A Soft (re)Start

A few weeks ago, I was in Costco with all three of the kids - Amelia proudly sitting in the seat of the cart like a big girl, Timothy and Susannah sitting next to each other in the basket, finishing off their hot dogs from lunch.

A lady rounded the corner of the aisle we were in, and immediately began to oooh and aaaah over my adorable children. Nothing does a mother's heart good like hearing someone else praise their children. I, of course, know they're cute, but it's nice to have other people say it too, sometimes...

The lady paused her cart to watch the kids for a second (she gave me the impression of being someone who didn't have any of her own tiny people around, and missed them terribly).

Right as she seemed like she was ready to say goodbye and move on, suddenly Susannnah's lemonade somehow turned 180 degrees in her hands, and dumped straight through the grid of the cart onto the floor. As she is wont to do in these situations, Susannah froze and panicked all at once. I almost habitually began to reassure her and help her put things to rights, as I so often do.

When we had reached something like equilibrium, that sweet lady gently laid her hand on my arm and said, "Oh, you did such a good job!"

Part of me wanted to burst into tears right there at that exact moment. I had no idea, until I heard them, how much I needed to hear those words. I told my husband later, I was so thankful for her saying that because otherwise, I would have made it to the end of that day never remembering that small moment in which I did something right. My head would have just been crowded with all the moments I did the wrong thing.

It reminded me of my sister-in-law's recent experience in the grocery store where a stranger said something like "Your kids are so happy!" Then looked straight at her and said "That's because of you, you know."

These are the kind of things we need to hear and say more often. Maybe there's a time for platitudes like "the days are long, but the years are short" or "these are the best days" - those might be helpful during the infant days, but I don't remember if they were for me. They certainly aren't helpful when all day every day feels like one long battle. These don't feel like the best days when you're in the thick of it.

That sweet lady at Costco reminded me, though, to try to channel that difficulty toward pointing out the specific good I see in others in the moment when it's happening, rather than trying to soliloquize about the general "good" I see in an overarching phase of life.

We certainly all do this - I can't tell you how often I tend toward telling single young girls aching for marriage and companionship how much they're going to miss the days they're in (not helpful, even if it is true - I know this from experience), just because sometimes I personally miss things about those days. Next time, instead of a "you're going to miss this" comment, I think I'll try "What you're doing now matters, and here's why."

For What It's Worth

Last night, this blog post and the social media response I've seen to it so far were bugging me so much that I couldn't sleep. So I sat down with some graph paper and charted out everything in the original blog post into four different categories:

1. Important Truths
2. Unimportant/Unnecessary/Distracting Commentary
3. Important things that were left out
4. Falsehoods

Now, one thing needs to be gotten out of my system at the very beginning and I won't talk about it again.

Y'all, that was an extremely poorly written blog post. I couldn't even make it through the first time I read it, but when I began to see all these responses appearing, I realised I needed to read it all the way through, so I did. Honestly, though, it was so poorly written that I'm not 100 percent sure I understand where she stands on some things. I believe there may have been times (not many, but at least two) where she was disagreeing with a point made by someone else, but her writing and/or punctuation usage was just so poorly chosen that it wasn't evident. Let's be careful not to vilify her without fully understanding where she stands.

In any case, the blog post (and social media response) is something I've decided I want to talk about, so here we go.

Many of the responses I've seen come evidently out of a sense of personal injury or insecurity. I realize our personal experience does inform the way we view our world. That can't be avoided. I'm not saying we shouldn't share personal experience in response to this blog post - I'm sure I will base some of what I say upon my own life - but we should never let our personal lives guide whether or not we believe the scripture is true.

As to the blog post itself, first, let's address the title, intro, and conclusion, which comprise the majority of the second category on my graph paper (Unimportant/Unnecessary/Distracting Commentary).

The blog post begins with a question (meant to be rhetorical, I think) "Do you know how much more attractive debt-free virgins (without tattoos) are to young men?"

And it ends with "Stay virgins until marriage, out of debt, and don't get tattoos!"

