Nancy Wilson's Blog, page 40

Just Repeating Myself.

So the other day I sat down and threw together a blog post. It was mostly just chatty – a little of this, a little of that. A little getting ready for baby. A little purchasing enormous outdated china cabinets on craigslist. I think I included this photo from vacation on the Oregon Coast.Then I think I chatted a touch about knitting, and about how Blaire took away the baby hat I was working on and put it on as a tightly squeezed belt over her jammies, went down two flights of stairs and stood in the toy box – leaving the yarn stretched behind her for me to follow. I finished it anyways, and you can tell there is a bit of a frumple going on in the middle there.

The blanket in the background there was a super speedy knit on big needles with two strands of worsted held together. But the real projects we have taken on in preparation for the new baby are mostly the days I spend where I basically do nothing but maintain the basics and grow a baby. Then, on the other days, we try to paint everything, rearrange the whole house, remove a few lingering cottage cheese ceilings, and purchase new bedding for everyone. Those are the days I buy china cabinets and plan a mural for the girl’s room. The whole time I was writing this super witty and fascinating post, I kept getting a little pink message saying that I did not have permission to do that. I ignored it. It threw away my post when I hit “publish”. Ah well, such is life. But you know, the main thing is….

O. Douglas

My mother-in-law was a great fan of the books of O. Douglas, which was the pen name for the Scottish novelist Anna Buchan, sister of John Buchan of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Recently, while Doug and I were bookshopping in Victoria, I found  six small hardback copies of her books, and I bought them just because they reminded me of Bessie.

I read a few of the books at Bessie’s request years ago when I was a young mother, and I found them to be sweet but a little too sentimental. I didn’t have the patience for them. But now as I read them from a middle-aged viewpoint, I am seeing a few things differently. First off, they remind me a bit of Jane Austen because the stories are usually set in an obscure little Scottish town, and all the action is really simply getting to know the characters by accompanying them to tea or on a trip across the Scottish countryside. These are not action-packed thrillers by any stretch.

Secondly, the writing is clever, if occasionally sentimental. Buchan clearly appreciated that everyone has a story, and she writes compassionately and humorously about widows, orphans, ministers’ wives, and spinsters, as well as young boys (which seem to be her favorite characters), cooks and maids. It was a different era when she was writing (her books were published between 1912-1940′s). Many had lost loved ones at war, and she writes with understanding about grieving wives and mothers. She loves the cheerful character who is up against it. And throughout all her stories is the assumption that her reader will understand her biblical allusions and her Christian viewpoint.

A few years ago I found a copy of Unforgettable, Unforgotten, which is a memoir she wrote about her brother John. Imagine my joy when I opened the cover and found it had been signed! So of course we bought it for Doug’s mom.

So this has been some nice summer reading for me. I’m finding that I understand my mother-in-law far better since I am reading these book now, at the same age that she was when she first urged them on me. They aren’t easy to find. If you stumble across them, do pick them up.

And Speaking of Amoretti…

….Bekah has a post up over on Desiring God called the “Nowness of Obedience.”

Coupons and Giveaways!

Howdy everyone! The time has come (the Walrus said) to harass you about Amoretti.

If you’re needing a fun summer dress for your daughter, granddaughter, niece, piano student, or neighborhood gang leader . . . now’s your moment. And when I say that now is the moment – I mean it. Many of the items are either sold out, or very nearly. So if you want one, grab it fast! For instance – this little number:I have one left. In a size 5. And that’s all. Sad but true. Size 5 anyone?

And this one:

I have a few size 8 left. No other sizes I’m afraid.

And this:

I have a total of 6 left – across all the sizes. You see what I’m saying? Let me spell it out in case you missed my drift. Now’s your chance. Seize the day. Get 60% off while the gettin’s good.

And since I haven’t done a giveaway in an absolute age, we might as well do one now, yes?

