Monday miscellany

1) I love Montessori. But I think it could benefit from some fusion with some Waldorf stuff — more imaginative play, more oral literature and music, in particular. I am not interested in anthroposophy at all; but I still think there’s good stuff in some aspects of Waldorf. Also, as I continue contemplating my prospective job as a Montessori early childhood assistant next year, and the possibility of it leading to teacher certification and Amy continuing past kindergarten, I get stuck on time — I don’t think kids get enough unstructured time, and I’m not sure I’m going to be okay with Amy being in any school, even a Montessori one, full time. Next year will be pretty pivotal, it seems.

2) Yesterday’s sermon was about having the attitude of Christ, in that he didn’t hold tightly to his status as God, but humbled himself to take on flesh and serve. This is really all well and good — it really is. But… in order to lay down your rights, you have to own them as rights first. If you think you have no rights, you don’t actually have any to lay down.

Jesus humbled himself and served people, but he did so from a position of strength and security and fullness, not because he thought he didn’t deserve better or was worthless or didn’t love himself or anything like that. My late therapist Joe Bauserman frequently said that “love your neighbor as yourself” posits self-love as a HIGH standard, not a low one. Jesus models excellent self-care as well as service — when John the Baptist was killed, for example, he wanted to go pray by himself. Finding a crowd, he took care of them first — and then stayed behind for his prayer time. Sacrifice must be balanced by self-care.

It seems unfair to tell people to sacrifice their needs, lay down their rights, without first making sure they have a healthy self-love. Yeah, it seems in our culture people are very selfish — but that’s NOT healthy self-love. The church gets too reactionary with this sort of thing. The guest speaker, for example, was telling a story of a person who, frustrated with a Bible study or biblical counseling (I don’t remember which), threw down the Bible and said “I’m done.” The preacher told him to go serve himself for six months and report back, saying he’d be miserable and so would everyone around him. But there’s more than one way to serve oneself. More of us should serve ourselves — should take time to rest, reflect, know ourselves, feed our dreams, bask in relationships, understand our limits, practice grace and compassion toward ourselves, etc.

I’ve said before and will keep saying — no one wants to be in relationship with a serve-bot. People want to be in relationship with people — and you can’t be a person if you take the doormat approach to service, without a good foundation of healthy self-love and good self-care.

3) Amy had a play date today. At dinner, she said she had such a great time. At the time, though, I felt I noticed more of the disagreements, shouts, conflicts, and sadnesses.

When you’re looking forward to something soooooo much — when you’re so excited — when your ideals come up against reality, like the reality that your friend might not automatically fall in with your already visualized plans — it’s not surprising that you might get upset a few times along the way.

I’m still learning how best to help with such things. We should probably have left earlier — but I hated to interrupt when the playing was going smoothly, and hated to stop in the midst of a conflict without giving them a chance to work through it. I took a time or two to take Amy aside and listen warmly to her while she cried out her overloaded feelings.

Good things — fun times, times of special connection and warmth, times of safety — tend to open the door to the backlog of feelings. I wish I could remember what blog post I was reading that mentioned this very thing — that times when we receive special kindness, we often feel our own backlog of feelings (especially sadness, it seems) welling up.

4) I want to be more gracious all around.

5) The Brothers Karamazov is a thousand times better than War and Peace.

6) I realllllllly miss being in a band or a good choir or both.

“Punishment is painful”

Not long ago, a mom was telling me and some other moms about how she taught her young child the Bible verse that says “All punishment is painful,” and how she explained that this is why spanking has to hurt, and that it’s God who says parents have to spank. She described how the teary kid would come to her after an infraction, and repeat the verse, and await the spanking.

Meanwhile, I’ve been conversing with a blogger friend on and off her blog as she blogs through her daily Bible readings — we’ve been largely discussing the punishments and judgments and afflictions occurring in the Old Testament.

These things and my ongoing journey toward a more gentle parenting have had me thinking rather a lot about punishment, parenting, and the Bible — whew!

First, that verse about painful punishment. Hebrews 12:11 reads:

• NASB “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.”
• NIV “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”

I looked at this verse in every English translation listed at Bible Gateway. “Discipline” and “chastening” occurred most frequently, while “chastisement,” “correction,” “training,” and “punishment” occurred least often.

“Punishment” and “discipline” are not synonyms — “discipline” is the broader word, with connotations of guidance, training, discipleship, teaching, correcting, and so on. It is possible to conceive of “discipline” including punitive methods. It is also possible to conceive of “discipline” as entirely non-punitive. So “punishment” is too narrow a word-choice for this verse.

