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How we deal with death around kids

By christine on June 15th, 2013

This post stems from a question asked on a previous post about fragile baby chicks.

I remember the morning when my daughter, then still barely learning to walk, toddled around the corner of our home to find a dead bird on the ground.  She could see clearly that it was a bird, but that it was not acting like a bird.  “It’s dead,” I told her, aware that this was the first time that word had meaning for her.

Death has a way of surprising us like that, just around the corner of our home on the morning we least expect it, never when we’re ready to explain it to kids.

A friend asked how our kids have dealt with seeing chicks die, and with death and sadness in general.  It was my daughter’s idea to bury the first chick, and she wrote on a board we pounded into the ground above it: “Here lies Polar Bear, the little chick who couldn’t walk.”

Remembering, marking, celebrating, honoring.  These are all parts of accepting death, and they help us cope when death has already happened.  But I think the real work of dealing with death needs to happen during the living, on the gorgeous spring days when all is bright.

We try to be honest about life’s limits. “Life isn’t fair” isn’t just an angry line we grunt at our kids when they want a bigger piece of cake, it’s a lesson we teach our kids.  It’s reality—they’re going to get let down in life.  They’re going to go without stuff, and get let down.  It wasn’t fair that Jesus had to get the death penalty, and it isn’t fair that we’ll have to suffer for reasons beyond our control.  In every life there will be a time to weep as well as to laugh.

But we need not fear. At around age 7 our daughter went through a stage of feeling afraid every night before going to sleep.  After a while she wasn’t even sure what she was afraid of.  She told me she was just “Afraid of being afraid.”  Night after night we would console her, until one day we hit a breakthrough.  It was midafternoon, not the dark of night, and we sat on our porch and talked about all the things in life to be afraid of.  Not getting along in school.  Being left alone.  Terrible sickenesses.  A parent dying.  Naming them in daylight helped.

And so did the words to a song that she’d learned with a group of friends in South Africa:

In Christ alone my hope is found,
He is my light, my strength, my song;
this Cornerstone, this solid Ground,
firm through the fiercest drought and storm…

No guilt in life, no fear in death,
This is the power of Christ in me;
From life’s first cry to final breath.
Jesus commands my destiny.
No power of hell, no scheme of man,
Can ever pluck me from His hand;
Till He returns or calls me home,
Here in the power of Christ I’ll stand.

(Listen to it here.)

We talked about words like “destiny,” and what it means that Jesus is in charge of it.  We talked about Jesus being there no matter what storms life gives.  We talked about not having to fear death because God has even that under control.

It was one of the most important conversations about God I’ve ever had with my children. I realized as she sat there, tears streaming down her face, that this is what it’s all about.  If Jesus isn’t hope for these moments, he’s not worth anything at all.

And she got it.  I remember her tears drying, her sitting next to me quiet, accepting.  And the nighttime fear stopped, just like a light switch had been turned on somewhere deep inside her and it wasn’t dark inside anymore.

Our kids have seen more dead animals than most kids their age. They saw chickens killed and plucked and served up for lunch in Africa by kids around the age they are now.  Within a week of moving into our home we had to catch and drown a groundhog who had made a home under our living room.  Last summer a band of coons ate our first batch of chickens, starting a summer of tribal warfare between the coons versus us and our trap.  They watch our outdoor cats munching down mice and chipmunks and birds.  They watched me cut up a deer leg on our kitchen counter that my in-laws hunted.

All this has them maybe even a little too comfortable with death.  When we put down our rooster, a mean old bastard who attacked every human who crossed our yard threatening to dig his sharp talons and beak into my children’s faces, my daughter asked if we could mount his head and put it on her wall.  This summer after the time coons nearly ate our nesting hen, the kids started researching youtube videos on making coon-skin caps, and we found ourselves in one of the strangest most amazing days yet—skinning a raccoon with our children watching.

All this gets them familiar with the physical thing called death.  Our son, watching the rooster breath his last, asked innocently, “Will my body twitch like that when I die?”  I never expected to be answering that question for a seven-year-old.

And yet I answer these questions as honestly as I can, because I believe they should know.  They should know that death is real, it is not so far away, it will come to us all.  Too many adults have never really accepted these things, either.  It isn’t fun, and it is often terribly sad, the most sad of all things we experience in life.  It isn’t to be taken lightly, even with the animals that end up on our table.  Sometimes I wish I knew one of the North American Indian ceremonies I heard about in my anthropology class this spring to say thank you to the animals that give their lives so we can live—for the rooster, for the deer, even for store-bought beef, even for the raccoons.