I’m giving away 1 dress . . . in the winner’s choice of either the cornflower (center) or the zig-zag print. I’m fairly confident that I can accommodate the winner’s color / size preference – but I can’t guarantee it! Like I said, selection is getting a bit patchy! So leave a comment on this post to be entered into the drawing – and then hurry up and use your coupon! Click here to shop now.

Peace and Comfort

The modern woman thinks she knows what a man wants because if you spend any time in the check-out lane at a grocery store, you are bombarded with the message that all a man really wants is a woman with an incredible body. But if that’s really the case, then why do so many of the marriages of super-bodies fall apart?

The truth is that men want a lot of things that never get mentioned on the cover of Cosmo.  They want respect. They want companionship. They want a hot meal and a happy wife.  They want mutual due benevolence. The bottom line is, what ever else they may want, they want peace and comfort in their homes.

How do I know this? Consider all the descriptions of the miserable husband in Proverbs. In every case, he is driven from his home to the roof or the desert because of a mouthy, complaining, unhappy woman.

So what am I saying? Look at it this way. What would most husbands want: a wife who is feeling overweight and in the dumps, or a wife who is feeling overweight and cheerful? A wife who is crying about the pay check not going far enough, or a frugal wife who is rejoicing in the hard times? A wife who is strung out and angry because of homeschooling a bunch of unruly kids all day, or a wife who is tired but can’t wait to tell her husband all the funny things that happened today?

So it’s no good trying to prioritize all the things your husband wants. Maybe he does want a tidy house and a hot meal and some affection when he gets home. Nothing wrong with that. But none of those things matter if the home is full of strife and sorrow and misery. Cheerfulness never makes things worse and always makes it better.

I’m not saying a wife should pretend to be happy and put on a fakey smile for her husband. Of course not. We should find peace and comfort and joy in Christ, and every Christian woman has access to those generous resources. Then, and only then, can we make our homes full of peace and comfort. In fact, we can’t help it. If we have it overflowing in our own hearts, it can’t help but slosh over.

So when it comes to deciding what our priorities are in the home, consider cheerfulness at the top. Establish peace. Extend comfort. That’s what makes home a desirable destination.

Content to Be Needy

Each and every one of us has needs. We have spiritual needs, physical needs, emotional needs, and there’s probably another category I haven’t thought of. There’s no denying that the human race is a needy bunch, and women are no exception. So there’s point one.

The second point is that God made us this way. It’s not a sin to be needy, but there are ways that this neediness can lead to sin, and I’ll get to that in a minute. God created us to need community, to need love and acceptance and fellowship. Ultimately, we need God. When we are put right with our Creator, our deepest needs for forgiveness and restoration and fellowship with our Father in Heaven are met. But even after being put right with God, because we are still fallen creatures, we will still have ongoing physical needs, emotional needs, and spiritual needs.  None of these needs of ours will stay in neat little categories. They slop over into other categories. They can be unruly. So what do we do?

For our physical needs, God gave most of us two hands, and He wants us to work. If we are hungry, we find a job. That’s what God designed us for. Ideally, fathers and husbands provide for their families, and  mothers and wives help provide for these things as well. Physical needs are probably the easiest to identify: the kids have outgrown their clothes, and it’s time for new ones.

For our spiritual needs, God has provided His Holy Spirit, the Comforter, to teach us and lead us, to convict us of sin and forgive us. God has given us His Word to direct our steps,  He has given us the Church to teach us and feed us,  and  He has given us one another for fellowship and friendship. But we often do not avail ourselves of these provisions. We skip church, we don’t read our Bibles, and we harden our hearts against the Holy Spirit. No wonder we feel spiritually dry!

But what about those frisky emotional needs? Where do they get met? Our emotional needs get met in relationships, but primarily in relationship to God the Father. We must begin there because if we look to our fellow creatures first, no matter how godly they are, we are guaranteed to be disappointed. Husbands get distracted, parents get busy, children grow up and move out, friends come and go. And on top of that, husbands, parents, children, and friends are all sinners. They were not designed to fulfill all our needs. If we lean too heavily on any of them, we are bound to crush them and hurt ourselves.

