Low enough to see inside …
This lesson from last year came back to me in a fresh, profound, unexpected way. Maybe I’ll get to share more details later, but for now, this: …
I stood tall at the door, arms folded, that familiar wave of overwhelm sweeping my mind into hopeless thoughts. Sure, it was just a bedroom. Kids have messy rooms, I get it. But this. This particular kid’s quirkiness translates into chaos on another level altogether.
The intense emotional attachment to objects translates into keeping everything–wrappers, scraps of paper, tags off clothes. The passion for creating inventions out of boxes translates into cardboard contraptions cluttering every corner, wires attached, duct-tape holding them together. A fascination with science translates to a half-dozen bottles, various experiments, growing salt crystals and green things and jars teetering on the edge of the table. The voracious appetite for reading translates to towers of encyclopedias, right at arm’s reach beside the bed, covers torn with frequent use, dog-eared pages. The love of Legos translates to countless “creations” that cannot be stowed in bins, must be left out on every available surface. The typewriter, his new love where clicks out stories, means strewn papers with half-written plots. The fascination with flags and signs (?!) translates to another dozen or so papers taped to sticks, papers taped on the wall, door, papers taped everywhere.
Every time I address it, I can feel my blood pressure rising, anticipating the battle: he gets defensive, upset, I get harder, firmer, harsher.
Hence, the overwhelm. Maybe, you’d say, it doesn’t matter. Who cares if he has a messy room? But our responsibility as parents is to prepare our children for life. This doesn’t just fix itself. With all my heart I want to give him the tools to thrive, and that includes an orderly space. The ability to tidy. Not perfect. Not spotless. I don’t mind boxes or Legos or weird taped papers on the wall. But this was out of control.
So I stand at the door. Point. Bark. I bend to move a box, but fail to recognize its function, breaking off some antennae-ish thing and bringing him to tears.
*sigh*
Those weird irrational thoughts begin formulating in my mind, those ones we moms have in desperate moments. I could take everything away and make him earn it all back one item at a time. I could make him sleep in the hallway, on the floor. He could lose access to his room. Would that be severe enough?
It’s dinnertime and we all need a break, so we head downstairs. Earlier, he had said this was the best day ever. We’d been outside all day in the cold sunshine, we’d adventured and explored and played baseball with our housemates. It was one of those glorious childhood days.
But now he hung his head, discouraged, eyes red with tears. I picked him up into my arms,
“Ok, babe, we had the best day until 4:30. Then we had a struggle. Let’s return to joy, ok? We’ll figure out your room. Don’t worry. I love you.”
He managed a smile and nestled his face into my neck.
We ate dinner and cleaned up.
“What should we do for family night?” I asked.
Dutch, as if suddenly remembering something, lit up:
“Oh mommy! I haven’t gotten to show you Hobbes’s room! Can you come see?!”
Hobbes (and Max) are his best friends, two well-worn stuffed animals who never leave his side. I can’t turn down that light in his eyes, so I let him take my hand and lead me up the creaky stairs.
We come to his room and before the birds-eye view can overwhelm me, I lower down, with him onto the floor. I look past the scraps of paper, to where he’s curled up next to an upside down detergent box. It’s white with A-L-L spelled out bright, a low, wide opening in the front.
“Oh, neat, hon!” I smile.
“No mommy, look inside.”
I have to lie down all the way to be low enough to see.
But I do.
I peer inside. Oh!
Oh, he’s right! There is unbelievable detail, a place for Hobbes and Max to hang their stockings (!), a large piece of artwork on the wall, (“It’s a real Van Gogh, Mommy!”), a picturesque window, even a cut-out piece of flannel on the floor (“It’s carpet!”). It was a stuffed animals’ dream-home, to be sure.
He had poured his heart, his time, into creating a special room for his favorite friends.
We were both lying there on the ground, his face was right next to mind, peering inside. I turned and kissed his cool cheek, looking into his lit-up eyes.
Of course. Why hadn’t I seen it before?
I have to get low enough to see inside.
From the top, it’s trash. All I can see is cardboard-box chaos. I see garbage, mess.
I look down and see a lack of care.
Could it be that when he looks up at me he sees the same?
Not saying that solves everything, but getting on the floor is empathy-in-action and at least it’s good place to begin.
