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Heroes

Apr6

Barbara at MommyLife is blogging about and asking about heroes. She lists four heroes: Joan of Arc, Winston Churchill, Henry V, and Mother Teresa. I tend to take my heroes (and heroines) from fiction rather than rather real life since there’s then no danger of my finding out that the person I was admiring is not such a hero after all. In fact, I think I became rather careful about real life heroes when I was a teenager. I greatly admired a couple in my church, Godly people, wise teachers, hospitable, leaders in our church. You can probably guess the end of the story. A couple of years after I graduated from high school the wise Christian man to whom I had gone for counsel and advice left his wife and four children saying that his wife of twenty years was no longer interesting or attractive to him. I was disillusioned, to say the least. Even historical heroes can be deconstructed and demythologized, a la Thomas Jefferson, into anti-heroes or at least flawed heroes.

The danger in having fictional heroes is that I may not be able to live up to their fictional perfection. However, high standards aren’t all bad, as long as you cut yourself some slack. At least with fictional heroes, I know all about the person, good and bad. Frodo’s not going surprise and disillusion me by deciding to give in to the evil of Sauron. So my fictional heroes are:
1. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee. Like Churchill, they never gave up even when everything looked as if it were hopeless. And contrary to the movie depiction, they never lost faith in each other. I want to be as faithful and loyal and hopeful as Sam Gamgee.
2. Horton. (Dr. Seuss) “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. And an elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.”
3. Frog and Toad. (Arnold Lobel) Their friendship is unshakeable. Even when Toad is a grouch or Frog is a bit dense, they still stick together and look out for each other.
4. Don Quixote. He dreamed and believed in his dream no matter what happened. He endured suffering and abuse and hardship and misunderstanding and doubt and still knew himself to be Don Quixote de la Mancha, knight errant.

I begin to see a theme here. My heroes are those who live out this verse: I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 2 Timothy 4:7

I do have some Biblical heroes:
1. Job: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.” Job 13:15
2. Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” John 6:68-69

And I do admire some living and historical people. I simply remind myself that human beings may fail or disappoint, but there is only One who never fails.

1. Joni Eareckson Tada. She continues to point to hope in the Lord after twenty or more years in a wheelchair.
2. I know at least two mothers who have been serving the Lord, homeschooling their children, honoring their husbands for many years. SJ has thirteen children, and several of them are grown. SJ isn’t perfect, and neither are her children, although those who are grown are serving the Lord, too. However, she is faithful. She continues to do what God has called her to do, faithfully serving her husband and her children and her Lord. She is a heroine.
JR has seven children. She also remains faithful to her calling in spite of physical infirmities and prodigal children. Some of her children have made good choices, and some have not–yet. She continues to pray for them and love them and train her other children who are still at home. She, too, is a heroine.
3. Corrie ten Boom. She served the Lord in obscurity until World War 2 and Hitler’s persecution of the Jews brought a crisis of decision to her doorstep. She couldn’t turn these persecuted people away, so she hid them. Then she survived prison and managed, by God’s grace, to forgive those who were cruel to her and killed her sister, Betsy. And she never quit testifying to the goodness and hope to be found in the Lord Jesus Christ: “there is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.”
4. C.S. Lewis. He, too, remained faithful to His Lord to the end of his life. “Feelings come and go, and when they come a good use can be made of them: they cannot be our regular spiritual diet.” The Screwtape Letters

These are the kinds of heroes I want to emulate. I want, not to just make a good start, but to finish the race. I want to be found faithful.
Thanks, Barbara, for making me think about heroes and renew my commitment to faithfulness in the Lord’s grace.

Cafes, Cathedrals and Communities

Apr4

Cafes and cathedrals are both very good things and have their places within communities. But somehow I think that “cathedral thinking” in this century requires us to consider a vision that is both bigger than a simple cafe and smaller than a city-of-God-type cathedral. We need to be building communities. My problem is that I don’t really know how to go about doing such a thing. I do have several models and threads of ideas from various sources:

1. The mega-churches aren’t all bad, after all. Build a place that becomes a community center, a place for people to come and exercise, study, have lunch, do crafts, and worship. The problem with these mega-church buildings is that the (relatively) rich people who build them sometimes feel such a sense of ownership that the “riff-raff” are discouraged from attending the church or using the building or becoming part of the community. So we need a central space/building that is dedicated to God by the entire community.

