Loud and Proud

So about the homeschooling kick I'm on...

Here's my trajectory, laid out so I can remember because I already find myself forgetting how I came to think of it as remotely possible in the first place.

I read Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, which I believe I found by bopping around the "Customers Also Bought" links on Amazon. That raised some good points about education and started me thinking about what I hope for my boys to learn.

Then I read a whole bunch of stuff on teh webz and from the lie-barry. Some useful, some fascinating in a wow that's differnt kind of way.
Somewhere in there, more toward the second category if I'm honest, I read the Duggar's book. Yes, those Duggars. While I don't agree with the quiverfull movement (i.e. having a jillion kids because you believe God commands it) as theology, there's something to the openness with which they live their lives that I find admirable.

There will be things I do in my life which won't find approval from the majority of people. They will think I'm small-minded, provincial, perhaps even a "neanderthal" as one of my colleagues has said about women who stay home. Well, we're adopting. We're Christians. We are looking at homeschooling. There are mistakes to be made, and I'm going to set out and make them without hiding what I think or just plain hiding. I hope I don't swing too far the other way and err toward squashing others in the process, but I'm done with worry silencing me.

Dave Ramsey reminded me of a quote today at a seminar full of great quotes:
"To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. ~Aristotle"

... and of course “The fear of man lays a snare,” the Bible says, “but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe” (Proverbs 29:25).

The fear of man is a somewhat Christianese phrase, but it is such a great concept, and encapsulates one of the primary differences between a Gospel-centered theology and one based falsely on ideas of prosperity, ease and blessing belonging to Christians in their worldly lives. Being driven by prosperity gospels and even bless-perity gospels lead Christians to be all sorts of jerks to their fellow humans. I like how Piper describes our longing to worship the blessings rather than the God giving them:

"We all make a god out of what we take the most pleasure in. Christian Hedonists want to make God their God by seeking after the greatest pleasure—pleasure in him.

By Christian Hedonism, we do not mean that our happiness is the highest good. We mean that pursuing the highest good will always result in our greatest happiness in the end. We should pursue this happiness, and pursue it with all our might. The desire to be happy is a proper motive for every good deed, and if you abandon the pursuit of your own joy you cannot love man or please God."

Totally unrelated to the post, I giggled when I saw that googling "fear of man" gives you an option of googling "fear of
mannequins". Let's face it: they are creepy, creepy indeed.

Tap tap tap...

Is this thing on?

I just read the stale old posts left here, and realized I'd like to get back to this whole blogging schtick.

Updates are: We left that church we were going to after 2 years there. We wish them well, but I am much happier at our new digs. We've been reading the Bible a lot more in the last 18 months or so, and went to the Desiring God conference, and a few other reformed theology conferences. I hope to write more about this stuff, but if you're looking for good podcasts I recommend Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church, Dr. John Piper, and a whole bunch more. Start with Marky D's doctrine series- it's very good. Perfect length for listening on the treadmill, too.

I'm thinking of homeschooling. In related news, we bought some hermit crabs, I'm making a fort out of a huge truck hubcap and curly willow, I like canning vegetables, and if I had a zillion dollars I would buy a small farm slash compound. You'd be invited, but only if you promise to shoot me on sight if you see me wearing floor-length denim skirts with white tennis shoes (my first ever homeschooling joke, you're welcome).


Isn't there a blog around here somewhere?


















Isaac turned 3 and has developed a fascinating array of facial expressions. Many approximate real faces people make. All are more dramatic. Like William Shatner in face form.






















At the end of the summer we plan to adopt. A human, not a habit or a theology or a pet. Though those sound (mostly) simpler.

At least we made it!

I took this with my phone about 10 minutes away from J's office Halloween Party. Both boys were so tired, and even when we stopped the car, opened the doors and started stuffing their warm & sticky little boy feet into their shoes they STILL didn't wake up. We had to use the c-word. ("CANDY!")

It was better than last year, when I tragically took too long to make a diaper box into a car costume for Toby and missed the party all together. That made me grumpy for a good week.