When the verse states that discipline is painful, it is not a prescription, but a description. In other words, it’s not telling parents that they need to make sure their disciplinary measures hurt — it’s certainly not telling parents that spanking is the necessary tool of discipline. Instead, the author is merely stating that discipline is, in fact, painful — it is unpleasant to not get what we want, unpleasant to be disappointed or frustrated or limited or to have to wait. There are enough unpleasant things in life that we can learn from — there is no need for parents (or teachers or bosses or whoever) to create painful situations in order to discipline children (or employees or spouses or church members or whatever). Discipline IS painful — no one has to MAKE it painful.

Back to punishment. Some say there is such a thing as rehabilitative punishment — punishment that allegedly brings about repentance, restoration, redemption, reconciliation. These folks argue that this kind of punishment has a proper place in discipline. I don’t know if anyone argues that retributive punishment also has a place in parenting, but even if someone does so argue, it’s not part of discipline. Retribution is not discipline.

My impression is that studies of spanking, any kind of corporal punishment, indeed any kind of punishment at all, do not indicate that punishment is very effective for rehabilitation. Instead, the studies indicate that punishment erodes both relationships and moral development. Whatever results it may seem to get are generally surface results that depend on the continued presence and power of the punisher. Or else, if the punishment is especially severe and long-lasting, the results are psychologically crippling. That hardly sounds like a harvest of real peace of the fruit of real righteousness.

And that brings me to the conversation about God’s punishments in the Bible. In multiple books and passages, there are statements like “I punished you, but you didn’t turn back to me!”

Given the studies about punishment, it doesn’t seem to be that surprising that people would not turn toward the person punishing them. So what is God getting at in these passages?

Is it that the biblical authors are interpreting natural afflictions as punishments deliberately sent? That’s problematic for me, because, while I think there is wide room for interpretation and the significance of genre, I am very reluctant to question statements in the Bible that are directly attributed to God. If the Bible says God said something, I want to believe that God said it.

Is it that God really does deliberately send such things as punishments, at least some of the time? There are other cases that make it clear that not all disasters are specific judgments — Jesus talked about the tower that fell on some people, or the guy who was born blind but not because he or his parents sinned. But if some disasters are direct judgments, then the question is, did God really expect that they would be effective instruments for bringing about repentance and reconciliation?

If so, then what does that imply, if anything, for parenting? I am more and more persuaded against punitive parenting, and so I am more and more reluctant to think the Bible calls for it or demonstrates it in any way. My friend points out that a) God is not always painted as a parent, and that b) God bends to speak and act in ways that would be understood at the time and place. True… and yet… I’m not yet persuaded!

What I have started to think about is, what if God is using this ineffective cycle of punishments and falling away to demonstrate that punishment is never going to be the way of salvation? What if it’s pointing the way to Christ as not only the final perfect sacrifice for sin, the atonement, but also as the demonstration of God’s kindness, which Romans says leads us to repentance?

It seems to me that whatever repentance and reconciliation happened in response to a punishment from God, was not a lasting thing — just like results from punitive parenting don’t last. And these instances of repentance and restoration were not deep enough, not reaching the hearts of the people, but more calculated, more fearful, more driven, more attempts to win back God’s favor on people’s own effort?

It seems to me that only Christ’s kindness, along with his work on the Cross, can effect real heart change, invite true repentance, provide authentic reconciliation.

And yet, if this idea is true, why did God speak as he did, as if surprised that the people weren’t repenting every time and forever?

Hand in Hand

Some of the parenting bloggers I follow have led me to Hand in Hand Parenting. Their approach resonates with my desire to parent with compassion and respect. Some of the ideas include the fairly common idea of making sure you spend time playing together, especially some time when the child is in almost complete control of the play, and also some time when you play physically, rough if the child allows, with the parent in the weaker role when possible (i.e. being chased), with lots of laughing — but not tickling. Now that I like. I was tickled far beyond my enjoyment of it, far too often, and I still REALLY hate to be tickled AT ALL. I have tried to not tickle Amy without asking or being asked, and to always stop as soon as she asks me to. It was really interesting to find someone else saying the same thing.

The harder, but perhaps more interesting, technique is called Staylistening. I’ve been hearing and reading a lot over the last few years about more positive approaches to discipline. First was the idea of a time out instead of a spanking. Then there were people talking about how time out can be just as shaming, isolating, punitive, and wedge-driving as a spanking. At first that sounded ludicrous to me… but it’s starting to make more sense that you CAN stay with a child who is misbehaving, in a way that does not condone or excuse or reward or reinforce the misbehavior, and that does not involve disconnecting from the child.