2. The Highlands Study Center isn’t a mega-church with a huge multi-purpose building, but they are a group of Presbyterians who are building a community similar to what I have in mind.

The Highlands Study Center exists to help Christians live more simple, separate, and deliberate lives to the glory of God and for the building of His kingdom. And that’s a big job, one done not simply, but deliberately. As a ministry of Saint Peter Presbyterian Church, we stand with the Westminster Standards. Our hope is to help Reformed believers apply those principles to the way we live our lives. To that end we have a number of different ministries.

I doubt if I’m reformed enough or theologically erudite enough for them, but the idea of a community of mostly homeschooling families gathered around a church and study center is appealing. Somehow I still want to add in the outreach and evangelism component of Catez’s Open Late Cafe.

3. In her book The Severed Wasp, Madeleine L’Engle creates a Christian community that revolves around life at a fictional New York Episcopal Cathedral. The setting is based on Ms. L’Engle’s real-life experiences as volunteer librarian and writer-in-residence at the Epsicopal Cathedral of St. John Divine in New York City. Norma at Collecting My Thoughts wrote last year about her Lutheran church and its many ministries, including a Visual Arts Ministry which showcases various artists including, but not limited to, church members. Our churches and cathedrals and communities should be places for artists and poets and writers-in-residence and architects and musicians to work and worship and follow God’s calling in their lives.

4. L’abri Fellowship in its various forms and locations is another model for what I’m trying to articulate.

L’Abri is a French word that means shelter. The first L’Abri community was founded in Switzerland in 1955 by Dr. Francis Schaeffer and his wife, Edith. Dr. Schaeffer was a Christian theologian and philosopher who also authored a number of books on theology, philosophy, general culture and the arts.
The L’Abri communities are study centers in Europe, Asia and America where individuals have the opportunity to seek answers to honest questions about God and the significance of human life. L’Abri believes that Christianity speaks to all aspects of life.

5. Another model is the Celtic monastery that I wrote about here.

6. Our homeschool co-op, called REACH, is yet another example of intentional Christian community that reaches across denominational lines. We have about 100 families participating in a co-op in which mostly moms teach children from babies to high schoolers on Firday mornings. All the moms teach or help in some way; we use the facilities at a large Baptist church. We are not a church, but we have learned to care for one another in a way similar to the way a church cares for its members. And we call on the gifts of each co-op member in a way that parallels the way the great cathedrals were built. To teach our children we need mathematicians and scientists and crafters and artists and nurturers and organizers and bloggers and readers. We all work together to build and maintain an organization that we hope will help educate the children and bring glory to God.

Study and evangelism and the arts and worship and families and churches and libraries and other institutions with actual buildings—I think we should be building all of these things to the glory of God. I would like to see these things built together as a Living Cathedral that forms a vibrant Christian community. I don’t know how you organize such a vision and bring it to fruition without the huge institutional support from the Catholic Church that was in place already during the Middle Ages. I guess what I’m seeing are many scattered communities-in-the-making and ministries and churches with a bit of vision for this or that piece of the Living Cathedral I’m envisioning, but nothing to bring it all together in any one place and make something that would glorify God and draw men to Him for generations to come.
Maybe you start small and trust the Holy Spirit to bring things together into a unified whole in His own time.

Good Friday

Mar25

Today is Good Friday, the day of Jesus’s crucifixion. This year it’s also the day that Jewish people celebrate Purim, the commemoration of the deliverance of the Jewish people from genocide at the hand of a Persian official named Haman. The fact that the two holidays coincide is appropriate since Esther risked her life to deliver her people from their enemies, and Jesus gave his life to rescue us from Our Enemy.
This year Passover, however, the Jewish holiday that most closely relates to the holiday Christians are celebrating this weekend, isn’t until late April. I have never understood why Passover and Easter week don’t always come at the same time. If that’s not confusing enough, Orthodox Christians use different rules for determining the date of Easter, and one of the rules is that “Easter shall never precede or coincide with Jewish Passover, but must always follow it.”
Right.
Nevertheless, Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples on Thursday evening before he was crucified on Friday. And the Bible says that He became our Passover sacrifice, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Because of His blood shed for our sin, death and Satan no longer have lordship over those who trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Hallelujah! It truly is a good Friday.