Women can get very distracted with their own needs because those are the needs most pressing. We are all well acquainted with our own needs, or at least we think we are.  But I think we are prone to get deceived at this very point. When we begin to get overly concerned about our needs, we are most certainly going to see the ways they are not being met. We seldom think about our needs when we are happily going along doing our duties. It is when we feel lonely, unappreciated, or tired that we see how our needs are not being met. We don’t wake up one fine sunny morning feeling great and marvel at how our needs are not getting met. Those are the days we can forget to think about our needs at all.

I don’t believe we can ever understand this category of emotional needs. No woman on earth can be fully aware of all the intricacies of her own heart. And (as Walter Trobisch put it) there’s not a man on earth who can satisfy the heart of a woman. If we don’t understand our own needs, how can we possibly expect our husbands to understand them? He is, after all, just a man. He can’t know all his wife’s needs, and even if he did, he could not meet them all. As I’ve said before, if it was in God’s plan that Jesus should marry while on earth (and, thankfully and obviously, it couldn’t have been in God’s plan), He would have been the perfect husband, right? But He would have had to marry a imperfect woman, and I can hear her saying things like, “Jesus, why are you late again? Didn’t you remember we had a date? I know you were healing blind men, but what about me and my needs?” I hope you see my point.

Women who are looking desperately for their needs to be filled will become clingy, emotional, even pests. You can see this in little girls who manipulate and pout and you can see it in grown women who manipulate and pout. Wives can smother their husbands with their neediness, they can drive friends away because of their obsession with their own needs, and they can actually make themselves miserable in the process.

Wives can become mighty distracted with their own needs and fail to see the big picture. This is where we can stumble and sin. We become discontent and critical. We begin to see our husbands as failures because they are not meeting our needs. We think we deserve better. We think more highly of ourselves than we ought. It would be wiser to think for a minute about our husbands needs. Are we as well acquainted with his needs as with our own? Are we meeting these needs?

The best cure for those times when we feel needy (which may be all the time) is to go to God for them. Confess being overly-distracted with me-ness. Confess the discontent. Confess the ingratitude for the many good things God has provided. Confess the whining (to yourself or to other women) about the way your husband isn’t meeting your needs. Ask God to fill the gaps your husband has left. Lean on Him to meet all those needs. Certainly you should ask God to enable your husband to be a good husband and father. But you may not have the right picture in your mind of what a good husband and father would look like. Pray for him, but don’t pray for him in a self-centered way. Central to the Christian life is the principle of laying down your life for another. Do that for your husband and your children. And do it again tomorrow. And the next day. That’s what it means to take up your cross and follow Jesus.

So am I saying that we might have to be content to be needy? Yes. It’s good to be needy. When we are needy, we are more eager to get grace, we are more apt to get in God’s Word, and that is good. Being needy may even help us understand others better so we  can minister with more wisdom to our own husbands,  children, and  friends.

Was Jesus ever needy? How did He handle it? He was certainly under-appreciated, misunderstood, lonely, and He carried a tremendous load on our behalf. Was He distracted with His own neediness? No. He was taken up with our neediness, and He still is. We have a Savior who is a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He knows. That’s why we must take all our needs, real and imagined, to Him. That’s where we will find all our needs truly met.

Vain Conceit

At the end of the list of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, Paul says, “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another” (vs. 26).

Apparently, we need to be warned against these things, so let’s consider first what it means to be conceited, and how women may fall into this temptation. Even sweet Christian women. I doubt many of us think that we are conceited. But if we think about it more carefully, we might see how we give way to conceit more than we realize.

What is conceit? Basically, conceit is thinking too highly of ourselves. When we are full of ourselves, when we are self-absorbed, when we are focusing too much on our own needs, our own achievements or gifts, we are being conceited. This is antithetical to walking in the Spirit. It is fleshly. Natural. Not Spiritual. When we are walking in the Spirit, we are thinking of others, we are humble. But when we are conceited, we think we are hot stuff.

