Practical Tips for Handling Bickering Kids

Our kids have been in a phase of particularly concentrated bickering for the past few months. My 7 year-old started tending to whine or yell; my 5 year-old is still strong-willed about what he wants or considers right; my 3 year-old is in his full-fledged, irrational, emotional terrible two’s; and my 1.5 year-old is old enough to screech for what she wants. What results is synergistic conflict: not anything egregious enough to be disciplined, and often not a situation with someone in the clear right or wrong—just this incessant bickering.

I’ve really struggled to deal with it, and it’s only in the past week that I feel like there’s been some practical breakthrough. Here is a list that I wrote to myself, of things that I’ve found work or that I want to remind myself to do:

- set a positive baseline tone and attitude myself at home: I can choose the attitude I set. I can choose to make our home the safest place in the world. I enjoy my kids and expect to enjoy them. If there is grumbling in my own heart, it leaks out to the kids. Sing songs.

- have preemptive activities planned: they don’t have to be huge deals (though that is good occasionally)—what matters is my attention and some amount of forethought. Get the play-dough out. Print out coloring pages.

- expect to be present: some multi-tasking is inevitable, but my primary goal is to be with my kids. “The dishes can wait; their childhood cannot”

- never escalate bickering by letting my own frustration and anger rise: I need to set an example. I need to teach an effective lesson. If I sense my frustration rising, pause. Talk slowly and softly instead of loud and fast. God can give me the strength to do this.

- quicker response time: if a bickering-related behavior is grating on me, respond to it early and effectively. Do not let it go on until I react with an angry outburst.

- call out the positive in my children: verbally recognize both positive behavior and the character trait it reflects

- practice positive behavior: give them the words or lines to say that are alternatives to something antagonistic. Consider practicing these lines in mock situations. Verbally model this myself by speaking helpful lines out loud (“it’s not a big deal”)

- separate them: they may need the freedom or guidance to have their own space and time as the natural default is for us all to be together

- spend individual time with each of them: the older ones need their own attention as much as the younger ones, though they demand it less

- avoid the group effect: do not disproportionately blame individual kids for sibling behaviors or group effects that they are not responsible for. They may need to learn to adjust their behaviors to make it easier for others, but it is not their fault their sibling has a trigger issue or the group effect made it worse

Eating The Flesh

In John chapter 6, Jesus says, I am your manna from heaven. I am your bread: and that bread is my flesh. If you drink my blood and eat my flesh, you will have eternal life; you will abide in me and I will abide in you.

The significant of the blood I’ve always found intuitively more understandable: God’s judgment requires substitutionary blood sacrifice, from the beginning when God presumably killed an animal to clothe Adam and Eve in animal skins after they sinned, through the countless animal sacrifices made in the old testament, through the final sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Because of his blood, God’s judgment passes over me.

But eating the flesh I never got quite as well. In John 6, Jesus is speaking at the time of the Passover, so naturally everyone would have been thinking of Exodus 12. On the tenth day of the month, they were to pick a year-old, blemish-free lamb and keep it in their house for four days. Probably long enough for their kids to name it. Then at twilight of the fourteenth day, they were to kill this lamb. Most people remember the part about smearing its blood on the doorposts, but quite a lot of attention is directed to its flesh: it was to be roasted, not kept raw or boiled; the head, legs, and innards were to be roasted. The flesh was to be eaten, but in a hurry: with shoes on and luggage packed and ready to go. Leftovers were to be burned; nothing could remain till morning.

Later in Leviticus 4, God says animals killed as sin offerings were to have their flesh burned: the focus seems mainly on the blood. So why, in Exodus 12, do we eat the flesh? Why not just huddle in wait behind the bloody doorposts, ready for deliverance; surely this would have been more efficient? Why did Jesus, so many years later, say we have to not only drink his blood, but eat his flesh?

Well, I know I’m always trying to get my kids to eat before we have to leave for a trip: it seems God is saying, I don’t just want this lamb that you loved to spill its blood so you can be spared the judgment of death—I want its flesh to give you energy for the journey ahead. I want its flesh to give you physical life, as you leave behind your old life of slavery and step out into the new. And as you travel, I’m going to send down that flesh, that bread, again, so that you know: I am God; I do this; I give you life. I don’t just spare you judgment; I bring you new life. And hundreds of years later, Jesus comes and says: I am that flesh. I am that bread. “My flesh is true food” (John 6:55).

And surely it is no accident that we are creatures who need to eat. All the time. Does that ever strike you as odd? We can eat the most amazing meal of our lives, but the next day, we’ll always be hungry again. Sometimes it hits me that I have to feed six people three meals every day for the next decade: that’s a full-time job. I think some of why we were created this way must be Jesus saying: I want you to understand how it is that you need me. You need me every day. You need me to survive. You need me digestively: you need to chew on me, on the Word. You need to ingest, and the growth is a process; it’s not a shot you take, or a file you download. But in that process, there is enjoyment, just as food gives us delight, and in that process, there is life, and the life that he gives us, is not only life to the full, but it is eternal life. We won’t carry our physical bodies as they are into eternity, but we will carry the life we gain by feeding on Jesus.

And that is why we don’t just drink his blood, but we eat his flesh. “Whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. … Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever” (John 6:57-58).

Immediate, Simple Obedience

For the sake of justification, we need to separate faith and obedience: we are justified by faith alone, not through anything we do. This aside, however, the two are really inseparable. We tend to put off acting until all our questions are answered, our doubts assuaged—but if you read the gospels, the acting and the believing are one and the same thing. Jesus calls the disciples from their nets: what follows is not a confession of faith, but an act of obedience.

Bonhoeffer writes “only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes. … In the one case faith is the condition of obedience, and in the other obedience is the condition of faith. In exactly the same way in which obedience is called the consequence of faith, it must also be called the presupposition of faith. Only the obedient believe.”

And so Peter leaves his nets, and later steps out of the boat into the water. The young man leaves his riches. The disciples distribute loaves and fishes. The paralytic takes up his mat. The servants at the wedding fill the jars with water. Jesus asks for participation because in the doing is believing.

In one way, this is encouraging: our belief doesn’t have to be perfect before we act, and in fact our actions inform our beliefs. The more we sacrifice our sleep and sanity to feed, change, and clothe our newborns, the more we find the wrinkly, wailing things actually quite lovable. The more we act loving towards others, the more we find in them to love. As my friend said, "Human nature feels its way into acting.  Christian nature acts its way into feeling.”

In another way, this is challenging: if I say I have faith, but I don’t immediately obey, then I don’t really have faith. Or more accurately, my faith isn’t in Jesus, but in myself, my circumstances, or my logic—and what matters is not so much the strength as the object of our faith. Tim Keller describes an imaginary scenario where we are falling off a sheer cliff and must grab hold of a branch: better to have a weak grip upon a firm branch, than a firm grip upon a weak branch. “It is not the strength of your faith,” he says, “but the object of your faith that actually saves you.” Once we see who Jesus really is, we see that even a small step of obedience to him is safer and more worthy of trust than an easier obedience to anything else.

What would immediate, unquestioning obedience today be? What would it be like if I contemplated less and acted more? Good questions to ask as I look to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2).

Stewards, Not Owners

I have to confess something: I have a hard time not feeling like I own and deserve what I earn. Getting into medical school, then a competitive specialty, then completing training took twelve years of hard work—research labs instead of the beach; Friday nights in college libraries; countless exams and sleepless nights on call and scut work on hospital floors. In medicine there is probably the biggest salary hike of any field, when you go from being a resident who earns less than minimum wage if you factor in how many hours are worked, to a doctor in private practice, and it’s hard not to feel like you deserve it.