Bored–Nothing To Do

Mar14

Spring break hasn’t even started yet, and one of the urchins is already worried about being bored. While I’m tempted to bop her over the head, I promised instead to make her a list of 100 things to do. Here’s the list. Feel free to use it to amuse and stimulate your bored urchin.

1. Read a book and write about it on your blog.
2. Bake a cake or some cookies and give them away.
3. Help Bee with her scrapbook.
4. Organize all the pictures you’ve taken with your digital camera into a scrapbook on the computer. (iPhoto?)
5. Sweep the porch or the driveway.
6. Plant the flowers in the flower bed around the tree in the front yard.
7. Go to the bookstore with your sister.
8. Help Bear clean and rearrange her room.
9. Read to Z-baby.
10. Send postcards to all your friends telling them how much they mean to you.
11. Write a real letter to your grandmother or to your aunt or to your cousin.
12. Take a photograph for each letter of the alphabet and make Z-baby an alphabet book.
13. Take someone with you and go for a walk.
14. Make a list of 100 random things about you: books you like, clothes you wear, things you’ve done, things you want to do, etc.
15. Draw a picture of something beautiful and give it to someone, or frame it and put it on your wall.
16. Plan a meal and make it for the family.
17. Write someone’s name at the top of a piece of paper. List all the ways you can think of to bless that person.
18. Rearrange and clean out your bookshelf.
19. Make a pillow for someone you love.
20. Write a poem every hour for a whole day–12 poems. Share them with someone you love or post them on your blog.
21. Make a list of every person you know and beside each name write at least one good thing about each person.
22. Find your favorite poem. Read it out loud twice a day until you have it memorized.
23. Read Psalms all the way through.
24. Find a place where you can be alone and pray for 15 minutes. Can’t make it for 15 minutes? Try 10. Try 5 minutes.
25. Go for a whole day without speaking. Can you do it? What do you learn by not talking?
26. Write a letter to yourself to be opened at your high school graduation. Tell yourself what you would like to be doing when you are eighteen.
27. Tell knock-knock jokes with Z-baby.
28. Make jello.
29. Put on some music and dance with your sisters.
30. Choose a drawer and clean it out.
31. Learn how to say “I love you” in ten languages and make a card for someone using the languages.
32. Help Karate Kid plan his birthday.
33. Try not to think about polar bears.
34. Comment on 20 people’s blogs.
35. Play cards (Alligator) with Bee.
36. Daydream.
37. Paint your nails.
38. Do 25 crunches.
39. Play SET on the computer.
40. Make brownies.
41, Update your calendar.
42. Jump on the trampoline.
43. Call a friend on the phone.
44. Find something that’s lost.
45. Play dominoes.
46. Drink nine glasses of water in one day.
47. Put lotion on your feet and then wash someone else’s feet and put lotion on them.
48. Turn your mattress over.
49. Clean out a flowerbed and buy some seeds to plant in it.
50. Tell somebody a joke.
51. Sort out our photographs. Have an envelope for each person in our family and and envelope for groups.
52. Match all the socks in the sock basket.
53. Ask Daddy to give you all his shirts that are missing buttons. Sew buttons on them.
54. Write 100 words in a journal or blog every day–no more, no less.
55. Give every person in the house a hug.
56. Listen to someone else’s music.
57. Learn to play a musical instrument.
58. Eat so much junk food that you’re sick of it.
59. 27 fling boogie.
60. 27 give away boogie.
61. Brush your hair 100 strokes. Brush someone else’s hair 100 strokes.
62. Take a long hot bath.
63. Do a math lesson.
64. Read the encyclopedia.
65. Color in a coloring book with your little sister.
66. Ask a neighbor if you can do something to help her in her house.
67. Write a story.
68. Read the jokes in the old Reader’s Digests and tell one to someone else.
69. Watch one of the movies on Semicolon’s 105 Best Movies list that you’ve never seen.
70. Scratch someone else’s back.
71. Rake up all the pine needles in the backyard.
72. Make funny faces.
73. Clean all the writing off the windows in the gameroom.
74. Find a way to display our collection of buttons.
75. Find a new word in the dictionary and use it in conversation at least 5 times today.
76. Go outside with a piece of chalk and write something encouraging on the sidewalk–in ten different places.
77. Send a thank you note to someone who’s done something for you.
78. Wash and dry all the comforters in the house.
79. Walk around the couch and tell yourself stories.
80. Videotape the younger children doing a show or a play.
81. Clean out the van.
82. Organize the pantry.
83. Doodle on the whiteboard.
84. Read a short book of the Bible out loud all the way through.
85. Pray for ten people who need your prayers.
86. Write something in all the other children’s blank books.
87. Paint a picture.
88. Play with make-up.
89. Make milkshakes or smoothies for the family.
90. Teach Bee to play hopscotch.
91. Learn calligraphy.
92. Make a collage.
93. Find your “life verse,” the Bible verse that God is giving you to help you see His purpose in your life.
94. Think of something you want someone to do for you. Do that thing for someone else.
95. Do something kind for someone for free–in Jesus’ name.
96. Read the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). Use your camera to take one picture to illustrate each Beatitude. Or take pictures to illustrate one of the psalms.
97. Read a magazine.
98. Get Karate Kid to teach you some martial arts moves.
99. Sing a hymn out loud.
100. Sing all the songs from your favorite movie musical.

