Small Investment, Big Pay Off

Around this time last year I did something I’ve never done before. I tracked down a prisoner and wrote her a letter. I had followed her story in the local paper for months. She was a veteran and a very young single mom who, in a moment of stupid, selfish neglect, accidentally killed one of her babies. Normally, I would read a story like this, feel sick, and be glad she was getting what she deserved, which was a whole lot of jail time. Instead, all I felt was sympathy and compassion.

It reminded me of all the stupid, selfish things I’ve done as a mother. I can’t remember ever jeopardizing my kids’ lives, but I’ve certainly allowed some things that could have turned out badly while I sat with my back turned at the computer or hid out in a locked bathroom for five minutes of alone time. All I could think was, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Yet reading the online comments about this woman was like attending a modern-day stoning. And here critical, judgmental me had no stone to throw. Weird.  

I thought about writing to her dozens of times, but I never got around to it. It seemed like too much work to track her down, and besides, what would I say? But as the months went on, I felt the prompting to write her getting stronger and stronger, until I knew I needed to at least try. So early last February, I used my remedial internet skills to see what I could find. I landed on the Department of Corrections site, only to learn that I didn’t have enough information to get beyond the first step. I tried a few times, but no luck. Days passed. I tried again. Nothing. I decided to forget about it, but the nagging thought continued. In mid-February, I tried again, and this time, all sorts of information popped up, things like her middle name, her prisoner number, her location, and the history of her transfers to different facilities. I sort of felt like I was invading her privacy. Then I saw her birthdate. It was February 29, 1988. She was a leap-year baby, and it just so happened she would be celebrating her “sixth” birthday in a few weeks. (As my friend Nate says, “Oh, God, you have fun with your kids.”) Now I knew what I would write.  

Side note: You don’t realize how singularly minded birthday cards are (“Whoop it up!” “Party all night!” “Eat more cake!”) until you’re trying to find one for someone in prison. I finally landed on a “thinking of you” card.

My mom, who knows about such things, told me I couldn’t send anything in the letter. If I sent pictures or stamps or even a bookmark, it would probably be confiscated by the prison guards. She also warned me that the letter may not reach her at all. Using an address I was only about 50 percent sure of, the kids and I prayed over the birthday card and dropped it in the mail about 10 days before the birthday.

Weeks passed, and I didn’t give the letter another thought. I’d given it a shot, and I was done. But actually, I wasn’t done at all. In fact, I’d just begun, because she wrote back. I’m not a terribly emotional person, but when I read her response—when I read that my card had arrived on her real leap-day birthday, and that it was the only one she had received—I crumbled into the fetal position on my dirty Shome carpet. Sobbing, I read how much my words had encouraged her, how they’d given her hope, how they showed her God’s love in a real and powerful way. She said she was thankful to have me as a friend. A friend!

Never have I seen so clearly how such a small, seemingly insignificant act of obedience could reap such monumental blessings.

We have written back and forth for the past year. My letters are short. I never say anything profound. Sometimes I share a verse I’ve recently read, or I just ask her how she’s doing. No matter how lame the words seem to me, every time she writes back she tells me how thankful she is, how blessed she is to have me as her friend. To me, a friend is someone you eat dinner with or have over to your house. To her, a friend is someone who writes a letter every once in a while and tells her that she can get through this. Amazing.

Amazing that we have a God who can turn our paltry little offerings into more than we could ever imagine.    

What the Bible Isn't

Here’s a confession: I don’t really read other people’s blogs. There are a million good ones out there that would stretch me and entertain me, I’m sure, but searching them out seems counterproductive to my goal of spending less time online. So it’s with some hesitation that I’ve let someone’s blog consistently creep into my screen time. Hers is a challenging voice, one that’s got me thinking on a lot of different fronts.

