THE SOUND OF STILLNESS...

Emma doesn’t just walk into a room—she enters it like a friendly detective on a mission from God. And if you’re lucky enough to be in her line of sight, chances are you’re about to receive a very polite but utterly disarming, ‘May I ask you a question?’

What follows could be a query about your life, your health, the price of carrots, or how your people go about curing warts. And no matter your answer, she’ll soak it in like it is the one missing page in The Manual of Life that she’s writing.

Emma seems like she’s from another century—but not in a dusty,

distant way. She’s fully alive, fully present and curious to the marrow.

She runs a household, teaches children, administers healing salves,

raises chickens, organizes weddings, and somewhere in between, she finds time to ask perfect strangers things most of us would never dare say out loud.

Her curiosity isn’t nosy—it’s holy. It’s the kind that builds bridges, that dignifies the details of someone else’s story, that turns a hospital waiting room into a gathering space of unfiltered humanity. To her, a stranger isn’t a threat or an inconvenience—it’s a mystery waiting to be gently and respectfully unraveled.

So, when one of our Amish friends (you guessed it—Emma) found

herself in need of a hospital visit, Wes and I put on our chauffeur hats and loaded up the car. We were expecting a long night. What

we got instead was a front-row seat to an unexpected masterclass

in human connection… starring one very curious, very kind and

endlessly surprising woman who decided the ER was as good a place as any to hold informal interviews with the sick and weary.

What happened next was well, absurd. And kind of beautiful.