So why does God own everything? A brief search through the Bible reveals at least four reasons: one, because he created it. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers” (Psalm 24:1-2). This is perhaps the most fundamental of all reasons: we may feel like we have power over something because we acquired it, but that is delusional and meaningless compared with the power that God has because he created it, and he created all things.

Secondly, we see that God owns everything because he can take it away at any time. This is a lesson I hope I’ll never have to learn, but anyone who has lost something probably feels this. There was gold and other treasures in Eden, but Adam and Eve took nothing with them when they left: it had all belonged to God, and he could take it away. Job 1:21 says, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.”

Thirdly, God owns everything because we can’t take it with us when we die: “For we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world” (1 Timothy 6:7). Most of us don’t think much about death, so this can be hard to see: but imagine if you got to go on a one-hour shopping spree at your favorite store at no cost (I’ve spent considerable time debating which store I’d pick). You go through the aisles grabbing everything and stuffing it all in your car, but on the way home you get hit by a truck and die. That’s what a condensed version of our lives can look like: we’re so obsessed with acquiring material goods, but in the end, and certainly compared to eternity, it’s all so temporary and meaningless, because we can take none of it with us.

Fourthly, God owns everything because he enables us to earn any money we have. Deuteronomy 8:17-18 says, “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.” God gave me my mind, my affinity for biology, my ability to do detailed work with my hands. It’s because of God that I was born in the twentieth century instead of the seventeenth, when women could not be doctors, and into a supportive family environment. And I could go on.

There are lots of interesting things that happen when I realize that I do not own what I have, but steward what belongs to God. I can actually be more content with what I have, because I know God picked it out for me, and he is a God who knows me and what I need better than I know it myself. I don’t have to worry that I need more, or compare what I have with others. I can actually enjoy what I have more, because I know it comes from a God who delights in me, and I actually feel his delight when I enjoy what he has given me. It’s a freeing, guiltless, pure kind of delight, that is quite different from the shallower, temporary pleasure I get when I greedily hoard or obtain something for myself. I am free from anxiety, because while I want to manage what he gave me wisely, I recognize that I can’t and don’t need to control my money as a means to security. I can actually be generous from the heart, because I know none of it is mine anyway; I can give willingly because it comes from God and I see that I only have it because of his grace.

The truth that God owns everything, that I am entitled to none of it, has been slowly seeping into my heart the last few years. And it’s not a grudging, bitter truth: it’s a sweet, freeing one. I see that who I am, and all the things I have in this life, are expressions of a loving, completely powerful God, before whom I bow, to whom I am deeply thankful, through whom I delight in myself and give to others. Romans 11:36 sums it up best: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Amen.”

Grace: Free, But Not Cheap

We value things more when we pay for them. Grace is something we receive as a gift, not through payment or our own works. Maybe that’s why, in the world of cultural Christianity, cheap grace is so prevalent. Cheap grace is when we use religion to make ourselves feel better, without actually changing anything. When we acknowledge Christ but do not follow him. When we market God for the masses, dilute him so he fits comfortably with our own priorities. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, it is “forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession… Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolations of his grace!”

That’s why I love how John writes that Jesus came “full of grace and truth.” The truth is, the sin we commit is wrong, a deep, deep wrong against a perfectly just God. Therefore, the truth is, Jesus had to pay dearly for the grace I receive. “What has cost God much,” Bonhoeffer writes, “cannot be cheap for us.” I value scribbles with a crayon because I know my kid spent half the morning creating it. I value a gift from Dave because I know he put considerable thought and maybe money into it. How much more do I value Jesus setting aside heaven, sweating blood, enduring the full weight of eternal judgment condensed into those hours on the cross? If someone I knew were to die for me, would it not be priceless?

“Costly grace,” Bonhoeffer goes on to say, “is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. … It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him… Such grace.. is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.” And that’s the key: grace is not cheap for me, because I want to give all I have to follow Jesus, and that costs me a lot of things. At times it costs me comfort, outward acclaim, control, self-centered desires. But in it I gain real life, life to the full.

I think about John the Baptist: when his own followers were pointing out that this guy named Jesus was baptizing more people than they were, John said look, this guy is the bridegroom. I’m just his best man. And when I hear his voice, I rejoice greatly—“therefore this joy of mine is now complete.” Have you ever experienced complete joy? When you just felt like nothing else was missing, when you felt completely replete, deeply happy? Does anything we follow bring us that, for more than a passing moment? But Jesus does. Sure, I gain eternal life, countless returns on whatever I’m giving up—but most of all, I gain him. And the more I follow him, the more I see that whatever it costs me is cheap and passing compared to that.

Created

The weather is getting colder, so I’m dusting off my knitting again. Knitting exists nearly in the realm of something magical for me: how one strand of thread can be wound around itself continuously to create something like itself, yet utterly different. You never really look at a sweater the same again after you learn to knit.

When you first start, you’re clutching the pattern and counting every stitch off carefully in your head. But after a while, you come to understand the pattern, not because you’re reading it off the page, but because you can tell where you are by how the previous stitch is looped. You gain an intuitive, big-picture feel for how the rows work together, why something looks different on the right versus the wrong sides of the work. You learn how to read the signs.

You’re flying along, feeling pretty good about yourself—I’m an awesome knitter! After this, socks!—then you make a mistake. You drop a stitch, or realize you did the whole last two rows wrong. And you realize you never really understood the pattern at all, and only now, as you painstakingly work each stitch backwards, as you hook up the dropped loops, do you really grasp it.

I think of myself as creating when I make scarves out of yarn, but really only God can create, can make something out of nothing. No other living being can do that. God the Father spoke through the word that is Jesus, as the Spirit hovered, to bring everything we know into existence.

We don’t, I think, in our postmodernist mindsets, think of ourselves as created beings. We think of ourselves as dictating our own narratives, writing our own meanings, constructing our own identities. Our culture has plenty to say about self-fashioned identity: blame your parents if you don’t like the mask they gave you. Watch the ads to figure out what you should look like. You’ll seem perfect if you get the spouse or career you want. Figure out who you want to be and self-help your way there.

But as I knit, I think about how the person I give the scarf to will never really understand it the way I do, because while they use it, I’m the one who created it. I’m the one who sees exactly how the threads overlap to create the warmth for which it was made; who sees the beauty of the pattern’s workings because I fixed it when it fell apart. How much more does God, who created us, understand me? I’m realizing more and more that he asks me to know and follow him because he means it so much more fully for my good than even I initially comprehend, and not only that, he wants to reveal himself to me in how he created me and in all of his creation.

Because, of course, there’s a bit of me in the scarf I created: in its gauge and tension, in the aesthetics of the pattern I chose. God too has written himself into the story, so to speak: in infinite and undeniable ways, he calls to us if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. He tells us this life is the prelude to and preparation for the eternal reality of our love relationship with him, and the more fully I live the redeemed life he gives me, the more fully I understand that story. The more fully I understand myself.

Grandma and the Littlest One

Happy Halloween!

Free-Range Versus Helicopter Parenting

Dave grew up in an environment without a lot of parental supervision: he biked to school and lessons on his own, hung out at friends’ houses without adults around. I grew up with parents who were involved in every aspect of school and social life: they drove and stayed with me through every lesson and recital; I wasn’t allowed to go on sleepovers. He recognizes that his parents could have been more involved and that he was lucky to live in a community with intelligent, loyal friends. I recognize that we lost out on the benefits of community and a directive style of parenting doesn’t work equally well on all personality types. But the point is, we tend to come at this issue of “free-roaming” versus “helicopter” parenting from different sides.

On the one hand, you have helicopter parenting. This has been around as a recent trend so I probably don’t have to describe it much: it’s the parent who feels they must control and directly supervise every aspect of their children’s lives. Their infants must eat pureed organic foods and listen to Mozart. Their toddlers must potty train on schedule and read early. Their kids must start a rigorous schedule of sports and music lessons. Everything they consume, wear, and do is carefully curated, ultimately to achieve success, however defined.

