I’m am, however, a little bit afraid of having my precious ego trampled on…and of having the background voices that seem to tell me I’m not such a great writer after all reinforced.

I guess we’ll find out.

After over a year of unemployment, I’ve had the opportunity to apply for two part-time jobs that I would absolutely love and am quite confident I would be good at.  The first is a youth suicide prevention educator.  This would be extremely part-time and would involve me going into jr. high and sr. high classrooms to give presentations about suicide prevention.  The other is for the missions coordinator at my church.  I’d help train short-term teams, deal with fundraising and coordinate communication with long-term missionaries.  I really, really, really want this job!  The crazy thing is, both jobs would fit well together as far as time goes.  Also I am only taking two MSW classes this fall and both are in the evening, so they would fit with that schedule as well.  So…

Pray hard!

Have you ever stumbled head on into a spider’s web?  Maybe on a hiking trail or in the corner of a not so recently cleaned attic.  Sometimes we notice the web and stare briefly in wonderment, but my experience has been that more often than not, I stumble into spider webs accidentally.  My arms flail and I shudder violently as if I’d been demonically possessed.  And if the spider is nearby, I kill it.  I assign no significance to the masterpiece or its creator.

And so too, I believe, it is with the Holy Spirit.  Often the most forsaken member of the Trinity, the work of the Spirit in our lives is mysteriously intricate.  Some Calvinists may disagree, but I don’t think we have any sure way of knowing if the Spirit’s masterful work in our lives is part of grand, precise plan or if it ebbs and flows, but with the power and beauty of a mighty river.

Also like the spider’s web, it is easy to miss the work of the Spirit until we stumble in unassumingly.  We do not pause or stand in awe.  Instead, we write off as insignificant both the creator and its masterpiece.  Orthodox Christians may speak freely of the Holy Spirit’s movement.  But I believe that the Body of Christ (starting with myself) lives with attitudes and expectations that squash the spider, so to speak.  We miss the true creating, sustaining, purposeful power of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit’s significance, like the spider’s, is lost and it practical theologies evolve which assign the Spirit only a minor role in our lives.

I know that I won’t see a spider’s web the same again.  At the same time, I also know that I won’t hesitate from flailing my arms around and writhing like a crazy woman the next time I walk into one.  But I do pray that I’ll be more attentive to the Holy Spirit’s sometimes precisely planned, sometimes passively arriving presence in my life…So I’d recognize its presence while the mysterious design is yet visible – and not have to wait for the flailing and writhing to begin.

I pray that I’d write off neither the spider nor the spirit, the web nor the work as insignificant.

What if I really believed that?  I mean daily, really believed that God was going to do something great in and through me…and I believed it adamantly enough to be different, to try to make myself holy, to set myself apart from the status quo.   Who would I be?  How would I live?

The two of them, the Man and his Wife, were naked, but they felt no shame…

The serpent was clever, more clever than any wild animal God had made. He spoke to the Woman: “Do I understand that God told you not to eat from any tree in the garden?”

The Woman said to the serpent, “Not at all. We can eat from the trees in the garden. It’s only about the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘Don’t eat from it; don’t even touch it or you’ll die.’”

The serpent told the Woman, “You won’t die. God knows that the moment you eat from that tree, you’ll see what’s really going on. You’ll be just like God, knowing everything, ranging all the way from good to evil.”

When the Woman saw that the tree looked like good eating and realized what she would get out of it—she’d know everything!—she took and ate the fruit and then gave some to her husband, and he ate.

Immediately the two of them did “see what’s really going on”—saw themselves naked!

When they heard the sound of God strolling in the garden in the evening breeze, the Man and his Wife hid in the trees of the garden, hid from God.

God called to the Man: “Where are you?”

He said, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. And I hid.”

God said, “Who told you you were naked? Did you eat from that tree I told you not to eat from?”

The Man said, “The Woman you gave me as a companion, she gave me fruit from the tree, and, yes, I ate it.”

God said to the Woman, “What have you done!?”

