My Life is in Boxes…

We’re in the final weeks of getting our new home move-in-able.  For all those readers who’ve built a house all by themselves, I know the first sentance of this post causes you to repond with, “Nuff said.”  You know what it’s like.  Insanity.  And to think, we actually chose to do this. 

Things are starting to get slightly overwhelming, or, at least, even more overwhelming than they’ve already been, but exiting, too—as in, I can’t believe that we’re actually going to move in, for real!  Last year when we started building, we thought we’d be in by Fall.  One year later, it will be Fall all right—just 12 months later than what we originally thought.   Ha. 

I will probably be pretty scarce here through the next 4-5 weeks.  You can find me in the kitchen, brewing another cup of coffee.  You know what I found out?  Cleaning and organizing and packing and, yes, even running on the eliptical, is WAY more fun when you have the dvd’s from Season 3 of House playing on the laptop.

Loving Him, Following Him, Feasting on His Words, Stepping Out of the Box

“For the Lord is righteous; He loves righteousness; the upright will behold His face.”  Psalm 11:7

In our church service today, we meditated on Psalm 146, and afterwards, one of the things we talked about was God’s heart for the poor and how being righteous, if defined Scripturally, is directly related to how we feel/think and what we do for the weak and downtrodden of society. 

By church service, I mean a little organic group that my friend Lydia and I have been hosting.  The Quaker Church we’d been attending was flat-out wonderful, but we had some serious differences of opinion when it came to who Jesus was, differences I didn’t realize at first but slowly came to realize.  I don’t mind differences of opinion, by and large, but when I gather with people for the specific purpose of fellowshipping with our God together, it’s sort of goes with the territory that we are in agreement as to who that God is.  Ie, I don’t think Jesus was a good man, I actually think He was God-in-the-flesh.  The Quaker group in our neighborhood is more of a theistic bunch, not holding to the idea of miracles or of a Jesus who was God incarnate. 

So, my best friend and I sadly hugged the Quaker service goodbye (though made friends we will continue to treasure) and have begun (in part due to courage gained from attending the Quaker service, reveling in it’s simplicity), a gathering of our own.  I suppose it would fit into the catagory of “emerging evangelical,” if one needed to find a label, though thus far we haven’t. 

Let me be blunt: I’ve spent a year trying NOT to do this.  I wanted to go somewhere else and have someone else birth the thing.  When the Quaker meeting fell through, it was as if the final straw had been placed on the camel’s back and the camel, well, died.  We decided to do it ourselves. 

For reasons I can’t explain, sometimes because I don’t fully understand them myself, I cannot go to a traditional church service and feel like I am “home.”  It feels like anything but that.  I have spent years and years making myself do it anyway, serving instead of expecting to be served, and all the other lines that people (that I used to be like) tell people (who are like me now).  Bottom line, I’d rather go nowhere than go to a typical church service, even the good ones.  It’s death instead of life (for me). 

Yet I know that I need a community of friends/family that I gather with to worship Yahweh together, and, more particularly, I want that for my kids.  Something organic, something real.  No programs, not program-centered, no pressure to be here on this night and don’t miss this event.  No discussions that are no better than glorified textbook/workbook answer sessions, no listening to a sermon that drones on and on, and no standing with a congregation where we all facing the front, where we sing and then sit and then stand and then sing and then sit, where spiritual passivity and leader-dependance is encouraged just by the very structure of the way the service is operated. 

It’s not that I think that a modern “traditional” evangelical service is always bad or unfruitful.  I think many groups have been fruitful and can be a very positive part of a Believer’s life.  But, this is the deal: I’m not a modern.  I’m a post-modern.  Ie, the way that moderns “do Christianity,” (which I know some claim isn’t modern but is rather an eternal Scripture-based format, despite the fact that church history rolls her eyes at said claims), doesn’t fit for me. 

I don’t want a canned curriculum.  Sure, I like Beth Moore but, listen, I just can’t sit down and fill out workbook pages anymore.  I can’t stand a passive-sit-while-I-tell-you-what-to-think approach.  It doesn’t work for me.   I’ll do it for a college class, yeah, but I just can’t do it anymore when it comes to following God.

 What is life to one person from the modern era is death to me. 