We had two ginormous pumpkins- in fact we still have their carcasses and guts all over our driveway. I'm sure the HOA is impressed. The are big enough that the boys can sit inside each and pretend they're on a train. Except Isaac is too prissy and doesn't like the feel of cold pumpkin all around him.

On another uncomfortable note... I spoke to one of the leaders of our church today. Ours is a church that believes over-programming is a real problem and that giving people pre-set ways to plug into a church can be detrimental to building true relationships among believers. I'm not sure I'm representing that fully, but there doesn't really seem to be a set statement available about this kind of philosophy. They use the word "organic" a lot and they emphasize connecting through House Churches. For our house church we go twice a month to a house about 3 miles from our own to worship, learn a bit more about the sermon and pray for each other. I love our House Church, but the reason I went to chat with the leader was that it just wasn't cutting it for me as far as bible study or connection with other moms in particular.

The chat I had went pretty much as I thought it would. She outlined their view again, and made clear that the church is not likely to change any of this any time soon. (I.E. They aren't going to let me start a bible study for moms and use their website to link people together.) I think at my most strident I said something about people with addictions and depression getting more help than young moms. But then I've been known to dabble in the dramatic from time to time, and I honestly did come around to their way of thinking at least a little.

It's true that if they provided a group for me to just show up and be a part of, I most likely would NOT be looking for relationships with people from the church on my own. And it's entirely possible that we would never have gone to House Church if I hadn't pestered J because I was going nuts without any community outside of tiny demanding people who share a large part of my DNA. So I would feel better and more connected but my family might not be and the church's vision for House Churches would become further from reality.

I am not fully convinced, but I'm willing to "give it six more months" as requested by the leadership. I still think parenthood, especially with preschoolers, is a demanding and challenging time. It's supposed to be a great time to set up habits and understanding of God in your child and I would love our church to give me direction there. We chose this church because of the fantastic preaching. Absolutely outstanding doctrine- and plenty of it each week to keep my own study lively just by looking into all the reference verses they give. You can find podcasts here.

I am a marshmallow.

Maybe a Peep?

I bawled in church today. Not because it's Easter and not because of the message.

It's these words, and the act of trying to sing them with a group of people:
~
How deep the Father's love for us
How vast beyond all measure
That He would give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure

How great the pain of searing loss
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the chosen One
Bring many sons to glory

Behold the Man upon a cross
My guilt upon His shoulders
Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers

It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished
His dying breath has brought me life
I know that it is finished

I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no powr's, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death and resurrection

Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom
~
It's especially those italicized verses that make my throat tight and hurty. The fact that my husband drives straight home, gets out his guitar and figures out the chords is pretty awesome, too. This year, I have that wonderful Christmassy feeling at Easter instead. It's probably better that way, really.

It's not that we prepared especially. We certainly don't have an Easter tree, and my mom had to buy all the egg decoratin' gear for Toby to have any memory of this year's holiday at all. We did stop at WalMart this morning and snag the very last bag of malted eggs in the whole state, apparently. We didn't even do lent despite my fascination with it. I guess you could say it's a pretty distant fascination, sort of like the way I feel about people who run ultra marathons or play in the Met Opera orchestra.

It's just that I feel the recent clouds- adoption failure, new baby haze, heinous church shopping, the various infections and medical mysteries the boys suddenly seem bent on collecting- have disipated. They're there, but it just feels like life and not so much like the other.

Yesterday I watched a community come together and celebrate a violist who was killed the year I moved here. I play some of her gigs, I have the priveledge of carpooling with some of her good friends. Preparing for the concert was a heavy responsibility and I found myself cherishing all the goofy things in my hectic and lovely life. It turned out to be fun, and fulfilling and I think she must have been quite something considering all the funny stories people were remembering. Sassy. I like that word even more now.

I love Easter. God bless you, internet.