(from Genesis 2-3, The Message)

Four weeks ago somebody came into our house during the night while all four of us – Dan, me, the little one and the puppy – were all fast asleep.  They took our TV.  They took our Wii.  They took most of our DVDs, Wii games, old school Nintendo games and an iPod.  They rummaged through every desk drawer.  And they took our Rubix Cube. (Honestly, who steals a Rubix Cube?)

We were so busy that Monday morning that we didn’t notice that our living room had been cleaned out until we got home from work.  It was the police officer who informed us the break-in likely occurred in the night.  Three other homes in our condo complex had been hit, all between 1 and 4 a.m.

While Dan and I were frightened and angry, we were also relieved that no one had been harmed.  Neither did our home get trashed.  It could have been much, much worse.  Our greatest crisis was not “are we safe?” or “how will we replace the stuff?” but rather, “how do we explain this to the little one?”

She has this idea that bad guys exist.  That they just might be in real life.  And that they will come into your house and do bad things and maybe even take you away from your mommy and daddy.  But she hasn’t tasted the fruit yet, so she doesn’t know for sure.  Maybe bad guys are in real life, maybe they’re not.  But as long as she doesn’t know for sure, they can’t terrify her.

Until the little one, I’d never had quite the heartfelt understanding of The Fall that I do now.  God loved his newly crafted children deeply and desperately wanted to protect them from knowing about the bad things that are in real life.  He didn’t want them to know because if they knew, they’d be terrified.  Ashamed.  Confused.  Angry.  They’d lose trust and the ability to sleep.  They’d grow clingy and skeptical.  It would never be the same.

Now I too, have tasted the fruit.  I know what’s in real life.  But when God inquires of me, “What have you done?!” I cannot let the answer be, “I let the little one taste it too.”  This little one, whom I did not birth but have been given, cannot know.  Not yet.  So Dan and I smiled as we told her, “Someone else needed a TV worse than we did, so we let them have ours.”

“Were they poor?” she said.

“We don’t know.  They just really needed a TV.”

If I could talk to those bad guys that took our stuff, like God, I would say, “What have you done?!”  Not so much because they trespassed or took our things (including the Rubix Cube), but because they handed our little one the fruit and tried to make her eat it.

]]> http://51twelve.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/because-weve-tasted-the-fruit/feed/ 2 justjen http://51twelve.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/the-proper-care-and-feeding-of-my-husband/ http://51twelve.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/the-proper-care-and-feeding-of-my-husband/#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:09:35 +0000 justjen http://51twelve.wordpress.com/?p=283 ]]> I’m currently reading The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands by Dr. Laura Schlessinger.   If I’d picked this up pre-marriage, it would have made me puke and I probably would have lit the sucker on fire.  Schlessinger advocates women being at home, looking nice when their husbands arrive home from work and faithfully tending to their husband’s sexual needs. Like I said, at one point this would have made me vomit.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it still would make many of my readers gag.

My perspective has changed now that I actually have a husband to properly care for and feed.  Schlessinger’s ideas have a lot of merit.  She deals in reality and seems to be in tune with the things I’ve noticed about my own husband.  For instance, Dan is happy to work.  He takes great pride in taking care of his family.  Because he works, I don’t have to work full time.  But he doesn’t work hard away from home so that I can sit at home and watch 7th Heaven all day.  (Which, yes, I’ve done.)  He works hard at his job so that I am freed up to do hard work at home.

Surprisingly, I’ve begun to take great pride in the work I do at home.  It pleases me to see the house half way tidy, to take care of the laundry and have a wholesome meal waiting for my husband and daughter when they get home.  It’s not that my husband isn’t willing to do these things himself or demands that I do them, I enjoy doing them for him.  If I take care of things at home he can spend more time with Ms. Thang and more quality time with me once she’s in bed.

