Dads: Paper Dolls.

We had a chocolate, tan and white rug that lay in the middle of the floor right in between the TV and the couch. It was a cushy rug in which you could, if you were  a child, immerse almost 1/2 of your finger. I used to push all of my fingers into the rug and make several indentions, draw a smilie face, write my name – it was a malleable rug.

My dad is wonderful with small children. He has a perfect sense of how to capture, enlighten and draw out the essence of a child’s imagination.

Dolly Dingle came to visit my house when I was probably 6. I can say, pretty clearly, that I was 6 because I cut all of my hair off in Kindergarten and was accused of looking like a boy.

Dolly Dingle came in a 20-30 page book, and she had many friends, parents, some pets and about 15 outfits. She also had hats and shoes.

Dad and I had a day together, and I introduced him to Dolly Dingle. When Dad met her, she was just a little girl wearing what any paper doll wears – some odd looking 1920’s bloomers and a tank-top.

I sat there, on the rug, and asked Dad if he would help me cut out the paper dolls so I could play with them. My 6 yr old fingers weren’t precise, and I had a tendency to accidently snip the folds that were supposed to keep the hats and dresses on.

Dad sat there with me; he trimmed and snipped and chatted with me about Dolly Dingle and what she was up to.

When we finished – we had cut out the entire 20-30 page book – every outfit, every pet, neighbor, parents and hat. Dad cut out her name, and we picked out an outfit for Dolly (in all of her various positions). We dressed every one of them, and we stuffed them into the rug.

They all stood up – the entire Dolly Dingle community – ready for the festivities of play time with a dad and his daughter.

My dad didn’t have a son to play football with, but regardless – he cut out all of his daughter’s paper dolls and played make-believe with her until she was satisfied.

Lora

What Sin Shows.

I was on the phone with my mom the other day. She is an engineer. She is a very smart lady. She works with a very eclectic group of people.

She was in the process of buying some make-up for my aunt who had all of her things stolen in India on a missions trip.

One of my mom’s co-workers walked in and asked her what she was doing. She relayed the information about my aunt and the make-up. After which, he followed up by asking what my aunt was doing in India.

I, listening to all of this, flinched. How does one explain to the secular world, the work of the church? It seems to impose its idea of good on other cultures. It seems to be uppity in its engagement. It seems, it seems, it seems…

My mom did not skip a beat.

“She was doing missions. They have a few churches over there she and her husband work for, and they were there to visit and support them.”

I breathed. Oddly, I was relieved. She said it as if it was no big deal. I mean, of course, there are people who love the church. There are people who GO to church. There are people who support churches, who support communities in other countries – who support people.

Why did this make me uncomfortable?

I think for a few reasons.

1. I orient myself and my behavior around what I see to be socially acceptable. And that social acceptability is provided largely by this huge academic world where Christianity is evil; in fact, God, interestingly enough, has become what used to be the Devil.
2. I don’t read enough scripture. What I mean by this is – I don’t allow scripture to be the mirror by which I see myself. Scripture is not the identifying, definitive ethic by which I live and understand myself  James 1:22-25
3. I don’t fully grasp the grace by which I am saved, or the way of life presented to me by Christ in Matthew.
4. I live mostly for myself, for my own comfort, for my own satisfaction – by my own god-like standards. In other words, I care more about ME than anything else.

The conviction of these things has been heavy on me the past few months. Of course, it has been and continues to be a process of understanding what the Gospel is, how do I put my weight on it, do I believe it is the salvation for all, is my identity so much wrapped in Christ that I can handle being disliked, being without everything I want that would “make me happy”? Am I able to be challenged without being crushed? Where does my ultimate desire fall? What – then, do I worship – by what worth am I shaped?

There have been a couple things that have shown me my sin.

1. I am almost 25.

There is a baby growing within me. Wrinkles are forming on my forehead, and my hair – that I spent so long growing out to do the Hollywood tousled – “no, I just woke up looking like this” look – is now short and will not do anything “pretty.” In other words, the idol of beauty is corroding before my eyes, and all of the wasted effort of worshiping this has been found naught, wanting, void and otherwise useless. Beauty will provide nothing but a grueling recipe for self-absorption and lust.

2. I am married and with child.

I am in between stages of life – where I am not quite a mother and thus belonging to a group of people called mothers – but I am also not without kids. And, I am no longer single – I have a person in my life to whom (and I am very glad for this) I am responsible for nurturing and spending the majority of my time with. I am attached.