Between these two sentences, there is a sprinkling of discussion about sexuality and debt, not another word about tattoos, and a whole bunch of talk about why young women should not go to college.

I could go on a rant about how this is very poor writing and would receive a C or lower in any basic college writing class, but I'm not here to do that.

I'll start off by stating the obvious: Christian or otherwise, if you're living your life based on what is attractive to the opposite sex, you're doing everything for the wrong reason.
Living for the good opinion of others is a dead end street and will never satisfy.

But what I really want to talk about is this: toward the end of that opening paragraph there is a beautiful sentence, completely overshadowed by the awful introduction, which I would urge upon everyone alike - young, old, man, or woman: "As believers in Jesus Christ, we need to live in a way that is pleasing to Him because His ways are the best."

That sentence was true and good. Living to please Christ is exactly what we are called to do as Christians, and it is the only satisfying way to live. 

The first sentence may or may not be true, but was certainly not good or scriptural.

What saddens me more than anything is that, in all the responses I've seen to this blog post, I haven't seen a single person acknowledge the good (though hard) truths that she pointed out.

Here are several of the other truths I found in her blog post as well as scripture references where applicable:

(By the way, my "Important Truths" category was by far the longest, and I haven't included all of them here)

1. Debt is a burden (Proverbs 22:7 and Romans 13:8)
2. God urges [commands] sexual purity (Hebrews 13:4)
3. Secular universities teach against the God of the Bible and His ways (This is obvious to anyone who has gone to college at a secular university)
4. Most young Christian women have not been taught to live in submission to their husbands (The biblical passage referenced here is most likely Ephesians 5, specifically verse 22. I think many young Christian women are aware of this verse, but have been taught to ignore it or misapply it. I'm also not positive I would agree with this particular blogger on what it means. I'll go into this in a little more detail later on.)
5. Older women are called to teach younger women biblical womanhood (Titus 2:3-5 is referenced here, but I'm not sure I agree with her main definition of biblical womanhood - also something I'll discuss in more depth shortly.)

These are all good, healthy, biblical truths, and if she'd stuck with these ideas and fleshed them out more in the context of living a life pleasing to the Lord, it would have been a great blog post.

Unfortunately, she chose to run off on a tangent against young women going to college, and I take issue with almost everything she said there.

Several of her reasons (and my arguments against them) are below:

She says women who go to college are unlikely to stay home raising their children.
There are any number of reasons why staying at home would be preferable for a Christian mother, so if this were true, I might agree with it, but I don't believe it is. I haven't seen statistics on this specifically, but I do know the number of stay at home moms in the U.S. has been trending upward in the last decade or more, and, as far as I know, there has not been a corresponding downturn in women deciding to attend college.

She also says the husband of a woman who went to college will need to take years to teach his wife the correct way to think since college will have taught her all the wrong ways.
(To be fair, this is one of those places where I'm not absolutely sure whether she's agreeing or disagreeing with this statement which was actually made by someone else.)
Here's what she's completely ignoring though - godly young women who go to college are not just sitting there with their mouths open, willingly swallowing whatever is placed inside. Perhaps some are, but most are weighing what is told them against the scripture, taking their questions to those who are older and wiser, and listening to the Holy Spirit within them, who teaches them to resist false teaching.

Next, she says "They will start having babies later in life. That is if they can still conceive naturally."

*Picture the laughing crying emoji dancing across this entire line*

What?

How long does she think it takes to get through college? Most young women who go to college will graduate by the time they're 22 or 23. For me, it was 24.
All I'll say here is if they're having trouble conceiving at that time, it has nothing to do with having gone to college.
An important thing to note here is that college does not equal career. If you want to talk about women putting careers before children, that's a different thing entirely. The argument she is putting forth is against women going to college, and that's what I'm speaking about here.
It may also be that she is equating going to college with accruing debt, in which case I could understand a concern that women would feel the need to work in order to pay off that debt and so put off having children. But the fact is, college does not equal debt either. I made it through a 4-year degree from a State University without any debt, and no, I didn't have a rich uncle who paid for it!