We talk about these things in night and day, while death seems both near and far, because in the end, without hope of eternity, without hope in death, there is no hope in life.  Without a vision for the continuity of one life into the next, that an eternal life can be born in us here that goes on through to the next, I could not face this death thing myself, nor could I find much hope in life right now.  In Christ alone, my hope is found.

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Microcredit and You: What’s the Connection?

By christine on June 10th, 2013

20091210_0548

Kenyan business owner

This weekend I had the privilege of introducing World Vision Micro to a few hundred people at the Collyde Summit in New Jersey.  I know that those few hundred people aren’t the only ones out there asking questions like “What can I do from where I live to connect to solutions to poverty?” and “Having worked with Microfinance, do you think it works?” So here’s what I shared.

How does Microfinance work?

In my first home outside the U.S., in the small Nicaraguan village of El Porvenir, I had my first experience knowing people who had not a single coin to their name.  People in the village grew beans and corn, and the village together owned a coffee cooperative that grew organic, shade grown coffee (now sold here).  But in the year we lived there, 2000-2001, the world coffee price dropped to the lowest it had been in 50 years.  The village couldn’t sell their coffee, creating a disastrous loss of over half the year’s income for every family there.

By planting time, money was gone.  People couldn’t afford to buy even oil to fry their beans, sugar to put in their coffee, soap, onions, or anything else.  Without buyers, even shop keepers ran out of money to restock their stores.

Around this time, I started crocheting.  Women loved it.  They’d seen crocheted things for sale in cities, and recognized immediately that this was a business opportunity.  I began teaching one woman after another to crochet.

But I soon realized that when these women told me they couldn’t afford even a crochet hook and a ball of yarn for a total of about $3, they were totally honest.  The business they were ready to run with was just out of reach because they lacked one piece: a lump sum of money.

For these women, that lump sum was as small as $3.  For many potential business owners around the world, it’s more like $100-400.  Whatever the amount, when you can’t think past where the next meal on the table is going to come from or you have no way of getting your hands on a piece of money, saving that much money to start a business feels like buying the Empire State Building.

That’s where small loans come in.  World Vision estimates that 56% of the world lacks access to credit, and of these, 500-600 million people could run some kind of income generating activity if they had start-up capital.  There are many kinds of lack when it comes to credit.  Some people have banks nearby, but those banks don’t find it profitable to lend out small amounts.  Many people don’t have the collateral, land tenure, savings, or other proof banks require that they can repay a loan. They might turn to loan sharks, who, for example, in South Africa charged as much as 100% interest per month.

Woman selling dried fish

Woman selling dried fish

Microfinance is no magic bullet for every kind of poverty.  In recent years it has been widely criticized for seemingly promising to solve all the world’s problems, and it went from the big “in” thing in development to yesterday’s news.   It’s true that for people in the deepest extremes of poverty, sometimes the pressure of meeting immediate family needs, the lack of business mentors, or the lack of viable business options in the area make running a business an unrealistic idea.  Other people simply aren’t cut out to run a business and don’t want one–and that’s true no matter what economic level you’re in. Microfinance doesn’t promise to solve every problem, but I do believe it has a niche where it makes a great difference.

For people who are willing and able to run businesses, if the one thing holding them back from running that business is a lump of capital, microfinance can jumpstart people out of cycles of poverty.  These loans can mean yarn to crochet, new seed varieties to plant, fertilizer or irrigation supplies to improve farms, young livestock, or stock for local stores. They mean income to care for orphaned neighbors, elderly relatives, and others who can’t provide for themselves.  They can mean diversifying people’s income, so when, say, the world coffee price plummets or a drought comes, you’ve got something to hang on to.

What does microfinance have to do with you?

This weekend I talked in New Jersey at a workshop of people interested in not wasting their lives.  Some were unemployed.  Some were in jobs that didn’t satisfy.  Some were trying to figure out what they were called to do with their lives.

Here’s what I find fascinating: these people showing up at a New Jersey conference because they don’t want to waste their lives can be directly connected to people all over the world praying they won’t waste their lives in poverty. And so can you.

Here’s one way that connection happens.

If you jump over to worldvisionmicro.org, you’ll find profiles of people around the world who are ready and approved to take out loans.  They live in communities where World Vision has already been operating, developing trust relationships and meeting the immediate needs communities identified.  These individuals have formed groups with other new borrowers that they’ll meet with through the loan repayment process.  They have gone through business training and chosen an amount they’ll need.

