to a closed bedroom door. No one is going to take my hands and thank God for breaking me. No one is going to make me say amen to violence. My children do not know me, but I hope one day they will understand.

[00:50:18]I hope they will read this or hear it or somehow know that their mother chose to burn the strap rather than hand it to them. That is my prayer now. Not for broken wills. Not for gratitude through tears. Just for understanding, just for a door that opens not closes, just for the chance to say one time without any prayer before or after, "I love you. I am sorry. I am here now." The strap hung on a peg for 18 years. The prayer followed it every Sunday. And I said, "Amen for 18 years because I did not know there was another word. But there is another word. It is no." No. You will not thank God for your own breaking. No, you will not call violence love. No, you will not pass the leather to your children. The first time you say no, it will feel like betrayal. The hundth time it will feel like breathing. And one day you will wake up and realize that the prayer has lost its power. That you can hear the word amen without flinching.

[00:51:20]That the strap is ash. That the bedroom door is open. And that you are finally impossibly free. My name is Miriam. This is the Amish files. If this story stirred something in you, anger, grief, recognition, relief, share it. Not for me. For the child who is still counting stairs. For the parent who wants to stop but doesn't know how. For the woman standing in the hallway with her hand over her mouth. The door is there. It might be behind the kitchen. It might be at the edge of a field, but it is there.

[00:51:55]Your life has always been yours, even when they told you otherwise. Amen. Only if you mean it or not.