One of the things that I appreciate about God, as far as I understand him, is that even when he allows us to experience negative consequences from our sins, he does not shut off the relationship or our status as his beloved. He doesn’t withhold love or attention or presence from us. This perspective on God is pretty important to me, and it’s why I had to quit the Bible reading challenge at church (the challenge was to read the whole thing in four months). It sure seems to me, reading a lot in the Old Testament and some stuff in the New, too, that God sometimes does disconnect, punish, shame, and so on — like in Isaiah (somewhere near the beginning — maybe 8, 9?) it talks about some horrible consequences to Israel’s sins, and then says “But they did not turn to the one who struck them,” and I want to say, “Well, duh — since when does being punished, being struck, make one want to turn to the punisher?” There are enough examples of the Staylistening God that I think I must be missing something with these other punitive stories. I trust God will a) continue to stay with me while I hate various things the Bible seems to show about him and b) lead me into true understanding.

Anyway, back to Staylistening — the idea is, your child does something you don’t like, like makes yucky faces or says something nasty or throws something or hits you or otherwise pitches a fit. This is a signal that they are feeling out of sorts with themselves and need some help feeling connected and safe again. There are likely some big feelings going on that need release. Maybe your kid throws a fit because their pancake is touching the pool of dipping syrup. Yeah, the emotional outburst is not in proportion to the trigger — that tells you that the trigger is just a trigger, opening up the possibility of getting to the bigger stuff underneath. That’s certainly true of adults — Joe used to talk about that, that when you feel something out of proportion to what you think you’re upset about, you’re likely actually upset about something else. So it makes sense it would also be true for kids, who are less articulate verbally and less likely to manage life by thinking and verbalizing anyway.

So you move in. You might start with “I don’t like nasty talk.” If the child continues, you try something playful and humorous, which partly shows the child that you’re not threatened, that they’re not as powerful and potentially destructive as they feel, and partly shows you’re still connected. (If you are threatened — as I sometimes feel I am — then you need an opportunity to work on your own feelings.) If they don’t respond well to that, you might say “I see you’re not okay right now. Here I am,” and invite them into a hug or conversation. If they hit, kick, bite, throw, etc, you move in close enough to gently but firmly contain them so they are unable to hurt anyone or anything. You assure them of keeping them and others safe. They may need to fight back — like Jacob needed to wrestle the angel of the Lord (how merciful that the angel of the Lord provided that opportunity) — and the fighting back and the hot angry crying is the emotional release they need. It can only happen in safety, which is why a) the foundation of trust from playing together and b) your calm assurance and emotional neutrality during the outburst are so important.

I still have a lot to learn about this approach — and I may not be articulating it very well. But this week it has been interesting to try to practice it and see what happens. When I’ve been able to calmly stay and listen and contain, the peace afterwards lasts and lasts. When I was conflicted and uncertain but determined, the outburst took a LOT longer to resolve. In general, I feel pretty good about the direction this approach is leading me in. I think it could be just the thing I’ve been looking for to resolve the negative, combative, oppositional, nasty mama-child climate we’ve had at home, which has seemed a serious obstacle to my intent to homeschool after kindergarten, not to mention a serious obstacle to peaceful home life.

Oh, one other thing; the approach is based on the typical positive discipline belief that children are innately good, and that they behave well when they feel good. At first glance that seems to contradict the biblical idea of sin, that all humanity is in a state of sin (separated, disconnected from God) as well as guilty of sins (wrong things done, right things not done). On the other hand, we start with the premise that people are created in the image of God, that God’s creation is “good” and creation of people is “very good,” and that “while we were yet sinners, God loved us.” So perhaps the idea of innate goodness can reflect this premise, and doesn’t have to negate the reality of sin. It seems good to view kids as good creations of God, bearers of his image, though burdened by sin as we all are.

Feelings, grace, and sin

Emotional health is something I think is important, and something I think some Christians have a hard time with — in some circles, it is considered sinful, or at best a lack of faith, to ever feel anger, sadness, or fear…

Here are some thoughts about the matter.

Feelings are neutral, neither good nor evil in and of themselves. It is what we do with feelings that can be good or evil — this includes not only outward behavior (like hitting someone or saying something mean) but inward thoughts and attitudes (like thinking the mean things even though you don’t say them out loud).

The Sermon on the Mount and some other things Jesus said discuss how heart attitudes can be sinful — God looks to the heart, not just the outward things. I suppose it’s easy to conclude that all heart matters — thoughts, attitudes, and feelings — are equally subject to moral judgment. Especially when you look at some of the admonitions that say things like don’t be angry with your brother, or don’t be anxious; but I’m pretty sure that those admonitions are thinking of the attitudes and thoughts that usually accompany anger and anxiety, not the anger and anxiety by themselves. There’s also the verse (reference?) that says to be angry and not sin — so it must be possible to have anger apart from sinful thoughts and attitudes.

Even if I’m wrong — even if feelings can be sinful — what then? Or, even though we can distinguish logically between feelings and thoughts / attitudes, what if in practical reality they pretty much always do go together? In which case almost no one is ever really angry without sinning. So — what then?