This is something I was once angry about, blamed myself for, was frustrated with others for, grieved over, cried about, pushed at and then away over, and the list goes on, until, one day, I realized that it just is what it is.  Nothing to be mad about.  Nothing to blame others over.  It’s just the way it is.  And by the volume of emerging Christian books and blogs, etc, there are, apparently I’m not the only one who loves Jesus but feels like the modern church just isn’t a place I can call home.  Some of us fit in the modern church world.  Some of us don’t.   

Lydia had a dream about this gathering of ours, which perhaps she might share sometimes, but I felt like the Spirit gave me a picture for this little experiment, a picture similar to the little life growing in a woman’s womb.  Just as the new mother doesn’t try to rush things but just rests in what is, while at the same time her body makes changes to accomodate the growth, so, too, we should view this beginning as the first spark of life, nourishing it but, really, accepting the fact that we have very little control over the form the new life takes. 

We decided we’d give it nine months and see what is born—meaning no giving up until “the due date” has passed.  The no-giving-up rule has proved helpful, er, particularly the second time we met when we were still trying to do the half hour of Quaker silence and ALL of the little kids sort of decided to quit sitting quietly (not helped by the fact that we have waaay more children than we do adults).  Thankfully, one of our rules for our gathering is that there are no hard and fast rules.  Meaning, that was the week we decided to turn the Quaker silence into Lectio, and we’ve been beyond delighted about that switch ever since. 

Our rhythm currently is that we gather in a circle in a living room.  We do Lectio Divina (my friend and author Ann Voskamp from Holy Experience talks about what Lectio means to her, here) first.  After meditating together on a portion of Scripture (everyone has a half sheet copy of the selected passage for that week) through the four stages of Lectio Divina, we then gather around the Lord’s Supper together.  Sitting back down, we open the floor for discussion on the Lectio passage (while the kids color a “comic book style” sheet I draw for them.  Then out comes the guitar (or the piano, or whatever we’ve got at that house) and we sing. 

The singing is loud and accompanied by many shaky eggs and other rhythm instruments, the kids singing at the top of their lungs.  The Lectio is wonderful—eating Scripture together and meeting Jesus in the words.  It’s a sermon, straight from the Holy Spirit, and made all the richer after hearing the thoughts of those sitting nearby. After we are done, which is an hour or less from the time we began, we enjoy a big potluck-style lunch together.  I love it.  My kids love it.   

But that’s not so much the point of this post.  I’ve heard it said that there are over 2,000 verses in the Bible to poverty and God’s concern for the poor.  Whether that’s true or slightly inflated, if there are ”only” 1,000 verses, what the heck is going on with the Christianity I was trained in at Bible College?  I recently heard about a hard-line conservative church not allowing a newly saved (and excited about God) young woman attend their Bible School, though she had applied, because she wore pants.   How many verses are there about women and pants, versus how many verses about learning to walk in one’s faith?

Likewise, I always framed “what righteousness looks like” in terms of not being drunk, promiscous, etc, and while I don’t think it’s a positive thing to be drunk or promiscous, it would appear that Scripture places a much higher premium on righteousness that takes the form of seeking after justice for those who do not have it, that we reprove those who are trampling on the weak, that we take active measures to speak and act on the behalf of those who have not.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. 

More to Come in Part Two…

Day #4 of School (for My Previously-Homeschooled Kids)

First of all, the routine I’ve known for years is now completely turned on it’s head.  Instead of my down time being in the evenings (when I’m attempting to recover from a long day of being with kids and finding ways to hide, escape, and otherwise close my ears to the never-ending din), the relaxing lull is now in the mornings after everyone gets dropped off at class.  It’s when they get home from school, in the afternoon, that the drama begins. 

It’s go, go, go from the moment we all barge into the house, laden with backpacks and emptied lunch bags and jackets, and it doesn’t stop until the last head has nodded off to sleep.  This has been slightly more complicated because my husband, a fantastic hands-on-kind-of-Dad to his children, has been gone from morning until late into the night this week, finishing the last of the electrical work on our soon-to-move-in-to home. 

I look forward to his return to family life, as does he, but for now, this means it’s 100% me attempting to juggle the pile of papers that are handed my way,  helping kids with their memory work, fixing snacks and dinner and what-do-you-mean-you-all-went-wading-in-the-mud-pit-across-the-street, and baths and memorizing states and listening to the sweet labored reading, “Mom mops.  Mom and Tom m…m…mop…,” and the-phone-is-ringing-but-where-is-the-phone, loading the dishwasher while listening to an excited recounting of what happened during math, reminding animal owners to feed the momma rabbit and the babies, and, “No, hon, we can’t keep them all, and asking that every day isn’t going to change my mind,” and… 

It’s been a change from my previous lifestyle, not content so much but context.  I’m not doing any less work—it’s just all shifted around a bit and, more importantly, there’s this amazing thing called, A Space to Breath.  I feel like there’s a margin, all of a sudden, in a life that had very little before. 

