Camping in the basement

Our camping trip with the church got cancelled. So we pitched our tent in the basement.

Complete with a roaring fire

...which we made our s'mores over.

...with a little help from these products...

This Beautiful Mess

Finally, nap time. I had just tackled the morning mess, including breakfast and lunch dishes and a few soaking pans from the night before. Being 30-weeks pregnant with baby number three, I was desperate for some sleep. Mercifully, our four-year-old went down without complaint. Our six-year-old was just as eager for some playtime by himself. I left him with Legos, books, crayons and the run of the living room. All was well.

I awoke an hour later to loud whispers in my ear. “Mommy, come see what I made!”

I rolled out of bed as he led me by the hand to see his masterpiece. At the foot of the stairs, the living room was shrouded in couch cushions, coordinating throw pillows, wool wraps, and freshly washed sheets.

“Don’t you love it? It’s my fort!”

“Honey, this is great,” I mustered. “But remember, we’re having company for dinner and Mommy just cleaned, so you have to put everything away.”

He looked at me with his puppy-dog eyes. “It’s like you care more about the couch than me,” he said.

“No, of course I don’t,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t understand my dilemma. I was proud of his creativity. But did it have to come at the expense of my peaceful, beautiful, orderly home?

What Matters Most

How could we have known, back when I was pregnant with our little fort builder, that the most important test of a good couch was not its construction, comfort, or color scheme?

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What mattered most once the kids arrived, was how easily all the cushions and pillows could be removed and made to resemble a pirate ship, volcano, or secret hideout. At least we’d had the foresight to spring for the Scotchgard treatment.

We were naïve. Lost in a steady stream of Pottery Barn catalogues, we shopped with dreams of showroom furniture artfully arranged in our first home. The only problem with that fantasy was the people, or lack of them. If you notice, there aren’t any in most furniture catalogues. Apart from the occasional dog or monogrammed towel suggesting a human presence, those catalogues are lifeless. But aren’t people what matter most?

The Purpose of a Home

In Home Comforts, a book about how a home works not how it looks, author Cheryl Mendelson writes, “When you keep house, you use your head, your heart and your hands together to create a home—the place where you live the most important parts of your private life.” When kids are little, the most important parts have a lot to do with making messes.

Stephen Curtis Chapman captures this idea in his song Signs of Life:

I’ve got crayons rolling around in the floorboard of my car,
Bicycles all over my driveway, bats and balls all over my yard,
And there’s a plastic man from outer space sitting in my chair.
The signs of life are everywhere.

Eternal Treasures

At times when Steve complains about the landscaping rocks the kids have thrown in the grass, I remind him, “Honey, we’re raising kids, not grass.” Recently he turned it back on me, saying, “We’re raising kids, not occasional tables and leather ottomans.”

pirate couch large-3

Those things aren’t eternal. No matter how perfect something is when you get it—or what you do to keep it that way—it won’t last. As disappointing as that may be, it’s freeing to just accept it. One motivational writer says she knows her stuff will break sooner or later, so she just looks at it and thinks, It’s already broken. That saves her the stress of trying to keep it perfect.

For me, it makes sense to look at our stuff and think, It’s already sticky. This attitude of not frantically trying to keep our stuff pristine is consistent with Matthew 6:19: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.”

My goals for our home no longer include maintaining the look of a decorating magazine. Our home wasn’t built to be a showroom. The life encompassed within its walls—loving husband and children, having babies, teaching them to know and love God—is far too important to be diminished by such low aims. Even if it means having to work my way through a cushion fort to finish my nap.

[Note: I wrote this article back in 2006. We've since passed our pirate-ship couch on to some friends and replaced it with a cushions-attached sectional. But the realization of what matters most is even more true now—with four kids and evidence that the mess-heavy years really do fly by—than when I wrote it.]

Family requires sacrifice

It is the right of little children to have individual love all day long and to have more than the tag ends of affection. But this situation will not change until the family is seen as an institution so precious that men and women will sacrifice something, even in excitement and personal expression, in order to maintain it.

--Elton Trueblood

Kitchen Help

They were so excited to help and I was thrilled to realize four is old enough to wield a potato peeler! Taking turns alternately peeling carrots and potatoes for our harvest soup, their joy in being able to help make dinner made light work of it. It was a surprisingly cold day, but unexpectedly cozy in the kitchen. I almost hated to clean up all the peels; evidence of delight all over the countertops.