I told the bored urchin that she should do something for someone else when she’s feeling bored, but this idea didn’t go over too well. So I tried to make my list to be fun and reflect that idea. Maybe some concrete examples will help. I do believe my children spend way too much time worrying about how to entertain themselves, and that goal invites boredom. Joy really is found in service, but it’s a hard lesson to learn. (It’s also a hard lesson for me to model sometimes since I tend to be as self-centered and entertainment-seeking as the next person.)
Some of these ideas, by the way, were loosely based on ideas found at a site called 52 Projects.

To Grow or Not To Grow (Up, That Is)

Mar7

I found a link to this interesting (2002) NRO article, Let’s Have More Teen Pregnancy, by Frederica Mathewes-Green at Boar’s Head Tavern, where they’re discussing singleness and marriage and saying that the evangelical church is way too hipped on marriage.
From Mathewes-Green’s article:

Until a century or so ago, it was presumed that children were in training to be adults. From early years children helped keep the house or tend the family business or farm, assuming more responsibility each day. By late teens, children were ready to graduate to full adulthood, a status they received as an honor. How early this transition might begin is indicated by the number of traditional religious and social coming-of-age ceremonies that are administered at ages as young as 12 or 13.

But we no longer think of children as adults-in-progress. Childhood is no longer a training ground but a playground, and because we love our children and feel nostalgia for our own childhoods, we want them to be able to linger there as long as possible. We cultivate the idea of idyllic, carefree childhood, and as the years for education have stretched so have the bounds of that playground, so that we expect even “kids” in their mid-to-late twenties to avoid settling down.

I was discussing this problem with a friend just last Friday. We know a whole group of young men, homeschooled, from Christian homes, professing Christian themselves, who have dropped out of college, are working at minimum wage-type jobs, and playing around with dating, planning to get married “someday.” They don’t seem to be preparing themselves financially for marriage; they don’t have any discernable long term goals. They aren’t preparing for or taking leadership positions in the church either. If this behaviour isn’t a refusal to grow up, I don’t know what to call it.
Then, there are the dozen or more young Christian women that I can name off the top of my head who have graduated from high school, finished college, learned to manage a household in addition to preparing educationally for a career, and who still aren’t married at age 20+ or 30+. I don’t think that for most of these young ladies their standards are too high; there just aren’t as many committed Christian men as there are women. So, any suggestions? What is the key to encouraging the Christian young men that are in our families and churches to grow up and commit themselves–to marriage, to career, to education, whatever the Lord is calling them to do?

