Tea Gazing

I stand at the counter, staring down into my steeping tea, lost in thought.

I regret my earlier impatience and misdirected anger. I love these kids so much and all the weakness is in me, my own to bear. And yet I am so like them, losing my temper because I'm hungry, being unreasonable because I'm tired, only I am the grown-up here, the one who should know better. Mother-guilt; I wonder if it ever really goes away.

As I watch the tea leaves swirling around, the familiar words start running through my mind, my heart. Most Merciful God, I confess that I have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, by what I have done, and by what I have left undone... My heart and mind together finish* the well-worn prayer of confession. I linger for a minute longer, then remove the tea leaves and draw myself out of my thoughts and back into the steady demands of motherhood.

My tea is cold by the time I finish it.

Today I miss liturgical worship more than usual. There's always a part of me that misses it, but my Book of Common Prayer - a gift from the husband who knows me so well and yet in other ways wonders if he'll ever truly know me, this confusing and ever-changing person he married - is always close at hand. I read the familiar words aloud, often, hoping to write them on my children's hearts just as the familiar prayers and words of Scripture were written on my own through the years.

But it's not the same. I miss the rumbling of an entire congregation petitioning God aloud as one. I miss the depth, the richness, and the beauty of liturgical worship. I miss the hymns led by the robed choir. I miss kneeling at the alter, bowing my head as I receive the blessed sacrament of Holy Communion. I miss the reverence. I miss stepping into God's story alongside others as we follow together the Church calendar - Advent, Christmastide, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time - together telling the entirety of our redemption in Christ, no part left out, over and over this individual and corporate pilgrimage.

Now I walk alongside others virtually, thanks to this double-edged sword that is the Internet, but here I am faced too with the relentless criticism of those who choose not to observe the church calendar; can't we all just let each other worship and learn and walk and grow in our own way? Must our journeys all be so identical; is God so limited? It hurts but I press on, drawing eyes off self and back to God as I walk and re-walk this Gospel road.

I miss the Anglican church. Our church now, small but home-like, is beautifully sincere and passionately community-minded. It is what we wanted, what we searched for. But oh, how I miss what will always feel like my true church home. How I long for the richness and depth of corporate liturgical worship.

How beautiful that day will be when Christ's Church is once again united and whole. One day every knee shall bow before God, together praising Him with one voice. For now, I seek my place amidst the brokenness as I worship Him in faith through the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit.

But today, I'm just missing home.


* ...I have not loved You with my whole heart. I have not loved my neighbours as myself. I am truly sorry and I humbly repent. For the sake of Your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on me and forgive me, that I may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your name. Amen.

Weekend Reading: Double Edition

This weekend is another Double Edition of weekend reading.

First, a collection of beautiful readings on Lent - why, how, what it all means - as we enter into this time of penitential preparation:

• Transfiguration and Beauty @ Mama Monk
• In which [it is Lent] words need flesh @ Emerging Mummy
• How to Prepare a Family for Lent and What Lent Really Means @ A Holy Experience
• Church Year Spirituality @ Internet Monk
• Church Year Spirituality: Living in God’s Story
• Church Year Spirituality: Practical Wisdom
• Church Year Spirituality: Faith of Our Family

And a collection of some of my favourite general readings from this past week:

• The List @ ThatMom
• On Bonding @ Mothers of Change
• The Power of Touch @ Welcome to my Brain
• "You think that by Scripture you possess eternal life..." @ Rachel Held Evans

May your weekend be filled with peace.

Painter's Tape Roadway

Yesterday I handed the boy a fresh roll of painter's tape and suggested he use it to build a road on the carpet. Immediately his eyes lit up with excitement.

"I can put tape on the carpet??"
"Can I use as much as I want??"
"What if I use the whole roll?"
"Thank you, Mommy, for letting me do this!"

I first saw the idea on Pinterest (you can find my Pinterest boards here!), where Imagination Soup had done this project using coloured duct tape. Thanks for the inspiration, Imagination Soup!

The boy started off small, preferring to cut and precisely place small pieces of tape. He soon had an elaborate combination of curves and straight lines.

He had a very particular system worked out as to which parts were road and which parts were train tracks. I know, because I drove a car on the train track and was quickly reprimanded.

Eventually he moved on to bigger and longer roads, taking his road halfway across the room in one fell swoop.

He finished off with a little ramp for good measure.

When the road was done (aka the tape ran out), they moved on to making a house out of board books.

Or maybe it was a parking garage.

The road is still there and holding up well. I think we'll pull it up this weekend (I've already checked; it comes up smoothly!), but this will definitely be a project we'll tuck away for another rainy day. Time to stock up on more painter's tape!