A New Problem with no Name

Fifty years ago today, Betty Friedan released the book The Feminine Mystique in which she described “a problem with no name.” She described how educated women felt trapped in suburbia, gazing longingly toward unrealized opportunities in corporate offices. Today, women enjoy those opportunities in the workplace, but are now experiencing a new problem with no name as they find themselves looking out their corporate windows wondering about life with a family. Writers ranging from conservative Danielle Crittenden to liberal Sylvia Ann Hewlett describe women who find it tragic that their corporate success came at the expense of having the opportunity to invest in children. Crittenden writes, “In the richest period ever in our history...the majority of mothers feel they have ‘no choice’ but to work.” In just 30 years, Hewlett says, “we've gone from fearing our fertility to squandering it--and very unwittingly.”

This is what it's come to. The successes of women in the twenty-first century are diminished by their sacrifices. For all our relative wealth, we can't afford babies. For all our learning, we don't understand the limits of fertility. For all our advances as women, motherhood seems unreachable.

Adapted from Start Your Family: Inspiration for Having Babies

What to Expect When No One is Expecting

Jonathan Last has written the best book to date on the dramatic global retreat from family making.  It has the creative title What to Expect When No One is Expecting and we mentioned it briefly here where we included an excerpt published by the Wall Street Journal. Recently, Last gave a talk for the American Enterprise Institute that provides an excellent overview of the book.

Just Friends Limbo

When Steve and I were first becoming friends--and I was hoping it would become something more--he was dating someone else. The "other woman" is part of the high-jinx of our story and it seems to resonate with a lot of women. So today I answer a question from a woman who's wondering if she (or her friend) should do the same. She asks,

In Get Married, you explained how as you and Steve were becoming friends, he dated another woman for a short season. If a woman is growing in friendship and connecting well with a guy to whom she is attracted, but he is dating someone else, what would you advise her to do? Should she continue to develop the friendship? How can she discern if God wants her to forget about the guy and move on, or to continue to hope and pray for a relationship with him?

It's always tricky, and maybe a bit risky, to speak to someone else's situation from your own. This question is a good reminder of that! Here's some of my reply:

This is a perceptive question and a reminder that much of what I share from my own story is descriptive (it tells what did happen) and not necessarily prescriptive (telling what should happen). To know what we should do in any given situation, we have to go to God's Word, the Bible. It's there that we learn who we are, who God is and what He requires of us. We learn of our design — how we were made by God to flourish, and how, because of our sin nature, we often limp along against the grain of that design.

There is no verse in the Bible that says, "Thou shalt not hope a man who's dating someone else will become available for you to marry." Nor is there a verse that says you should. What's needed in situations like this is wisdom (see the book of Proverbs, especially chapters 2, 8 and 9). It may help to ask some questions about the situation.

To read the rest of my answer, and see what those questions are, read "What if the guy I like is dating someone else?"

Family Declines Prompt James Dobson to Write Dystopian Novels

Dr. James Dobson, author of over 25 books on marriage and family, recently released his first novel, Fatherless. With his co-author Kurt Bruner, Dobson portrays a dystopian future in which foundational family realities, taken for granted for eons, grow increasingly marginalized. Dobson recently answered questions about this new work in an interview with Religious News Service.  Here are some highlights:

Q: Why did you venture into fiction after writing about real-life parenting for so long?

A: This is my first novel, but not my first foray into fiction. I have always believed in the power of narratives to influence thought and shape the spiritual imagination. While with Focus on the Family I challenged the team to create a radio drama series called “Adventures in Odyssey.’’ My co-author, Kurt Bruner, led that team for several years. We couldn’t be more excited about the potential of this new trilogy to embody themes on which I have been writing, speaking and broadcasting for decades.

...

Q: What are some of the real-life issues today that made you write this future fantasy?

A: The single threat to our future is the trend away from forming families to begin with. Marriage is in drastic decline. For the first time in history more women are single than married. Raising children is now considered an inconvenient burden rather than life’s highest calling. For the first time in our history there are fewer households with children than without. The most basic human instinct, forming families, is in dramatic decline. And the implications of that reality, as we’ve depicted in these novels, are breathtaking. That’s why we chose the looming demographic crisis as the backdrop to these stories.

We're hopeful this creative storytelling approach will engage people who otherwise wouldn't have heard about these pressing demographic trends or may have glazed over seeing them presented outside of a narrative context.