We picked a private Lutheran school that is a bit advanced, academically, which isn’t the reason we chose it (we chose it more for the close family-feel it had, explained in this post here), but I’m now realizing that the academic emphasis is no joke.  My 9 year old 4th grader has had one-and-a-half to two hours of fairly heavy homework every night thus far.  This worries me a little bit.  She’s not going to grow up to be a college professor—she’ll be a business entrepreneur or a drama/music queen or a leader of various charges, but the advanced academic track is not something that I see as being a positive thing for her.  Whereas her little sister delights in all things bookish, Judah labors painfully over writing a paragraph in cursive, frustratedly figuring out why Constantinople was an important city, and painfully processing spelling words that are a grade ahead.  As of right now, her spirit is sagging.  This is very difficult for me to watch.      

The other children?  They’re LOVING it.  My 3rd grader, who is a lot like I was as a young student, is eating the academic emphasis up, as is the 1st grader and the Kindergartner and, even, my youngest, the kinesthetic “all-boy” three year old who cries and cries every day when the kids leave and turns cartwheels of joy when it’s a preschool day and he gets to go to his treasured, “cwass.” 

In short, 4-out-of-the-5 currently LOVE this change we’ve made.  Judah is the only one struggling, which is difficult to observe, obviously, but I’m careful not to communicate my concerns to her but express more of a non-challant, “You’ll get the hang of it, girl.  Now, pull out those spelling words and let’s run through them together.”  This is because I’d like to wait and see how many of struggles will resolve once she gets used to the new atmosphere (I’ve already seen an improvement, as she makes friends and grows more comfortable in the new setting) vs. how many of them are going to prove to be actual issues.  If, by Christmas Break, she’s still struggling and buried under a load of homework, I’ll probably pull her out and home-school her again. 

As always, with parenting, church-life, marriage, and all other forms of community, the person has to come before the concept.  As Jesus reminded the Pharisees, the Sabbath wasn’t madefor the sake of the Sabbath but for the sake of the humans who needed a space in which to rest.  The Sabbath is the tool, not the humans.  The Pharisees had reversed the order and, in so doing, turned the rest into a real burden.   

Too many times, the beauty, order and efficiency of having everyone be/do the same is done at the expense of the individual person.  I like to think that the School of Christ results (or is intended to result) in the same thing for every person following—Deliciously Knowing and Being Known By Him—and yet that “sameness” is accomplished in a myriad of intricately different and unique ways.  So I am watching my daughter carefully, trying to prayerfully determine how much of her pain is a positive maturing thing that will end up being beneficial to her, vs. which parts require the ever-ferocious-to-protect mother in me to step in and intervene on her behalf, knowing that, as in all things, what works well for one might not be best for another.

Faith and the Feminine Gender: Body Talk [Conversing With Jonalyn Fincher]

Jonalyn Fincher, author of Ruby Slippers and co-founder of Soulation, and I have decided to do some back-and-forth banter about faith and the female gender.  Jonalyn’s thoughts are in quotations, and my rambling responses follow in blue.  She’s a lot more succinct with her words than I am (no suprise there–ha).  Jonalyn is a fun thinker and, as her above-mentioned book reflects, just as fascinated as I am with realities pertaining to femininity and following Christ.  Her post on this same topic is found here.      

 This week, Jonalyn introduces the topic and starts the conversation:  Body Talk

 

I’ve been waking up with sleeping lines on my checks and forehead. It’s not the sheets cause they’re always in the same place. It looks like I’ve been frowning all night.  I think it’s a sign of aging, which seems premature as I’m not 30 yet.  Makes me start to notice other miniscule unpleasantries about growing older. What will I be like when I get older, will I covet my younger elastic skin? Will I mourn it? Will I feel envious of young women?

 

Yes.  And, just as equally, no. 

 

Because growing older is, in it’s way, a part of the dying process, a thing that human beings were never originally designed to do, I don’t think it’s odd to want to resist death—and an aging body is an ever-present sign that, “all flesh is as the grass of the field.” 