As a side note, there is such a thing as negative conceit. That is when we are still thinking about ourselves, but instead of thinking too highly of ourselves, we devote our time to thinking about what big losers we are. This is still being self-absorbed, and it is not walking in the Spirit. To be self-forgetful is to be in Heaven! It is hard not to be self-centered, self-absorbed, self-focused. Our flesh enjoys it. But if we are walking in the Spirit, we will have the power to deny ourselves and think of others.

In marriage, wives can become conceited, thinking they know best about pretty much everything. This conceit manifests itself when a wife becomes bossy and domineering, when she doesn’t listen and refuses to be persuaded. Conceit nags and complains about how much her husband is not meeting her needs, because her own needs are the only ones she sees. This kind of conceit, if not checked, can turn a woman into a tyrant.

Women can become conceited in their friendships when they boast about their blessings, whether it is about how many kids they have, how in shape they are, how many people they have to dinner, how smart their children are, how much their husbands make, or even how evangelistic they are. This stems from an underlying competition that wants to elbow its way to the front of the line. Our flesh likes to compete, to be better than someone else, to get the best seat. It’s a sure way of having no friends.

Mothers can be conceited toward their own children. What do you know anyway? I’m the mom around here. The most important thing is what I want, not what you want. Conceit fires off commands, criticizes, and provokes.

You get the idea. Conceit is anti-walking in the Spirit. It is not a spiritual fruit, but a bad work. Conceit is anti-community; it disrupts the fellowship we should be enjoying with one another and stumbles our loved ones.

The good news is that God can deliver us from our petty conceit. He gives us His Spirit and enables us to walk in the Spirit. So let’s be done with the conceit and replace it with kindness and gentleness,  meekness and humility. Our husbands, our friends, our children will be the better for it.

Blog Jam

A big hello to all our Femina friends!

I would describe the past month around here as overflowing with activities. Though you might have thought we had checked out completely, that would not be the case. Blogging is a get-to, not a have-to, and we haven’t “gotten to” in a while. Not that we haven’t had some smashing ideas, but they usually occur to us while we are in the midst of demanding activities, like keeping these boats of ours afloat. And whenever we get a free minute, those smashing ideas evaporate into thin air. Some call it writers’ block; I call it a blog jam.

Tonight we are all getting back from a week-long vacation. We’ve flipped over the page on the calendar, and we are now looking at the long lovely months of June, July and August. Ahh. Summer.

Doug and I started off a week ago by heading to Lynnwood, Washington for a family conference, which felt a little like a family reunion. It was wonderful to reconnect with old friends and be encouraged by what God is doing over on the Eastside.

Then we did something we have wanted to do for about thirty-seven years….we took the ferry to Victoria, B.C. and spent a couple of days exploring that beautiful city and taking in all the top-of-the-tourists’-list activities like tea at the Empress and the knock-out gardens of Buchart. But we also found a perfect little used bookstore and unearthed some treasures. (Book shopping is much easier when you drive your car…lots of room for books and no weight restrictions.)

Then we headed south to meet up with all the rest of the clan on the Oregon beaches, which was having unheard-of-for-the-end-of-May sunny weather. I  just finished shaking the sand out of our shoes and setting them outside to dry off. Heather got some good surfing time in, the grandkids need no help figuring out what to do with a beach, and we spent some great bonfire-on-the-beach time last night, drinking cocoa and listening to the crashing waves.

So now it is officially summer. Bekah and I have finished the school year: Hoorah! (We teach high-school literature classes, and we’re just as excited as the kids to end the year!) Heather, Bekah, and Lizzy will be adjusting to their kids being footloose. And it feels very smart of us all to have already had our vacation! That is a real accomplishment!

Rachel is due with her baby boy in August, and, hot news, she is also writing her next book. I expect she’ll birth that manuscript before she births this new son (Lord willing, that is the plan).