Inconspicuous Jesus

Okay, don't get mad. That title comes from a morning spent googling infant diseases and constantly coming up with references to a condition involving boy-parts. I'm not blaspheming, it's just running through my incredibly pious head. Hey, look, a picture of baby Jesus with, like, 16-pack abs! It frightened me at a Catholic church gig last month so I knew I had to show it to you immediately.

We're up against another non-negotiable problem with the church we thought we finally liked. The worship dude had a full sleeve and often pronounced things like that guy from the Decemberists, which tells me he's got to have at least some redeeming qualities. So that wasn't the problem. It was a boring theological thingamaBLEH that the pastor said in the middle of his sermon. J and I exchanged glances, zipped up our matching christian-fish-eating-darwin bible covers and backed out while hissing and speaking in tongues. Not really. We haven't sprung for the covers yet.

So I guess instead of finding a church we'll just have to start our own sect. To belong, you must like 79.4% of the following:

Mexican food (margaritas required)
Lawyers
24 or CSI
Violas above all those inferior instruments (that's a gimme- how could you not, you heathen? Also, if you say, "Isn't that kinda like a violin?" we will betray you for 30 pieces of silver.)
This American Life
Irony and/or Sarcasm

I feel like I'm forgetting something...

Externally processing churchy things...

I still feel really out of my zone in Portland despite our living here for three years now.

I've been thinking about why I still feel like a stranger, and I think it has a lot to do with my misperception of church. When Jonathan and I met we were part of an amazing place, with a mix of ages and other socio-economic junk. The way they did the worship music built a community unto itself- anybody could play but you had to attend a regular Wednesday night rehearsal every week. If you weren't playing that week you'd study music or theology or sit around and eat donuts, but you were, forgive the Christianese, plugged in. At the time I just assumed other churches tried to do something similar.

As if.

We went to a church here called Imago Dei for two years before we started shopping again. Toby was dedicated there. Imago is famous for being post-modern, edgy, young: Don Miller's church. We loved the pastor, we loved the idea that creativity honors and expresses our creator, loved exchanging ideas for new tattoos, we even met a handfull (okay, three) friendly people there. I just ended up feeling completely unwelcome. I tried the membership class twice. Both times somebody asked "Why would God allow evil in our lives if he's supposed to be good". The first time the question came from an emotionally disturbed girl (a girl like the girl in The Breakfast Club but without the kissing and the emergence from weirdness). The teacher/pastor person basically said We Don't Have Time for That Kind of Question. I thought, well, maybe he's new to this and just wasn't ready to go there. He was following a hand out. But when it happened again, this time from somebody who had spoken to the church several times on Sunday and was on payroll there, I had had enough.

When I walk down the halls of a church, I guess I would hope to see some people planted there. They don't have to wear a tie and shake my hand. They don't even have to say anything, maybe smile sometimes, but if I have a question or want a program or need some prayer it would be nice to not feel as though I'm messing up their clique. And if it's a staff member then my feeling is they are OBLIGATED to be nice, because it's not their church.

At Imago I served on worship, I tried the classes (including one whose teacher later said he had questions about Jesus' divinity), I tried a house church, I served in the kid check-in, and I almost served as the Women's Coordinator. I told them I couldn't do that last one because my husband's job was changing, we might have to move, we might be adopting and I was pregnant with my second kid. They said okay, we'll find somebody else and never asked me about any one of those things again. Is that community? We've gone back from time to time because there are a few people we love, but the last two times people walked past me whose homes I've been in without so much as a Good Morning.

I wasn't raised in a church, but I have come to believe it's really important for me now to be part of one. I need mentors and inspirors and I need to serve. It baffles me that God would make it so flipping hard to figure out where I should be doing that. Lots of things He does confuse me, I have tons of questions and I can't understand why it would be hard to find the answers. I've spent a lot of the last year doing my own (lazy) kind of wrestling with God, which really amounted to me not asking him out to coffee or hiring Him for any gigs for a while. He still showed me some stuff, but I figured if He was going to be all distant then two could play that game.