Next, she says "'They lost a handful of years of experience learning to cook large meals and learning how to work in the garden...' (Young women learn nothing about biblical womanhood or what it takes to run a home when they go to college. They don't learn to serve others either. They learn the ways of the world instead.)"

I'll admit I never saw a college course offered on "Biblical Womanhood" or "How to Run a Home and Cook Large Meals" and I definitely did learn a lot about the ways of the world when I went to college.

But you know what else I learned? Here's a sample list:
Take the trash out when it needs to be taken out
Inviting 5 people over when you live in a house with 4 other people means you need to cook a lot of food
You need spiritual mentors who will not only talk about scripture, but will enter into your daily life and tell you when you're neglecting things - it they don't find you, go find them

If that doesn't fit those requirements, I don't know what does, but let's take a closer look at Titus 2:3-5 to see if this is actually what biblical womanhood is about: "...train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands..."
That, my friends, is biblical womanhood, and it is a shaping of the heart and mental attitudes that neither years of experience cooking large meals and working in a garden nor a college education will ever teach. We only learn biblical womanhood from the influence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, being an active part of a biblical church, and being willing to learn from wise older women.

This brings me to another quibble I have with this blog post - I'm not positive, but it seems to me that she is disappointed in churches who "support college kids" - I'm assuming she is referring to college ministries and the like here. Goodness gracious! As we've just established, church is the only way most of us are going to learn biblical womanhood, college students or otherwise. Please, churches, keep supporting those college kids! (And also (which may be more her point) include the ones of college age who have chosen not to attend college - we all need to learn how to be God-honoring adults - it is not something that comes naturally for any of us.)

One last thing I want to say, and then I'll close. There is a lot of talk throughout this blog post about young women who want to be wives and mothers one day and how they should behave "until they get married."

Oh friends, I have talked about this before, and I'll say it again briefly. We do not know whether the Lord intends marriage for people or not. We cannot assume that all young women who want to be married will be married!

Let's focus on the truths found in scripture and allow them to shape our lives. Let's even follow the sound advice offered by the second to last sentence in that original blog post:

"Trust God with your life, study the Word, and take the narrow path that leads to life."

And I would add, ignore all the other stuff!

Y'all, my husband bought me a faucet!

And it may be my favorite gift from him to date.

Let me just tell you the saga of the faucet:

As you may or may not know, we live in a house (a gorgeous house, might I add) that was built in 1927. It has been well maintained and relatively untouched since that time. (Read: original hardwood floors and some original bathroom tile and fixtures, beautiful woodwork throughout, many of the original windows. Eeek! Dream come true, basically, if you ask me...)
Obviously, though, since people have been living in it all this time, the kitchen has been "updated" multiple times, and is in need of a complete overhaul at this point.
It doesn't fit the charm of the rest of the house at all in terms of appliances and it's not the most practical in terms of layout, but it is functional.
Soooooo, we're not making any decisions about "big" things until we really know what we love and what works well for us as a family.

Enter leaky kitchen faucet in the first week of our marriage...
I dont know if it was because I was washing so many new dishes or what. (Thanks everybody who gave me beautiful dishware for my wedding! That was the most fun I've ever had washing dishes, and you may have inadvertently contributed to my new faucet as well!)
I was honestly secretly glad when the faucet started leaking, because it was far from being my favorite thing about the house.

In fact, I have a very distinct memory from the first time I washed dishes in this house, when we were still dating. I thought to myself at the time "this may be the most poorly thought-out kitchen sink situation I have ever experienced."

You're not convinced? Behold the evidence:

The faucet is centered over the small basin so that it barely reaches into the large one, and it's so short that rinsing things without banging them against the side of the ceramic sink is nearly impossible.
Unfortunately, we discovered that it wasnt really an immediate need - the leak was mostly fixable by replacing some piping through the cabinet below and just not using my sprayer. It wasn't a perfect, long-term fix, but it worked for the present.
I just adjusted my dishwashing practices and went about life as usual.

But a seed had been planted in both of our minds. We wanted a new faucet.