What has this shown me? I have nothing to offer other people. (Right, I know that’s not true – maybe? But I feel it.) Really, I can’t speed here and there doing random stuff. I don’t have the same freedom to be up until all hours of the night or even out past like 8 – mostly because I’m pregnant and exhausted. I have less money than I used to – which means I can’t buy people fun things as much. I am, in effect, only worth what you see – a person, foggy-brained and without much energy.

And all the while, Christ consoles me – you are worthy because I made you. You have value because I bought you. The blood you see, falling like sheets from my hands was shed to make you clean, to give you a living hope – to assure you of your value. And beyond that – it is not primarily about you, Lora, nor is it about the ease of engaging others but the reality that community, no matter the difficulty, is the body and you need it.

The Baby Blog.

For a short and sweet – very concise and random assortment of peppy pregger information – please check out the baby blog:

www.kelleybaby.wordpress.com

Beware, the word placenta might be used.

-Lora

Honestly…?

I think I have a problem with “honesty.”

I find that there are too many selves to which I want to be authentic.

There is:

• the “Be tough, you can do this, Lora!” self,
• the “intellect and reading will get me through this” self,
• the “ahhhh, I am so vulnerable and over-whelmed” self,
• the “Just make everyone happy” self,
• the “Hair is good, lipstick is right, – did I tell you that I’m awesome?” self
• the “cannot disappoint people” self (which might closely related to make everyone happy self)
• the “I am a loner” self
• the “I love people! Give me more friends, please!” self

Either way – all of these selves are an authentic, at least in some way, representation of me. And yet, divided into categories and actually existing in reality – they are fairly dishonest.

On the one hand – intellect and reading is helpful, but on the other hand, I feel completely lost and vulnerable. And I am never quite sure how to reconcile all of these different ways  of being – into a person that is fraught with dignity, wisdom and yet is completely stable in her emotional sensibilities.

Pregnancy is a lonely thing. Sure, there are other people who have experienced it – so it’s not as if there isn’t a companion with which to commiserate to be found, but when you break it down, in marriage or outside of it even, as the pregnant one – you are quite alone.

It’s impossibly hard to describe, everyone’s experience is different, and the spiritual mystery of life growing within you is – well, incredibly frightening, at least for me.

I’m sure I have deluded myself into thinking that I have any semblance of control over my own self or other people – but, when it boils down to it, I will be introducing another being into the world over which I have about 0 % control. He or she will be a totally different, not pre-existing, new new new new person. A NEW PERSON.

So, in this, I cannot figure out what I am supposed to be feeling. I mean, I’d like to shoot for what I’m “supposed to” be feeling. But, even if there was a recipe – I’m not sure the estrogen would grant me access to it.

I feel this strange alienation from the person I used to be, and I haven’t even really changed yet – but the knowledge growing (now the size of peach) within me had made everything different somehow. I feel paralyzed to know what to do in this waiting pattern before he/she actually makes her existance tangible.

I think, perhaps, what I realized as I just rambled on here – is that I strive for what I think I’m “supposed to be”  -feeling, thinking, doing, …. And perhaps, I just ought to feel, think, and do.  Most of the time, I never feel like I’m actually doing what I’m “supposed to be” doing. Not sure. These are new thoughts.

Oh, pregnancy – beautiful and formidable.

A Woman’s Work.

Do you ever feel like there is a work that is particularly woman?
OR
That there is a thought out there (or many thoughts) about what YOUR work as a woman ought to look like?

I thrive on conversation that produces new thoughts. I actually enjoy it more than chocolate or massages (though, both good and delicious things). And, as I am moving toward motherhood, I have begun to realize how many conversations circulate about what women can or cannot do/should or should not do/want to do and don’t want to do – and how their identity is shaped by all of these conversations, expectations and pressures.

So, here are 3 tid-bits I gleaned this week, nuggets to chew on and process, from very wise and interesting women and men:

1. A quote:

“I don’t want to be told I cannot do this because I am a woman or I have to do this because I am a woman.“

Is this something that strikes you?

2. The Tripod of Creational Relationship:

As a man, you can think of yourself in terms of various roles and none of them are mutually exclusive. For example, if you are a businessman, you may also be a husband, and you may also be a father. 

It is the potential tripod of relationship on which you stand. All are considered equally important, valuable and good. Of course you may be a husband and a businessman, or janitor, or pastor or painter. Why would being a husband exclude your vocational calling?

Of course you may also be a father and a musician, photographer, CEO or DJ. You may run construction, or teach swimming lessons, be a professor or a therapist. 

It is understood, for men, that there is a trifecta of relationship that is acceptable, if not expected. Husband, Father, Vocation.

For women, however, we tend to understand ourselves in terms of a relational bi-pod or monopod. It looks something like this.

• Vocation.
• Wife and Vocation.
• Wife and mother.