Critics of helicopter parenting point to research that suggests kids parented this way turn out to be less flexible and more anxious and self-conscious, as well as more likely to be medicated for anxiety and depression. They have more difficulty devising their own plans and carrying them out, skills involved in executive functioning.

On the flip side, you have free-roam parenting, a concept that has been brought out more in recent articles. The TIME article I discussed earlier found that many families with high-achieving siblings let them free-roam as children. A recent NPR article discusses how our society’s averseness to leaving children unattended is more moral judgment than actual risk assessment. A recent NYT magazine article highlights an “anti-helicopter” parent’s desire to establish a “playborhood” where kids have self-directed, physically riskier, communal play.

Free-range parents feel that kids need to have unsupervised, even risky experiences to form happy memories, to learn how to titrate fear, to develop self-efficacy, to problem-solve on their own, to build confidence. They feel kids need to self-explore to develop independence and responsibility. Kids are allowed to go places on their own, to be taken care of by other adults or play with other kids without adults around, to have free-play without agenda or programs.

The opposition to free-range parenting seems obvious, probably because parenting has been trending away from the more hands-off styles of the 60’s and 70’s for a while now: it’s almost a moral assertion that a parent must constantly watch their kids, that anything else is unsafe. My personal objection to free-range parenting is that it can slide into neglect—I see our neighbor’s kids doing nothing but drinking sodas and jumping on trampolines all day with nary an adult in sight, though maybe that’s a bad value assertion?

The first thing I would say about all this is that there is some class distinction involved. Typically, helicopter parents are wealthy and high-educated: frankly, it takes a lot of money and/or time and energy to hover over your kids. Families with less resources, or families with more children, may naturally tend to free-range more.

The second thing I would acknowledge is that there’s a natural bit of discomfort when someone’s parenting style differs noticeably from your own. I’ve been around parents who are much more controlling of their kids’ exposures and activities than I am, and it makes me feel pressured, and less able to relax. I feel I have to monitor my kids more because I don’t want them to do anything to offend them; I feel more judged, and that my kids are being judged more. I’ve been around parents who are more free-roaming than us, and it makes me feel a bit dumped on: I have to be the one to make sure someone’s kid isn’t stabbing someone else in the eye, because their parent seems totally unconcerned.

The third thing I would say is that, like any trend or style of parenting, I think the point is less to judge others than to examine yourself: to ask, what is the goal or point of my parenting? How can I incorporate the strengths of various trends, or what I see in others’ styles, to that end? In what way am I falling into cultural mindsets that are not helpful?

Finally: which is better? Well, I’ll have to leave that, maybe, for later, as this post is getting too long… feel free to chime in if you have any thoughts.

How Sex Points to God

There’s a difference between gratitude and adoration. Gratitude is when I say, “thank you for this, God.” Adoration is when I ask, “how does this reveal an attribute of God that I can admire him for?” Gratitude goes as far as saying, “thank you for sex, God; it is a good thing”; adoration takes it further, asking “what does sex reveal about God’s nature and narrative?”

Putting God and sex in the same sentence can seem awkward, which I think reveals how much we are creatures of our culture, and how powerfully Satan uses sex to drive us towards shame, instead of pointing us towards God.

J.L. Packer writes about how sex is a signpost to God: now if you camp under a signpost you’re not going to get much of anywhere. If you’re driving down I-64 and camp under the sign that says “Virginia Beach, 60 miles” and say, “we’re here, honey!” you won’t get there. Yet that’s what we’re doing: our appetites are so habitually inflamed as to distract us, or our shame is so great as to paralyze us, from moving on to the destination.

So how does sex point us to God?

It points to one way in which we were made in his image. God is one God, but in three persons, and at the center of the Trinity is a state of mutual, self-giving love. C.S. Lewis calls this the “great dance”: a dynamic, pulsing activity in which the Father, Son and Holy spirit pour love and joy into one another continually, and sex mirrors that.

Sex points to what it will be like to be with God in heaven. In Ephesians 5:31-32, Paul writes, “the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” This is why, I think, sex can never be just about the body—it involves the heart, mind, soul, all of us—because it is meant to point to the wholeness of union we will have with Jesus one day for all of eternity. That is the story God is writing us for, and sex now is somehow just a faint foretaste of it.

Sex points to the gospel in involving the ability to create new life. After all, God didn’t have to create sex for procreation. I can think of a few alternative ways of mingling genomes. But God chose to have a covenant act of self-giving bring new life, a life that we cannot take credit for masterminding, and I can only think that it points to the gospel.

Ultimately, I think sex makes us realize we are creatures with needs that only Jesus can meet. If I dig deep enough, I see that sometimes underneath the need is a desire for connection, meaning, understanding, and identity that ultimately only Jesus can satiate. As Isaiah 54:4-5 says, “Fear not, for you will not be ashamed; be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced; for you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer.”

Evangelism in the Christian South

Michael Wolff in his article “The Party Line” in the New Yorker talks about the schism in America, between a quicker-growing, economically vibrant, morally relativist, urban-oriented, culturally adventuresome, sexually polymorphous, ethnically diverse nation, and a small-town, nuclear-family, religiously-oriented, white-centric other nation. When we lived in Boston, which was the former, we shared the gospel by engaging it intellectually, examining alternate-faith assertions, applying doctrinal truths, living out social engagement in the context of urban community. We were living out gospel relevance in a culture that despised the exclusive claims of the Christian faith.

But here in southern, suburban Virginia, sharing the gospel feels completely different. Church here is culture: it’s a social meet-and-greet, a see-and-be-seen. You hear “have a blessed day” and people dropping the fact that they’re “a Christian” at work as a way of connecting with people, whether or not they actually act like one.

It makes me think of how Tim Keller describes a cultural being inoculated to Christianity. An inoculation is when you introduce a mild form of the disease to render a person immune to the real, full-blown version of it. Being steeped in either a mild, nominal Christianity, or a separatist, legalistic Christianity, is a bit like producing spiritual antibodies: it makes people resistant to the real thing. It gives just enough of an illusion of religiosity that true life-change, true heart-knowledge doesn’t happen.

So this makes how we share the gospel different. It’s less about daring to bring God up, then trying to wade through lingo and lethargy to get at heart-change. I’m grateful we go to a church that emphasizes vulnerable community and practical application. We’ve been challenged to abandon consumeristic mindsets towards church services and ask where God wants us to be to live out our faith in a real way with real community. We admittedly look a little different than the average, two-physician family ensconced in the suburbs: we both commute out to underserved rural and urban areas to work; have made unique work-life balance decisions that abdicate both career glory and full-out home-schooling stay-at-home-mom culture; we commute out to a church plant where the folks are all racially, stage-of-life wise, and socioeconomically diverse.

In the end, we try to be transparent in living out how the gospel has changed our lives. People here aren’t interested in apologetics debates or shocked at faith claims: they want to see what difference any of it makes, in how you act towards your family, handle suffering, relate in friendships. In the city, it was easier to look radically different right from the outset; around here, not so much, but over time people do start to notice.

The Lavishness of God

I’m reading John chapter 2 today and thinking about the lavishness of God.

The setting of Jesus’ first miracle is a wedding, which in first-century Jewish culture was a week-long affair to which nearly the whole town was invited. Back then, drinking wine was the equivalent of drinking water: in fact, their wine was mostly (anywhere from 30-90%) water. It was less to enhance the wine than to improve the water, which by itself was unsanitary to drink, causing nausea, dysentery, or worse. Lowering the alcohol content through dilution was probably necessary as everyone from babies to adults drank the stuff, all day long.

