of ignorance, no matter how genuine. It wouldn’t matter to the elders that Grace had seen no distinction between a friendship with an unrelated man and a friendship with one of our cousins. Why would she? We had been told all our lives that church members were our family, and that’s how we had always seen them—related or not. For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother. The same verse that justified cutting our brother Josh out of our family was the one that instructed us to bring these strangers into it. And more, the fact that Justin was married gave Grace an even greater sense of safety in their closeness. It was unthinkable that anything improper could happen with him, because he was married. The line was so bright and crossing it was so far outside the realm of possibility that she simply didn’t believe it could be improper.
Punishment was swift. Grace was forbidden from having any contact at all with either Justin or Lindsey, not even to apologize. Instead of chasing after children as she did every summer, Grace would be required to take a temp job at the Kansas Department of Revenue, sitting at a desk doing data entry work for eight hours each day. My siblings and I would no longer be permitted to spend time with Justin and Lindsey, but instead would avoid them—except that we could say hello if we happened to pass them at church on Sundays. Because Lindsey had not asked to be baptized since she’d arrived six months earlier, the elders decided that it was time to isolate her from the rest of the church. She was a negative influence. “What makes her any different than the rest of these heathen, except that she’s related to a member of the church? That doesn’t confer any special benefits to her.”
New restrictions kept coming, growing increasingly draconian all the time. Sam and Steve had never approved of Grace’s freewheeling spirit, and they encouraged my father to rein her in. It seemed to anger both men that Grace had opinions and that she was willing to ignore their advice—even when the smallest issues were implicated. Two years earlier, Grace and I had decided to switch to Apple computers. Steve advised against it, and I yielded to his recommendation immediately and without complaint. Grace, on the other hand, thanked him for his input and explained that she would be getting a Mac. Steve pestered my parents for weeks afterward, strenuously arguing that his reasons for remaining with the status quo were worth following. It had seemed embarrassing at the time, because it was clear that Steve only cared about the issue because he wanted to be obeyed. My mother eventually came up with an excuse for why it had to be a Mac (“It will help Isaiah learn another operating system for his job!”), and though I didn’t care about the computer either way, I was glad that my parents had pushed back against Steve’s bullying.
But my father couldn’t really do that anymore. His judgment had been so severely called into question by the church that he had seemed unwilling to trust himself—or my mother—ever since. Instead he listened and followed the recommendations of his fellow elders, even when they were contrary to his instincts. Most of these new rules had no specific foundation in Scripture—just a reference to a broad passage calling believers to abstain from all appearance of evil. When Sam and Steve learned that Grace was using her required twenty-minute work break to explore the area around her downtown office building, they prompted my father to forbid it. He did. The appearance of evil. She began spending those breaks sitting on the couch in the twelfth-floor bathroom. When Grace asked to take our brothers to a park to climb trees, our father forbade that, too—not just on that day, but ever. That Grace would request such a silly thing was taken as evidence that her heart wasn’t in the right place. The appearance of evil. When our father instructed Grace to choose a degree other than art, Sam and Steve advised him that he hadn’t gone far enough—that her options should be limited to the study of nursing or computers only. The fact that both of those studies were anathema to my sister was almost the point. In the words and actions of these men I could not