Well — so there is room for repentance, and for leaning on grace, as a friend put it. Having confidence that God will keep his promise to finish our sanctification and to forgive us and cleanse us of all unrighteousness.

But repentance and grace / trust / faith does not preclude feeling the feelings.

You repent and trust AND sit in the angry feelings, or the anxious feelings, or the sad feelings, or whatever they may be. You work on being able to separate your feelings from your thoughts and attitudes — to repent of thinking mean things about so-and-so, while acknowledging that you are in fact angry with so-and-so.

You explore why you might be angry; perhaps you have just cause for the anger. Then you can deal with that just cause — perhaps a confrontation is necessary, or perhaps you can / will choose not to defend yourself — not because you deserve to be stomped on or don’t deserve defense, but because you know God is your defender and truly feel secure in that knowledge. Either way, giving your anger to God doesn’t mean it vanishes or he takes it away — it means you trust him with it and you trust him with what happens.

Or perhaps you discover that your anger is irrational or out of proportion. Maybe it has less to do with what so-and-so did or said, and more to do with some experience from your past, or some aspect of your personality, or the weather or your mood or what you ate for breakfast. Then, you can use your will to choose to disconnect your anger from so-and-so. The anger is still there — just because it’s irrational or out of proportion doesn’t mean it’s non-existent.

Trying to stop feeling it isn’t going to work. Trying to make it more than it is won’t work either. Mindfully let your anger be what it is, and dissipate on its own. You can take some actions to help metabolize it (relaxation, rest, better food, prayer, fun things, journaling, meaningful things, etc), but you can’t just will it away.

What if your feeling lasts “too long?” I’m not sure there is such a thing. You might have an attitude of clinging to the feeling or to what it means to you… that’s different. Discerning the difference can be tricky. I think mindfulness is the key — being open to the feeling being there, and being open to the feeling leaving. Being willing to listen to what your feelings have to tell you. Being compassionate in that way.

Trusting God and depending on him doesn’t mean that our negative feelings will dissipate faster. It does mean being in a secure place with a compassionate father while we metabolize those feelings. Trust God to manage your situation. Trust God to be with you with the feelings. But I don’t think it makes sense to trust God to stop the feelings themselves. As I said above, giving your negative feelings to God doesn’t mean he takes them away.

A less-thought-out final thought. I believe that the separation that occurred in Eden was threefold — separation from God, from others, and from self. Because of that, negative feelings are inevitable — toward God, toward others, and within oneself. As such, I think somewhat that negative feelings are symptoms of the fall… like sickness and natural disasters and war.

But, like pain, negative feelings have a purpose. Feelings give us information about situations, ourselves, others, and even God. It’s good to be open to learning from feelings.

Check out the tag in the right sidebar for “prompting events” — these are worksheets I’ve written out in dealing with various feelings at various times. You can use the outline, which I got from a DBT support group, to work through some of your own feelings. Would love to see if anyone posts one on their own blog.

Commute

Our commute to preschool was full of interesting conversations. I tried to jot down as much as I could remember.

1. Amy “Why don’t I bring my wipe-off book?”
Me “I don’t know why you didn’t bring it.”
Amy “No, why DON’T I bring my wipe-off book?”
Me “I don’t know.”
Amy (bangs her arm, sighs dramatically.)
Me “What are you upset about?”
Amy “Can I be alone for a while?”
———
Me “I need you to be able to talk to me now.”
Amy “Okay, what would you like to talk about?”
Me “I want to know why you were upset. You said ‘Why don’t I bring my wipe-off book,’ and I said ‘I don’t know.’ Why were you upset about that?”
Amy “Because someone should know!”
Me “You’re the only one who could know; you’re the one who makes that decision. We don’t have a rule about the wipe-off book.”
Amy “But I DON’T know!” and something about someone should know everything, and being upset about not knowing everything.
Me “Yes, it’s upsetting not to know everything.”
Amy “Only God knows everything.”
Me “And that’s comforting.”
Amy “Yes, it is.”

2. Amy “Are we going to put up our Christmas tree at Christmas?”
Me “Yes.”
Amy “Why do people do that?”
Me “Put up Christmas trees?”
Amy “Yeah.”
Me “… Well, I think it started in Germany. People brought in branches from evergreen trees, as a reminder that life continues — that some things are still alive in winter, and that life would return in the spring. When Christianity spread, people decided they could use that tradition for Christmas, too. After all, God keeps things alive and makes life return in spring.”
Amy “I don’t understand you.”
Me “What?”
Amy “I don’t understand what that means. How? How does he do it?” (I think that’s what she said — something like it, anyway.)
Me “That’s a hard question… well, since God made everything, he’s able to keep things alive.”
Amy “I don’t understand you.”
Me “Do you want me to keep trying?”
Amy “No.”