 

But I also think that each woman’s personality differs in how she responds to the aging process.  For example, I have two very close friends who handle aging in separate ways.  One has a husband who loves a beautiful female body (and loves hers), and as she’s nursed six successive babies, has always reassured her not to worry about the wear and tear of her breasts, because, “we’ll get you all fixed up when you’re done.”  Approaching her middle-thirties, she wears make-up regularly and tries to maintain a stylish appearance.  My other friend, a mother of seven leaving her thirties behind, wouldn’t pluck her eyebrows if her life depended on it—and though she likes to dress up and put on make-up on occasion, she finds jeans and a t-shirt much more conducive to being in the kitchen all afternoon fixing the gourmet meals that her husband and kids delight in. 

 

They are both beautiful women, but both have different focuses on outward appearance.  I notice that my stylish friend struggles more with aging than my other friend, because her youthful beauty matters more to her.  I find myself in the middle, a mix of someone who likes to have a nice appearance and someone who is sitting here typing a response to your thoughts instead of taking a shower.  Ha.

 

My pilates friend, who’s barely in her mid-twenties has one strong body.  She’s a regular marathon runner, a few months back she nearly made it to American Gladiator, and she spend most her days thinking, eating, talking nutrition.  But the women she trains come into her studio and have tighter buns and flatter abs than she does. They’ve got some work done on them.  And my friend gets frustrated by it all. Why do the 50 year older women have this demand to look younger and stronger than a 25 year old?  Will I end up wanting that?

 

I remember disdaining women who were so vain as to color their grey, wear make-up or get “work” done on their bodies.  Of course, I was twenty.  I’d never known what it was like not to have a great body, so it was easy to pass judgment.  I’ve felt so bad for my bold brash statements many times since then… 

My Husband, The Bat, and Egalitarian Musings

If you aren’t a reader at the group blog, Complegalitarian (a blog with complementarian [husbands are servant leaders to wives, wives submit to husbandly authority] and egalitarian [husbands and wives serve each other mutually, according to their giftings] Christian writers striving to figure out how to talk about these issues WITHOUT killing eachother, something easier said than done at times), you might want to check out a post I recently put up there. 

In it, I muse about gender differences, whether or not those differences ”prove” that males are supposed to lead females, and a funny story about my ever-masculine husband and a little bat that decided to stop in one night for a visit.  The end of that story proves, to any discerning reader, that I am obviously supposed to be the true authority in our home…

Discombobulation (Compliments of Vaccination)

Vaccinations suck.  It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t, world out there for Moms, I tell you, and vaccinations are one of the many horrors we have to face.  On the one hand, we have the CDC and all their friends telling us that if you don’t let them stick a mercury-laced cocktail of microscopic brew in your two-month-olds thigh, your baby might/will get sick and die.  Then you have the anti-vaccine crowd telling you that if you do put that cocktail in your baby’s thigh, your baby might/will die (or get autism, brain-damaged, or any number of other nightmarish outcomes).  

As if that’s not confusing enough, I get to top that off with a real-life friend who claims her boys were totally fine until they got vaccinated and then began exhibiting signs of brain-damage (no joke), MIXED with my mother, a person in the health care profession who actually GIVES OUT the vaccinations herself and sometimes has a batch at home in her fridge.  Yes, this is a slice into my mad mad world. 

The long and the short of it is, I’m lazy.  Hey, I homeschool.  So, like, vaccinations?  Who cares?  Why vaccinate when I don’t have to anyway, I say.  I’ve read all the books and watched all the movies from both sides, and I swear I can’t tell who’s lying and who’s full of the truth, or even worse, how the two sides are both telling the truth and lying, so I’ve sort of claimed the excuse of, “Oops.  I keep forgetting,” and have only vaccinated every so often. 

I’d brag now about how my kids have always been so healthy so that my lazy vaccine policy has been a good thing, but, I can’t, because about four years ago, they all actually aquired a vaccine-preventable (though how preventable is up for debate) illness.  I got to experience what it felt like to be a mother of children with whooping cough and it was a visual demonstration of how much more grateful I’d be for vaccinations if the diseases in question were still around in high numbers. 

My oldest child, then six, who’d been vaccinated four times for pertussis (whooping cough), had it the worst out of the whole group.  I have hazy memories of sitting by her bed hoping she’d stop coughing eventually, long enough to at least catch a breath.  Then I understood how a child could die simply from coughing too much.  It was two weeks of terror.  

