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.

Being Present

“For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence.” – Psalm 62:5

Two years ago, we came up with a family mission, vision, and values statement, and one of our values was peace. I was thinking today how I yell at the kids less than I used to. Yelling at kids is easy, especially when you have a lot of them: it’s the poor man’s method of crowd control.

In retrospect, two things have helped the most with that: one is making sure I have my kids’ attention when I communicate, and the second is having an expectation of first-time obedience. The latter has to do with realizing that if I have an issue with my kids’ compliance, the solution is not more yelling, but effective discipline. Yelling is just beating them over the head with verbal demands, which kids have an amazing ability to increasingly tune out; it’s an odd sort of auto-vaccinating process. Discipline addresses the heart of their behavior in a process that involves as much understanding as asking. Discipline takes a lot more time and work, but it saves you a whole lot of potential yelling down the road.

The former issue sounds pretty basic but was just as revolutionary: making sure my kids can hear me when I talk. Lots of times I’d get frustrated at them just to realize they couldn’t hear me calling up to the second floor, or even just across a room when they’re otherwise occupied. What we hear is a product of what our priorities are and how present we are—so yeah, I think getting somewhere on time is important and I’m pretty present to what needs to get done next to accomplish that, but my kids think their imaginary story is important and are more present to that than my asking them to get their shoes on. If I want my kids to be present for me, I have to be just as present to where they are in their worlds.

It makes me think about how present we are for people in general. Obviously we do have to get things done, but I can remember even as a kid wishing my mom would just sit down to ask me how I was doing, and listen. I think about how often I tell my kids to hurry up, or wait until I finish doing a chore to read to them, or think whew now I’ve got some time to get stuff done when they start playing well together instead of how can I join them and enjoy their play?

There are some practical ways we try to be present for the kids. Dave tries to sit down with each one of them alone at some point during the day to talk. We take turns taking each of them (well, the older three at this point) out on dates once a month. We try not to look at our phones too much in front of our kids—it’s amazing how much we tune out when we’re glued to our screens, and it sets a bad example if we expect our kids to be screen-free. We work on not interrupting each other so we can listen when someone talks.

But a lot of it is just a mindset. Do I wake up thinking, how can I be present for my kids today? How can I be present for Dave—for God? How often do we do the equivalent of yelling at God—this is what I want, this is how I feel—instead of waiting in silence? How often do we treat God like a consultant instead of the God that he is? And if we understood who he is, how could we be anything but present?

The Lost Art of Lingering

“[Friendship is] not about what someone can do for you, it’s who and what the two of you become in each other’s presence. .. The notion of doing nothing but spending time in each other’s company has, in a way, become a lost art,’ replaced by volleys of texts and tweets, Mr. Sharp said. ‘People are so eager to maximize efficiency of relationships that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend.’ By his definition, friends are people you take the time to understand and allow to understand you.

- “Do Your FriendsActually Like You?” Sunday Review, New York Times

The first time I was aware of Dave’s existence was when I read a blog post he had written about the lost art of lingering. It struck a chord because I was efficient and task-focused to a fault: if hanging out with you doing something without aim wasn’t going to benefit my resume or what I needed to get done (and I could never see how it could), I didn’t see the point. An attitude which got me into a great grad school but into deeper and deeper isolation. Dave’s post found me around a time when I realized I may have gotten all the right things on the outside, but life on the inside was pretty lonely and unhealthy without true friends. Turning that around changed my life.

Now we’re in a different stage of life. Finding friends after thirty is tough: people have kids and disappear. They move around to follow careers or spouses or schooling. They hit the suburbs and get enclosed in enclaves—school groups, soccer leagues, church circles—that promote superficial connection and identity without pushing for anything deeper. Then there’s social media, which promotes friendship as image, self-gratifying connection, selective exposure. Pretty much the opposite of hanging out to hang out. Psychologist Robin Dunbar is quoted in the article as saying we only have five slots for high-quality friendships, which is a laughable contrast to the hundreds of “friends” folks have on Facebook.

The fact is, you have to be intentional about finding community when you have an absorbing career or family. Especially family—it’s easy to become so absorbed in your kids you feel you can never leave them, or not want to pay for childcare, but we’ve found it’s worth it. We leave the kids to go to small group, meet up with other couples; we arrange playdates when that’s not possible. All that structured community is okay, and necessary.

