Nancy Wilson's Blog, page 46

A little Lewis in the a.m.

Most mornings Doug and I read (well, he reads to me while I drink my coffee and try to wake up) selections from a couple of books of daily readings. Every day is full of good stuff, though I may not be fully awake enough to appreciate it all. But I must have been wide awake this morning, because it was so good that I wanted to post it up for you. It's from C.S. Lewis (A Year with C. S. Lewis, Daily Readings from His Classic Works) called "Love Your Neighbour as Yourself." It's really supposed to be read on July 25, but we press on. It's a quotation from Mere Christianity. (Don't be confused by the British spellings and punctuation. It's just what they do it over there.) Here it is:

Well, how exactly do I love myself?

Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently  ' Love your neighbour' does not mean 'feel fond of him' or 'find him attractive'. I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine 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. Go a step further. In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do."

Thanksgiving Prep

I love that we have a feast day called Thanksgiving. And I also love that it's entirely American and that every where across America everyone is serving up the same basic menu on the same day. It's just such a funny thing to think about: millions of people feeling culturally obligated to cook a turkey and serve it with all the culturally expected side dishes and pies. Pretty fantastic!

I also love making the side dishes and pies and cooking the turkey bird. Love it all, start to finish. But I have to confess that my very favorite part of it all is setting the table. I will probably set it early on, maybe even Wednesday night, so I can feast my eyes on it. I will enjoy putting every fork and spoon and goblet in exactly the right spot designated for such things. Ah, cultural expectations galore!  Tradition galore!

I love making the table look beautiful. I've been thinking about what tablecloth or runner I'm going to use. This year it's a Thanksgiving runner from a few years back over a pale green tablecloth from a few years back. Sounds weird, but it looks so calm and fall and festive. And since we are having a smallish group this year (just seventeen!) I can use my granny's crystal, which I also love. The ten children will not use Granny's Fostoria, no. But I will bless the seven adults with it. And all the silver has been polished (went through a whole tub of polish) which makes the table sparkle like nothing else. What better time to use the family heirlooms?

The leaves will be in the table and extra chairs hijacked from the four corners of the house. The white napkins will be ironed. That's not what I do every week. Goodness no! But for Thanksgiving they will be pressed. The candles will be lit. The flowers (I bought tulips) will be just hitting their zenith. Glorious!

The place cards will be on, the salad plates (so the jello doesn't melt into the dressing) in position, the dessert forks above the plates, and the silly turkey salt and pepper shakers will be stationed where they will feel important.

I've wondered what it is that I enjoy so much about the table setting. I love the way it looks when it's set. I love all the rules about what goes where. I love all the memories associated with the table. I love the symbolism of the table as we all gather around. We sing "We Thank Thee Our Father" every year at Thanksgiving, and that's something my husband brought over from his family traditions.

And I love, love, love filling the table with all my people and seeing them enjoy it. Isn't God good that He gives us such potent, powerful work to do? Work that we can do with our own hands? Work that will bless future generations? Is there a mess afterward? Oh, mercy, yes. Something epic. But that's my cue to put on the Christmas music!

Blessings on all your prep work, and may your tables shine with God's goodness and Grandma's china!

Thankful vs Covetous

Yesterday's sermon, in preparation for our Thanksgiving celebrations, contrasted the virtue of gratitude with the sin of covetousness. God doesn't mind us wanting stuff, but He cares about what we want (not our neighbor's stuff) and how we want it. Righteous wanting is ordered and in submission to God. Ungodly wanting is disordered and covetous. But the Good News is that with our regeneration comes the death of disordered wanting and the birth of ordered wanting. When we are born again in Christ, our covetous wanting is put to death, and thanksgiving is born. Covetousness is thanksgiving's mortal enemy.

Opinions

Back when I was learning how to lead a Bible study (before I was married), I remember a little booklet called "To Many Opinions." It discussed how easy it is to get off the point in a Bible study, and rather than looking at the clear meaning of the text before us, we can lurch into "Well, I think it is saying…." or "I think it means…." etc. The point was to not ask, "What do you think this means?" but rather to ask a question that could be answered by looking at the text.

The important point is not really what we think it means. The point is always what God thinks it means. And though there are, granted, some difficult passages in the Bible that theologians wrestle with, most of it is plain as daylight.