3. Amy “Did God make pretend things?”
Me “No, but he made imagination, which allows people to make pretend things. He didn’t make firetrucks, but he made the things firetrucks are made from, and he made the brains of people who figure out how to make them.”
Amy “What’s a brain?”
Me “It’s the organ in your head that you use for thinking. Your feelings are there, too.”
Amy “And attitudes.”
Me “Yeah. People usually talk about the heart when they talk about feelings and attitudes, but they really happen in your brain. The heart just pumps blood… Did you know that in Bible times people thought feelings happened in the kidneys?”
Amy “What are kidneys?”
Me “They’re near your waist, by your back; they filter your blood to make pee.”

We then talked about how the body has two ways to get rid of stuff — poop and pee. We talked about the long tube from mouth to anus, and how in the intestines the good or needed stuff goes into the blood and what’s left comes out as poop. And we talked about how the blood carries good stuff to the cells and carries bad stuff to the kidneys, which make the pee and send it to the bladder, which pushes it out. We talked about extra stuff, too, how extra liquids make more pee, and how extra food gets stored as fat. I wish I remembered more of the questions and answers for this whole part.

After I talked about the intestines sending to the blood the parts of the food that the body can use:

Amy “What about pudding?” (I.e. she wanted to know what parts of pudding does the body use or get rid of.)

Love Week

Today we visited CrossRoads, an Evangelical Free church we’ve visited a few times before.

I hadn’t realized I’d been missing contemporary music. We sing some older contemporary at our current church, but not many of the ones I especially like. And it was nice to hear a band again — drums, electric guitar, etc. The band wasn’t too loud; we could hear people singing around us and hear ourselves. And while this church maybe (this is just one Sunday, after all) could use more songs about God and his other attributes, it was refreshing to hear and sing about his love for us. (Not in the Jesus-is-my-boyfriend sense that some contemporary music carries.)

It was nice to be with more than a dozen other families.

Amy enjoyed her Sunday School class — decent snack of cheese crackers and water (good — no juice, no candy), Bible story with followup activities, a song, painting, felt board play. There was a CD playing, and Amy said they didn’t have a video because the DVD was lost — I would rather have a Sunday School class without background music or video.

The church just finished something they called Love Week. There was a mission team sent to the Dominican Republic, and some other mission called Project Reach, and a ton of community service projects including clean up, painting, yard work, visitation, and so on. All ages participated. Neat idea.

The sermon was called “Is Love Week Over?” and the basic gist was, “No, it’s not — we need to keep this up every day!” I appreciate the desire to not compartmentalize, to not have service as a once in a while thing.

On the other hand, I didn’t get a good sense of the importance of sustainability. It is relatively easy to set aside normal commitments to do unusual service for a week. But to have an openness, willingness, and commitment to serve every day needs a different perspective and approach. It has to take into account ordinary commitments like work, family, and — yes — self-care, friends, rest, and the like.

I think of the Good Samaritan, who was not on a mission trip, not going out of his way to find opportunities to serve, but was merely traveling on his own business — he stopped to take care of a need he came across, did what he was able to do, and went on with his business. I think we need to think of service as less an extraordinary, unusual, separate, distinct thing, and think more of it as something included, something assimilated, something that is sustainable.

The text for the sermon was the first chapter of Nehemiah, in which he learns of the distressed situation of the post-exilic Israelites, mourns, and prays. The next chapter goes on to say that he went on with his normal business of being cup-bearer to the king, and that only when the king noticed and asked about his sadness did he say anything, and even then didn’t share any plans until the king asked.

Boldness, and faith that God can and does do immeasurably beyond what we ask or even imagine, does not preclude keeping up with ordinary commitments and activities, does not mean stomping preemptively on others’ sensibilities, etc. The key seems to be praying and waiting, being open, rather than too quickly jumping into grand schemes.

It was nice to visit another church. To be in our own town. And to be home well before lunch time!

My behavior IS me!

Most parenting experts these days make a big deal of distinguishing between your child and your child’s behavior — doing bad things doesn’t make her a bad kid any more than doing good things makes her a good kid — she’s just a kid who sometimes does good things and sometimes does bad things.

I understand the idea — if you give a kid a bad kid label, it will tend to be self-fulfilling. If you treat a kid like you know she can make good choices and will do so more and more, that’s likely to help, too.

On the other hand, maybe Amy’s right, too.

Yesterday we were talking about loving one another in all sorts of situations — when one of us is grumpy, angry, sad, afraid, happy, silly, etc. I think I said something about how I don’t love her behavior when she is rude, but that I love her when she’s rude. And she said, “But my behavior IS me!”

I explained the distinction… but then I keep thinking she’s onto something. The distinction may well not be so clear-cut and complete and absolute as advised by the experts.