Mother and vocation are interchangeable and almost a synonymous. Your motherhood IS your vocation. 

Do you ever feel like this? Does this ring true to you? Do you feel pressure to either accept or deny this? What are your thoughts on the roles available to women?

3. A Creational Illustration – The Image of God:

There are two ways to conceive of the image of God.

1. Only man and woman in unity fully image God.
2. Each individual fully images God.

I can see both sides to this idea, but for the sake of argument I will say this:

First, The name of image-bearer was given in the midst of gender distinction, but not divided by this distinction. It says he created “man” as the whole in his own image. And moves to state that male and female are in his image.

Secondly, we must consider that an individual reflects the image of God with as much importance and celebrated dignity as the unity of male and female.

Lastly, it is important not to divide God’s image into particular characteristics – these are the feminine parts of God, these are the masculine parts of God.

Why does this matter?

Because the creational mandate prior to the fall was to flourish/work and multiply. It was a two-fold mandate given equally to each image-bearing person, in a non-discriminate way.

Not – YOU, man work. And you LADY, multiply. But with mutuality – flourish/work and multiply. Consequently, the call to a vocation, husband/wife, father/mother, was a dual call – giving weight and dignity to both persons for all three aspects – not making the three exclusive of each other or synonymous of each other, but individual yet interdependent.

Do you feel like the image of God is divided between genders? Do you feel like a woman must choose between her created vocational sensibilities and motherhood? Do you think that her created vocational sensibilities become motherhood? How do you reconcile your gifting and abilities as you pursue or think about the different roles a woman? Do you feel like motherhood and vocation are pitted against themselves?

Mom: Hot Tea and Sweet Rolls.

Before dawn usually, I would hear, in the deep recesses of my mind, a shuffling around in the kitchen. Usually the coffee would start, depending on whether Dad had set it to come on the night before, but on Sunday it would be dishes. 

I would groan and throw a pillow over my fairly matted and dirty hair and try to sleep those last precious hours before Sunday school. Most of the time there was a warm body beside me, a better sleeper, rarely touched by the noise of a very deliberate lady clanking around trying to make breakfast and pick up the day-before-evidence of living.

My nose was always cold, a result of the torrential fan above my bed and mother’s winning desire to create an alaskan atmosphere in our home. She always left the lights off in the hallway to protect, never popped the doors when she closed them, and contained herself to the kitchen for the better part of the morning, until, at last, 8:00am would roll around and I would hear a small shuffling down the hallway.

I knew then, as always, that this meant in about 0.5 seconds, I would be gently coerced from the bed.

She knocked. I rose. She entered and placed two mugs of hot, sweet, milky tea on the bed stand. 

“I have sweet rolls,” she said, “We have to leave in about 45 minutes.”

She left the door to the bed room open. No going back to sleep now.

At this point, the warm body beside me rustled, rolled slowly over toward my direction and muttered between yawns, “I love your mother.”

She sat up, and I with her, our complimentary hair fuzzy and fluffy and tousled from heavy sleep, and we sipped our hot, sweet, milky tea.

This sort of morning happened with beautiful normalcy. 

After tea, we’d rise, rub our eyes and proceed to the kitchen to claim our sweet rolls (before Dad would eat them all) and then shuffle into the bathroom for the morning routine of hair taming. 

Mom would sit with Dad, reading the newspaper for a time (later she would become a news expert or junkie), already ready for church – in her lovely and organized skirt-suit and panty hose, some cute pumps and maybe a broach. And, she had great eye-lashes. I could never figure out quite how to do mascara like she did it – natural, full and pretty.

We took forever getting ready, and mom patiently would stand one foot out the door, bible, and sunday school lesson in hand, calling to us to come get in the car.

We ran, with our adolescent awkwardness, out the door, falling into the backseat, thinking of our intelligence and whether Ben or some boy would be there, taking for granted almost everything we had and went to Church.

My mom did this every Sunday for almost 18 years, except during the early years, I’m pretty sure it was high chairs, baby food and a less organized skirt-suit. But she did it. Roused me, fed me and took me, and whatever friend I needed as companionship to church.

Two Sides of One Horse.

On the one hand, proud and disdainful personalities come from basing your identity

on your performance and thinking you are succeeding. But on the other hand,

discouraged and self-loathing personalities also come from basing your identity

on your performance and thinking you are failing.

 

-Tim Keller, Galatians Study

 

Interested in knowing more about how Paul handles this conflict in Galatians? Go here.

Aged.

Homecoming is tonight for my 9th grade girls. When I say 9th grade girls, I mean the girls I disciple for church who are in 9th grade.

 

Girls!