Wordless Wednesday: Promise

Intimate God

I lay curled on my side, my favoured fetal position.

(The husband hates this. "It's hard to snuggle with you when your knees are in my ribs, you know." Sorry, Love.)

I lay there wondering when I will finally feel those first movements of the tiny one growing inside me. I marvel at the intensity of the love that I already feel for this child who I can not yet even sense, much less see and touch and smell.

I hear the silent whisper: "That is but a reflection of the way I love you, My Child."

That is the way my Heavenly Father loves me. Even more, truly, in its perfection and completeness.

I can scarcely fathom that sort of love from our holy God.

Scars still run deep from my first understanding of God, distant and angry, meting out his forgiveness with reluctance and only after much begging. Always watching, waiting for the mistakes, quick to anger. Sins separated as far as the east is from the west? No, never, but rather counted and recorded and stockpiled on scales that could never be balanced out.

My head has since learned of another picture, a picture of a God who is Love itself - not simply loving, a single characteristic, but Love in His entirety, the very embodiment of Love! - and yet my heart has been slower in accepting this. It's too good to be true...but then isn't the entire Gospel? It's all just too good, and yet somehow still true.

I surround my children with this picture of a God who is Love, but can I really do so completely if I haven't wholly accepted it myself? Can I reflect a picture, however weak and marred by human error, of that sort of unconditional, all-consuming love if part of me is pushing it away in my own life?

This, I decide, will be my Lent. Giving up...what? My picture of an angry God? My hesitance to wholly accept His perfect love in my life? I don't know. I can think of it only in the positive: I desire to spend this Lent coming to better know this God who loves us passionately and intimately and wholly. Drawing closer to the source of all life and goodness. Learning more of the passion that led to a cross and a tomb and a bodily resurrection.

"As Jesus addressed God by the Aramaic family word 'Abba', Father, so Christians are encouraged to do the same: to come to know God in the way in which, in the best sort of family, the child knows the parent. From time to time I have met Christians who look puzzled at this, and say that they have no idea what all that stuff is about. I have to say that being a Christian without having at least something of that intimate knowledge of the God who is at the same time majestic, awesome, and holy sounds like a contradiction in terms. One of the characteristic signs of the Spirit's work is precisely that sense of the intimate presence of God."
-N. T. Wright, "Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense"

Lead me during this time of Lent, Father, to a more intimate sense of your love and presence. Prepare my heart to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, Your Son and our Savior.

Just writing along with The Extraordinary Ordinary...

Is Obedience the Goal?

"The key to developing your children's full potential is to recognize that their foremost responsibility is to learn obedience. While they are living under your roof, they have a primary duty to learn to obey. It's absolutely crucial to understand that this is a child's primary goal in life. If a child can't learn to obey a parent who is visible, he'll never learn to obey a God who isn't." -Chip Ingram

"A child's primary goal [responsibility, duty] in life is to learn to obey." This quote is only one voice among many who presuppose the idea to be true. But is it? Is learning obedience the primary responsibility of children? Is obedience the goal of our parenting? While I will be exploring this question primarily from a Christian perspective, both the question and conclusion are universally relevant.

It's a tempting goal, to be sure. Who doesn't want obedient children? Things are certainly easier when a child obeys the first time, every time. Add to that the threat that a child who does not consistently obey his parent will be unable to obey God, and the whole question instantly becomes a non-issue. Of course the Christian parent wants his or her child to be able to obey God!

But for me, to have obedience as my goal is to have everything entirely backwards. Obedience is not my parenting goal.

Training a child to respond only to an external source of control fails to develop within them the confidence to make right choices in the face of pressure to do otherwise. It also fails to develop critical thinking skills, problem-solving skills, and the ability to hear and follow their own God-given instincts. It attunes them to external direction rather than the internal promptings of the Holy Spirit.

Training a child towards obedience is little more than moralistic behavior modification. It removes the child's focus from the bigger picture of God's story and places it instead on themselves and their own behaviour. Yet it is not our behaviour that draws us into a relationship with God, but rather His great love, kindness, mercy, and grace.

Although it is typically the parent who shapes a child's initial understanding of God, we cannot presume to take the place of God. Training a child to obey his parents in order to teach them how to obey God is both illogical and nearly blasphemous. God is perfect; we are not. Obedience to God is part of the child's own individual walk with God. It is not something that can be trained into them, but rather something they must to choose to do, and increasingly so as their relationship with Him deepens and matures.

Exploring God's Word

The Gospel of Mark tells the story of a rich man who asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life. This man had obeyed all of God's commandments since he was a boy, and yet he lacked one thing:

"Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.
-Mark 10:21-22

The man lacked one thing: a love for God that outweighed his love for earthly wealth and possessions.