Her name is Rachel Held Evans, and she’s written a recent bestseller called A Year of Biblical Womanhood. I first encountered Rachel’s writing just after the election in a post called “The Real Evangelical Disaster.” Her name popped up again after the shooting in Sandy Hook. And if those weren’t thought-provoking enough, she wrote a piece called “Do Christians Idolize Virginity?” This woman is unafraid to take on anything. While I don’t agree with everything she writes, I’m captivated by her style and challenged by her thoughts. In other words, I wasn’t willing to spend fifteen bucks on her book, but I’d check it out from the library.

The Biblical Womanhood book is an experiment in living out some of the commands in scripture that pertain to women. These include internal things like cultivating a more gentle and modest spirit as well as extreme things—which have gotten all the press—such as calling her husband “Master” for a month and camping out in a tent during her period. Critics have called the book heretical and a mockery. I can see how those labels come to mind, along with gimmicky and silly. But beyond the labels, I found the story of a sincere woman learning more about her Christian faith, about the way other people practice that faith, and about the Bible that she dearly loves. Of everything I’ve read from Rachel, her words on her new-found respect, awe, and appreciation for God’s Word are the most meaningful to me. They encourage me to stop feeling guilty or stupid for not understanding so much of the Bible and to think twice before casually using the word “biblical.”  

The Bible isn’t an answer book. It isn’t a self-help manual. It isn’t a flat, perspicuous list of rules and regulations that we can interpret objectively and apply unilaterally to our lives. The Bible is a sacred collection of letters and laws, poetry and proverbs, philosophy and prophecies, written and assembled over thousands of years in cultures and contexts very different from our own, that tells the complex, ever-unfolding story of God’s interaction with humanity.

When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded word (like manhood, womanhood, politics, economics, marriage, and even equality), we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don’t fit our tastes. In an attempt to simplify, we try to force the Bible’s cacophony of voices into a single tone, to turn a complicated and at times troubling holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says. . . .

If you are looking for Bible verses with which to support slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to abolish slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to liberate and honor women, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to wage war, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to promote peace, you will find them. If you are looking for an outdated and irrelevant ancient text, you will find it. If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it.

Cyberbullying and Parental Acquiescence

Look out. The soapbox has been pulled out of the closet, and I’m about to hop on.

A series of articles in my local newspaper today has got me all riled up. The topic was cyberbullying. The point was that this is the new issue in schools today, and administrators and law enforcement officials are struggling to keep up with it.

And here I thought it was the job of school administrators to educate children and police officers to track down criminals. But who does that leave to parent our children?

Oh, yeah. Parents. The ones who bought the phones and computers in the first place. The ones who pay the monthly fees. The ones who are supposed to be in charge. The ones responsible for teaching respect and kindness and that all actions have consequences.

My local newspaper did feature one of these parents in a sidebar article. Finally, I thought, we’re going to get to the heart of the matter. Here was a mother of four who tracks her kids’ internet use, limits their screen time, and keeps them off of Facebook and other social media sites. “I let them make other choices, so it feels very independent, but I’m watching them without them knowing,” she said. Laudable, right? Except that this woman’s children range in age from two to eight! The next line in the article states, “Such vigilance is not common.”

Seriously? Is it “vigilant” to monitor your 8-year-old’s internet use? To keep him off Facebook? Wouldn’t that fall into the category of simple “good common sense”? And isn’t that equally true for your 15-year-old? 

And what about the mother who made national headlines over Christmas when she gave her 13-year-old son a cell phone with a list of rules? I completely agree with every one of her rules but am stunned that they got so much attention. Why are rules and consequences for breaking them a novel idea? We teach our children to make good food choices, to make their beds, to not get in the car with strangers, to make their own mac and cheese, to drive moving vehicles. Why on earth wouldn’t we teach them how to appropriately use technology? And why oh why do we assume that once it’s in their hands, we’ve lost all control and there’s nothing more we can do? Why are 12-year-olds sending texts at 2 a.m. while their parents sleep? Why do I hear parents say, “Oh, I don’t know what my son’s password is; he won’t tell me”? Why do we rely on overworked, underpaid officials to police our children’s online presence instead of doing it ourselves? Someone tell me why!