For about a month we've been going to a new place. The pastor is completely amazing. He includes a heaping pile of verses every time, he's memorable and humble and funny. He reminds me of our Madison pastor- a man who looked and sort of spoke like an accountant but gave sermons I remember to this day. The church seems pretty bare-bones as far as I can tell, but it's got all the essentials.

I've changed my requirements for a church. If I don't make a bunch of bff's there, I'll be a little disappointed but not shocked. If we find a way to get directly involved, great. If not, then I'm going to buckle down and focus on the teaching. Which brings me to the biggest shift in my thinking: I am the only one responsible for my knowledge of God. No church or school or study will fix the problem if I don't just do it, no matter how many verses they cover. It's like practicing. Or running. Or any of a million SHOULDs I love/dread every day.

I'm trying to thicken my skin, to look for my family where God puts it. I'm hoping this makes me feel more at home.

Inspiring

I wanted to put some thought and organized writing into this post, but for now I'm just going to get it out.

This weekend at Imago, an African man called Saah Joseph came and told us a little bit about how our church and others had helped him in his pursuits over the past year. He told us a ton of churches have sent folks over to talk about how they were going to supply wells and promising him the moon, only to disappear. I cannot fathom how a church could do that to people in such dire straits. Christians should be outraged at that, maybe hunt down the offenders and slap them with fish. I recommend either electric eels or spiny blowfish. But that's not what impressed me about Saah's story: check out a few of his accomplishments.

Saah played on the Liberian national soccer team before the chaos in Sierra Leone in the late nineties. Since the struggles he has planted 17 churches, 12 schools and a technical program for women whose only choice before his doors opened was prostitution. His programs sound practical and effective: for $500 sponsorship the street women are taught to read, given a meal a day and basic medical care, given a sewing machine, given prenatal care should they need it, and upon graduation receive $100 toward starting a business. This is a man whose father was killed and mother shot, who was forced to escape on foot, walking more than 400 miles through the bush to a refugee camp. He is 32 years old.

He is 32. 32!

He was joined on our church stage by Benjamin Nkusi, a man who survived the genocide in Rwanda. This guy spoke so matter-of-factly with the lilting accent of Africa that you could easily have missed the facts of his story. He hid in a home with his wife when the rebels came, and hearing them fire on the room where she lay he assumed she was killed. Fortunately, she was unharmed. They were then stranded behind enemy lines without food, and he was forced to go out in search of some. He said this like I would mention a trip to Target. In fact, he had to leave their hiding place on foot, was picked up by somebody with a truck and unfortunately didn't escape the notice of the rebels. They pulled him from the truck and tied him in the back room of a bar. He said a man drinking in the bar was a "specialist in the killing of people", in just the tone you or I might mention that somebody's very good at Trivial Pursuit. Happily for Benjamin, a priest happened by while he waited for his executioner and asked permission to speak with the prisoner, then chided the rebels for having innocent blood on their hands. And they let him go. I imagine that saying this is an exceedingly rare outcome is an understatement.

After the genocide, Benjamin started a ministry of reconciliation (ALARM) and has seen executioners turn themselves over to the mercy of families of those they killed. As he said, "it was very difficult for those families, but they were able to show mercy and forgiveness."

There are so many unimaginables in these stories that I can hardly believe I sat in the same room with these people. I've seen Hotel Rwanda, I had Japanese friends who were in Sierra Leone as all hell broke loose. Reconciliation, grace, mercy, hope: these words act weighty, but what do they really have to do with my own world?

The grief and terror these people have experienced is so indescribable: hopefully it doesn't also become forgettable in the clutter of my daily life.

ps. If you'd like a good place to start with support, try Living Water International. It's our church's Lent project.

The Braxton sucks sermon.

Sorry, blog. I'm pretty tired lately.

I spend a lot of time cursing Toni Braxton. Okay, I know they're really called Braxton-Hicks, but whatever you call them, practice contractions are of the devil. Besides, she clearly has poor taste in how to help endorse dental floss and Charmin.