I started getting more up to date with vaccines after that, though selectively and, well, still lazily.  I mean, why bother with MMR just yet—no one has measles in our neck of the woods, you know?  My motto was, “I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it…”  But now the kids are going to school.  I have to go buy backpacks, lunch boxes, and catch up on vaccinations.  The first two are way more fun.

So, off to the public health center we went today, five little ducklings all in a row, dreadfully behind in all the required shots but generally clueless about what was about to befall their trusting little souls.  Don’t get me wrong—I had them all prepped and everything, you know, like answering their wide-eyed questions with stuff like, “Oh, it hardly hurts at all.  Feels like a pinch.”  

“Like this, Mom?”   Anna gives me a big pinch and I try not to show that, dang it, that hurt. 

“Yup, like that.  See?  You’ll do great.”  I smile big.  And I really mean it.  And they troop into the public health center in their usual animated way, not worried at all, or, if they were, doing a great job of hiding it.   

After hanging out in the waiting room—a waiting room that was really cool for the first half-hour what with all the neat toys and the box with those wires and balls attached to the top of it and books and a little table and chairs, a waiting room that started getting a little tiresome the second half-hour as the sound of the fire truck siren button on the Bob the Builder book started wearing thin, as in really thin, and the little table began to be mistaken for a diving platform, a waiting room that was completely in chaos by the third half hour when the boys decided to start acting like boys and joyfully attempting full body slams on each other in the middle of the entry way area (whereupon I wished to God I’d remembered to stop by the coffee drive-thru down the street and ordered an extra-tall mocha), they called our name.  

Our name. 

All five kids magically stopped what they were doing, closed their mouths, peeled themselves off the carpet and sat quietly in a row, looking at the nurse and appearing, for all practical purposes, almost like children in a museum, excited about what they were going to discover down the mysterious hallway. 

My oldest went down that dark blue hallway first, her hand in mine and her resolve to be cool, calm, and collected slowly dissolving as we followed the kind nurse ahead of us.  Walking into the exam room, she saw the table, the table with a line up of shots sitting on a clean white cloth.   Resolve finalized it’s complete dissolution.  When the screaming began, I ended up having to try out some of the earlier demonstrated wrestling holds I’d learned about in the waiting area. 

Less than one minute (and five needle sticks) later, she was done.  I wished they had a back door exit, so I could have shuffled her straight out to the car.  Because let’s just say that having Judah walk out of that hallway as a quivering mass of tears was not good for group morale.  The once eager faces were now no longer raising their hands in the air begging to be selected next.  And so the drama would play itself out.  A walk down the hallway, a collapse into panicked terror, and me learning about the many ways to pin down arms and legs.  In fact, by the time it was the last kid’s turn, I was trying out more than just wrestling moves. 

If I had it to do over again, I’d have gone strongest to weakest, but as it turned out, Emmanuel was last, the child who could grow up to be an Olympic athlete (if he had parents who could invest in that kind of training.  Sorry, son).  I’m talking natural born muscles, grit, and the brains to put both to use.  Prying his hands off the waiting room couch was complicated enough, but I forgot to think about the grip factor of the door frame on the way into the hallway.  He didn’t.  

Five McDonald’s icecream cones later,  I think everybody’s forgiven me.  At least mostly.

Confessions of an Imperfect Soul

lamb at dusk

I am.  But my “I am” does not come with as many capital letters as Yours does.  I am just a lamb, and you are the Lamb.  Pretty big difference contained in one little, ”L.”  I think there are some brambles in my coat from the last bush I fell into.  I am also fighting a deep-seated urge to head-butt the lamb feeding peacefully to the right of me.  If I confess that ahead of time, can I still hit him? 

Seems like I am either ahead of You or way behind.  You’re patient though.  Sometimes I could swear you’re laughing, but when I look back, You always pretend to be looking somewhere else.  I don’t get what’s so funny.   

I’ve got it pretty good, really.  My “big” troubles can engulf my mind and send it careening off into a canyon, yet You take the time to comfort me and bring me back to reality.  Some of Your lambs have real problems, like, real ones, but, still, You think my dumb ones are worth Your time all the same. 