Now, if we were going to make the investment in a nice faucet, we needed to know what sink we would want in the eventual remodel, in order to know what faucet would go nicely with it.

I'll spare you that process for a different day, but, suffice it to say we ultimately decided on a ceramic sink.

Now, what faucet finish would you put with a ceramic sink? Very early on, my husband threw out polished nickel as, in a general sense, a finish that he really liked. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm ashamed to say I shot him down real quick about that one. I'd seen brushed nickel and liked that, but I was just not interested in a shiny version thereof, and he was certainly not interested in brushed.

Quite honestly, I dont think I'd ever seen a single thing finished in polished nickel. He tried describing it to me, but it just sounded like stainless, which I was not interested in. I might as well have plugged my ears and sang "la la la la la" I was so not interested.

Ultimately we settled on oil-rubbed bronze and did piles of research, but still couldnt make a decision. The sink we decided on has only one hole, so we had to get an all-in-one faucet, because there was no way I would be living for the foreseeable future without a sprayer. So, should we go with a pull-down or a pull-out? Do we want one handle or two? What should we look for to make sure it's built to last? What warranties are offered by what companies?
You get the idea. With my Father-in-law being in construction and my husband being a researcher, we covered it all.

(Of course that's a very loosely-used "we" - I was mostly, if not only, concerned with how it looked...)

Once we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted, we started window shopping, casually walking through the faucet aisle at any home inprovement store we stopped in.

You'd be amazed at how hard it is to find what you want when you actully know what you want. (And, you know, when you dont feel like spending six hundred dollars...)

But then, last night, we were at Menard's, picking up some electrical stuff, and my husband casually led the way to the faucets, as usual. We stopped at the bronze finishes, as usual, and there was one I actually liked the look of, but not a brand we had considered. We pulled the box, and my darling husband began his researching. So far so good, but we were both hesitant, having never considered that brand before.

We pulled a box from a more well-known brand, and began comparing. We decided on the first one we'd pulled, and turned to go. Then my husband noticed a marked-down box just sitting under the displays. He opened it (somebody had already done so before us, hence the mark-down), and we both fell in love.

Friends, you've probably already guessed this, but it was polished nickel. And? The most beautiful faucet I could imagine.

Just to make sure our instincts were right, we carried it over to the sink aisle and held it against a ceramic sink, and yes, it was a wonderful complement.

We walked (well, I might have skipped a bit) out of that store with our marvelous find, and I looked it up on my phone to see if it truly was polished nickel exactly, and of course it was. And while I was at it, I accidentally discovered that we'd just saved THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS off msrp.

Everything we needed was in the box, the faucet is spotless, and I couldn't be happier. I'm assuming somebody bought it online and returned it to the store? This store doesnt even appear to regularly stock polished nickel.

I guess it was just meant to be.
We brought it home and installed it immediately (as in, my husband installed it immediately - I sat at the kitchen table copying down a recipe for French Bread and handing him a wrench every once in a while, and you know what? My amazing husband finished installing that faucet before I finished my recipe.)

And here's the picture you've all been waiting for: my new, gorgeous faucet, centered on my sink with a ready-to-use sprayer!

We do need to plug those holes in our sink, and it is awfully shiny, and will show fingerprints like nobody's business, but I don't mind polishing it up every once in a while, and I did have to compromise by sacrificing my desire for the touch-on/touch-off feature, but I am so pleased with everything about this whole kitchen sink situation!

I guess the moral of the story is: listen to your husband - he's probably actually got really good taste.
And also, possibly: do your research and be patient, but when you see a golden opportunity, reach out and take it!

An Experiment

Does this little old blog still generate its own traffic?

What do pictures uploaded from my phone look like?

On Not Pursuing "The American Dream"

You know who was a really wise man?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I'm glad we have a celebration of his life, because I bet he didn't really get celebrated much while he was here.

I sometimes think even if people had publicly celebrated him during his life, he was probably too busy humbly making things happen to allow himself to be celebrated.

I've never seen a quote from him that I didn't like, but today, one hit me extra hard with it's depth of truth:

"The end of life is not to be happy, nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may."