You can read their stories and learn about their businesses.  And then–here’s the cool part–you can sign up to fund their loan.

You can give any increment of $25, or fund the whole loan, or sign up to fund one new loan every month. Either way, for every loan you fund, you get updates from the borrower as they pay back the loan.  When the money is repaid, it gets reinvested in another person’s loan in that community.  Over time, that community will have enough capital to continue the microfinance organization, and World Vision Micro moves on to fund another community.

Funding a loan isn’t going to end poverty for every person on this planet, and it isn’t going to get you some gold star in heaven.  But like the story of the boy throwing starfish into the ocean one by one, funding a loan let’s you say with certainty, “it made a difference for that one.”


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Does being “radical” depend on where you live?

By christine on June 5th, 2013

My husband and I just got this question from a reader of This Ordinary Adventure:

I gather that the transition back to the United States was not an easy one for you and your family, and understandably so. I really wanted to send you a message because my boyfriend and I have been discussing just this. We both want to be missionaries and we know God is calling us to minister cross-culturally, possibly in Africa.

Yet, recently we’ve been pondering what life would even look like coming back from something like that. Both of us know that missions is a lifestyle, not an event, so we want to live that way in the United States, too. How did you know what this looked like for you? How did you keep the “radical” in your life? My boyfriend is convinced that living in the suburbs would be too “comfortable”…not at all a place for radical living. Rather, places in the inner city, or diverse apartments are the only options he sees that are “radical”. I am not so sure.

Sign at a South African house: "Praise God, Amen."

Sign at a South African house: "Praise God, Amen."

Great question.  It’s one Adam and I have definitely wrestled with.  Are some places inherently life-sucking, draining the will (and opportunity) to live intentionally and full of creative energy to do what matters?

I wish I could give you some pat reply of  “live there and only there,” but life is rarely has that kind of answer.  So here’s the kind of answer I seem to give to a lot of life’s hardest questions—a “yes and no” answer.

Does being “radical” depend on where you live?  Yes.

I see your boyfriend’s point here, that putting yourselves in certain settings could be a cop-out.  In 1 Thes. 2:12 Paul is “urging” and “encouraging” and “pleading” with people to “lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.”  That is, he’s begging us not to settle for anything less than a life that’s worthy of God, which is, clearly, no small thing.  We’re meant to live as part of his kingdom, seeing his kingdom come right here and now, “on earth as it is in heaven.”

That means we have to put thought into choices like where to live.  Don’t drop what you believe you’re meant to do just because you’re afraid or annoyed to live in the place that job exists.  And this works both ways–I loved the thrill of moving overseas, but cried for a weekend when my husband got a job in “ordinary” Oshkosh, Wisconsin (where we ended up having a fabulous year).

Start by asking, where do we see God working, or sense a connection between what we have to offer and what someone else needs?   We don’t get to choose a place to live just because it’s easy and comfy and makes us happiest.

But, does being “radical” depend entirely on where you live?  Absolutely not.

That phrase from the Lord’s prayer I mentioned above asks for God’s kingdom to come “on earth.”  It does not specify just some little corner of the earth, or some certain kind of people.  I don’t think you could come up with any place on the planet that you couldn’t possibly find a way to live for the glory of God in some way—if you’re willing to take the initiative to do what it takes to live that way there.

It’s all about attitude and initiative.

What would be your motivation for living in the suburbs?  Would it be about raising your kids in a setting without guns and prostitutes, about having a nice big yard, about getting to push a stroller to the park and have enough space for three vehicles?

Or is it about living in a place where you’ll connect to your neighbors, get to know them, and care about what’s happening in their lives?  Is it about having a place you can welcome others into?  About making a place of peace that you and others can meet God at amidst the intensity of serving God in the “marketplace” all day long?

And likewise, you can have right and wrong motives for living in “intense” places (of greater poverty, diversity, violence, etc).  Are you living there because you feel like you need to prove something to yourself or the world, and if you don’t, your identity will shrivel up and die?  Are you there because you think God can’t possibly do his work without you, and you’re angry at all the other Christians for not being radical enough?  Or are you there out of a genuine love, out of a sense that you have gifts and skills that can be useful there, because you’ve given your life to being concerned about what God is concerned about and you have drunk deep from the love of a God who cares deeply for people in poverty or suffering?