I don’t really know what You are doing.  Hey, I’m just being honest here.  I mean, some days we’re over here, then other days You walk us over there and for the most part, I don’t get it.  It’s kind of hard work following You, what with all the interesting things to look at that we have to walk right on by, and these annoying sheep that drive me nuts with their incessant bleatings and smelly habits.  How do you put up with this crowd? 

Sometimes I don’t do such a swell job with the whole following business.  Or sometimes I do such a good job of it, I forget to see if You are the one I’m following or if it’s some half-cocked sheep leading me in a direction opposite from Yours.  Sorry about that.  And thanks for coming to get me.  Again. 

I like Your smell.  I like Your feel.  I love Your voice.  I can’t remember a time when You weren’t there, when Your form wasn’t a part of my life.   You make it all feel right, somehow, even when it’s not.  I really love You. 

Even though I forget You sometimes.  I can get caught up in all sorts of other things—and do—particularly when the pasture is wide and green and we spend a long time there.  Memorizing the features of local boulders and other fascinating topics crowd thoughts of You right out of my head. 

Funny how fast I remember You when the howl of a too-close wolf rips into the night.  The earlier arguments about the local landscape seem insignificant as I lie there, trembling, thankful for Your solid presence.  The wolf will flee, eventually.  But I want to keep my heart in that place, always.

Ah, the Internet: Glory Land for Dispensers of Advice

My friend and humble muse, Amy Scott, recently commented,

“One of the problems with this whole internet thing, is that I never knew I was supposed to be all these things. I often wonder about the elephant in the room––how does a mom be “quiverfull” AND homeschool a large family and and and and and and? What if she has health issues? What if she doesn’t have free interns? What if her husband doesn’t work from home? What if she is uneducated herself? Is there another area in life where we just “trust God” and continue doing something that isn’t working?

It is very true that many people do not carry the cross of Jesus, and so I am thankful to the extent that we are being called to keep ourselves from being blemished by the world. Of course, it is easier to sub in Biblical models instead of each family being led by the Lord Jesus Christ.

As I get older, I’m learning that we need wisdom from God, who gives to those who ask, not so that we can go our own way, but so that the glory of God can be best shown through our unique families.”

Amy used to claim the she got me started blogging (back when I was safe to be associated with, that is-HA).  I used to strongly deny it.  So this is where I tell you that, actually, Amy got me started blogging.  She’s competitive, so I hate giving her any points, but it’s been a lot of years now, so it probably won’t kill me.  I don’t remember the details, but I remember finding her original blog (her current blog is a great read, by the way), which had only two posts or so, and thinking that she sounded a lot like me and that I wanted to do that weird, “blog,” thing too.  That was a few blogs ago.  I’m not sure I’ve forgiven her yet, either.  Or thanked her enough.  Depends on the day. 

I’ve echoed Amy’s above thoughts many times, conversing about it with internet-savvy friends who’ve felt the same way.  Did the internet grow their relationship with Jesus, or has it buried them under a never-ending to-do list?  Has the internet been a positive force in my Christianity, or has it been a whip driving me into bondage?  I’d have to say it’s been a tool for both things.  My particular sub-culture for my first five or so internet years was the conservative Christian mother’s world, and Amy’s comment brings out truth that most women in that conservative area of the blogosphere can relate too.  In realms of legalistic condemnation, the benefits of connecting with those women have often been counter-balanced by the destructive tendancies there. 

I remember as a new mom wondering about the headcoverings spoken of in 1 Corinthians 11.  I typed in the search words and, BOOM, I learned that veiling was for today and that women should not cut their hair and that your prayers won’t be heard unless your head is covered, even at night, and all sorts of stories about how headcoverings got people saved and all sorts of other things that I felt compelled to worry over for the next couple years.  Would I have worried about those things on my own?  Probably.  I’m good at worrying.  But did the internet feed it?  Baby, I was a juicy dry log to it’s flame.   

There’s an odd beauty about advice that comes through relationships that are face to face.  Advice is annoying.  On the one hand, I love hearing it, if I ask for it.   On the other hand, unsolicited advice can be a surprise gift, a serious annoyance, or a slap in the face—but, hey, at least it’s face to face.  Meaning, to put it bluntly, we have the treasure of KNOWING the advice-giver.  That means we can shrug off the hot-air coming from the guy who is one peanut short of the funny farm, can listen selectively to the gal who is full of advice but probably shouldn’t be followed without serious caution, and we can carefully weigh with gratitude the advice born of a real Jesus-loving walk that you watch the speaker live out right in front of you, day after day. 