When we look inside cardboard boxes we see inside hearts.
{Praying we get low enough to see inside. Thank you for reading. }
RESOLVE: Love our enemies (What it does & doesn’t mean.)
I want you to know, I am resisting the temptation to turn this blog into a steady stream of CS Lewis quotes. Really though, I am falling in love with Mere Christianity all over again. He is a master of brevity, logic, wit, and wisdom. His humility and humor, coupled with candor and keen insight, give him this winsome way of speaking hard-to-hear words without apology, and his complete lack of appealing to sentiment or emotionalism is so refreshing.
In other words, he isn’t trying to make me cry or conjure up some feeling or experience, he’s simply presenting the plain truth of Christianity, and allowing me the space to make an intelligent decision on whether or not I will follow this Jesus Christ with all my heart, mind, soul, and strength.
I do. I do want to. And this means also agreeing to perhaps the most difficult of Christ’s commands:
The call to love our enemies.
When something’s repeated, we do well to pay attention. Thursday morning I had read aloud to the kids from Jesus’ sermon on the mount:
You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. … For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
Then, that afternoon, when I stepped on the treadmill and opened Mere Christianity, CS Lewis spoke on the same subject. I paid attention. Several things I observed, about what this does and doesn’t mean.
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Loving means, first of all, forgiveness
There is no use talking about loving our enemies until we have forgiven them. Love is impossible while grudges are held. Only as forgiveness flows freely can we hope to let love flow as well. I don’t think we have a real grasp on how profoundly difficult real forgiveness is. I have a hunch that most of us hold onto more little grudges than we care to admit. At least I think I do. Last summer, when I went through an extensive exercise on forgiveness, I was surprised how many things the Holy Spirit brought to mind. It was kind of embarrassing, but freeing too.
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Loving doesn’t mean a feeling of fondness.
We have got ourselves on the horn of a ridiculous dilemma because we’ve redefined love as something overly emotional. If we “fall” in love our out of love, how have we any hope of loving someone detestable? Lewis writes,
” Love your neighbor” does not mean “feel fond of him” or “find him attractive.” … That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagining that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. … Hate the sin and not the sinner.”
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Loving our enemy means hating his or her wrongdoing in the same way we hate ours.
This is what really brought clarity and conviction for me. Do we feel a little tiny bit of gladness when someone we despise does something despicable? Trump-haters: Do you gloat just a little bit when he says something stupid or unwise? Obama-haters: Did you love it, just a little, when he does something else worth criticizing? Do you forward jokes or memes that ridicule, belittle, or rejoice in someone’s faults?
Do I find myself just a little bit happy when that person I don’t care for does something that validates my feelings of ill-will?
Lewis writes,
“Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. But it does want us to hate them in the same way that we hate things in ourselves; being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.”
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Loving our enemies doesn’t mean they are never punished.
Here is where Lewis helped me with something I’ve been chewing on for months. Does loving our enemies mean we never report a crime? Does it mean we never fight in a war? Where do individual responses differ from governmental ones? Does turning the other cheek mean that if someone bombs our west coast we invite them to bomb our east coast too? Of course that last one’s ludicrous, but how do we navigate. He goes into a passage on pacifism and makes some clear and helpful distinctions, then says,
“Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment. … Remember, we Christians think that man lives forever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or hellish creature. … We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed.”
The bottom line is, if we are to love our neighbor (including our enemy) as ourself, then we will despise the evil done while still hoping for redemption. Love never gives up hope. Love never secretly rejoices in wrong-doing. Love yearns for wrongs to be righted and evil to be thwarted. Love rejoices in the truth.
Well, this has gotten far too long and we’ve not even scratched the surface. But hopefully at least the mention of the topic will get our gears turning and let God go to work on those hidden places of our hearts. Let’s RESOLVE to love our neighbors, and enemies, a little more this year. Thanks for reading.
RESOLVE: Fix what’s broken inside
It was Sunday morning and we were having a little family worship gathering since our regular church service had been cancelled due to ice. I was already thoroughly agitated, feeling like it was wholly unnecessary to have cancelled corporate worship. The temps were rising, snow was melting, and I couldn’t help thinking of faithful believers all over the world who travel through far more treacherous and dangerous conditions in order to gather together. Why were we such wimps?