Paul Lukacs writes an intriguing book called Inventing Wine in which he notes that ancient wine contained additives such as pitch, lead, lye, ash, resin, gypsum, marble dust and myrrh, to make the wine more drinkable. They would then add honey, salt, pepper, and all kinds of spices and oils to improve the flavor. Ancient wine likely tasted nothing like our wines today. I like his quote from Pliny: “It is a proof that wine is beginning to go bad if a sheet of lead when dipped in it turns a different color.”

So when the bridegroom ran out of wine only three days into the wedding, it was a deep and public embarrassment: more like running out of water in a culture where hospitality was highly valued, than like not having a wet bar at the reception. Jesus asks the servants to fill six thirty-gallon jars with water, which he turns into wine—the best wine.

Now the symbolism here is rife—the emptiness of Judaic rituals replaced by the poured-out wine-blood sacrifice to come. Our shame replaced by the restoration and satisfaction wine symbolizes (Amos 9:13-14, Joel 2:19). The baptism by water John the Baptist proffered replaced by the baptism into salvation by Jesus’ blood, and the intoxicating Holy Spirit. Jesus as creator, creating something that brings noticeable joy to the celebration, blessing the institution of marriage and pointing to the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:9).

But look just at the numbers of the thing: six jars holding 20-30 gallons each; let’s say 25 gallons, to average it. Each filled to the brim. That’s 150 gallons, or 567,750 mL. If an average glass of wine is 175 mL, then Jesus made just over 3,244 glasses of wine. You could then debate whether that wine was diluted with water, presumably after being tasted by the master of the feast but prior to being served to the guests; if three parts of water were used for one part of wine, then that’s possibly nearly 13,000 glasses of watered wine. Some commentators suggest this was Jesus’ wedding gift to the couple, who could sell it afterwards to supply their financial needs.

Jesus gives lavishly. In the areas of our life where we are empty, when our own efforts to purify ourselves fall short, Jesus fills us up, to the brim, with lavish grace, with life to the full. He meets our thirsts and brings us from shame to celebration. When we follow in faith and obedience, we are witnesses, like the servants drawing the liquid from the jars: privy to the miracle, beholders of the glory.

Pitfalls Of A Big Family

I have this theory that when it comes to the optimal number of kids, it’s a balance between your ability to give each child the individual attention and care they deserve, and the benefit of greater community. You have too few kids, and they miss out on the camaraderie, love, and learning to sacrifice that the unique personality of each sibling—and the unique combinations of each of those personalities—provides. But have too many kids, and some of their needs can slip by under the radar since you’re too tired or taxed to notice. It’s just impossible to give each one the same degree of attention when you have many.

We’re at a stage in life—four kids six and under—where the group effect is particularly pronounced. It’s easy to fall into something author Rachel Jankovic (who had five kids in five years) calls the “bulk effect.” She gives a great example of this in her book Loving The Little Years: Motherhood In The Trenches:

“Let’s say that you are trying to get ready for church, and one child is disobedient (something petty, like not putting on their shoes when you told them to). They wandered off and got distracted and loitered in the living room for a minute. In that minute the baby starts crying, you see the clock and realize that you are going to be late, you can’t find the wet wipes or the baby’s shoe, which you know you put on the table last night. The baby is still screaming, so you are trying to rock the car seat with your foot while doing the hair of your middle child who will not stop bouncing. You are shouting out to your husband to see if he knows what happened to the baby shoe, probably punctuated with ‘Sit still. Stop. Don’t wiggle.’ As it turns out, your husband is out looking for someone’s lost shoe in the car where they are prone to remove them, so you get no response. You begin to have evil thoughts about shoes. The tension is mounting. You may very well be feeling hot and sweaty while your coffee is getting cold on the counter, untouched. At this moment, the child who didn’t put his shoes on comes wandering back, refreshed with a nice spell of magna-doodling. What do you think happens?

“You take that shred of guilt and then harness onto it the stress of the whole situation. You make your child into a scapegoat… He did, after all, disobey… the consequences for his sin go way up, and the consequences for yours go way down. It is simply a classic shifting of the blame. … Oftentimes you won’t even discipline the sin that did occur, because you are wanting to leave this situation with the feeling that you were full of grace toward that child who maliciously magna-doodled. Next time, you say, you will get spankings. This time, you will just have to bear the weight of my discontent, my anger, and my lack of self-control.

"If you took the actions of each individual child, nothing big happened. One kid took her shoes off last night in the car. One kid keeps bouncing when you are trying to fix her hair, one kid had a dirty diaper, and one kid magna-doodled instead of putting on his shoes, and the baby just wants some attention… The combined effect is certainly ripe, especially when you add in the things that Mom and Dad were responsible for. The time. The lost clothing that could have been found last night. Not noticing the distracted disobedience right away. Not getting up early enough to drink your coffee.

“The situation is not sin. It is merely the combined effect of a lot of people. And just because you can pin down one sin in the batch does not mean that child is responsible for the situation. Your children are not a situation. They are individuals. Disciplining an individual for a collective situation is a great way to alienate your children. It is not only unjust and unkind, but it is untrue to the gospel. Christ takes our sins; He does not load us down with someone else’s.”

The bulk effect is when I let my reaction to the overall situation unduly affect my reaction to one child; when I functionally make them responsible for the behavior of the group. There’s a difference between asking Elijah to be quiet because Esme is still sleeping, and becoming mad at him because she woke up. There’s a difference between reminding Eric to let Elijah pour his own cereal because he’s two and wants to feel grown-up, and snapping at Eric because he triggered Elijah’s third tantrum of the hour. There’s a difference between reminding them they’ll have to deal with certain grocery-cart arrangements, and getting upset at them for making a grocery run so complicated—it’s not their fault there are so many of them. When having a lot of kids becomes a problem, it’s my responsibility to deal with it.

The other pitfall for big families is mistaking our ability to contain and organize them for actually addressing their hearts and seeing their needs.

Big families naturally require a lot of organization—keeping them clean, clothed, and fed is a major operation. It’s practically consuming in and of itself. I think our lives are doable because we’ve gotten pretty good at running the ship, but we have to remember that, as Jankovic puts it, “Christian childrearing is a pastoral pursuit, not an organizational challenge. The more children you have, the more you need to be pastorally minded.”

This means a lot of things. It means being willing to let the operation be interrupted if there’s an emotional need. It means seeing my kids: observing shifts in mood, the faint door-slam, the persistent grumpiness, and taking time out to get to the root of it. It means spending time alone with each child without an agenda. Since I have limited energy and resources, it might mean putting aside my career or ministry in some way so I don’t miss out on being able to know and address their hearts and minds.

Sabbath

I went on a girls’ trip this past weekend. We made a point of doing things we couldn’t normally do with kids (go on a strenuous, uphill hike; eat at a fancy restaurant; watch girl movies), but I think the part I enjoyed most were the leisurely mornings and conversations. It wasn’t until I was away from it that I realized how often I live at home with a sense of what must be done: chores, monitoring the kids, always a sense of multi-tasking and planning ahead.

I’ve been thinking for a while about this concept of the Sabbath. I like thinking of it as acting out our belief and trust in God as creator and sustainer. As William Willimon said, “Sabbath keeping is a publicly enacted sign of our trust that God keeps the world, therefore we do not have to. God welcomes our labors, but our contributions to the world have their limits. If even God trusted creation enough to be confident that the world would continue while God rested, so should we.”

I also like thinking of Sabbath in the context of our work-driven culture. We live in a world where work defines our value and identity; it’s all about productivity, efficiency, and doing it all. We bring work home through email, texts, and pagers. Those who work at home—take online classes, telecommute, parent—have an even harder time leaving work.

In our culture, we work until we’re burned out, then splurge on a vacation to get away from it all: but the Sabbath is not retreat so much as rhythm; as Eugene Peterson describes it, “entering into the rhythm of creation.” Even God, who is all-powerful, chose to rest for one of the seven days—to shabbat, which literally means to stop—and so we are created to do the same.