For Adam and I, every choice on where to live has been a mix of all these questions and answers.  After years sleeping in barn rooms, apartments in polluted Chinese cities, and several dozen guest bedrooms, we’ve landed in a house that feels like a total splurge in so many ways.  We have enough rooms for us and our kids (to share) and a spare room besides, a huge yard, plus two acres of forest and mini-CSA garden.  It’s outside of town, and we have middle class neighbors along the street who make it feel a touch like a suburb, and yet the farmy setting (we’re surrounded by restored prairies and long-haired cattle) feeds our creativity and souls.

Yes, our home feels like total comfort.  When I think of families in Nicaragua who asked us for used newspapers to decorate their walls, or the student we knew from Burundi who took ten years of savings and prayer to collect enough bricks to build his family a two-room house, I feel gushingly rich indeed.

And yet we chose this place knowing it could be a unique place to share with people (see my husband’s latest post on big parties!)  We rent out and share our spare bedroom.  We try to improve and use the land the way God intended it to be used.  We chose jobs we see matching our skills and interests and callings, and this house is close enough to keep our commutes short and bike-able.   It’s close to our church.  Our kids have a great school, but we felt like that came as an added bonus, not our highest priority.

Maybe whether you can be radical in one place or another is the wrong question to ask. Figure out what you want to live for, and trust me, it’ll fit, wherever you land.

What about the rest of you?

How did you choose where to live?  Do you suffer pangs of guilt that you should be elsewhere, or are you figuring out how to live “radically” right where you’re planted?

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Life is not practical

By christine on April 30th, 2013

Three centuries ago, back when Europe was called Christendom and everyone figured they were Christian (however syncretistic or nominal), something started shifting.  It’s a shift that got us to the place we are today, where belief is an option, and not a very easy one at that.

The shift?  Life got practical.hatched chick

I’ve been reading a huge book about how shift toward secularism happened, Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age.  Here’s the deal: Around the 18th century, people began to see themselves as rational, benevolent individuals walking in some premade divine plan, rather than people needing the grace and intervention of an intimate God.  People were “coming to see society as an ‘economy’, an interlocking set of activities of production, exchange and consumption, which form a system with its own laws and its own dynamic,” guided only by the invisible hand of the economy (p.181).  The virtuous thing now was not to go off and get sanctified, but just to be productive, to contribute to an economy that would somehow magically carry out God’s plans if we all just acted in our own self-interest.

And what did we lose?  Taylor says, “It seemed that greatness, heroism, full-hearted dedication to a non-utilitarian cause, were in danger of atrophy, even of disappearing from the world” (p.184).

Full-hearted devotion to a non-utilitarian cause… atrophied.

This evening I went with my kids to a meeting about joining 5th grade band.  The teacher joined us in marveling that in this state of budget cuts and slashed music programs, our district has kept this program alive and kicking.  Then she read this:

Why I Teach Music-

A Poem, Anonymous

Why I teach music:

Not because I expect you to major in music

Not because I expect you to sing or play all your life

Not so you can relax

Not so you can have fun

But, so you will be human

So you will recognize beauty

So you will be sensitive

So you will be closer to an infinite beyond this world

So you will have something to cling to

So you will have more love, compassion, gentleness, good – in short more life.

If ever there’s a non-utilitarian cause that demands full-hearted devotion, it’s teaching ninety eager fifth graders to blow into their instruments at the same time.

I came home to find Hobbles dead in the chick waterer, drowned.

Earlier in the day I had carried Hobbles, our tiniest chick with one spraddled leg, upstairs to rewrap a Bandaid around his feet to help them grow straight.  My son, seeing the little fuzzy head peeking out of my hand, came to watch the little guy.  He was the smallest of the chicks, and his little Bandaid-tied feet seemed to have the opposite effect of what you’d expect: he ran everywhere, Forrest Gump style, throwing himself into all of life full force with bounces and tumbles that made him by far our favorite chick.

And also the one most likely to stumble into the waterer and drown.

I should have known.  I’d read the chick care websites, and I should have put rocks in there to keep a fallen chick’s head above water. But I didn’t.

So tonight we buried Hobbles beside the only other chick we named, Polar Bear.  My daughter named that one.  He was the fuzziest of all chicks, but the one who never managed to learn to stand up.

And oh, how weakness inspires devotion.  He worked at it with all his might but his legs never held him, so he tumbled around, crashing face first again and again while the other birds ran and cheeped and nibbled their first bites of food.  Finally Polar Bear just seemed to give up the will to live.

