When I was in kindergarten a little girl came into the classroom about a week...

When I was in kindergarten a little girl came into the classroom about a week after the year started. She was dressed in a cute homemade dress that reminded me of Raggedy Ann. She was very quiet and, as it turned out, she was a Mennonite girl who only spoke Plattdeutsch, an old German dialect.

Since I had been learning German from my grandmother and her siblings, who spoke both modern and old German, I knew enough for basic conversation.

Our teacher, a sweet lady, announced that the girl was joining our class and didn’t speak English. Right away, the other kids were quite mean to her, which was the only time I saw any meanness in that class. They teased her for not speaking English and even tried to get her to eat paint and glue.

So, I sat down beside her, spoke the little bit of German I knew, and her eyes lit up. She started talking to me very rapidly in German, but unfortunately, I lacked the depth of the language.

For the rest of the school year, she always sat beside me, and I always protected her from the other kids, stopping them from bullying her. She was really a lovely girl, and I would try to learn a few more words of German every weekend from my grandmother at church so I could have more to say to her.

Unfortunately, halfway through kindergarten, my family decided it wasn’t a good idea for me to continue learning German because they felt it would interfere with my learning of English. This was ridiculous, as I was already speaking English better than most adults and I was enjoying learning German.

I didn’t see her again until we were both 16. I had seen her father around a bit, and everyone in her family was very tall so they stood out at community events. By then, she had grown from a sweet, awkward little girl into a wholesome, stunningly beautiful blonde, blue-eyed young woman.

It turned out she still remembered me very fondly and had asked her father to approach my father to make introductions between us. Unfortunately, my family wouldn’t have it, as they were from a different church, and we were both 16. In the Mennonite community, young marriage is common, and I think it’s healthy, especially since the community supports their couples and families.

The point is, I wasn’t kind to her because I expected anything out of it. I was kind to her because it was the right thing to do, out of the goodness of my heart. She felt like family to me, as much of my family had a long association with the Mennonites. She just felt like one of my people, so I took care of her.

Today, people ask me what they can do to meet a man or a woman or get married, and I tell them the two most important things they can do:

1. Belong to a tight-knit, pro-family community. If they weren’t raised in one, they need to find one and make the sacrifices necessary to be part of it.

2. Be good, kind, and loving to everyone you meet, to the extent that it’s possible. Put out the energy you wish to receive.

When you’re good, and you let that goodness shine from you like a bright light, it will attract people and everything in life gets easier.

Some of you are worried about the story having a sad ending. But I want to let you know that she was absolutely gorgeous. I’m sure she got married and probably has something like 8 or 10 kids by now, which would be very typical in the Mennonite community. I got married as well, some years later, and now have three children of my own. We all ended up happy in the end.