I also like thinking about what it means to make time holy. Marva Dawn brings this up in her book Keeping The Sabbath Wholly: how Abraham Heschel argues that we have a faith that aims at the sanctification of time, as opposed to Western civilization’s drive to conquer space. The first thing in the Bible that is designated as “holy” is not a place, but a time, the seventh day.

“Time,” insists Peter Forsyth, “is a sacrament of eternity.” When I set apart time to sabbath, I am acknowledging that time itself belongs to and is created by God, a God who is himself outside of time and will one day draw us outside of time as well. Time is not something I must control and bow down to and be driven by.

What does it mean for our family to observe a Sabbath? For me, since I can’t exactly stop being a mom one day a week?

Often a weekend day is when we stop our “regular” work (school, day jobs) so we can catch up on “other” work (yard work, errands, meal planning, laundry) and feel good about what we’ve done. But I think Sabbath is more about separating our identity from any work.

For me, even though I still am at home, it means I stop doing the kind of housework and parenting that feels like a chore—and instead enjoy. It might mean I cook something because I or the kids really love it, as a special feast. It might mean I don’t harangue Ellie about doing a math or piano lesson, but instead draw a story with her or go outside to collect snails—things that help us enjoy creation and how we are created. It might mean we hang out with friends. If Sunday is our sabbath, it means going to church with an attitude of special anticipation rather than as cultural obligation or drudgery.

To approach the Sabbath not legalistically, but intentionally, probably looks slightly different for everyone. But it should make us look different to everyone around us. In a work-harried, achievement-focused world, to stop, to rest and feast and enjoy creation, not just once in a while but every single week, is to spell out with our time what we’re living for in this life.

Emotional Intelligence

I’m learning how to understand and manage my emotions rather late in life. Growing up, I thought of myself as a rational person; I would have sudden, severe bursts of anger but didn’t much know how to manage them. After leaving home, I never got close enough to anyone to feel that angry; I didn’t cry much—so it was rather a shock when my first year of marriage involved all kinds of angry and emotional outbursts that I had great difficulty managing.

Since then, I’ve learned a lot about regulating emotions—and it is something that has to be learned. Emotions aren’t just something that you “fall into” or have no control of, and you can’t fully address behavior sometimes until you address the root emotion. Looking back, the process has involved a few steps.

First, identifying my emotion. Calling out what I’m feeling before it automatically starts controlling my behavior and mind, which requires a certain level of awareness and intentionality. Before I start banging doors or shutting down from someone, stepping back to ask: okay, am I feeling frustrated? angry? hurt? sad? What’s going on? And where on the spectrum of that emotion am I? How far has it already carried me?

Then I think I sort of acknowledge and process the emotion. Okay, I feel hurt. Why do I feel hurt? How long have I been feeling hurt? I talk to myself about it. Because sometimes it’s easy to suppress how I feel, particularly if it seems illogical, or high-maintenance, like it would take a long time to deal with. But repressed emotions always come screaming back later, often to a degree that’s much harder to manage and ends up hurting someone.

Then I figure out how and whether to express the emotion, which involves evaluating the emotion and being aware of others. Evaluating the emotion is asking: is there a constructive or okay way for me to let this emotion out? Sometimes when I’m sad, I need to curl up in bed and cry awhile, and that’s okay. Sometimes when I’m mad, I need to close myself into a room to throw some pillows until I calm down. But sometimes the emotion is bad, or bad to express, and I need to help myself get out of it. If I’m feeling disgust I may need to call out the selfish or judgmental attitude that led me there and stop my train of thought. If I’m feeling overly anxious I may need to recall some verses to mind to reorient myself in the truth.

The second part of regulating expression is being aware of others: how are my feelings affecting the mood of the whole house? How are they changing my facial expressions or tone of voice, and what are my kids picking up on? Am I crossing a line of behavior I shouldn’t be? Am I getting so bogged down in the feeling I can’t function enough?

Learning how to identify, evaluate, control and express emotions is something we try to teach our kids. We try to give them the words for how they are feeling, which sometimes involves drawing cartoon expressions, or offering them suggestions to pick from. We encourage them to tell us why they feel this way and understand their perspective. We try to be present with them in the emotion—usually that means holding them, or telling them it’s okay that they feel sad, or hurt, or mad. We try to help them be aware of how their emotions affect other people, and be clear on what lines can and can’t be crossed. It’s okay if you’re angry to have some alone time in your room, or maybe punch a pillow, for example, but it’s not okay to hit someone, or say a bad word about someone. I try to explain to them how I’m feeling, to help them get used to the vocabulary and hear someone else processing how they feel.

If it sounds exhausting, it is, particularly at the beginning. But it gets easier and easier. Right now Elijah has prolonged tantrums and I have to walk him through the steps as best I can, but Eric can come up and tell me he feels mad without hurting someone else to show it, and tell me he needs some time alone but then can I hold him, but without talking? And Ellie will disappear and I’ll find out later she went to her room because she was feeling frustrated from being tired. Of course there’s plenty of line-crossing too, but if they’re going to learn how to manage their emotions anywhere, how to appreciate their feelings but not be ruled by them, home is probably the place to do it.

Questions To Ask The Kids Every Night

Well, the kids are back to school, an experience that apparently induces immediate retrograde amnesia. What did you do today? “Nothing.” What was your favorite lesson? “I don’t know.”

The first key to getting any kind of useful information about their day is to ask specific questions. Never: how was your day? what did you do? But: who did you sit next to at lunch? what did you write for your language lesson today? My sister forwarded me a friend’s post of question ideas:

Who have you been sitting by?

Who do you like better this year than last year? Any new kids?

Is anyone in your class struggling? Is anyone all alone?

Has anyone done anything really nice for you?

What’s your favorite part of the day? Least favorite?

What did you do during recess? Who did you play with?

Were you nervous about anything today?

What rule do you hate the most?

What do you like most about your teacher?

The second key is to keep your antennae up, radar on for good moments to talk. Unfortunately, for Ellie and Eric that never seems to be in the car on the way home from school: it’s usually later, during an unexpected moment we have alone in the house, or maybe during our bedtime routine, or even during discipline.

But my favorite new discovery is from this article that Dave sent me, about three questions to ask your kids every night:

How were you brave today?

How were you kind today?

How did you fail today?

I would love to get into the habit of asking these during dinner. They teach kids that they can be brave through small acts. That kindness is important, requires awareness, and can take many forms. That failure is not only okay, but we can choose how we respond to it.

The first time we tried this, we got the usual I-don’t-know’s, but then I shared my answers from my day, and gave them some suggestions for answers, and soon they were coming up with things to share: Eric was brave when he walked into a new library we visited that day. Ellie was brave when she tried a tough math lesson. Eric was kind when he showed a three year-old in his class how to do number rods. Ellie was kind when she was a little friendly (not a lot friendly) to a girl who had pushed her last year when she tried to get a pencil. In typical fashion, Ellie could immediately think of several mistakes from her day, while Eric claimed he had none (and I never could get him to give an answer to that one).

Of course, this conversation only occurred on a day when the younger two were not around, but we’ll have to try it again and see how it goes.

Imagination

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” - Einstein

I’m finally starting to realize that I have an unusually vivid imagination. I not only love, but need stories. I am very empathetic. I get spooked easily in the dark. I process and retain information visually; I can remember the outfits and colors from significant events that happened years ago. I envision the future more easily in terms of my own projections than logical reality.