But on the internet, you don’t see any of that.  Nope, just typed words and carefully selected pictures, if and.  It’s Advice-Giver’s Heaven for anyone with the gift of gab and the ability to type it out coherantly.  The cooler his grammar (said that way just to bug you grammar geeks!), the headier his vocabulary, the more frequent his Bible verse referencing, the better his advice must be, no?   

We’ve got a massive panel here of self-proclaimed “experts” preying on our ever-endemic-to-humanity levels of fear (baa). Most of the experts are well-intentioned people (endowed with, ahem, personal giftings in the area of advice-giving and leadership), but well-intentioned doesn’t mean right, and they are telling you and I what to do, how to live, what to think, and, usually, why everyone who disagrees with them is evil.   

I’d complain about these people more, but having been one and often still acting as one mistaken for one, I can’t.  All I can say is please don’t follow me.  I hope that the tone of this blog is one that conveys my deep and abiding faith that His grace is what holds me up because my feet are the sort that stumble, that my walk is a faltering one, that I am in the position of sheep, not shepherd, and that confidence and a gift-for-gab should never ever be mistaken for authority.

I Used To Be A Homeschooling Mom…

But all that’s about to change.  Because I just filled out enrollment papers for a nice little WELS Lutheran school a mile down from our new home. 

Today was their Open House, classrooms open, curriculum books laid out, teachers available to answer questions and give you a tour.  I’ve been interested in this school since last year when homeschooling friends of ours signed up their four daughters.  They didn’t just like it—they loved it.  So I’ve been curious, but admittedly skeptical, for more than one reason.  I mean, first of all, you can only quit home-schooling if you’re in full-on sin, right?  I spent most of last year wrestling through that one. 

You have to understand, I love home-schooling.  I love the theories behind alternative educational strategies.  I love books about why home makes for a top-notch education.  I love ordering home-school curriculum and I love drooling through home-school catalogs.  I planned to homeschool and started collecting materials before my first child was even born. 

There’s only one catch.  I can’t stand the actual reality of home-schooling. 

Maybe that would have been different if I had less children, or maybe if the last three hadn’t been a one-on-top-of-the-other pack of active tiger cubs boys.  Or, er, maybe not.  I use that as my excuse, but then I think, come on, Molly, would you really like homeschooling with only one child?  And I shake my head in the sort of sheepish wiggle that indicates, “Probably not.” 

Not homeschooling had never actually been a real option in my mind until last year.  Sure, I always said we “might not” homeschool for high school, but I didn’t really mean it.  Hello, I’m a home-school mom.  That’s part of my identity, part of what it means to be me.  I’d never entertained real legitimate serious thoughts of not home-schooling until last winter and it was so bad, I was only a hair-breadth away from just chucking them all into the nearby elementary school right in the middle of the school year.  I’m not sure why I didn’t.  Probably mercy.  Probably the fact that I knew that the culture shock would be hard enough without the stress of being tossed in after the classroom rhythm’s were already in full swing.  I knew that if they did go to a school, it should be in the beginning of the school year, which meant that I needed to take a deep breath and work to make it until the end of Spring.  So I did.     

When you think that home-schooling equals good parenting, you may want to quit but really have to figure out what quitting means.  Would it mean my children would all go to hell in a hand-basket?  Would it mean I didn’t truly love them?  And while I was ridden with guilt at my secret fantasy to never-ever-ever-home-school-again-for-the-rest-of-my-life, WHY was my friend, a fantastic Jesus-loving mom of five, same age as myself and with an obvious glowing affection for her brood, able to so candidly exclaim, “You homeschool?  Wow.  That’s great.  I could never homeschool.  It’s just not a fit for me.” 

How could she admit that so freely, with no trace of guilt, no apologetic explanation?  And why was that okay for her to say but somehow not okay for me to hear coming out of my own mouth? 

That’s sort of the scattered/long way of explaining how it took me about a year to be able to admit that I’m just not a homeschool kind of mom, and that not homeschooling doesn’t equal hating my kids.  Don’t get me wrong—the kids have done well at home.  My oldest scored top marks at her year-end standardized test last year, yadda yadda yadda, but, really.  I just…barely got through the year.  And, I thought, hey, this can’t be a good thing.  The kids have a mom who’s functioning on only half of herself.  I’m so exhausted just from being a mom—adding in school (as well as what happens to a house when we all are actually living in it all day long) and it just becomes flat-out too demoralizing to think about.  Depression.  I’m bubbly, I’m goofy, I’m excitable.  But I’m a depressed homeschooling mom.  Tell me I have to homeschool next year and watch me deflate. 