I think it was Mark Twain who said something like, "It's not the passages in the Bible that I don't understand that bother me; it's the passages that I do."  He was honest about his quarrels with God's Word.

When a text rubs our fur wrong, it is tempting to explain it away some how or other or try to get it to mean something else. "Have you looked at the original Greek? " we say in a lofty tone. "If you did, you would see clearly that what this really means is….." Or we establish our authority in disagreeing with the text by telling everyone that we read a book once about this very thing. Aha! Brilliant!

This is one of those age-old temptations; it's nothing new. Pagans and atheists do it, and even genuine Christians can do it. We ought to decide to have no problem passages. If the Bible says it, then I go on the record as giving it a hearty Amen. If I don't understand it, then I should assume that the problem is not in the passage, but in my understanding or in my heart.

No doubt we can find some troubling bits in the Bible that are hard to understand. But let's just focus on obeying the ones that are crystal clear!

Potent Comfort

Love and respect are both very transformative. A loved woman becomes more and more lovely,  and respected men become more and more respectable. We all know this at a foundational level. It is true all over the world that when someone bestows love on something or someone, change is visible. I am not talking simply of emotions here – I mean the action of loving, or the action of respecting. Emotions follow actions, and it is one of the great myths of our time that love is an uncontrollable force, coming and going in ways beyond human control.

Our culture is plagued with women who do not love or respect their own callings.  Loving and respecting your calling at home is almost unheard of. Not one, not the other, but both. When you respect your calling at home, you will not struggle with your purpose. You will not feel wasted. You will feel the value of your work, and have the faith to see its power. But respect alone is not enough to make your work powerful, because respect alone is not enough to give you joy.



Homemaking is not respected in the world – it is held up as something that women with either no ambition or no ability might do. So when a Christian mother chooses to be at home because she understands what she is called to do, she may very easily fall into a low view of herself and her work. It would be easy for her to think, "My lot in life is messy diapers. I do this because I have to, and my church thinks I need to be at home with my children. Personally, I could see myself doing really well in real estate, because at least that is something that I am interested in." So she begins to do the least possible to get through her tasks to just complete each day.

The problem in this sort of situation is that the woman is at home out of some sort of respect for the calling, but she has no love for it. Without the love there is no joy, and without the joy, the home becomes unlovely.

In another situation we might have a woman who has a lot of love for being at home, but no respect for what she actually is doing. She spends her days scrap-booking and watching reruns. She likes coziness, but not influence; comfort, but not power.  She does not value the force of her position, only the leisure and freedom it affords. In this situation, we see how the lack of respect for what she has turns into a different kind of powerlessness. She becomes irrelevant. If the woman who has no love for her calling communicates nothing, the woman without respect for her calling has nothing to communicate.

God does not want a bunch of women at home with discontent and fussy spirits, and He does not want us at home burying our talent in the ground. The Lord wants us here to do His work, to do what we are able to do. He wants our children to grow up in a place of joyful and loving faithfulness.  If we struggle with joy,  it is not as though there is no hope. We simply need to look for some tangible ways to love our homes, and our calling in them. And if we struggle with fulfillment, we need to look for some tangible ways to respect the work we are doing. Honor your calling by working hard, by pushing yourself to grow, to learn, to give. When you love, the object of that love grows more lovely. When you respect, the object of that respect becomes more worthy of it.

By God's grace, a home that is full of both love and respect will become a place of joyful influence and potent comfort, a place that overflows with loveliness.

Blessings

Years ago when my children were small, I knew that someday I would be sitting at their feet learning from them. That day arrived some time back, and I couldn't be more blessed by how God is blessing them. Here's the latest:

Rachel (aka Lizzy) now has a blog called Loving the Little Years and one of the things you can do on that blog is write her a question.

And here's Nate on NPR's "All Things Considered" which aired today!

Let Your Hearts Loose at Home

Spurgeon (in his entry for today) discusses Deut. 33:27, that God is our refuge. He points out that "refuge may be translated 'mansion,' or abiding place,' which gives the thought that God is our abode, our home."

Then he goes on to draw connections between our own earthly homes and what it means to dwell in God as our home. I was particularly struck by his idea of home. Here's a summary of his comments on home.

1. "At home, we take our rest; it is there we find repose after the fatigue and toil of the day."

2. "Home, too, is the place of our truest and purest happiness."

3. "It is also for home that we work and labour."