There are great things about imagination: it compels me to create, to sketch or play or write. It makes reading novels an acutely immersive pleasure: I inhabit the fictional world, speak the dialogue, picture the scenery and movements of characters in my mind. It’s a world that I can live in and go back to even while say, doing the dishes or supposedly-parenting my children. I enjoy colors—seeing what hues are trending, envisioning how I would redo a room’s décor, noting pairings in a good outfit. I’m easily awed by nature, in the grandiose or miniature. My career is visual: compared with other specialties, it’s based much more on what I see over what a patient tells me. One removes a cataract more by sight than feel.

And being highly imaginative makes parenting so much fun. I can invent silly rhymes (my latest one, after Eric got frustrated when Ellie tried to tell him he was wrong about something: “thank you for the education, I’ll use my imagination!”), spin any situation into a narrative, craft spontaneous things from a motley of items. If imagination is what connects our perceptions, what builds fantasy landscapes, what powers wonder, then kids live in the stuff, and being prone to it myself helps me connect with them.

But it’s not all good. In a talk on cultural imagination, David Brooks quoted someone as saying being alone with your imagination at night can be like opening a “drawer of knives.” It’s easy to be affected by fears. Sometimes I can’t stop picturing over and over how I should have done a particular step of a surgery differently. I’m seized with scenarios of my kids getting kidnapped and have a hard time letting them go outside unsupervised. I’m particularly affected by shows or books that are too frightening or sexually explicit. I don’t like reading about tragedy unless I know I have the space to process it. The only scary movie I ever let myself watch was “The Sixth Sense,” and I remember suffering from insomnia while backpacking through Europe years later because of it.

Part of discovering myself as an imaginative person—which, as a daughter of an engineer father and a no-nonsense mother, is coming to me rather later in life—is delighting in all the ways imagination helps me connect with my kids, create and enjoy creation, and moves me forward into the future with vision. But part of it is also discovering that I need an unusual kind of discipline: I need to be more intentional than most about my mental life. I must be careful of what I feed my mind and eyes, about what I let my thoughts stray to. What I think isn’t peripheral; it is the world I inhabit, and therefore how I am changed. In a way, it is what I worship and who I become.

Francis Parkman was an American historian who longed for the West as a young man. He later described his younger self: “His thoughts were always in the forest, whose features possessed his waking and sleeping dreams, filling him with vague cravings impossible to satisfy.” I live much of life with my thoughts in the forest of my imaginings—and, to follow the metaphor, if I feel I have never really arrived, it is because, as C. S. Lewis wrote, “all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so.” When one day we experience our bodies, our earth, our loved ones, and our God as it is meant to be, maybe we’ll find it was less about what we knew than what we imagined.

To Elijah

Dear chub-chub (that’s what you want to be called, as opposed to jah-jah, chubs, li-jee, jack-jack, or Elijah),

You’re smack in the middle of your terrible two’s.

There’s a striking sort of transparency about it for you. I remember this phase being muted for Ellie (or maybe I’ve just forgotten how it was—hard to believe!), and disproportionately tempestuous for Eric, but it’s like I can see your struggles right under the surface. You can’t decide if you’re big or little; you vacillate between furious independence and irrational clinginess, you want to be heard yet can’t get your words out right all the time; you’re sensitive to being slighted or left out yet wish to declare your need for privacy. If it sounds exhausting—well, it is.

You like that Veggie Tales song: “you’re big, I’m little / you go, I stay / why can’t little guys do big things too?” You go on interesting monologues describing why “I’m big—right?” (because you can reach your arms high, go to a BSF class, pretend-read books) or why “I’m still little” (because you want to get carried to bed, get help eating, prefer diapers).

You insist on doing certain things by yourself even though it takes ten times as long and makes us all wait (like put on your sandals by carefully un-velcro-ing and re-velcro-ing every single strap, or repeatedly attempt to buckle yourself into your car seat). You want to go everywhere but insist on being carried all the time. And I mean all the time. Everything is just a little bit emotional, because it’s all a statement about your identity and independence, and when you don’t like how things go, it comes out in tears and stamping of feet and shouting (“no, not like that!”). It’s either, “you can haf it—your whole life” or “I’m not playing with you anymore!” Not much in-between. I’ve been explaining to Ellie that “your whole life” for you means “until I feel like getting it back” which is on average about three minutes.

But, you know, this is you changing, saying goodbye to infancy forever, becoming your own person with a new sense of self. I sort of miss the laid-back baby with the rolls of chub, but you know, you’re so entertaining now in your wide-eyed, earnestly serious expositions upon the world and how things work (usually I’m nodding while actually understanding about a third of what you’re saying). I won’t really miss the tantrums and emotional lability, but I am looking forward to seeing who you become.

Love,

Mommy

First Day of School

Screens and Kids

“The defining issue for parenting in thirty years will be screen time.” – Dave

So this is a topic I’ve been reluctant to write about, for the simple reason that I don’t mean to guilt-trip anyone who regularly lets their kid look at or touch a screen. Which, as far as I can tell, is everyone I know. But it’s admittedly a topic Dave and I agree passionately about, which is why our kids don’t have screens, and don’t touch ours. They get occasional television, usually in thirty-minute segments, but that’s it. And we make a considerable effort not to be on our screens too much in their presence.

Obviously this makes us stick out. Research shows that children spend 2-7 hours/day in front of screens (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; nonprofit Common Sense Media). Six month-olds spend half an hour a day on mobile devices, with a third of them swiping and tapping screens (Pediatric Academic Societies). Less than half the time kids aged 2-10 are in front of screens is spent consuming “educational” material (nonprofit Joan Ganz Cooney Center).

Why is screen time harmful? Four main reasons: one, early brain development is numbed. I’ve never seen a smartphone-told story, but apparently it spoon-feeds images and words in a way that doesn’t provide the stimuli required to form certain neural networks specific to the first three years of life. When an adult reads a book, the child is actively processing voice into words, visualizing complete pictures, exerting mental energy to follow the story line, in a way they do not when a smartphone does all the work for them.

Two, early screen time impedes ability to socially interact: to take in nonverbal cues, practice empathy, and recognize emotions (studies from UCLA and British Psychological Society). The frontal lobe just gets less practice interacting with a screen instead of a live person.

Third, studies show screens lead to a diffuse range of behavioral issues, including decreased focus and concentration, childhood obesity, and irregular sleep patterns. I found limited long-term studies, probably because this is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Fourth, touching screens is addictive. When a child touches a screen and gets an immediate response, it releases dopamine and teaches a child to prefer touch-screen interactions, where there is more immediate gratification and response, over real-world connections. It doesn’t take much conjecture to see how it would be harder for kids to break free of screen addictions if they’ve been conditioned to them since early childhood.

Certainly some programs can be educational—increase literacy or math skills—but our main question has been: what can a screen provide that I cannot? And I just don’t think there is much. Discussing letters with Elijah, having him trace them with his fingers, match them with flashcards, and any other real-life interaction is going to be as effective if not more so than putting him in front of a screen. Am I concerned they won’t be as savvy on a computer as their peers later in life? They may not be as familiar at the start, but I’ve no doubt they’ll learn fast, and the value of them not being already too-used to screens outweighs any risks I can think of.

In the end, we give our kids screens due to habit or laziness, or maybe our own addictions bleeding out into their lives. How many times have we missed our kids’ cues because we’re staring at a screen? How many times did you check your phone today (was any of it a real emergency)? Interrupted a real-life conversation to text someone else? Been tempted to text while driving? How many people do you see looking at their phones in a restaurant instead of each other?

There’s definitely a part of me that dreads navigating the “screenager” years with our kids. I remember as a teen feeling like my life was ending because I had a zit on my nose or someone gave me a look at school: throwing the capacity for hundreds of people to “like” or “un-like” something seems positively explosive. In a way, keeping our kids from screens now is an extremely simple thing to do. There’s always a book to read, something outside to explore, a toy to build with, a picture to color, or a play-story to act out. Our seven- and four-year olds comment about how they don’t have an iPad or kindle like everyone else, but they don’t seem to mind it. It’s just how it is, and they’re too preoccupied with playing to care. Guess I’m enjoying this stage while it lasts.

