A Plain Arrangement: A Marriage of Convenience and Faith

A brutal Pennsylvania winter doesn't negotiate. When it threatens both the Yoder and Stoltzfus farms at once, the families face a choice with no comfortable option: lose the heritage they've built their lives around, or combine what's left of their resources.

The solution is a marriage of convenience, arranged by their parents and blessed by the bishop. Anna Yoder and Moses Stoltzfus become husband and wife out of necessity, not feeling.

Anna knows Moses only as the quiet, serious man she's seen at church. She worries she's a placeholder, a practical answer to a financial problem. Moses carries the weight of family duty and a heart closed off by past disappointment. He agrees to the arrangement expecting shared labor, not anything warmer than that.

Then they're living under the same roof, and proximity does what it does. Navigating the Ordnung together, watching each other under the community's careful gaze, forces a kind of honesty that distance never would have. They secure the barn against a violent storm. They nurse each other through illness. A carved wooden bird appears on the table. A shared meal by lantern light runs longer than it needed to. Honest words exchanged in the dark reveal things neither expected to find in the other.

Then a secret letter surfaces, exposing Moses's previous heartbreak, and Anna begins to wonder if she was ever truly chosen or simply convenient. Gossip moves through the community. Doubt takes root alongside everything else that's been quietly growing.

Can a marriage built on duty become a genuine covenant, or will the shadows of the past decide for them?

***

In the gentle glow of the Lantern Light of Swartzentruber, discover this heartwarming standalone tale of faith and love...

Lantern light in a Swartzentruber Amish community means something specific: faith held close, simplicity chosen daily, and a life shaped by the Ordnung from the moment you wake.

The Lantern Light of Swartzentruber series follows devoted men and women navigating what that life actually asks of them. Family duty, community expectations, the quiet weight of doing what's right when the heart pulls in a different direction. Each story moves through trials and forgiveness, grounded in trust and the kind of love that grows slowly in plain and faithful soil.

Wholesome, clean romances filled with tenderness, redemption, and the steady warmth of a lantern in the window.

Quiet lives. Deep convictions. Love that holds.

© 2026 Velvet Ink Press (E-bog): 6610001306915

Udgivelsesdato

E-bog: 24. juli 2026