My downstairs bedrooms are booked for a couple weeks with grandkids visiting. Merkle kids will be here while Ben and Bekah go to Oxford in July so Ben can wrap up his dissertation. My Wilson grandkids will be here while their folks do a trip to NYC.

My yard is looking very much like a jungle in need of a haircut. Doug laid down the fertilizer before we left, and it did its work while we were gone. After visiting the Buchart Gardens, I’m feeling very inspired indeed. But they have fifty or so full-time gardeners, so I must pace myself.

So onward! And happy June to you all!

Connect the Dots

When Jesus was telling the parable of the evil servant and the faithful servant in Luke 12, He concluded with this: “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more” (vs. 48).

I know this principle can be applied in multiple ways, which is the whole idea. Jesus’ teaching is always relevant, and the Holy Spirit opens our eyes so we can connect the dots between Jesus’ teaching and our own lives. We have all been given much, and so, connecting those dots, much will be required of us. We are called to be good stewards of all that has been given to us.

But there’s also another principle. In Luke 19, Jesus is telling the parable of the talents. “And he said to him, ‘Well done, good servant; because you were faithful in a very little, have authority over ten cities” (vs. 17). If we are faithful over what we have been given, God will give us more. As my son once said, baskets of fruit are heavy. It takes strength to carry them, especially when God keeps heaping more and more in our baskets. Fruit is very, very good! But it’s heavy!

So what have you been given? Do you have little responsibility? God will ask for an accounting. Steward it well. Be faithful. He will give you more. Do you have much? Then don’t be surprised that you have many duties. Steward them well. Do you have a house full of children? Then you are blessed, and much is required of you. Remember this when you are up to your elbows in dishes and laundry and a hundred other things. Blessings come with duties, and God is paying attention to how we are discharging those duties. He will ask for an accounting.

What has God given you? Take an inventory. Look at your blessings. What duties come with those blessings? How are you doing with those duties? Are you being faithful? God will give you more, so roll up your sleeves. Do you wish you had more? Then be faithful with all you’ve been given so far.

My daughter made a comment once about her time in college when studying for finals seemed like the most important thing in the world. She stewarded those duties well, but now she looks back on it and laughs that now she is playing with real money. Nevertheless, faithfulness in those duties is what equipped her for taking on the house full of duties she has now.

This principle is true no matter what stage of life. A college student must steward her studies. A married woman must steward her opportunities to be a help to her husband.  A mother sees the faces of her blessings while she stewards them. As a very blessed grandmother of fifteen (soon to be sixteen), I can sometimes feel daunted by the sheer volume of hungry kids, but “much is required.” That’s a lot of birthdays and a lot of Christmas stockings and a lot of other things. But as we connect the requirements to the blessings, the labor is sweetened. We can say by faith, “Bring it on!”

God loves to bless us and He always gives us the strength to do what He commands. He never expects us to fulfill these obligations on our own. Blessings really are blessings, but I doubt they would be so without the attached duties.

Connect the dots. See your duties as your faithful response to a loving Heavenly Father who has loaded you with blessings and given you the privilege of stewardship. And when you get tired, remember the blessings, and remind yourself that much is required of the blessed.

Hunger Gaming

Attention all Hunger Games lovers or haters out there. Head on over to Trevin’s Wax’s blog at the Gospel Coalition site to check out my ND Wilson’s review. It’s drawn some lively responses on the great World Wide Internet.

One big take away is found at the end of the review.

“One final thought: never read or watch a story like a passive recipient, enjoying something in a visceral way and then retroactively trying to project deeper value or meaning onto the story you’ve already ingested. Such projections have been making authors and directors seem more intelligent than they are for decades. As you watch, as you read, shoulder your way into the creator’s chair. Don’t take the final product for granted, analyze the creator’s choices and cheerfully push them in new and different directions. As we do this, the clarity of our criticism will grow immensely. Which is to say, we’ll be suckered far less often than we currently are.

Lastly, Suzanne Collins can really write. It’s just that we can’t really read.”