Loving your wife when you hate the romantic industrial complex

Men, as we enter the week of Valentine's Day, is there a part of you that feels a little anxious as sellers of romantic gifts and services peddle their wares and set expectations for how men should go about translating love for their wives? Are you tempted to just write it off as a Hallmark holiday and boycott the whole thing? If so, I think you'll enjoy something my colleagues Randy Stinson and Dan Dumas wrote about this that ran in the Southern Seminary Towers magazine:

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Some men who suspect they should do more to express love to their wives are turned off by what we call the “romantic industrial complex”—the producers of cards, jewelry, flower arrangements, chick flicks, chocolates, candlelit dinners, stuffed bears, getaways and other romantic stuff — vendors who seem to be in a conspiracy to hyper-commercialize romance, they run men through a gauntlet of unrealistic expectations and then extort them into paying to prove their affection. You know it’s gotten out of control when Evergreen Waste Services of Delaware runs an ad that says, “For Valentine’s Day, nothing says ‘I love you’ like affordable, reliable trash service” (Can you imagine the husband that banks his Valentine’s Day on that gesture?).

Because of this kind of craziness, a lot of men we know tend to check out and write it all off as beneath them. There’s a lot to hate about the business aspects of romance. But you have to make sure you don’t throw out your baby (your wife) with the “Romantic Raspberry” scented bath water. You don’t have to become a mindless consumer of the romantic industrial complex, but you do need to love your wife and live with her in an understanding way. What matters is being enough of a student of who your wife is — what delights and encourages her — that you can customize your romantic efforts to her and tune out all the mass marketed stuff that you know doesn’t communicate love to your wife.

This study of your one-of-a-kind wife may lead you to see that what blesses her most are things, like encouraging words, uninterrupted conversations, morning notes, back rubs and other priceless things while expensive gifts and dinners out register little with her if they aren’t given in a way that shows that you know her. Your ongoing effort to know your wife and bless her distinctly may, however, lead you to realize that you need to “get off your wallet” and stop being stingy with your investment in her. And that may mean venturing out into the so-called romantic industrial complex. But you can (and should) bring leadership to the process. Have a good laugh at the “love junk” that gets marketed, but go take dominion and bring something back that shows that you know and cherish your wife. In that spirit, you can buy flowers, chocolates, cards and other things as unto the Lord and all to the glory of God.

I hope this is helpful as you seek to bless your wife this week.

Change the world from your family room

Over the past century, the inertia has been toward turning family and home life inside out. "Prior to the industrial revolution," writes Dr. Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, "most families assumed responsibility for economic production, the education of children, and socialization into the culture. Recreation, entertainment, child rearing, and vocational training were all conducted within the confines of the family."

Over the years, the industrial system encouraged families to out-source all those activities--to help the economy by paying someone else to do them. In many ways, this change was a relief.  Unlike the Ingallses (immortalized in Little House on the Prairie), families no longer had to spend the bulk of their day just trying to get chores done and food on the table. The labor saving devices and division of labor introduced by the Industrial Revolution made home management much simpler.

But something was lost in the process of reengineering all the functions of the family home. According to Allan Carlson and Paul Mero in the book The Natural Family, "Family households, formerly function-rich bee-hives of useful, productive work and mutual support, tended to become merely functionless, overnight places of rest for persons whose active lives and loyalties lay elsewhere."

Carlson and Mero say today's families can still find a way to have "a home that serves as the center for social, educational, economic and spiritual life." New technology and a fresh longing for a sustainable balance between work and family is slowly encouraging families to find ways to reproduce some of the benefits of the preindustrial, home-based family.

Outside-in homes--those in which parents are intentional about "in-sourcing" primary educational responsibilities, child rearing, Christian discipleship, recreation, entertainment, and more--can still have an inside out influence on the world around them. Edmund Burke, an Irish statesman and philosopher in the late 1700's, described the family as an essential foundation for the larger world. "To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society," he wrote, "is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind."

Additionally, men and women who desire to have lives of influence often find that the work of caring for and investing in the next generation is among the most important influence they can have. For all the hopes and dreams we have for our own lives, we often overlook that the under appreciated work of parenting is likely the greatest contribution we'll make. Author Gary Thomas talks about how the genealogy chapters that tell how so-and-so begat so-and-so, may be among the most important in the Bible:

God chooses to simplify these men's lives by mentioning their most important work--having kids, dying, and then getting out the way. I wonder how we might simplify our own lives by recognizing that eighty percent or more of what we spend our time on will ultimately be forgotten. Perhaps we might pay a little more attention to the remaining twenty percent. Indeed, the effort we put into creating a lasting legacy through children and great-children might increase significantly.

