A Secret Identity by Gayle Roper Page A

“Me? Vibrating? I never vibrate. I’m low-key. I’m quiet and laid back.”
    He looked at me skeptically.
    “Truly,” I said. “I’m a writer. I lead a quiet life. My brother and sister-in-law say I only live through my characters. Mom and Pop kept at me all the time to get a life.”
    He shook his head. “I don’t know about then, but this is now and you’re having a hard time sitting still.”
    I grinned. “I am fidgeting a bit, aren’t I? But isn’t it exciting? I may be meeting my family!”
    Todd seemed to just then catch my admission to being a writer. “Did you say you’re a writer? What do you write?”
    “Okay, don’t laugh, but I write inspirational romance novels.” I waited for the inevitable incredulous reaction, but Todd only paused a moment, taking in this new information.
    “Well, I guess this is where I should be embarassed to say I don’t think I’ve read any of your books,” he finally said.
    “That’s quite okay. I generally give a pass to men when it comes to reading my books.”
    “Reasoner, party of two,” a metallic voice called over a PA system. “Reasoner, party of two.”
    We followed a young woman with a head covering to a booth along the outside wall of the restaurant. She left us studying two large menus with amazingly inexpensive meals.
    “Is she Amish?” I asked Todd.
    He glanced at the hostess’s retreating back and shook his head. “No, she’s Mennonite.”
    “What’s the difference?” I asked. “They both wear those prayer cap thingys.”
    “They come from the same Anabaptist heritage, but they’ve diverged through the years.”
    “How?”
    “While the Amish have stayed as separate from the general culture as they can, the Mennonites have accepted change and integrated it into their religious lives. They share the Anabaptist heritage of nonviolence and adult baptism, but they’re thoroughly modern.”
    I laid my menu on the table. “I know Southern Baptist and General Baptist and Regular Baptist and lots of other Baptists. What’s Anabaptist?”
    He leaned back in his seat and rested a hand on the edge of the table. He lowered his menu so he could see me more easily. “Back in the Protestant Reformation, a group of dissidents decided they didn’t agree with the Catholic Church practice of infant baptism. They argued that a person shouldn’t be baptized until he was old enough to understand what faith in Christ was all about. So these dissidents rebaptized themselves in the early 1500s. That’s what Anabaptist means. Rebaptized or baptized again. One group of the Anabaptists followed a man named Menno Simons and became known as Mennonites. Another group broke from the Mennonites more than a century later and followed a fiery preacher named Jakob Ammonn. They became known as Amish.”
    “How did the two groups end up in this area?”
    “Religious persecution.”
    “Pacifists were persecuted? But weren’t they gentle people?”
    “Yes, in that they wouldn’t retaliate. No, in that they stood against the institution of the state church and were considered very dangerous to the political and social order of the day. That was a time when church and state were intricately linked, and those of differing religious views were seen as seditious.”
    “So they got kicked around?”
    “Kicked around nothing. They got drowned and burned and murdered in great numbers. They came here to escape, and by chance they ended up in one of the most fertile areas in the world.”
    I grinned at the way he emphasized by chance . It made me think that he might understand how God can make the evil that people do praise Him in the end. Persecution meant flight, which meant the New World and Lancaster County. Plenty after famine.
    Our waitress came for our order. I decided on stuffed chicken breast, baked potato, and a salad. Todd had pork and sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, and cottage cheese with apple butter. We both ordered sweetened iced tea.
    She returned in record