Secrets of Super Siblings: A Rambling Discussion

I haven’t written for a while because we went on a family vacation, then recovered from the family vacation. We stayed with a few different families during the trip, which always brings up interesting comparisons of home culture (I’ve realized we have a ton of fruit, tissue boxes, and hand soap compared to other people). Family culture and parenting styles can be a difficult area to discuss—for whatever reason, we don’t have a lot of close friends here who do a lot of thinking on this topic—and it’s an area where one can be particularly prone to blind spots. It’s so affected by geographical culture, racial culture, personal experience and values that it’s hard to assess clearly, and it’s rare to know another family well enough that you can point out mutual blind spots or challenge each other constructively.

Which is why I like reading occasional articles about parenting: “The Secrets of Super Siblings” in a recent issue of TIME is far from scientific, but interesting. They examined nine different families, extraordinary in the sense that all (two to three) of the siblings excelled, and all in different fields. They found six common traits:

1. Immigrant drive: most had immigrant parents, leading to a strong sense of the family as being more important than the individual, a strong work ethic, and a sense of high standards (“less was required—but more was expected”).

2. Parent-teachers: three families had at least one professor as a parent, and all nine had parents who did some kind of teaching. The families understood the importance of at-home instruction; “their children recalled early supplementary lessons, books read aloud, regular library trips and even at-home worksheets.”

3. Political activism: families were politically engaged, outspoken for reform, involved in the community, had heated political debates at home.

4. Controlled chaos: most families described a sibling dynamic that was “wildly competitive at best and physically violent at worst.” There was a sense of misbehavior and trial-by-combat that taught resilience and a willingness to make mistakes and move on.

5. Lessons in mortality: majority of families had experiences with death, in the family or of a relative. Such experiences were credited to fuel ambition and teach priorities.

6. A free-range childhood: few siblings had parents who closely monitored their movements: “you could say it was the opposite of helicopter parenting.” They were allowed to play and develop their own ideas.

The first two describe my parents to a T: both immigrants, my professor dad left detailed explanations and alternative solutions for physics problems tucked into my textbook, and my school board-activist mom took us to the library every week. When she babysat our newborn, she claimed to have toured her around the house teaching her about each room; when she watched our two year-old, she taught him how to count to twenty in two languages. They raised three ivy-league daughters in a place where folks didn’t necessarily go to college.

We’re close enough to my parents’ generation that the immigrant mentality is present in some forms in our family too, and teaching and my belief in the importance of the early-childhood years is a major reason why I work part-time. I’m not a political activist, but hopefully Dave’s career in public service and interest in global events will rub off. I hope we have interesting discussions of current events over dinner when the kids are older; I’m challenged to travel and go on missions trips more with them.

I found the chaos point encouraging because our kids bicker all the time! There’s always some amount of debating statements (is “dang it” a bad word?), complicated trades (usually of Legos), competitions (who has the biggest? the newest? who is first? who is last which means they will be first according to Jesus?), etc. Maybe I should regulate on this and be discouraged by it less.

The free-range point is an interesting argument against helicopter parenting: here in Chesapeake, I’d say a free-range childhood is the norm (though it reflects I think a passive attitude towards parenting in general that’s not necessarily healthy), but the definite trend among parents who want their kids to be high achievers is to hover. Schedule every minute to maximize resume potential; monitor every environment to make sure it’s the best.

Yet more elementary schools in good districts are promoting self-directed learning; high schools are realizing too much stress and work is destructive. I would say we live out a relatively free-range type of day: our kids go to a Montessori school; they spend plenty of time in free play—but I do feel a sort of constant, guilty urge to be more structured, to monitor them more closely, and one semester we got to a place where we had so many activities scheduled that we canceled them all. I suppose it’s a balance between high standards and educational engagement, yet giving kids space to choose their own paths.

In the end, it boils down to your parenting philosophy more than a magical list. Like the point about encounters with mortality: no one would wish that upon their family, but our faith should have a similar impact, since we believe we are living for eternity. And that should impact not only our degree of ambition, but what we are ambitious for.

I like how my brother-in-law described the Biblical perspective on parenting: “discerning and trusting God's call for them, not making them something they're not necessarily supposed to be, focusing on helping them be faithful and accepting of the true talents God has blessed them with, and furthermore, all this not to serve their own purposes or their parents', but for God's glory.” 

Dust and Entropy

Sometimes, after being at home with the kids, a good portion of it alone, I just feel plain tired. I start to feel like all I ever do is pick up the same toys and wash the same dishes and wipe the same surfaces. I’ve become habitually seized with keeping the house tidy and clean—it’s cleaner now than it was before we had kids—because it helps me feel psychologically that the chaos is being contained. But it means I’m forever stooping to pick up scattered duplex Legos and dollhouse furniture and trucks and dinosaurs. I’m forever scrubbing the same kid cups and sippy straws and sweeping the same floors.

The kids are actually pretty good about cleaning up, probably due to my minor obsession with it; even Esme will mime grabbing a tissue to scrub the floor. I try to get them to clean up one set of toys before they start playing with another. But the sheer entropy still manages to overwhelm us. And sometimes entropy is the price of distraction: I’ll let Esme get into a box of pens whose caps I know she can’t open, or dump all the recycling out on the floor, if it means I get ten minutes to cook at the stove, or help Ellie with a piano passage, or test Eric on a sight word.

Sometimes, I sit down and consider the fact that I have to feed six people three times a day for the next decade. That every inch of the house is one I have to clean; by the time I’ve worked to one end, the first end is dirty again. That every toy and object has to be curated: collected, stored, maintained. My life feels like a fight against indomitable dust and entropy. The life of the homemaker is not for the faint-hearted.

How strange that, after years of book studies, my life has devolved into a succession of menial tasks. These are times when I think about what it meant that Jesus was a carpenter for the vast majority of his life: the Greek word tekton [Matt 13:55] may be translated craftsman, but seems to refer in particular to a worker in wood. Either way, he worked with his hands in the dust. He had to habitually sweep, wipe, wash, and clean. He had knowledge that amazed the elite intellectuals of his day [Luke 2:47], yet after astounding them all as a twelve year-old prodigy, he returned to a life of manual labor.

I know I am doing all of this with a purpose. It takes a certain brand of humility and love, I think, to do these kind of things repeatedly and cheerfully. Jesus didn’t just turn on the works at thirty; he was the same person then as he’d always been, and these kind of weeks, I pray for the kind of vision to see even the mundane as ministry.

Eternity-Conscious Relating

“I have imagined what it will be like when Lisa comes face to face with God. The Bible guarantees this will actually happen. One day, my wife will stand before the Creator and Judge of all things. … Because I am crazy about Lisa, I want her to have a great life. But more than that, I want her to have a great eternity.” – Francis Chan, You And Me Forever

I’ve been meditating on the singular emphasis our culture places on sexual romantic love—as Tim Keller said, “there’s never been a culture in the history of the world that puts so much emphasis on and hope in sex”—and how I like to think I live on my own terms, but in reality, I’m a creature of my culture. How could we not be? And how can our fixation on sex and romance not bleed into our relationships? So in some teensy way, I think that a great marriage means we have to always be jumping into bed together. That our marriage is about what fulfills me, or makes me look good, or solves my problems. Because our idolization of the romantic other is really about writing our own self-worth or meeting our own needs.

Not that our needs aren’t met in a healthy marriage, but that’s not really what it’s about. I like how Francis Chan describes it: and when I picture Dave standing before God one day, what do I want for him? I want him to have no regrets about how he lived his life. I want him to be so accustomed to worship that to be finally in God’s presence is a joyful extension of his life. I want him to know his closest friends and family will be in heaven and to have the peace of knowing he did all he could to see that. I want him to have a great reward; to know that he served and suffered faithfully, that he rooted out sin in his life, that the path he walked was straight and true.