Why must Charlotte’s Webb teach us to care for runts?  Why must every good story tell the victory of an underdog?  What drives us to want to name and love most the two most hopeless little birds?

Farmers learn this, I thought as I buried the Hobbles beside his Polar Bear.  Don’t love the runts.  It just isn’t practical.  Runts die.  Practical says root for the easy winners, and let the weak die.

And yet everything I do on this farm, ultimately, feels like caring for runts.  And it just isn’t practical.

If I wanted practical, I wouldn’t plant my own raspberries and go to bed with tiny thorns in my fingertips.  I would pay some immigrant I’ve never met unsustainably low wages to pick my raspberries for me on a massive farm far away.  If I wanted practical, I wouldn’t build a chicken coop and nurture these fragile chicken lives for the sake of a pocketful of eggs every day. If I wanted practical I wouldn’t spend 6 years of my life working on a PhD in anthropology.  If I wanted practical, I wouldn’t teach my children piano, or take time out of my day to help them sew muppets or go fishing or take bike rides. If I wanted practical I wouldn’t bother bringing kids into this world at all, and I certainly wouldn’t love—not runts, not anybody.  Of all life’s impracticalities, love must be the least practical.

As an afterthought, I went back out to the woods to my chick graves and tucked beneath the soil two paper flowers.  My friend made the flowers by hand as wedding favors out of handmade paper—oh the impracticality.  Spread in the paper are seeds of purple flax.  Here I plant more impractical seeds, aptly representing the love of marriage in a country where your marriage is more likely to end in divorce than not.  Seeds somehow supposed to grow amidst all the unpredictability of weather, weeds, and the scratching of my hungry chickens themselves.

But I go on planting, I go on nurturing fragile life. So we will be human. So we will recognize beauty. So we will be sensitive. So we will be closer to an infinite beyond this world. So we will have something to cling to. So we will have more love, compassion, gentleness, good – in short more of this impractical thing called life.

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Get your Mothers Day gifts!

By christine on April 30th, 2013

Know a mom who’s compassionate, kind, and thoughtful?  The stories in Into the Mud will go straight to her heart.

Know a young mom who’s sifting out her own dreams amidst the chaos of caring for little ones?  This Ordinary Adventure is designed just for her.

I’d love to send signed copies of either of our books for the wonderful women in your life.  Let me know if you’d like a personalized message, and I can send them either to you or directly to the mom.  Prices $10 for one or $18 for two, with free shipping.

Send me an email to order at intothemud[at]gmail.com.

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Get happified?

By christine on April 15th, 2013

The series of articles I’d been writing on the topic of joy and happiness seems to have snagged some interesting readers.  Today I got an email from a company called “Happify Pioneer” asking if I’d like to help test pilot some happifying techniques.

Their website says they’re looking for folks to:

  • Explore new happiness habits by completing 4-7 quick Happify activities per week for 4 weeks.
  • Follow, comment and cheer on others on the site.

Adam and I recently saw the movie Happy about the growing movement of researchers along these lines, and I must say it was fascinating stuff.  Scientists are figuring neurological evidence for stuff we’ve known works all along, like that trying new experiences (*having Amazing Days*) gives you happy kicks.  And being around other people, and helping people, and being grateful.  This is not rocket science, especially if you’ve looked inside a Bible.

But what do you all think?  Do you think you can improve your life with 4-7 “Happifying” activites per week? Or is happiness something you can’t just muster up with tricky techniques?

And if so, what would you list as your top Happify activities?

What would this study include, if you were in charge of it?

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Coping with Rejection

By christine on April 5th, 2013

grumpy-faceRejection sucks.  I don’t care if you’re Moses, the so-called humblest person who ever lived.  Nobody likes finding out that all the sweat and tears you poured into creating something beautiful or being somebody worthwhile just aren’t what the world wants.

A friend of mine worked hard for months and months to create a piece of writing to publish.  I read it, and it was beautiful.  He submitted it.  It made it to the top level of the decision process.  Then it got tossed to the reject pile.

When he got that first big rejection letter he wrote this:

Writing is so hard. These words, they can be erased and forgotten so easily. I feel like I’m constructing a bridge with my words, but it’s suspended in mid-air and the bridge can collapse at any moment. And if it does, what will that do to me?

We’ve all been there—job applications, scholarship applications, writing submissions, projects your boss hates… we can’t win ‘um all, but sometimes it feels like we’re not winning any.