 

 

They’re all 10 years younger than me. This is a huge gap right now. They’re all on the cusp of womanhood, they’re all on the verge of adulthood – they are all on the edge of the rest of their lives. It seems strange, but somewhere in the middle of college, when adolescence is all you know, you begin to turn this corner into the rest of your life and you age. It is not longer getting older, but you ARE, in fact, OLDER and now you are aging. 

They know almost nothing about where I am in life. To them, it is all a strange visualization into the incomprehensible realm of maturity (not that I am DONE by any means… a fine wine needs a touch more aging than I’ve had). What is it anyway, that makes an adult an adult? What is the strange canyon that cannot be crossed between 15 and 25? It is a decades worth of experience, yes, but it is also a decades of worth of just being. I have been for 10 more years than they have. It is so strange.

And, I know almost nothing, anymore, about where they are. I only know where they are in relation to where I am now. When they think about first kisses – it is magical. When I think about first kisses, I think 7th grade choir camp with some sleeze named Gene who wore sun glasses and had a tongue like a slug… and from which I got the flu. I think reality.

When they think relationship, it looks something like “The Proposal”, “Twilight”, “Harry Potter” or something fictional, not their own. When I think relationship, I think marriage – and a million other references – my cousin’s marriage, my parents, my pastor, some of my friends, some wise long-lasting thoroughly difficult and real relationships. I have scraped almost every fictional relationship I ever knew. To me, they seem 1 dimensional, false, disingenuous. 

This is the first time that it has struck me that I am on my way to old. And, frankly, it is the most beautiful and exciting proposition. No, I don’t want my hearing to go or my face to crinkle like a over-soaked cucumber – but I do long for the incredible wholeness of knowing, of experiencing, of the maturity Christ grants through facing and persevering the hardest stages of life. 

At the same time – I love the beauty of youth, the excitement, the idealism, the joy and spirit of before the unknown. 

Tonight was probably one of the most enjoyable nights of my life, and I think – this is the church – a giant gap between the ages learning from and assisting each other in the on-going reality of youth and age – of – learning and wisdom.

The other wonderful thing – I joined a Bible Study that meets on Tuesday morning. Almost all of the women are 10 years older than me. We are friends. It is just an exciting thing to think that at some point these young ladies and I will brush very closely in life-stage, and that perhaps they will at some point, take on young women very much like themselves. Isn’t this the way of it? The constant renewal of knowledge. Love it.

As for Me and My House.

GOOD Book Alert:

I started reading “As for Me and My House” by Walt Wangerin.

If you have not read it, I suggest you buy it right now and read it.

It, over the last few weeks, has been extremely helpful in thinking through how to craft a marriage that is mutually beneficial and helps each person flourish. It is practical in that it gives clear prose on marriage and the bible, but also enjoyable in that it tracks the marriage of the author and his wife. 

Enjoy!

Lora

Of Babies and Marriage.

I can’t pretend to know a lot.

It has just struck me that no book (as I naively thought for marriage) can fully prepare me (though can HELP a lot, as with marriage) for the impending mystery and madness of child-bearing and rearing. 

There have been some definite changes around our household as of late – like this overwhelming desire to be a bird and create a nest of various snacks and cozy blankets (as well as a neat phreak streak, I did not know existed until now).

While we’re watching me morph into this bump-laden lady with a hoss appetite and exhaustion that rivals olympic athletes post-game, it has begun to set in that I have about 7 months to formulate a habitual culture of well-ordered loves in which to bring this baby. And, what this means more than anything is that God has to be dusted off and kick-out the various idols of my heart. What this means even more is that, rather than relying on my own discipline (weak and inconsistent as I am), spiritual intellect (small as it is), and ultimate desire to prove myself (though the historical failure rate is 100%) – I have to begin to trust that the Righteousness of Christ is what saves me.

This is a new realization to me, though I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it my whole life. I think, I’ve always thought that its MY faith that saves me. Which is just another way of saying that I save myself insofar-as I can muster faith. But, as I’ve understood Christ more – it is faith through God’s grace that saves, not because of my own perfection, but because of Christ’s perfection in place of me.

Again, I am just beginning to grapple with what this means, so excuse my inability to articulate it well; but, I am pretty sure if that is what I really believe, it will change significantly how I think about myself and others – and especially how I relate to God. And it will definitely change the shame-factor that seems to prevail over all “mistakes” I make.

I think, usually, I want to do the right think because it will make me look good – because I need the ego-stroke of approval. But, again, it is becoming more and more clear to me that the only righteousness that matter is Christ’s, and only it can actually change me in such a way that does not desire to turn back and worship myself, but rather to turn with grateful and satisfied heart to the one true God of life.