Please understand: I wasn’t pointing fingers. What bothered me was me. What bothered me was that I was willing to risk my neck in order to go wherever I wanted, but I was all-too-willing to cancel plans that didn’t directly serve me. I was eager to spend money on self-serving purchases, but felt livid when our power bill doubled or when an unexpected medical expense caught me off guard. Wasn’t I grateful for HEAT? For MEDICAL CARE?
I couldn’t quite articulate why I was so sad, but the whole morning just felt off. Then Heidi, sitting on my lap, opened her Bible at “random” and started reading aloud, completely unprompted. She just happened to read Ezra 9:5-15 and I could barely believe my ears.
This is the passage where Ezra discovers that the returned Jewish exiles “have not separated themselves from the people of the lands with their abominations.” That is, they were inter-marrying with the ungodly inhabitants of the land, even though God had clearly forbidden them.
Ezra’s response reflected how I felt.
“As soon as I heard this, I tore my garment and my cloack and pulled hair from my head and beard and sat appalled … and fell upon my knees and spread out my hands to the LORD my God.”
Ezra then goes on to pray, to repent on behalf of all the people who have mixed-in with the world, and asks God for wisdom on how to proceed, how to make it right.
The answer is one of the hardest, I believe, in all of Scripture.
The people of Israel had to go through, person by person, and make right the wrong they had done. The men who had intermarried had to separate from their foreign wives. Now this might seem harsh to us, or even bizarre, but this serves as a picture to us that God does not take worldliness lightly. He doesn’t just shrug His shoulders and say,
“Oh sure, why not. You can just do your own thing.” No. He says, “I have a better way for you. I want you for myself. If you have intermingled with the world, if you have “married” the customs and ways of this world, you need to go back and painstakingly separate again.”
Honestly, this story makes me uncomfortable. It took three months for the entire process of re-separating, and I cannot imagine the sound of weeping, the hurt and pain and disappointment and anguish that took place. Innocent children were probably devastated. Women were probably left destitute. And we are so quick to blame God and say, “How could you make their consequences so harsh? Don’t you care?”
Yes, He does. That’s why He gave them the prohibition in the first place. That’s why He said,
“Don’t go the way of the world. Don’t marry it. Don’t fall in love with it. It will only lead to unimaginable heartache in the end. Your family will suffer. Your loved ones will suffer. Please, my beloved child. Obey me.”
I knew, as we read those words, that God was highlighting areas of my own heart. Where I had let myself love the world. That’s why I was agitated. Something needed to be made right.
Something inside needed to be fixed.
Just then our housemate, Michael, stuck his head in the door,
“Jeff! You’ve got a broken pipe in the garage!”
Oh no. We raced downstairs, and there it was spraying like a hose through the drywall and into our (converted) garage, soaking the couch and carpet. (Yes, we had kept the faucets running, but apparently the freeze from earlier in the week had weakened the pipe, and then it finally broke.)
Thankfully, the guys got the water off, the drywall torn out, and quickly found that the broken spot was small and easily repairable. (Grace!) But still, it would take time, money, work.
Fixing broken things always does.
Jeff took off for Home Depot, and I came back upstairs, curled up under the quilt, and knew exactly what my next RESOLVE would be: Spirit-guided introspection to see where brokenness had caused an inter-marriage with the world. Then, painstaking re-separation from whatever wasn’t God’s way.
{I understand this isn’t the most exhilarating resolution out there. But our Father loves us so much He can’t let us go a way that will lead to heartache in the end. Let’s resolve to let Him show us what’s broken, and commit to making it right, by His strength, no matter what time, money, or work it may take. It will be worth it. Thanks for reading.}
RESOLVE: 2016’s top 10 reads & why I took a break
This year I did something I’ve never done before: I quit reading.
I shared HERE about my conviction, in early September, to set books aside for a season. It seemed strange, but it was a clear conviction, and I sensed that God wanted me to spend an undetermined length of time without reading any books. I was only to read the Scriptures, and life. There is plenty to read as we look around and LIVE!