In mulling this over with him and thinking of other friends’ and my own rejections over the years, I pulled out some of my favorite verses that keep me going through rejections.

First, I recently found this verse that’s written about Samuel as he started his “career” as a young prophet:

“As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground” (1 Samuel 3:19.)

I LOVE that.  It doesn’t mean that every single word we ever say and everything we pour energy into is going to be used in some spectacular way.  I think it does reassure us that to the extent that we speak on behalf of God, God doesn’t waste that.

Isaiah 55:10 is similar:

“As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”

What does that mean for a shelved project or a job denied?  God accomplishes his purposes and he doesn’t waste an inspiration.  He’s got work planned out for us to do through Christ’s strength (Eph. 2:10).  When we let speaking, writing, and everything we communicate to the world be about saying what God wants said, it becomes something we have to do out of obedience—and something we can do joyfully—whether we see results or not.

Besides, there’s that grandmotherly phrase we all hate hearing after rejections, “At least you learned from it.”  It comes across trite and bitter, like getting the booby prize, but there’s nothing trite about it. Wisdom is actually an entirely respectable aim in itself.  Look at Proverbs 8:35:

“Whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord.”

The “me” in that is Wisdom.  The whole chapter shows this female character called Wisdom (a lot like my friendly Muse) dancing around during creation, shouting in public, promising riches better than gold and silver, having a blast, and begging to be your BFF.

The cool thing here is that wisdom in itself is something that is life-giving and God-honoring.  Often as a writer and academic I can buy into the secular (and pretty logical) idea that to be pleasing to God, you have to DO something big with wisdom, like share it or teach it or use it to make money.  While those good, it strikes me as totally freeing to think that just gaining wisdom in itself is pleasing to God.  That doesn’t mean I can’t sit around on my bum all day reading and never do anything with it, but then, who would want to? Wisdom is a good friend to have—she cheers us up and gets us moving, whether the world rejects her (and us) or not.

And speaking of what nobody wants to hear as consolation, let’s be honest: sometimes rejections are for our own good.  I’ve got more on that here (”When God Says ‘No’”).

Ok, and one more I drink deeply from in times of disappointment:

The fig trees might not bud.

The vines might not produce any grapes.

The olive crop might fail.

The fields might not produce any food.

There might not be any sheep in the pens.

There might not be any cattle in the barns.

But I will be glad

because of what the Lord has done.

God my Savior fills me with joy.

The Lord and King gives me strength.

He makes my feet like the feet of a deer.

He helps me walk in the highest places.

This prayer is for the director of music.

It should be sun accompanied by stringed instruments.

-Habakkuk 3:17-19

(I know those last two lines are a little odd, but I like that they’re specifically about singing, like writing, about God’s goodness during defeat.)

Stay strong and courageous, friends.

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Does being saved make you joyful?

By christine on March 11th, 2013

Pool clip_image001(1)As far as I could tell, I saved a little girl from drowning.

She was about four years old with no parents in sight. She quietly waded into the swimming pool, straight out to the deep end.  Her little face slipped under the water and didn’t come up. I dropped in, jean skirt and all, and yanked her out.

I like to think God had that all planned out.  We were on a three-day trip across South Africa in the middle of a dry hot plain when our truck died.  It cost us a few hundred dollars in repairs, a long night in a train station, and a near miss of a plane we were supposed to catch on the end of the trip.  But the timing of the delay put us in that swimming pool at that very moment. (There’s more of this story here).

One thing I know about God is he’s in the business of saving people.

Like a drowning kid too far under water to make so much as a squeal for help, we’re messed up sinners needing a yank up out of that death if we’re going to live lives worth living.  The story of Jesus dying on the cross is all about rescue.  It’s about a loving God who didn’t just jump into a pool in his jeans or pay a few hundred bucks in car repairs for us, but went so far as to suffer death himself.  All that so our freedom could be bought.

But that’s hard to wrap our heads around.

When the little girl climbed out of the pool, she sat shaking silently on a deck chair.  She stared at me with wide eyes, too shocked to say a word.

She didn’t say thanks.  She didn’t say anything at all.  She looked bewildered, but definitely not joyful.

And let’s be honest, a lot of know very well the story of Jesus the savior, but we don’t show our joy much either.  It’s a lot to take in.  I was really on the road to death?  I was really drowning without God?

It’s easier to deny it than to grasp it.