This assumes, however, that men and women who are faithful in biological fruitfulness will also be faithful in spiritual fruitfulness. Andreas Köstenberger addresses this in the book God, Marriage and Family:

In godly homes, husband and wife sharpen one another as "iron sharpens iron" (Proverbs 27:17), and their children are drawn into the communal life of the family and into the path of discipleship pursued and modeled by their parents, which fulfills the Lord's desire for godly offspring (Malachi 2:15).

This too is part of obeying the risen Christ's commission for his followers to "go...and make disciples" (Matthew 28:18-20).

To show how this can happen, Köstenberger provides a compelling picture of how God designed biological fruitfulness and spiritual fruitfulness to intersect:

What God desires is happy, secure, and fulfilled families where the needs of the individual family members are met but where this fulfillment is not an end in itself but becomes a vehicle for ministry to others. In this way God uses families to bring glory to himself and to further his kingdom, showing the world what he is like--by the love and unity expressed in a family by the husband's respect for his wife, the wife's submission to her husband, and the children's obedience (even if imperfect). What is more, the husband-wife relationship also expresses how God through Christ relates to his people the church. Thus it can truly be said that families have a vital part to play in God's plan to "bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ," "for the praise of his glory" (Ephesians 1:10,12 NIV).

In our own "begatting," in our intentionality about taking primary responsibility for the care and discipline of of our children and especially in the faithful discipleship of our children, we can to some degree, and often beyond our what we ever would have imagined, change the world from our family room.

Adapted from portions of Start Your Family: Inspiration for Having Babies.

Read blog posts related to changing the world from your family room.

The Demographic Cliff

In all the recent debates about U.S. fiscal policy, debt and threats of a fiscal cliff, an underlying problem has received little attention. "Forget the debt ceiling. Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the entitlement cliff," Jonathan V. Last wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. "Those are all just symptoms. What America really faces is a demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate." The article is an excerpt from Last's new book that comes out today whose title says it all: What to Expect When No One's Expecting, but the blurb for the book fills in some helpful details:

For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that’s busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else. It’s all bunk. The "population bomb" never exploded. What to Expect When No One’s Expecting explains why the population implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the world.

We have enjoyed the writing Last has been doing on marriage and family for the Weekly Standard and were glad to see him write such a substantive book on the significant difference it makes when countries have fewer babies. What we especially appreciate is that Last is willing to describe the problem in great detail, but then also prescribe a way forward. And his prescription is simple:

In the face of this decline, the only thing that will preserve America's place in the world is if all Americans—Democrats, Republicans, Hispanics, blacks, whites, Jews, Christians and atheists—decide to have more babies.

He goes on to to address a variety of cultural attitudes (such as our preoccupation with an exalted view of "happiness" that drives us away from procreation) and policies that should change (Social Security reform, college cost management, land management planning, etc.) in order to make it easier to welcome babies.

Dodge Ram's Charlie Brown Moment

I still remember the ad: Mean Joe Green limping off the field down a gray corridor to the locker room, where a boy of about eight offers to help. Mean Joe says no. The boy insists that Mean Joe take his Coke. The football player relents, chugs the brown soda, then turns to the disappointed kid and utters the famous line, "Hey kid, catch!" He tosses his sweaty jersey to the disbelieving kid and smiles from ear-to-ear. Have a Coke and a smile!

It's about as syrupy as the Cola's secret formula, especially viewed through today's eyes. But when it first aired in 1979, that ad hit its mark. We were less cynical then; more open to pictures of brotherly kindness. A lot has changed. I used to watch the Super Bowl and its ads with my parents--I was nine when that Coke ad ran. I don't remember worrying about what we might see. It was pre-DVR but for the most part, the remote control's off button was untouched. No longer.

Last night we stayed close to the power switch on our TV (the remote's broken and we still don't have DVR), wanting to watch some of the game, but doing our best to weed out the raunchy and degrading commercials. Not just because we have four children, but because most of what aired during the time outs and half time is twaddle.

By the final quarter, I was in bed half asleep. Sometime before the Ravens' triumph, Steve started talking about the Tweets that were going around about "the farmer" ad. Being a big Paul Harvey fan, he pulled it up on his iPhone and played the spot. In my half awake state I listened, dumbfounded.

According to ABC News online, the ad "wasn’t flashy or filled with special effects but Dodge Ram’s Super Bowl commercial that featured the late radio broadcaster Paul Harvey’s tribute to U.S. farmers might have won the hearts and minds of viewers Sunday night. … The spot immediately set Twitter ablaze, with viewers registering their overwhelmingly positive reaction to the commercial."