I might be wrong, but I've always thought maybe his goal wasn't to create a political movement, but more to do what he knew God wanted him to do.  His boldness and gentleness sounds almost superhuman sometimes - he must have had more motivation than just a "cause."

I've been reading the Psalms lately, and there is so much there about our God being a God of justice - He never forgets the needy or afflicted (Ps. 9:18).

Dr. King did so much for America, but I don't know that he did it with America in mind, and he certainly didn't do it because society expected it of him (society in general didn't seem too keen on what he was doing).  He did it because he served a God of justice and he couldn't ignore that calling on his life.

To me, that's the bravest thing he did - he didn't do what people expected of him, but he did do what he knew he was supposed to do.

But what about when you're not called to bold action?

What if you're called to silent service?

Like me, what if you're working quietly and invisibly in the background?  I've been called to the background, and I'm staying there until I'm called to the front lines.

And if I'm never called to the front lines and I stay in the background for my entire life on this Earth, I will have done the best thing I could have possibly done with my one wild and precious life.

I wonder sometimes if we do our children a disservice by raising them to be movers and shakers just because that's what we do in America.

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for leaders and world-changers, but let's be sure we're not doing these things because they're what will help us be happy, achieve pleasure, and avoid pain.

Let's do good because it's right, even when it's hard and counter-cultural.

I'm a nanny, and I love those kids, and I would love to think that I'm helping, in some small way, to raise the next president of the United States (who knows - I might be), but I'm also totally on board with the kids' dad, who says frequently that he doesn't care what his kids do with their future - they could be ditch-diggers or garbage men, as long as they are being the best ditch-diggers or garbage men they can be.

The leaders and the world-changers will emerge, whether we raise them to be such or not, because they will know, just like Dr. King did, that they can't do anything but what they've been called to do.

Micah 6:8 says "He has shown you, oh man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

Let's raise up a generation to do that, and see how they will change the world.

Today I Received a Thank You Note

For a hug I gave someone 3 years ago.

I'm not kidding!

Okay, so maybe it was for a little more than the hug, but seriously, I was kind of overwhelmed by the fact that she mentioned me hugging her on a hard day as a memory that has stayed with her this long. How wonderful to think that little normal everyday actions we make can so impact other people's lives.

Physical touch is a necessary part of my life - hugs are my thing. Sometimes I wonder if the main reason I give them is because I need them. Regardless of all that, though, giving someone a hug on a hard day is just my natural response to their trouble.

It was really amazing to realize that what seemed small and insignificant (and maybe even routine?) at the time was very impactful on someone else.

What a powerful reminder to keep loving on others in small everyday ways!

There Used to be a "Pretty-ish Kind of Little Wilderness" Behind MyHouse

I spent my childhood in a house on the dead end of the street. No, we're not talking about a neatly groomed cul-de-sac, we're talking about asphalt that gradually turned to grass, which quickly turned to woods.

It was really idyllic - there were woods on the side and behind my house, with little trails cut into them for us to explore, and, as the neighborhood slowly lost all other wooded areas, ours stayed.

Then, when I was 12, we moved to the "real" country. We had 4-wheelers, chickens, and multiple dogs and cats, and we sometimes shared our property with other people's cows. Again, idyllic - lots of exploring outside, turning trees into playhouses with only our imagination and nary a nail or board in sight.

Now, I live in a neighborhood again, and, again, in the back of the neighborhood with a little wood behind my house. One of my favorite things about this is that I get to look out the kitchen window and see green as I'm washing dishes.

But recently, someone has bought the property behind us and built a house, and it looks more and more like they're going to develop further.

Y'all , my heart is kind of breaking about this. I realize they were never my woods to begin with, but they sure brought me joy.

It's kind of like a very mild form of torture or something - every night, I go to sleep thinking, well, surely they're done now, but every morning I wake up and they're back at it again.

But there is no great loss without some small gain, and my consolation is that, if I get up early enough, I can now see the sunrise out of my kitchen window. Along with a house and the few scraggly trees they left behind...