4. And here's my favorite: "At home, also, we let our hearts loose; we are not afraid of being misunderstood, nor of our words being misconstrued."

What a lovely image! And what a good thought for mothers and wives. We should labor to make our homes all these things and more. And our children and husbands should find that home is where they can let their hearts loose without fear!

Peer Pressure

One of the things parents should be concerned about is preparing their kids to handle peer pressure. We want kids who will do the right thing, regardless of pressure from friends to do something other than the right thing. So how do we teach them to do this?

I would suggest that we teach them by learning it ourselves. We parents are not immune to peer pressure. Think about it. How many times do we feel an urge to do something, or buy something, because are friends are doing it? Our friends are traveling to Europe. We should go to Europe. Our friends are building a new house. We should build a new house. Our friends are taking up golf. We should take up golf, etc. Now these are all neutral issues. It's a free country. Golf if you want to!

But some issues are more important. What if you feel pressure from peers to homeschool or to enroll your kids in a Christian school? Both of those choices may be good choices; neither is wicked or evil.  But if you make a weighty choice like that, a choice that will affect your kids long term, without understanding why you are doing it and what it means, you are simply following the crowd and responding to peer pressure.

Other issues may include what I would call "cultural" choices. You may feel peer pressure to adopt a certain lifestyle based on peer pressure. This could include the kind of foods you will or will not eat, the kinds of grocery stores you will or won't shop in, the kind of car you will or won't drive, the way you celebrate or don't celebrate Christmas, the kind of diapers you will or will not use. All of these choices involve decisions that must be made. But why are you making them? Is it because you want a certain group of adults to admire you, welcome you into their select group, and think you're one of the cool ones?

You see, we adults can still be affected by peer pressure, so we had better be able to spot it when it is applied to us, and we had better learn to make wise choices that are not simply the result of wanting to please certain people.

Our children need to be taught how to do this, so we need to show them how. That means we are teaching our kids how we made the choices we did and why. We don't just send them to a Christian school or homeschool them; we teach them how we came to that decision. We want to be thinking Christians and we want our children to be thinking Christians. We want to make principled decisions and show them how we got there.

Now of course, some peer pressure is good pressure. If the pressure is coming from the right kind of people steering us in a good direction, then we ought to be grateful. We may have made a decision because of peer pressure that turns out to be a great blessing for us down the road when we finally understand the wisdom of it. God is good.

If one of our kids is being unkind at school to a classmate, we want their peers to exert pressure on him or her to put it right. A godly peer pressure is a good thing, not a bad thing. But even here, the goal is to get our children (and ourselves) to do good things for the right reasons.

Imitation is how we learn. We are to imitate Paul as he imitates Christ. We want our kids to have good role models in us, so they can imitate us. We don't want them imitating the wrong kind of people, not because imitation is bad, but because the world is always eager to press them into its mold. In the same way, we want them to imitate us as they see us imitating the right kind of people. This is how wisdom is passed on from one generation to the next.

Who Doesn't Need Some Free Stuff?

N.D. Wilson has a new book. While I'm quite sure you all know that all ready, perhaps you haven't heard of the fabulous promos he's been running. First off is a giveaway for all you Facebookers out there. Just "like" the official Ashtown Burials page here and then vote on which book trailer score is your favorite. You can vote here. Up for grabs are two audio copies of The Dragon's Tooth and a signed set of the 100s Cupboards books. Christmas shopping at its easiest.

Second freebie is for those of you who have the book already. Simply snap a pic, tweet it with the hashtag #dragonstooth, or post it on the Ashtown Burials page on the Facebook, and you'll receive a cool-as-can-be boxing monkey patch, the ultimate stocking stuffer and fashion accessory.

The Facebook promo ends Monday so go cast a vote!

Wow and Oops!

Dear Readers and Commenters All,

So I've been going along and supposing that I had cleared all the comments coming in when Bekah called and said something like, "Mom, did you know there are over 70 comments waiting to be cleared?" Yikes! I'm so sorry everyone! I didn't mean to leave your comments high and dry. I've cleared a bunch now, so they'll see the light of day.

Those of you who have requested the Minister's Wife….it's coming!

Also, a few of you have asked for some personal advice. So, as soon as I can, I will answer those. (Meanwhile, I'll leave those off the blog.)

And finally, keep on commenting! I'll try to keep a closer eye on things.