Last year, my 10-year-old daughter wrote a note to a friend—a very tame note—that was confiscated by her teacher. She came home and sobbed her eyes out, horrified that her teacher had read it and terrified that it would make its way to the principal’s office. Of course it didn’t, but I let her think it might for a good long while. We talked about how she should just assume that anything she writes, draws, photographs, texts, or types WILL, in fact, be seen by her teacher, her classmates, her classmates’ parents, her own parents, the principal, the governor, and the U.S. president. Assume your words and photos will be broadcast to the world, Addison, and plan accordingly. Hard lesson, but how thankful I was for the opportunity to teach it. I’ll do it again and again and again. I don't mean to imply that I've got all the answers or I'm doing a perfect job, but at least I know I have a job and I'm taking it seriously. 

One final comment. I know a family whose three teenage daughters didn’t get cell phones until they were able to drive alone in a car, which was close to 17 years old. They got Facebook accounts about that same time, with their access limited to an hour a week, just enough time to check out what time the graduation party began and get directions to a friend’s dance recital. Were there social consequences to being so unplugged? Sure. But I’ve heard them all say it was worth it. They are mature, responsible, kind, attentive, and oh-so articulate. And if they were the victims of cyberbullying, they didn’t know about it. Because really, if a tree falls in the forest and you're not there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Lessons Learned from Less Food

Things I’ve learned after 33 days of eating less and eating wiser:

1. When you feel like something’s out of whack in your life, it probably is. If you think you’re eating too much, or thinking about food too much, you probably are.
2. I heard recently that a size 4 woman who is consumed with eating every calorie perfectly and who’s terribly upset when she misses a workout has her food priorities just as messed up as the obese person who binges all day long. I couldn’t agree more.
3. Sharing food journals—a written record of every bite that goes in your mouth in a given day—is highly motivating and leads to much more intentional eating, but it can also become an idol as easily as anything else.
4. I’m only interested in sustainable changes. I’m not a person who’s ever going to be into extreme eating, like banning whole food groups from my diet. Balance, self-control, and mature eating are what I’m after. If I lose some pounds in the process, great.
5. Amazingly, at the age of 42, I’m realizing it’s time to start eating like a grown up and not a 6-year-old. Salad can be really good. Vegetables grow on you if you eat enough of them. You really don’t need a cookie every day, even when you’re good.
6. An Andes Mint, when savored over a 15-minute period, is more fulfilling than a bowl of mint-chocolate chip ice cream wolfed down in five minutes. 
7. I am not a trash can. My kids’ toast crusts go in the trash, not in my mouth. What can be gained by eating every leftover mound of chicken enchiladas on their plates? Not the money I spent on the ingredients. Not the time I spent preparing them. Only unneeded calories. I am not a trash can.
8. Superbowls happen. Valentine’s Days happen. Kids have birthdays with cake. Spontaneous pizza parties break out. I need to be flexible. Intentional. Self-controlled. Smart. And what I am or am not eating should not be a buzzkill for everyone else.  
9. This is such a first-world problem. I’ve heard that people in third-world countries are astounded by the fact that Americans pay money, every month, to go into an air-conditioned building to burn calories. Probably they’d be equally astounded by writing down every bite of food to avoid overeating. A little perspective is a good thing.
10. No matter what I call it or how subtle I try to keep it, my kids will still tell everyone and their dog that their mom is on a diet. 

Lance and Lying

Like most everyone else in the country, I’ve watched with fascination as Lance Armstrong’s moral decline has played out on television. How can someone spend so many years of his life lying so publicly and assume it’s OK and that he’ll never get caught?