But when we contrast this man, who had obeyed God's commandments since he was a young boy, with the one whom God called "a man after God's own heart", we find some striking differences. David, too, had great wealth, but his love for God far surpassed that. And yet David was not known for his obedience. This was a man who remained in Jerusalem while his troops were at work, coveted his neighbor's wife, committed adultery with her, devised a plan to cover up his sin, had his mistress's husband murdered, and remained silent about his sin for nine months before repenting to God.

Despite David's disobedience, his heart was for God. He loved God. We find this same theme played out over and over in Scripture. The ones named among the righteous - Noah, Abraham, Peter, and more - are not without grievous disobedience and cause for repentance. Conversely, those who are secure in their obedience - the rich man, the Pharisees, many of the religious rulers of the time - are those whose hearts were furthest from God, lacking a sincere love for God while praising their own righteousness. Jesus said that the prostitutes and tax collectors would see the Kingdom of God before the Pharisees.

Even today, those who focus on obedience often do all the right things, believe all the right things, and yet have a haughty arrogant superiority that says (often quite literally, out loud, says), "you are not good enough to deserve my love. You don't believe the right things. You don't act the right way. You don't line up with my idea of a 'good Christian'. I will not get to know you, I will not listen to your story, I will not love you as I love myself." Doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons. Clanging symbols without love.

No, mere obedience is not my goal. Obedience is important, but only within the correct context. The words of Jesus describe that context clearly in the book of John:

“If you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever — the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”

Then Judas (not Judas Iscariot) said, “But, Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?”

Jesus replied, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me.
-John 14:15-24

We cannot be obedient in our own right, sustained by our own power. "No one is good but God alone." (Luke 18:19) If pure goodness and obedience were possible, we would not have needed a Savior. Such a gospel is no gospel at all, for it lacks the Good News of the Messiah entirely. God does not want us to be merely moral and obedient for obedience's sake. He wants so much more than that: an obedience born out of love and sustained by the power of His Holy Spirit. Psalm 23 reminds us that He leads us along right paths for His name's sake. It is for His glory, not for the sake of our obedience. It is about Him, not about ourselves and our behaviour.

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control."(Galatians 5:22-23a) Goodness is the fruit of the Spirit, not the fruit of our own strivings towards obedience. True obedience is alive, organic, and vibrant; mere moralistic obedience is flat, self-reliant, and lacking in a true understanding of God's desires and purposes. The former is the "obedience that comes from faith for his name’s sake" (Romans 1:5); the latter is a Pharisaical pseudo-righteous obedience to rules and precepts.

What are My Parenting Goals?

If God truly is the source of all goodness, and if I desire my children to come to live in true obedience to Him, my primary goal should be nothing more and nothing less than to point them towards the richness of God's love, kindness, mercy, and grace.

As such, if I had to sum up my entire parenting goal in a single word, it would be only this: Love. Loving my children is easy, but my goal is more than that. When I say that my goal is love, that goal is tri-fold: first, that I would express that love to my children in a healthy and undeniable way; second, that I would communicate clearly to them the unfailing love of their Heavenly Father, and develop in them a love and trust in response to that; and third, that they would love others in the truest possible sense of the word.

To phrase it another way, my goal for them is relationship: healthy relationships with family, with others, and ultimately and above all else with their Heavenly Father.

I don't want my children to walk through life simply doing as they are told. I want them to be awake and alive to the world in all its messy God-created glory, living their way through the ups and downs and greys in their own beautifully unique journey, a journey I could never presume to dictate for them, I who do not know what their Creator has planned.

My desire is to actively teach them right from wrong, pointing them always to the promptings of the Holy Spirit living within them that they may come to discern the difference for themselves. I desire to instill in them a strong internal locus of control that does not bend to external pressure, but rather chooses to do what is right in whatever situation they find themselves in. I desire to disciple them to maturity, not drill them to fear-based obedience where they recognize only external sources of control.

In short, my goal is to raise healthy, confident, self-aware, and compassionate individuals who love God with everything in them and who love others as themselves. If true, heart-level, internally-based obedience is a side-effect of that goal, all the better, but it will not and should not ever be my parenting goal in itself.

What is your primary parenting goal?

Weekend Reading

• Reclaiming the "I" @ Dreaming Aloud
• “Getting Better” is Not the Goal @ Internet Monk
• Nine Essential Skills Kids Should Learn @ zenhabits
• Gentle Parenting: When the biggest achievement looks like nothing at all @ The Parent Vortex