I have replayed that story of the drowning girl a hundred times in my head.  Maybe she wasn’t really drowning—maybe she knew how to swim and just thought she’d float under water for a while.  Maybe she was about to come up on her own.  I wonder if she thinks the same thoughts herself.

The story I believed then and still believe now, though, is that she was really on the short road to gulping in a lungful of chlorinated water and turning blue.  She needed a rescuer.

What do you believe about yourself?  Do you really believe you need a savior? Are you trying to teach yourself to swim in this life, do enough good and make enough friends and money that you won’t need any help from God now or ever? Or are you 100% sure God rescued you and living joyfully because of it?

The best interpretation of the evidence I see in the world is that we, like that girl, were drowning.  We can’t do it on our own.  We need a yank up.  We can’t make ourselves good enough.  There’s no “enough” without God.

And that, my friends, is something to be joyful about.  Maybe there’s a time to sit in shivering shock, but ultimately we’ve got to see we were dying and now are living, and then get up off the deck chair and give Jesus a big happy hug, say thank you, and live like it matters.

We’ve got to choose that certain kind of joy that comes from being saved.

Joy’s not an easy thing to find in this world.  If you want more of it, you’re not alone.  I’ve been working through a series of blogs on joy, and I’ve heard from many of you that you struggle to find joy.  I’ve been hunting through every verse on joy I can find.  Here’s a few on the joy of being rescued that I leave you with today:

Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.

Ps. 43: 5

Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

-Ps. 51:12

And those the Lord has rescued will return.
They will enter Zion with singing;
everlasting joy will crown their heads.
Gladness and joy will overtake them,
and sorrow and sighing will flee away.

-Isaiah 35:11

Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

-1 Peter 1:8-9

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In the news, On being normal Americans, Writing 9 comments

Why my blog posts are few and far between

By christine on February 20th, 2013

You may have noticed I don’t blog as often as somebody doing good author-blogger-speaker promo is supposed to. I blog with an irregularity that often makes me cringe before my social-media guru husband.

I could give you a sob story of the reason you’d expect—life is so dang busy.  I’ve got two kids, a PhD program, a husband working full time, speaking engagements, church involvement, four chickens, a rabbit, a fish, and a a huge commercial garden in our yard (which I don’t run, thankfully).

Instead I’d rather talk to you about the better reason.

I love words.

I love the power of crafted, thoughtful, dare I say inspired words.

I have come to be honest with myself.  Those kind of words don’t promise to show up at my fingertips whenever I want them.

I am a full devotee of the concept of a Muse.

Back a couple centuries, writers used to think it was smooth to start out their big important writing by invoking the Muse, thanking their Muse, admitting they’d be nothing without the Muse.  Correct me if I’m wrong (those of you who have studied literature more recently than my 13-year-ago degree in English lit), but I think good old blind John Milton actually invoked a Muse before he wrote Paradise Lost, the big fat Christian poem he supposedly wrote in one long sitting by the miraculous power of God.  His Muse is not just from some Greco-Roman mythological deity, it’s a Christianized way of talking about how dang hard it is to write.

Those writers got it right: writing isn’t something that we have any right to claim to do well by our own power.  It’s sucky hard.  It always seems so ludicrously unlikely that I should ever have anything to say worth sharing on the WorldWideMonstrosity.

If I do stumble on something you needed to read today, it is most definitely through a supernatural power.  The fundamentalists would make me call it the power of Jesus.  I prefer to envision that power like an elegant lady in an emerald green gown who floats into my bedroom on occasion to sing a haunting tune that gets me out of bed to go take dictation to her spoken word art.

I’m not saying I sit around and don’t do anything with words until the green lady shows up.  I am about the most regimented student/writer you’ll ever meet.  From the moment my kids leave school until the moment they return home, I am at my computer or with book in hand or on a bus or in a classroom getting article-reading and paper-writing done, muse or no muse.

Most often I work by the power of a different deity anthropomorphism.  I call him Hard Work.  He looks more like Mr. Clean with a big wooden paddle he whacks me in the butt with every morning.

But just because I get up and have to write and read and study every day doesn’t mean I should subject you to all to the misery of reading what I might spew out on a given morning if I were required to write to you with greater frequency than I currently manage.  You deserve better.  In fact, I believe you deserve less.

The internet is full of more.  Oh, so much, much, writing.  One of my great fears about the future of the world is that Google will get so filled up with pages of links to crap like this (you know you can’t resist that link) that the actual quality stuff out there gets lost forever on the third and fourth pages of Google searches.  I know it happens already.