One of my roommates at UCLA was a pathological liar. I didn’t know that term at the time, but it definitely describes her. She stole clothes from the store where she worked and blamed it on other people. She cheated prolifically on her schoolwork and lied about it. She lied to her parents every time she got on the phone with them. One time she lied about me. She ate some of our other roommate’s food, even when I warned her—begged her, actually—not to. I knew our roommate would get off work late and be starving, and that was the only food we had in our dorm. As usual, I went to bed two hours before everyone else, but I was awake when our roommate got home and searched for her missing food. When she asked the lying roommate, I heard, “Oh, maybe Leura ate your food. Yeah, I saw her eat it.” I sprung up out of bed and confronted her. She giggled it off, but I remember thinking this was like nothing I had ever seen before. She couldn’t seem to do anything but lie.

I have my own sad history of lying. It came naturally when I was a kid and especially a teenager. I embellished my stories to get attention. I told my parents I was going one place and went somewhere else. And then there was the time I hit a truck in the parking lot at a school dance. No one saw me and the damage was minimal, so I actually picked off the part of the guy’s truck that had attached itself to my parents’ car, drove a few miles outside of town and threw it in a field, and came home to tell my dad that someone had hit our car while I was inside the school. I got off scot free, but I lived in fear for a year of that guy tracking me down. It was a happy day for me when he finally graduated and I could walk the halls in peace again.

My lying didn’t end in high school, but by the time I moved in with the scary roommate, I had had a serious encounter with Jesus and my life was slowly changing. If not for the grace of God, today I might be a less decorated, less public Lance Armstrong. Still, I would call honesty the last and greatest frontier of the Holy Spirit’s work in me, and probably in most people. It takes discipline to always tell the truth. It’s so much easier to guestimate the number of hours I worked on a project than to track them, minute by minute. But that’s what honest requires. I’m swapping food journals with a friend, and it takes discipline to honestly write down every bite I take throughout the day and not “overlook” that bite of my daughter’s cookie.

It’s only in the past few years that I’ve been freed from feeling like I have to offer an excuse—sometimes a made-up or embellished excuse—to get out of something. I’ve learned to just say, “No,” with no lie to back it up. I feel the Holy Spirit’s conviction now when I tell a story and exaggerate something, “There were a million people there!” No, back up, it was more like a hundred. I’m more conscious of even the “sweet” lies we tell our children. When Camryn asks me if there’s a Santa Claus, I’m careful to say, “Well, what do you think?” rather than telling her a lie that surely the rest of the world would excuse me for.

Because here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks. It doesn’t matter if my lie is not hurting someone else. It only matters what God thinks, and it matters deeply if He’s the one I hurt.

“Lying is extraordinarily common, and we couldn’t get along without it,” says David Livingstone Smith, a philosophy professor and author of the book Why We Lie. Speaking about lying in light of the Armstrong confession, Smith says, “[Lying] greases the wheels of society.”

Another professor wrote that nothing about what Lance Armstrong did is shocking. “We all lie every day,” says Robert Feldman. “We live in a culture where lying is quite acceptable.”

Except it’s not. It’s not acceptable to God, and I don’t think most people would say it’s acceptable to lie to them. It’s certainly not acceptable for my children to lie to me, which is why that brings the most severe punishment in our house. I want my kids to know—and I want myself to know—that telling the truth, always, even when it hurts, is one of the things that sets us apart as followers of Jesus. “Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Col. 3:9–10). God does not lie, and my new self, my redeemed self, follows His example. There’s simply no place for lying in the life of one who has been redeemed by Truth Himself. 

How Hard Have We Got It?

Flipping through the channels while on the treadmill last week, I heard a panel of both men and women say that this is the hardest time in history to be a woman. Skeptical but curious, I tuned in for another minute to see what evidence they would give. Nothing new or surprising came up. They mentioned how women are expected to keep bearing the load of home management and child rearing while working at least 40 hours a week.