So the question I should be asking is: how do I help prepare him for that day? How do I present him in splendor, without spot or wrinkle, holy and without blemish [Eph 5:27]? I create an attitude of God-centered worship in our marriage so we can practice that together. I support his ministry and career calling; I help process visions, call out gifts. I identify, work through, and pray for areas of sin or growth. I join in praying and relating to his friends and bring healing and build bridges in his family. I help create margin so that he can enjoy personal time with God. I delight in him and show him God’s affection, delight, humor and joy.

And yes, sex is a way I do those things: have delight, affection, humor; deepen our bond; foreshadow reunion with God in eternity. It’s important, but certainly not everything, and not really anything like the me-centered consumeristic image-and-performance conscious sex we are blasted with culturally.

It would be interesting to ask: how does an eternity-conscious perspective of marriage affect how we date? It probably wouldn’t be finding the externally-perfect person who also happens to be a Christian. Or finding someone who meets every item on my checklist. Or finding someone who makes me feel good or look good. If I were talking to Ellie in twenty years, I’d probably ask, who helps you be sanctified? Pushes you to grow in Jesus? Who can you relate to so closely, easily, and have such delight in, that you see yourself helping in their sanctification over your lifetimes?

On Books: Or How I Ditched My Kindle And Went Back To Paper

“Maybe you can tell I gravitate toward fiction rather than the newest Christian titles? I was formed (since second grade) by C. S. Lewis, who taught that it's story rising to the level of myth that puts us in touch with our deepest longings. I can see Jesus everywhere, hiding in plain sight: The Lone Ranger (who fights for justice while always being taken for a criminal), Superman (a deliberate Christ figure if ever there was one), Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon (who wins through weakness), The Iron Giant (who wins through self-sacrifice), Balto (who was despised and rejected but is the savior), Miles Vorkosigan in the Vorkosigan Saga (whose disability enables him to triumph), Tavi in the Codex Alera series (who, well, that would be a spoiler), Gandalf, Frodo, and Aragorn (prophet, priest, and king), and so on.” – Kathy Keller

I am an armchair escapist. A story addict. I don’t know if I just like good writing, or have an overactive and empathetic imagination, but I live in stories and live for stories. It’s been that way ever since I pulled all-nighters in middle school reading Pride and Prejudice and then Jane Eyre and then Count of Monte Cristo. If I’m not reading a good book, it feels like something is missing from my life, and in a sense, good fiction has ruined my appetite for most other forms of entertainment.

Sometimes there’s a bad side to good things, and the problem I got into early on was reading the junk food equivalent of the book world. Stuff that is more sensation than edification, that drags you down, makes you less content with the real world rather than more invigorated for it. Mostly for me this meant novels with too-explicit sexual tension, ranging from romance to thriller to fantasy genres. It’s like getting a hit: it feels great, mostly for the first fifty pages, when you get into characters and plotlines that exist purely for fantasy-fulfillment; then it sort of tanks as the ridiculousness of the plot and shallowness of the characters become obvious. Then you search for the next hit.

Eventually, in my search for some kind of novel, I’d go for whatever was easiest to lay my hands on, which meant borrowing free e-books from the library onto my kindle, which meant mostly junk-reading. Cheap, easy, probably popular stuff, and sometimes stuff I would be too embarrassed to be seen holding the book cover of, but that was the great thing about the kindle: you could be reading Dostoevsky or Nora Roberts and no one can tell the difference.

All my life, I’ve had the niggling feeling that I needed to rehaul my book diet, and through a series of events, I finally grabbed the conviction to do so. For me, it meant giving away my kindle and returning to the accountability of paper: putting books on hold at the library, and carefully investing in pieces for my library.

And it means renavigating the book world, which I’ve always found confusing. I’ve never met anyone with the exactly same book tastes as I have: Annie Proulx, Juliet Marillier, Annie Dillard, Lee Child, Tolkien, Anne Lamott, C. S. Lewis, Robin McKinley… Sort of a motley mix of reliables, with the occasional nice surprise (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Night Circus). Contemporary novels but only if the subject is not too depressing and the writing amazing; fantasy but preferably if the world is not too odd and there is compelling romance; historical but only if not too archaic; mystery and thriller but only if not too gory or scary. And I probably could be pushed beyond my comfort zone sometimes to read something worth reading.

Lately I’ve been finishing the Jack Reacher novels (just read Worth Dying For which was excellent). I’m contemplating rereading Watership Down or The Good Earth, both of which are good enough to own. I started rereading Lord of the Rings but can go back to finish that. As far as new tries, I remembered Kathy Keller being a fiction reader, found this helpful page, and now have on hold at the library Master and Commander, Storm Front, and Young Miles. We’ll see how it goes.

Running Up The Sunbeam

“This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew. This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore.

“Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.

"One could, if one practiced, hear simply a roar and not the roaring-of-the-wind. In the same way, only far too easily, one can concentrate on the pleasure as an event in one’s own nervous system—subjectify it—and ignore the smell of Diety that hangs about it.”

- C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

One really wonderful thing about kids is their sense of wonder. You don’t realize how much of that we’ve lost as adults until you start hanging out with kids all the time. Today Esme stood around watching Elijah bounce a small rubber ball in a plastic cup, and every time the ball bounced high enough to fall out of the cup she’d dissolve into peals of laughter. Today Eric pulled some weeds and thought the way he could see the roots winding through the dirt was exciting enough to call me out into the hot sun to see. Today Ellie shut herself in her room because she was so excited about reading a new book undisturbed. Today they marveled over the full moon, Lego creations, tater tots, a tent, cubes of cheese.

Of course there is a sense of presence and attention that kids have, to even the little things. But there is also a sense of admiration and awe. In its purest form, they aren’t trying to compare it to something else or get more of it for themselves (though there’s certainly plenty of that at times): they just delight and wonder. They adore.

I like how Lewis puts it: he says we automatically attach meaning to sensing. “When the wind roars I don’t just hear the roar; I ‘hear the wind.’” And in the same way, receiving a pleasure and recognizing its divine source ought to be a single experience. This is what separates gratitude from adoration: rather than thanking God for having something, we ask ourselves, what does this show me about God?

And in a way, it is like the analogy he gives of running your mind up the sunbeam to the sun. When you see a sunbeam, you see a ray of light and some dust motes: when you look at the sun, you burn your retina. You look from a beam of light to an orbit-inducing star 109 times the diameter of our planet. It’s not really comparable, yet it’s only by looking at the beam, and seeing everything else by it, that we begin to understand the sun at all.

I think doing this is a combination of intentional presence and practice. Everything we consume in our culture tells us to pursue pleasure for the sake of pleasure, and is designed to make us want more of it. To be content, to be present, to enjoy pleasure in light of the God it reveals—well, I think that actually enhances the pleasure. It allows us to delight within the context of purpose and promise. It deepens my adoration of God which in itself is one of the pleasures I am most designed for.

Ironically I was doing this about the sun the other day. It’s been oppressively hot, and I got to thinking about how in heaven we are promised that the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat [Rev 7:16], not because there will be perfect 70-degree weather every day, but because there will be no sun: the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” [Rev 21:23]. God will be our sun. The sun I experience now is just a foreshadowing of the glory of God that will literally be my light for eternity. Everything about the sun now—its ability to sustain life and affect climate, its stability, its size, even its weighty radiance that melts me into the ground with sweat and heat—points to God. It’s like a huge clue that’s always been there, but that I’m only just now picking up on. Receiving not just the pleasure of a sunny day, but how it reveals a quality of God I can adore him for.