But I resign to be somebody who might get lost on the third page of Google searches, but who writes stuff well worth reading for those of you who have dug down deep enough to find it.  I appreciate you beyond words.  I feel deeply the responsibility I have to you.  I want to give you more than regurgitated news-vomit.

I hope you are also with me in believing that writing doesn’t have to be new to be good.  Another of my biggest fears is that we as a society will base such a great portion of our reading on search tools that are determined by what is new that we’ll miss the good old stuff. And by old, I don’t mean just way back to Milton (he has long since been somebody read only by freaks and students fearing for their grades, and that’s a great loss).  I mean old like last Thursday.

So instead of more frequent blog posts, I happily offer you a reminder of the obvious, if you’re a blog reader.  There are those cool categories and tags over in my right-hand column.  You can click them, and you can read stuff I wrote a year ago, and most likely it’s no worse than it was when I wrote it.  If you’ve already read everything I’ve written here (bless your heart, I don’t understand you), go find somebody’s else’s good blog.

There’s more than enough.  Praise God, the Muse is out there; she has not stopped working.  She’s out there spreading the love around while I get some sleep.

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Family fun, Noticing Things 1 comment

Forget the Valentines: Celebrate Thanksgiving in February

By christine on February 8th, 2013

February is a dull month in Wisconsin.  The little groundhog comes out of his hole.  Then you get Valentines Day, the over-hyped over-romanticized commercial holiday guaranteed to disappoint.  Plus president’s day, which is hard to get buzzed about.   Then coldness, darkness, shoveling, and slush.  Oh joy.

February in the farmer’s year is also dull.  It’s too early for the first thaw when pea seeds drop in the ground and asparagus spears sprout up.  It’s not the hopping summer months of lush greenness reminding us of God’s abundant proclivity to procreation at every turn.  It’s not the harvest time of heavy wheelbarrows loaded with zukes and pumpkins and apples.  It’s just February.  Waiting.  The most a farmer has to do in February is page through seed catalogs with a wistful yearning.

It’s no wonder we don’t have harvest Thanksgiving celebrations in February.

It’s easy to think about giving thanks in September or November if you’re living close to the land.  The year’s harvest is in, freezers and canning shelves are filled tight, and the sagging seed heads of wildflowers giving their last along roadsides are still poetically beautiful.

September and November are the seasonal equivalent to getting a brand new job that promises to use your every gift and passion.  It’s like driving home with a new baby, or finding another $1,000 in your bank account, or receiving a visit from an old close friend.  It’s easy to give thanks when goodness is abundant and new.

Sure, I’m all for celebrating at times like these, when the harvest is plentiful and fresh.  Part of the laws given to the newly forming nation of Israel in the Old Testament were guidelines for celebrating the harvest (Dt 16:15).  And in that kind of harvest celebration, God promises “your joy will be complete.”

It’s easy to find joy when God’s gifts are new.

But we have to keep celebrating when gifts get stale, too.

Lately I’ve been working my way through posts about seven sources of joy that I noticed when I looked up the word joy in my Bible concordance.  Number two is “Joy found in recounting and celebrating God’s works.”

I love that when I lumped together verses on this category, I found not just verses about finding joy right in the midst of God working in our lives, but also about joy continuing years and generations later as we keep on remembering what God has done.

Psalm 66, for example, is the kind of cheerleader hooplah intended to get every last soul out of their seats and shouting.  “Shout with joy to God, all the earth!” it begins.  The NIV version has two more explanation points in the first five verses.  The cause for this excitement?  All God has done.  On the list are long-gone historical events like crossing the Red Sea, as well as personal vows fulfilled, forgiveness from God, and answered prayers.

Let us “tell of his works with songs of joy,” says another Psalmist (107:22), and over and over the songs insist we tell the stories of God’s intervention in our lives, not just when it’s fresh, but for weeks and months and generations to come.

So today I’m thinking turkeys.

I’m pulling out my Country Living Encyclopedia to see what it would take to raise a few next summer.  But more important, we’re doing a little Thanksgiving right now in February.

I’m pulling a turkey out of my freezer.  Some time soon we’re sitting down at our big table to give thanks for God’s works, both recent and distant past.

You’re all invited.  Just let me know and we’re sure to have space at the table.

And what’s on your list of works God has done?  What memory do you need to dust off and recount with joy this month?

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