While I would concede that we women may be operating at the fastest pace ever, I cringe at the word “hardest.” Does this panel of well-dressed, well-fed, well-paid American men and women ever read about history? Can we even begin to imagine what “hard” looked like for a woman in the ancient world? A woman who had no warm place to live, no hospital or medicine, no lifespan beyond a couple of grueling decades? What about all those women who gave birth in fields, only to watch baby after baby die? Generations and generations of women lived their lives knowing—and fearing—that men viewed them as little more than objects to be used and assaulted. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they also had to sew and wash their clothes by hand.  

In more recent history, I think of the slave women who watched their husbands and children sold on an auction block. Or even the pioneer women, who traveled for months by foot or horseback, enduring violent storms, illnesses, and attacks by natives, only to end up in a freezing cold shack miles away from the nearest neighbor, cooking three meals a day out of whatever they could grow. What about the women who starved themselves so they could parcel out their few morsels of food to their children during the Great Depression? Or the women who saw every man in their lives—husbands, boyfriends, brothers, and sons—leave for the great wars, their minds consumed with worry, their hands burdened with holding down the American fort?

There is nothing simple about American life today, but to call it the “hardest time in history to be a woman” shows a shallow, self-centered view of history. I know that there are women today who still live in slavery, who still have no rights or opportunities, who live in war zones and have babies in fields, but I would argue that most of them are beneficiaries of at least some modern conveniences. And American women? I don’t know one who doesn’t find it difficult to juggle all the responsibilities of her life—but we do it in warm (or air-conditioned) houses, driving warm (or air-conditioned) cars, sipping lattes and checking our e-mail.

Not a day goes by when I am not somehow grateful to be living at this time in this place. It’s far from perfect, and life is hard for everyone, but I’ll take our “hard” over history’s “hard” any day. 

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

A funny thing has happened at kindergarten this year. This mom has learned one of the Big Lessons of her life. I wasn’t looking forward to kindergarten again. I secretly felt done with the phonograms and the “100 Days of School” party, done with meeting throngs of new people, done with that whole phase of life. We’ve been at our school seven years now, and I’ve settled into some deep friendships with other moms. My son Braden’s friends are all first-borns, like him, and their parents are very similar in age to us. We have multiple sets of brother-sister friends and families who mesh nicely, comfortably, easily with our own.

Problem is, I wasn’t done. Camryn was ready for kindergarten.

She was born when I was 36. And a half. That makes me the grandma of the kindergarten class. As the other moms filed in on orientation night, some pregnant, some pushing strollers, I decided that since these were probably not going to be my new best friends in terms of shared live experiences, I’d ask God what role He wanted me to play with this group of parents.

In years past, when I met the kids and parents in my children’s classrooms, I instinctively sniffed out those who seemed to have the most natural friend potential and focused on knowing them. This year I didn’t go in with that (or any other) agenda. And here’s the big ah-ha moment: When I stopped jockeying for social position—both my own and my child’s—I was able to see people in Camryn’s class I never would have noticed otherwise. I spent the entire Thanksgiving party visiting with a mom from another country. Her daughter looks like no one else in the class. (A multicultural school we are not.) Mother and daughter both stayed far outside the circles of cute, social moms and cute, social kids. I didn’t see another person talk to either of them, actually. But their story—which includes an arranged marriage and a college degree earned in an unknown language—is fascinating. And I would have missed it if I’d been focused on “people who seem like us.”

While setting up a mother-daughter outing with this family, I received a simple e-mail message written in broken English: “Thank you for the love.”

It broke me. This is all it takes to show love to someone? Chatting for an hour over “Pin the Waddle on the Turkey” and getting together for a quick play date? Could God really use such minuscule, natural things? Then came a more powerful second revelation: How many other opportunities have I missed over the years to love the unseen? Because I was so focused on myself?

Oh, God, forgive me! And thank you for using my fourth child, increased age and maturity, and one more round of kindergarten to open my eyes to your ways.