Behavior influences heart.
Heart influences behavior.
Diet, exercise, weather, circumstances, past experience, nurture, genetics, activities, values, beliefs, assumptions, culture — and who knows what else — influence both heart and behavior.

Sometimes the Bible emphasizes the distinction side — people see the outside, but God sees the heart… they are like whitewashed tombs, beautiful and shining on the outside but inside full of bones…

Sometimes it emphasizes the unity side — by your words you will be justified, by your words you will be condemned… the sheep and goats will be separated based on their deeds… Ps 28:4-5 says to requite the wicked for their deeds.

I wonder how helpful it might be to talk to kids about how all these inner and outer things can influence one another in comprising this thing called a person.

The garden

One of my friends has been creating a beautiful garden in curved landscaping beds around her house, and drawing encouragement from spiritual lessons in weeding, pruning, cultivating, and the like.

My garden, with its half-eaten broccoli and brussels sprouts, inadequately thinned salad greens, beets, and carrots, whole swaths unweeded or mulched, quite a few things not yet planted, bales of straw still sitting around, and half the fence not yet pinned down, has other spiritual lessons.

Sure, we could talk about failure, and laziness, and how you reap what you sow and therefore don’t get as much quality produce from a haphazard gardening effort.

And that lesson would be especially appropriate if we were poor and / or lived in a culture where feeding our family depended on a productive home garden.

Since we are not that poor, and don’t live in such a culture, should we act as if we did anyway, and take the failure lesson to heart? Push on to garden perfectly in addition to meeting all life’s other obligations?

Or can we accept our own context, and consider the lesson of “good enough,” and of “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly”?

We can, perhaps, enjoy the salad we had tonight, scrounged from that overgrown lettuce bed, supplemented by the tiniest carrots from a three-minute thinning session, and by baby peas, without mourning overmuch for the tatsoi and mizuna that bolted before being picked much, and with only a cursory glance at the beet bed, waiting its turn to be thinned.

We can be grateful that there are a few leaves on a few of the broccoli and brussels sprouts plants, and hope for a fall crop, too.

We can admire the red clover and how huge it’s getting, or the equally impressive size of other weeds less pleasant than clover.

We can rue the fifteen new fly bites and think how many more we can avoid by not staying in the garden to work some more.

We can adore God who will not snuff out a smoldering wick or break a bruised reed, and who doesn’t look down at me with scorn for my un-ant-like garden work ethic.

This “good enough” thing is tricky; for those of us with a highly developed sense of obligation, perfectionism, and massive capacity for guilt and shame, it is easy to focus on Scriptures that do urge hard work and attention to detail and exquisite standards. It is interesting that there are also those smoldering wick and bruised reed verses — certain messages, certain exhortations, are for certain times of life, times of day, certain temperaments and personalities, and so on.

Notice Jesus’ summary of the law — to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself — does not explicitly spell out a work ethic or elevate “do perfect work” verses over “smoldering wick” verses. Love can be fully itself, fully mindful, fully whole-hearted, fully present, in any situation, whether focused on a work, on breathing in and out, on connecting, on playing, etc.

———

ETA: We could also turn the whole thing around and talk about the immense value of rest, reflection, contemplation, and the like. And the dangers of overwork and anxiety and stress.

gnashing of teeth

On my mind this naptime:

1) Every once in a while it seems we creep back into a pattern of Amy weeping and gnashing her teeth snapping and screaming at us when she doesn’t get her way. What a hard stage for her — how frustrating it must be to want so many things just so and to get very few of them just so. How difficult to accept unpleasant realities.

I think back about all the good ideas and suggestions — need to work again at making sure everything is put away before dinnertime so bedtime is less of a hassle. Need to keep working at using the “baskets” idea to choose which issues are good for problem-solving communication, which to let go, and which to stand our ground about. Keep an eye on our expectations. Think about the long-term — what is most likely to help instill or develop the value, principle, idea, skill, etc. Think about the short-term — what’s most likely to foster calm and acceptable results when we’re all tired and short on time.

I also need wisdom and discernment on how to distinguish between the quest for power (even if she doesn’t think of it as power over us in particular, power includes the desire to have things her own way — we all want to have things our own way, and sometimes we pursue our own way with energy and commitment despite obstacles, and other times we let go in the face of obstacles, and sometimes we think about whether our own way is really the best thing at the moment…) and the quest for comfort and connection.

When Amy’s screaming and snapping, she generally doesn’t want, or can’t accept, comfort and connection unless it comes in the particular form she’s demanding. If the answer to that demand is “no,” it seems we have to wait for the storm to calm before we can help her.

It seems the problem-solving communication opportunities are more rare than they should be — it’s either cheeriness or screaming. Need to look at what’s going on there — where I might be asserting power more often than I need to, or whatever else might be contributing.