It was hard to believe such a sincere piece could make the Super Bowl cut. Harvey praised the selfless, sacrificial, tough, unbending, tender nature that is essential to a farmer--"somebody who'd bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing." Listening to Harvey's comforting voice, I felt like Linus searching with Charlie Brown for the perfect Christmas tree in a psychedelic age. Surrounded by strobe lights and towering pink, orange and yellow aluminum Christmas "trees," Charlie Brown sees the twig that captures his heart.

"Gee, do they still make real Christmas trees?" Linus asks, unbelieving, as Charlie Brown declares about the twig, "I think this tree needs me."

And so I fell asleep thankful, surprised by the answer to my Linus question. "Gee, do they still make sincere, hard-work affirming, sacrifice honoring, soul-inspiring Super Bowl commercials?"

It turns out, that in the midst of the garish, glitzy, soul-eroding fare, they do.

Thanks, Dodge.

Link Between Spiritual Formation and Family Formation

As I was finishing my master's degree in public policy I needed to find a topic for my thesis. For several years, I had been interested in the differences between baby boomers and the generation I grew up in that has been called generation X, baby busters, mosaics, etc. Around that time, I read a variety of articles about how my generation voted at lower percentages than their parents did at their age. I decided to take that on as my thesis topic. I was going to discover what shared life experiences and attitudes of my generation was driving down our voter participation. Not too long into my research, however, I had to throw out my original hypothesis and start over. While popular news articles kept speculating that my generation wasn't voting because of various cultural influences, the research pointed strongly to another less publicized factor--life stage. People who are married and have children have more tangible motivations to vote. They are motivated by what some call "bread and butter" issues related to property taxes, schools, safety and other day-to-day issues that tend to be of less interest to singles. The drop in voter participation tracked fairly neatly with the generational delay of marriage and starting a family. As my generation has gotten around to these life stages, we've improved on voter participation.

Something very similar is going on in churches. Increasingly, churches are concerned about what some call the "graduation evacuation"--the tendency of people who were raised in Christian homes to disconnect from church shortly after graduating from high school and not finding their way back. As young adults show greater detachment from the church, all kinds of theories are proposed about what's keeping them away and what churches can do to get them back. Many of the speculations are similar to the ones I read back in the nineties about my generation and their voting habits--all focused on various generational attitudes that needed to be addressed through creative ministry engagement such as coffee bars, cool music, casual services, movie clips, etc.

In his book, After the Baby Boomers, Princeton professor Robert Wuthnow shows the shortcomings of this approach:

In the absence of solid information, speculation about the religious needs and interests of the next wave runs rampant. Self-styled cultural experts have been arguing that young adults will be the leaders of a great spiritual revival. ... Other forecasters are placing their bets on technology. Persuaded that religion is somehow a function of gadgets and electronics, they predict an Internet revolution in which congregations will be replaced by Web sites and chat rooms. Still others see in their crystal balls that young adults will flock to jeans-and-sweatshirt ministries where everything is warm and supportive -- as if that were something new.

The truth is, these futuristic speculations make headlines, but seldom make sense. The reason is that they are the product of someone's imagination, rather than being grounded in any systematic research -- or, for that matter, a very good understanding of young adulthood and social change. Pastors and interested lay leaders can titillate themselves reading such speculation in religious magazines. But they need to realize how flimsy this sort of information is.

Wuthnow goes on to show what research actually reveals:

Religious involvement is influenced more by whether people are married, when they get married, whether they have children, and how many children they have than almost anything else.

Similar to voting, marriage and kids give young adults more direct reasons to connect to a congregation. I like how Dr. Leon Kass puts it in the book Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar:

Marriage and procreation, are, therefore, at the heart of a serious and flourishing human life, if not for everyone at least for the vast majority. Most of us know from our own experience that life becomes truly serious when we become responsible for the lives of others for whose being in the world we have said, "We do." It is fatherhood and motherhood that teach most of us what it took to bring us into our own adulthood. And it is the desire to give not only life but a good way of life to our children that opens us toward a serious concern for the true, the good, and even the holy. Parental love of children leads once wayward sheep back into the fold of church and synagogue. In the best case, it can even be the beginning of the sanctification of life--yes, even in modern times.

For pastors, parents and mentors who are praying for spiritual formation in the twenty and thirtysomethings they know, it appears that an investment in family formation is the better investment.