I wasn’t sure how long this “book fast” would be, but I waited, and periodically just checked back in with the Father, and prayed that He’d show me when we were done. About mid-December, I was praying about this, and clearly heard/sensed: “CS Lewis.” As I continued to pray I had the impression that I had the freedom to read CS Lewis. Thankfully, he was fairly prolific so that should keep me busy for awhile! 🙂
Overall, I can see more clearly why God had me lay aside books for a season. It was so good to quiet down all the “other” voices in my head, and tune in to His alone. It also afforded me much more time to prayerfully follow along with current events, be engaged with my kids and read aloud to them. It also slow my pace, so that I wasn’t always caught up in some new idea that I’d read. I have a tendency to move along very quickly from thing to thing, idea to idea, and this helped me become more slow and steady, chewing on the Word rather than constantly entertaining new ideas. Overall, I’m very grateful.
So, my reading this for the new year is very simple: Read and re-read all of CS Lewis’s books. Of course, my own book will be coming out in late summer, so I’m hoping He gives me the go-ahead to read that. 😉
I share all of this not to say that you shouldn’t read anymore. Not at all! Just to say that sometimes less is more, and reading more doesn’t always mean we’re living well. May God give you clear direction as to what to read this year, I do hope that it includes my book. I promises it points to Jesus!
Anyway, here are the books I enjoyed from 2016, that I’d recommend, in no particular order. I read others as well, but these are the ones I recommend. 
- Unoffendable by Brant Hansen. Oh my, LOVE THIS BOOK. The kindle edition is only 99cents–so worth it! It’s funny, refreshing. The author has Asperger’s, so I only read it because I thought it might help me understand my son, but I gained so much from this book! If you want to fun, impacting, easy-read that will make you smile and think, get this one!!
- Do What Jesus Did by Robby Dawkins. Such a great book. It’s fabulous, can’t recommend enough. Great practical field guide on crazy stuff like healing the sick and casting out demons.
- The Shattering by Jessica Smith. This was given to me by the author at a conference where I was speaking. It’s simply her story about discovering the truth behind yoga, and her VERY REAL encounter that forever changed her life. It’s a quick read but WORTH IT. I know it’s a controversial topic, but her testimony is powerful and I highly recommend. It’s one you could read then pass on.
- For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macauley. Oh my goodness, where has this book been all my life?? It’s an absolutely fabulous philosophy of education for homeschoolers or public schoolers. I love her insights. You can easily get this one from the library–I highly recommend!
- The Jesus Fast by Lou Engle. I’ve already talked lots about this book here and in the entire fasting series on my site this summer. It’s not so much a primer on fasting, but a call to lay aside comforts and life-as-usual to embrace an adventure of bringing about God’s kingdom here on earth through extended fasting. A faith-builder for sure!
- The Charlotte Mason Companion by Karen Andreola. A friend loaned this to me and I devoured it on a vacation trip. It’s a long read, and you could spend countless hours here, planning and taking notes. You can get at the library, and then determine if you need your own copy. I love Charlotte Mason so this was right up my alley. If you’re a homeschooler, I highly recommend this book.
- Give Your Child the World by Jamie Martin. I’ve already written HERE about this beloved book. A great resource for reading to your kids! Jamie has a new book club for the new year also. Check out www.simplehomeschool.net for more info!
- The Daniel Prayer by Anne Graham Lotz. This is a great wake-up call for Americans. I don’t agree with every single thing in it, but I am grateful for her TRUTH, and especially her specific call to repentance, prayer, and fasting. Excellent!
- Childwise by Gary Ezzo. All the —wise books go along with the Growing Kids God’s Way DVD curriculum which Jeff and I are doing right now, and I LOVE it. I have been so blessed by these books, and enjoyed Babywise and Toddlerwise as well. I read Childwise this summer, and it was really helpful for understanding some specific ways I needed to train and nuture our kids at the stage they’re at now. Along with this…
- Preteen-wise by Gary Ezzo. Believe it or not, my kids are now in this stage! This book focuses on ages 8-12, and it is SO helpful in preparing for the teen years. However, a lot of this book is a repeat of Childwise, so you might not need to read both, if you’re short on time. If you had to choose, I’d say go with Childwise because it covers the critical core components of teaching and instilling moral reasoning. It’s excellent!
That’s it! Now, you’re turn: What was your favorite read of 2016?
Thanks for reading.