By the way, I wish she would get out of the habit of wiping her fingers on her clothes and use a napkin. She’s not even aware that she’s doing it. I also wish she would distinguish between “take your time and observe all around and talk about all of it” times and “do the one required thing and do it quickly” times. AND I wish she would panic less easily and about fewer things, and show a little more willing perseverance.

2. What exactly is the difference between the evil and the righteous?

In the parable of the wheat and the tares, the weedy tares are planted by an enemy — analogies only go so far, but what is Jesus getting at here? Surely God creates all people, so in what sense does the enemy plant any people?

Or again, the sheep and the goats. No one is exempt either from reward or from punishment, because everyone has done at least one good thing and one bad thing and so meets both conditions. But the consequences — reward or punishment — are not given out together, but divide the sheep and goats entirely.

I still find the Calvinist idea of election not based on merit more sensible than the Arminian idea of prevenient grace — either way, God could easily enough make sure that everyone is saved, so why doesn’t he do so.

It is sometimes tempting, reading / hearing some of these parables and other passages, to think the evil and the righteous are actually different kinds of people, impermeable groups that cannot be left or joined. And yes, it matters; it affects, for example, how you think of people who have committed heinous crimes, and whether or not you can lump yourself in the same class as those people. If evil and righteous are permeable groups, then there’s nothing but grace that keeps me from committing the same heinous crimes, and there’s grace freely offered to the criminals. If they’re not permeable groups, then maybe those criminals really are evil monsters, entirely different from me, and it’s pointless to talk to them or offer them the Gospel.

By the way, it’s interesting that Amy is often choosing to listen to our current Bible CD, often from beginning to end, when we’re in the car. It’s one voice, not dramatized (she didn’t like the demons’ voices and some of the others in the dramatized versions we’ve listened to before), and covers the first half of Matthew, in the NRSV I believe.

On the death of Bin Laden

The pastor of the church we attended in NY, Steve Froehlich, wrote this letter to the church family:

A California elementary school teacher posted on Facebook yesterday how she was greeted that morning by one of her 6-year old students : “Osama Bin Laden is dead … is that a good thing?”

Out of the mouth of babes, eh? What an excellent question to ask, one worthy of a careful answer.

10 years ago the world changed, or at least the world that sees America at the center of global influence. The US was brutally attacked, a shrewd but cowardly action that struck at symbols of American power and claimed thousands of civilian lives. The world watched as the aura of American invincibility crumbled. The decade-long aftermath has been a costly and controversial war against a real yet shadowy enemy identified as “terrorism.” Yesterday, that war celebrated a victory with the elimination of Osama Bin Ladan, the mastermind of the 911 attacks.

“Osama Bin Laden is dead … is that a good thing?”

Bin Laden is the Hitler of our generation. So it may seem like an obviously good thing to rid the world of such a monster. Even most people who are reluctant to affirm a belief in Hell are willing to make exceptions for the Hitlers, Stalins, Pol Pots, Edi Amins, and Mao Zedongs of history. Bin Laden is a small-time player compared to that list, but he qualifies.

Is it a good thing that justice is served? Yes, I believe it is. Justice is served on the Cross, although upon the one true Innocent, and we are charged to enact justice (personally and collectively) as men and women made in the image of the One who is perfectly Just. However, we would be wise to recognize how often we imperfectly carry out justice, an awareness that should temper any hubris in its execution. We are starting to lose count of the number of people confidently sent to death row by a jury of their peers who have now been pardoned and released after a more comprehensive review of the evidence has exonerated them. For as many times as we do well in exercising justice, we seem to practice a justice that is polluted by arrogance and ignorance.

There seems to be little doubt that Bin Laden is guilty of launching the murderous assault upon American civilians in 2001 — he has celebrated his actions openly and repeatedly. Therefore, it is just for the American government to punish him for his crimes — it is a God-ordained responsibility for those entrusted and empowered to govern to use “the sword” for protection and punishment (Romans 13:3-4). Within the biblical framework of justice and punishment, requiring the life of the murderer for the life he has taken is a just measure of punishment. But it is an option, but not a requirement. In fact, I am personally quite persuaded that in common civil law, it is usually unnecessary and unwise to take the life of criminals even though they may be indisputably guilty of heinous crimes. The famous Levitical legal principle of lex talionus, “an eye for an eye” (Leviticus 24:17-22) is not a prescription for punishment, but a restraint on excessive punishment, a restraint upon our sinful impulses in meting out punishment. If we have been robbed, it is just to ask that what was taken be restored, that we be made whole. While it is just to exact the full measure of punishment that is appropriate, as was done on the Cross, we are always free to temper justice with mercy. Why? Often the punishment, in the end (if we are honest), is more about our own visceral satisfaction than the just measure of the law. Often, sadly and ironically, the pursuit of justice exacts a costly toll upon our souls — too often, in seeking justice, we become poisoned by hatred, bitterness, pride, revenge, and arrogance (Consider Javert, the policeman in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, who will not rest until the full weight of the law falls upon Jean Valjean, a pursuit that in the end drags him to a lonely and bitter death). It is no surprise then that the Lord our God calls us not only “to do justice” but also “to love kindness and to walk humbly” with our God (Micah 6:8).