Schlessinger doesn’t venture down the path of headship, but she does tackle the notion of what really makes a woman free and independent.  In her eyes, the reality is that women are the axis on which the home turns – true whether the woman stays at home or works full time.  She’d also venture that men and women are wired differently, giving each a different set of needs and gifts.  Finally, she’d affirm the idea “when momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

The author’s take on reality was something I had a hard time stomaching at first, but when I used it as the lens to reflect on my parent’s marriage, on friends’ marriages and my own marriage, I decided there was a lot of truth to what she was saying.  It must be said, Schlessinger would probably also say that “when daddy ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”  Her reality is a two way street and it’s a street that makes a lot of sense.  How could either adult be happy if they are both expected to work all day plus come home to all of the full time work of running a household? A stressed out person does not become less stressed by coming home to a stressful situation.  Being stressed out = being tired = things don’t happen…like clean clothes, non-frozen dinners, sex.  Those are pretty simple things that men AND women need, and when one of the adults – particularly the woman – is able to work in the home – those things can happen on a much more regular basis.

Not to say there aren’t wonder women out there who make it all happen – thriving at a job away from home and running a well-oiled machine of a home, but I know that the only way that can happen is with a ton of grace.  If that wonder woman’s world contains resentment about having to work in the home as well as away from it, if that wonder woman believes her need for sleep is more important than her husband’s needs for intimacy – well, than that wonder woman’s well-oiled machine is probably a little bit of a sham.

Please note, neither I nor Schlessinger are saying that women who work away from the home are shams.  All I am saying is that once upon a time, I thought the high value of women staying home was a sham.  And now I don’t.

The most health paradigm for living that I was exposed to in seminary goes like this: personhood>partnering>parenting>pastoring (career).  First things first.  If I don’t take care of my life priorities in this order, things just aren’t going to work out.  I need to be happy and healthy before I can tackle being a wife, a mother or career woman.  If those priorities get out of order, I’m not going to be able to do any of them well.  Can I really be happy at work if I know I’m coming home to a stressful literal and/or emotional mess?  Can that mess possibly be avoided if my relationship with my husband or kids is fractured?  Can the stress of work and less than ideal relationships at home contribute to me being healthy and happy?

I need to take care of me so that I can engage in a healthy, solid, loving relationship with my husband.  Then together we can tackle parenting.  Only then can/should my energies be spent on my career.  This is a paradigm that works.  And it’s glaringly obvious when men or women try to do life in any other order.

Overall, I’d recommend this book to any married women who are in a safe and relatively healthy relationship.  As best I can tell, that is the assumed target audience.  Schlessinger does not tackle the subject of abuse, but I don’t get the sense that she would advocate trying to change an abusive man’s behavior by being nicer to him.  She’s not blatantly ignoring abuse, but you kind of have to shelve any ideas like “only in a perfect world” or “this is totally irrelevant to so many women’s experiences”.  If you are in a safe and healthy relationship, the book is relevant and realistic to you. Many things she says may make us all brissle, but there are so many things to glean and so many challenges worth taking.

2.  Took Ms. Thang to her daycare lady’s house where she proceeded to cling to my leg and act like she was 2 instead of 4.

3.  Went to Wal-Mart.  Gag.

4.  Escorted the dog on her best ride ever to the vet.  She finally figured out how to hang her head out the window like a normal dog.

5. Brought my own sad version of a lunch to my hubby’s work to have lunch with him.

6.  Walked the dog and was pleased that she did not find any dead baby birds to eat.

7.  Watched an episode of Family Feud.  I knew it was a few decades old when the answers to “What can some people do for hours at a time?” included sewing but not surfing the net.

8.  Got new windshield wipers for my car and felt like a total girly blonde when I asked the guy to put them on my car for me.

9.  Was surprised to pick Ms. Thang up from daycare and find out that she had no recollection of being a two-year old earlier in the day.

10.  Took Ms. Thang to dance class in her new leotard and dance slippers only to be dumbstruck by a total meltdown that had something to do with tiptoes and parents.

11.  Purposely left a rambling 5 minute message on a friend’s answering machine.

12.  Ate some chicken.

13.  Watched some Sifl & Oly clips that my old college roommate sent.  God I love sock puppets.  Does anyone else remember these guys?