By the way, all the discussion at BHT started with this address by Dr. Albert Mohler, Part 1 and Part 2
Then, iMonk wrote this essay asking, Have We Said Too Much (about marriage, that is)?
From there, you can go on to read all sorts of responses, both pro and con.
Put me in the same camp with Dr. Mohler. I see too much anecdotal evidence that young men, especially, are delaying adulthood in many areas, not just delaying marriage. I am praying that the Holy Spirit will bring revival, not so that everybody will get married, but rather so that that the church will have the strong male leadership that it needs to follow Christ in this century.

Careless

Feb22

It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

I’ve finished re-reading The Great Gatsby for my American Literature discussion group, and my first thought is that some people lead very sad and empty lives. Hunter S. Thompson, inventor of “gonzo journalism,” shot himself on Sunday. Somehow, even though I don’t know too much about Thompson, this apparent suicide seems to fit in with Gatsby and Tom and Nick and Daisy and the lives of, not quiet, but rather loud desperation they all led.
Unfortunately, I see a lot of carelessness in our society. People carelessly have abortions or get divorces or hop from relationship to relationship leaving mayhem and confusion behind them. They carelessly retreat into drugs or alcohol or they commit suicide, leaving others to mop up their mess.
Of course, some people, like Gatsby, care tremendously. But they care about the wrong things. Gatsby thought he could find meaning in Daisy, but the green light at the end of her dock that became an object of worship for him was really a mirage. Daisy herself was a siren, not a goddess, and she had nothing to give except disilusionment and death.
The kicker is that we’re all desperate: we’re either desperately lost in sin and idolatry and ultimately despair, or we’re desperately dependent upon the Only One who can save us and mop up our messes and redeem our carelessness. And where our desperation finds an end matters not only to each of us but also to those whom our lives touch.

Upside Down

Feb19

Contra Mundum Vision at BitterSweet Life: “My tendency to invert common “life-usage,” for want of a better phrase, makes me wonder if there isn’t a redemptive use for the human trait we usually label “difficult” or “stubborn” and repress. Why not channel latent defiance into a really useful pastime: pitting oneself “against the world” (contra mundum) and turning it on its head? This isn’t just against-the-graininess. Rather, this conscious flaunting of appearances reaches toward something better. Not merely different, not merely counter-cultural, but better. True. This isn’t rebellion for fashion’s sake, but for truth’s.”
How is it that God is able to turn evil into good? Can all suffering and even sin be redeemed? Can we even begin to see the world through God’s eyes to some extent and use the lemons, not to make lemonade, but rather to make something totally new and different and even better?
George Grant says much the same thing in a post at King’s Meadow about St. Patrick. (I can’t link to the specific post; it’s dated 2.10.05) “We know that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to “those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness” (Matthew 5:10) and that great “blessings” and “rewards” eventually await those who have been “insulted,” “slandered,” and “sore vexed” who nevertheless persevere in their high callings (Matthew 5:12-13). We know that often it is in “afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, tumults, labors, sleeplessness, and hunger” (2 Corinthians 6:4-5) that our real mettle is proven. Nevertheless, we often forget that these things are not simply to be endured. They actually frame our greatest calling. They lay the foundations for our most effective ministries. It is when, like Patrick, we come to love God’s enemies and ours that we are set free for great effectiveness.”

Age of Innocence

Jun17

We watched Age of Innocence tonight, and I realized that one theme of the book and the movie is the same as this post I wrote a few days ago. Isn’t there something to be said for living in a society guarded by rules and conventions? How many people might be saved from a life of regret and misery if, at the moment when they were about to make a really stupid decision. they were reminded that society or their family or someone would not approve? Now there are no rules. Society accepts any and everything. Does this “freedom” make it possible for people to live happier, more abundant lives? I think not. We need boundaries. Biblical boundaries are best; however, if we are determined to discard those, then some sort of societal norms are better than nothing. I agree that the rules that a given society imposes may be stifling, but life without any rules and expectations is likely to hurt the weakest and those least able to protect themselves. In Age of Innocence, the characters all seem to give up passion for the sake of safety. I would argue that within the boundaries of Biblical law it is possible to live a romantic and passionate life. It truly is possible “to delight in the law of the Lord.” In fact, discarding that law brings despair, not delight.