We may agree that it is just that Bin Laden be punished for his crimes. But more importantly, I think, we need to examine how we respond even to the death of the wicked.

Should we be relieved that Bin Laden is dead? Should we put our heads on our pillows with the blissful belief that all is well, the dragon has been slain, and we may live happily… and safely ever after? Certainly we enjoy a measure of relief knowing that this particular dragon is no longer a threat. While we hope that the loss of a leader is a major setback for a movement committed to violence and evil, there are hundreds of dragons-in-training who are eager to take his place. The epic Lord of the Rings is the about the war against the diabolical Sauron. But in the wake of Sauron’s defeat, Gandalf warns that “other evils will come.” Our government must remain vigilant against all sorts of evils that threaten us. But so must we be vigilant in our every day lives. We are to live well-armored lives because we must not be naive about the nature of evil — it is relentless, cunning, and powerful, and we must not live our lives thinking otherwise. We may give thanks for victories, but we must fight on keeping in mind 2 realities: 1) the inescapable persistence of evil, and 2) the invincible presence of Christ. We stand firm and stand ready (Ephesians 6) knowing that “we are more than conquerors through him that loved us” (Romans 8:37) — “he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).

Should we be glad that Bin Laden is dead? Certainly any measure of freedom and safety resulting from his death is appropriate reason to rejoice — in that sense we may say we are glad he is dead. We are happy that the threat and evil he embodies have been removed. Also, justice is a gift to those who have been wronged by the evil-doer — when the system “works” those who have been wronged may “let go” and find a happiness in healing that is free of the corrupting impulse to seek revenge.

Yet at the same time, our hearts must be ruled by the fact that even a wicked man like Bin Laden bears the image of God. We argue that the unborn must be protected because they bear God’s image, and we must hold onto that belief when we are confronted with the most unlovable and despicable of our kind. We may be called upon to carry out just punishment of a fellow human being (parents, this includes you and your children), but we must never allow ourselves to do so glibly or gleefully. All too often we think that because we believe people deserve to be punished that we can dance on their graves — but, this is to our shame that we do so, and we add sin upon sin. Furthermore, such an attitude disgraces the image of God we bear. God is not shy about punishing the wicked — he executes judgment boldly and at times ferociously making some episodes in the Old Testament painfully difficult to read. But even God who does so with perfect justice, who is ultimately the one violated by our evil and sin and has the true right unleash the fury of his justice, does not take joy in punishing anyone. “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord God so turn, and live” (Ezekiel 18:32). “As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; so turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:11). God will punish the unrepentant in Hell — he will do so justly (as he did on the Cross) — and this certainty must kindle deep compassion in our hearts for all who reject Christ as Saviour.

Also, our taking joy in the punishment of the wicked cannot help but be an evidence of our pride. We rejoice because we have declared ourselves not-evil, not worthy of punishment. Or, in other words, we think of ourselves as righteous and deserving of the benefits of justice. But this pride is rank with self-deception. We may say, “I thank God I am not a Hitler… a Bin Laden… a Republican/Democrat…” (Luke 18:11ff). The Gospel frees us to stand fully exposed in the light of God’s grace to admit what we really are apart from him. The truth is the just estimation of our lives as expressed by the Psalmist: “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” The answer is: no one. We each have enough sin to merit the judgment of God that fell upon Christ. We are no less sinful than Bin Laden, and it is possible we could be guilty of the very sins he has committed were our lives not constrained by God’s grace. The Gospel demands that we make this honest assessment of ourselves. But the Psalmist does not stop with the bad news. His very next statement is this 2nd completing affirmation of the Gospel: “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared [worshiped]” (Psalm 130:3-4).

How are we to respond to the death of Bin Laden?

* We give thanks for the benefits of justice — freedom, security.
* We sorrow over the effects of sin and the need for justice.
* We repent of our own sin mirrored in the sin of others.
* We pray for peace — God’s shalom that comes from hearts made new and lives reconciled to him.
* We renew our commitment to live righteously, humbly, mercifully, justly.
* We worship — we bow our hearts and lives before the true King, give him our allegiance again, and trust him to govern the world in such a way that his eternal purposes are brought to their undiminished fulfillment when Christ returns to make all things new.