Anyway, I'm running around feeling all my insides tense up and wondering if we are going to go from a family of three to five in a short period of time, maybe even shorter than we thought. And I wonder if I will be allowed to have a life outside mommyhood between now and my first year in the AARP. And if maybe parenting's what I'm supposed to do to the exclusion of other stuff. And whether I can do all this and still focus on my faith and my marriage let alone my music. Yup, MY. Mine. Me me me. I feel no guilt saying I've gotta be able to honestly commit to the roles I choose, especially parenting.

I've been reading John Piper's Future Grace, and it has already changed the way I thought about how we are supposed to live. The modern Church's way of sort of making good living a required & expected response to God, a "thank-you" lived out to repay Him, cheapens grace. It's unattractive to non-believers because it is all premised on a transaction-style dead and dusty faith. You're either in... or you're out. Worse, it's not what's emphasized by God in the Bible. Piper makes a very convincing case for our living by reliance and joy and thankfulness for Future Grace- well, here are some of my favorite of his words:

If grace is to be free- which is the very meaning of grace- we cannot view it as something to be repaid... {the debtor's ethic}
[and]
The Bible does not assume the true believers will have no anxieties. Instead the Bible tells us how to fight when they strike.
[and]
This is not decoration on the permanent structure of Christian life, it is what makes the Christian life permanent. We live moment by moment from the strength of future grace...

This is a radical idea, and it brings the emphasis back to a lively and almost dangerously current view of faith. There should be no worldly safety in being a Christian (incidentally, no guarantee of prosperity either). God's got us in a world full of all kinds of challenges but even greater piles of grace are available and God deigns to allow his grace to show (be glorified!) through us. It should be a little scary to ask for opportunities to be given those gifts, if we really understand what we're asking.

Just in case anyone's still reading, looky what Toby ate for dessert after lunch. Playdough!!

Play?!

This morning we went to the Indoor Play Park at our community center. It blows Toby's mind every time- he starts running around with his hand up and knees high, alot like the kid in all those Maurice Sendak stories. For $1.50 and some extra taxes, I think this place is a steal.

I walk in and feel like a good parent. I can see how great my kid is when he's playing there. I feel that way at book babies and when I take him for leisurely walks, too. We need to do that stuff more often, and I hope I remember that when there are two of them.

It's funny how deeply my feelings about myself still affect my behavior. I guess I always thought that I would automatically be more secure in these things as an adult. When I've been practicing regularly I feel like a great violist and I play better. I'm not talking about being better prepared- I mean I concentrate and expect more of myself even thought I might play all the notes either way. When I feel good about my body I take the best care of it, and if I think I'm a good wife then I'm able to let go of all the multitude of annoying things J does. Ha! Just kidding, sweetums, you light up my life. Let's have another discussion about copyright and THE LAW (echooo echoooooo), shall we?

There is a thought and a post brewing on gratitude, anxiety, God and my daily outlook on life. You'll be the first to know if anything solidifies in the muck of my mind.

Doing our part... for the economy.

We bought/received this as a big huge Christmas present this weekend.



It looks really nice in our living room. Our Materialism Guilt Reduction plan is to cancel cable and get a Tivo box for the public channels instead. I have decided that Tivo is essential. It is sooooooo nice to never "have to" watch tv, even though sitting there comatose is clearly not much of a hardship for us in general.

My other new plan is to just screw it and do my bible study while watching. I know. It's clear what my priorities are, right? Well, that's where I am right now, and I'm not going to get up any earlier or give up any time with J. I need all the time I can cobble together during the day for practicing, so there it is. We'll see how it goes, maybe I'll trudge upstairs if the tv's too distracting.

I really like our church's take on Christmas- our pastor and his friends started this old idea of the Advent Conspiracy. "...an international movement restoring the scandal of Christmas by worshipping Jesus through compassion, not consumption."

As you can see from the flatscreen 42"-er, we aren't exactly turning it all over to God yet. It's hard to find a balance between doing what we'd like to and doing what we're expected to do. It doesn't feel fair to skimp on generous people we may see only a couple times a year. For us, the reduction of consumption will start with our immediate family and the people we're able to give to relationally.