But I feel like the best friendships come not through planning or production, but something more natural and organic. They happen almost when you’re not looking: you’re just being. You’re looking at something else together. And in it, you’re revealing yourself, and understanding the other person.

So sometimes, it’s just about having space for the unexpected. Being open to being uncomfortably vulnerable. Being okay with mess or hassle. Being generous with your time. Being forgiving with faults. Enjoying instead of analyzing. Doing together instead of alone.

Have you ever noticed how kids are champion lingerers? We’re always telling them to hurry up, get their shoes on, finish eating, come on, come on—because they naturally linger. They ask follow-up questions even when it’s time to go. They stop to look at something interesting even when it’s not the point. They get excited about someone else’s ideas and doing stuff together.

I’ve loved that about this summer: it’s really been a golden summer, watching all four hang out together in a way they never have before. Unlike the school year, they get to do everything together—eat, play, do lessons, nap—without the usual hard timeline. In a way, they have a purer friendship now than they may ever have in the future. They’re changing each other, and bringing things out of each other no one else could have, without even realizing it. I still have to remind myself: linger with the kids instead of getting other stuff done! Hang out with Dave just to enjoy being with him. Set aside time to do that with other friends. With God. Somehow that instinct to linger gets bred out of us, but I look at them and see that without the time and margin to hang out that way with someone, I’m missing out.

Fantasy Sex Lives

I’m going to go on a limb here and talk about secret sexual sins. Not a comfortable topic. Twice in my life, I met with girls who were brave enough to confess their struggles in this area, and both times it opened the door to me doing the same. While recent studies have highlighted how often women watch porn, and certain bestsellers have shed light on erotic literature, this is still a hard topic to talk about, especially for women.

I was reflecting recently on how it is so common, even for those who are outwardly moral, to have a fantasy sex life, defined as watching or reading anything that leads to having mental fantasies often manifesting in masturbation. The actual content one struggles with may range from what most believers would call bad (porn, erotic novels) to more acceptable things (lyrics in songs, TV shows with sex scenes, christian romance books with sexual tension).

The reality is, it’s almost impossible to grow up in this culture without struggling to some extent with a fantasy sex life. Before you get married, you figure actually having sex will fix all of it, but it doesn’t: while the fantasy sex life affects the real sex life, having the real life doesn’t always affect the fantasy one. Because at heart, they are two totally different things. The real sex life is about relationship, about a real person, about putting ourselves aside, about being vulnerable. The fantasy life is about consumerism, objectification, and immediate gratification, without actually giving anything. It’s faster, easier, and more addictive.

What’s behind the fantasy life? Sometimes it’s time-of-month hormones, or being tired, or being angry, but mostly it’s an idolization of feeling desired, at least I think for women. You don’t have to foray far into the romance novel industry to figure this out: the longer the book can draw out the pursuit and ongoing sexual tension, the better.

That’s why, to me, the issue is at heart a spiritual one. There are so many rational reasons to stay away from this stuff (objectification of women, bad examples to our kids, polluting effectiveness in ministry, contributing to pedophilia, rewiring our brains, affecting our sexual expectations, wasting our time, practicing deceit), but what will make us stop?

The other night I was confronting the reality of this in our lives, and I felt overcome with sadness in a way I never had before, just sadness for myself, my friends, for those I loved, that these things which we struggle to utter to the people closest to us on earth will one day come before a holy God. I saw how much these things hurt God, and cheat us of what he wants for us, and as I was crying I started thinking about the picture of Jesus in Revelation 5: Jesus with seven eyes, seeing everything. A slain lamb, because he loves me. Standing, because he has resurrected and overcome the darkness. With seven horns, because he has complete power, power that he gives me to overcome. It’s a bit of a horror-movie image, but at that moment, it felt precious.

It doesn’t take much to see that our story with Jesus is the stuff of fantasies. He went from one world to another, changed form, became poor, suffered for us. He is the ultimate alpha male, sensitive lover, and unfailing protector that all these novels hark on about, and I suppose there is a kind of tension that we exist in, anticipating the ultimate consummation of our lives forever with him in eternity. But there’s a difference between knowing these things and feeling them deep in our hearts, in a way that takes away the hungers and habits we nurse in the dark. I think it can. I’ve experienced that, and I’m praying it for the people I know and love.