What a concept.  Not homeschooling might morph me into a better mom?  Woah.  I thought a “better mom” meant I was a homeschooler.  Perhaps that is true for some moms, but not true for others.  I think I’m an other.   

I also thought a lot about genetics, like how I would have hated homeschooling, social creature that I am, ever the lover of groups.  I also remembered last Fall, when my newly-turned-four son looked up at me matter-of-factly and informed us of his plans.  “Mom, I’m not going to be going to homeschool next year.  I’m going to go to a class for my school.”  The way he said, “class” was with big wide eyes and an eager grin.  I didn’t know what to say.  Where did he get that idea?  How did he even know what a classroom was?    

He’s the kid we’ve joked (behind his back, of course) about growing up to be either Nobel Prize winning Leader of Nations or the next Mafia Godfather, for reasons including the fact that the kid wasn’t made to exist anywhere but right where the action is.  Let’s just say that Israel didn’t get that from his father.  The right kind of classroom would be like rich loam for a kid like that, a place to plant his roots and drink deep.  Would the right kind of classroom do the same for my other children?  Homeschool has it’s positives and negatives, as do all other forms of education.  Would a classroom-based education be a better fit for the genetic hard-wiring of my kids?         

But how do you transition home-schooled kids into a school setting in the least painful way, and more particularly, what kind of school do you choose for them?  How do you find the “right kind of classroom?”  How do you know if you aren’t making a terrible decision?   

I don’t suppose there are any black and white answers to that question, because every family is different.  And as for us, we’re surrounded by schools–public, charter, and private, but for me, today the little private school down the road won me over.  It was like home-chool–smaller, family-ish, everybody knows everybody, warm, nurturing-yet-challenging, multiple grades in one classroom, bright classrooms…  

I walked into their Open House today, hopeful, but not expecting much.  I walked out with my arm full of papers to sign and dates to mark down on my calendar, and grinning from ear to ear.  There were no fearful thoughts of condemnation running through my brain.  In fact, the only thing I kept wondering was, WHY DIDN’T I DO THIS FIVE YEARS EARLIER??? 

Will it “work?”  Will the kids thrive?  Will it be a fit for our family?  I don’t have access to the future, so all I can say is that I’m excited about giving it a try.  For one thing, my husband thinks it’s a great idea.  Two of the kids are feeling really nervous, but the other three are jumping for joy.  School starts in two weeks, with even the youngest going to two mornings of preschool.  So I guess we’ll start finding out then.  And in the meantime, I have to start adjusting to being a school kind of mom.

Hating Love: One Woman’s Frustrated Musings

Speaking in sweeping generalities, I think one of the primary reasons we American Evangelicals like to find relationship formulas and promote our doctrinal camps and work hard to have a “Biblical worldview” about things like homosexuals and girls who dress like sluts and people who know all the lyrics to the latest gangsta rap songs, and all the other people we generally feel good about hating, is because we need those things in order to cover up the Real Issue, which is that we do not have Love and that we don’t really want it in the first place.

Love is the Impossible Way, the Way that I will fight with claws and fangs and no-holds-barred flailings.  Give me a principle to stand on.  Give me a rock to throw.  Give me a mystical experience to float through.  Give me a rulebook to follow.  Give me anything but these dust-formed hands and feet and this messy thing called Life in which I am supposed to walk in the Law (of Love) that is wholly Other than everything I know. 

We have our formulas and we know who goes to heaven.  I’m in, you’re out.  Pretty simple.  It’s all based on what you know, the list of beliefs you subscribe to, a moment of dunking/sprinkling water, on the legal contract you signed.  Not bad.  But it doesn’t fit with this passage below.  And I think about all the times I’ve walked right by Him, lost in the foggy intoxicating cloud of myself.

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory.  All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.  He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

 ”Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

 ”Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?  When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?  When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

 ”The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

 ”Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

 ”They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

 ”He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

 ”Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

When it all really comes down to it, the thing about Love that is so absolutely terrifying is that I can’t do it.  It’s the one thing that requires total dependance on the ability of Another.  And there’s the rub.