Faith and Family

I was never a tomboy. Although I played softball through the Boys and Girls Club, I played outfield and hoped throughout each game that the ball wouldn’t come sailing to me. Thankfully, it rarely did. Even when I played Hot Wheel City or G.I. Joe with my brother, I turned it girly. Dolls and make-believe homemaking were my specialty. In fact, I think I was born to nurture. So, it’s no surprise that my favorite childhood book was Little Mommy by Sharon Kane. I treasure this Little Golden book. Besides a few Seuss books, this is one of the only books I still have from my childhood. I remember studying the pictures and then trying to re-enact with my own dolls the delightful scenes pictured in the book. I could be jaded by sentimentality, but I think the art is precious. I remember one time secretly swiping my infant brother’s washtub, filling it with water, and giving my dolls a bath just like the Little Mommy in the book. (I also remember my mom being not-too-happy about the water mess in my room. :))

My daughter seems to have that gift and desire for nurturing too. A year ago or more I tried to find a copy of Little Mommy to give to her. I discovered that it was a rare Little Golden Book that was highly sought-after and nearly impossible to find. So, you can imagine how delighted I was yesterday when I ran another search for it and discovered that it’s being reprinted and will be available in April! Hip-hip-hooray! (I’m just hoping they haven’t changed anything. The cover is different, although it looks like the same art. So, I’m cautiously optimistic.)

Maybe you won’t like this book as much as I do. But if you’re a 30-something girly-girl, most likely it will take you back to a simpler time and place, and it will make you want to dig all your old dolls out of your parents’ attic and celebrate with a tea party!

We’ve been focusing on loving others lately in our home, and I’d like to share with you some of the ways I’m teaching my children to be others-conscious.

1. Friendliness: I’ve got a shy daughter, and when friends at church say Hi to her she’s prone to avoid eye contact and remain silent. I was the same way, so I understand her struggle. At home we’re practicing. I pretend I’m “So-and-so” from church and greet her while she practices eye contact with a friendly response. We’re working on it. So, if you know us, and if you say Hi to my daughter and she doesn’t respond, will you mind waiting just a minute while I coach her in her ear and we work on it? Thanks!

2. Friendliness #2: It’s harder for both of us to be friendly to strangers, so we’re working on this one together. When we go to the park, I try to focus on being friendly to the moms while I encourage my children to be friendly to the other kids. When we pull up at the park, I try to remind all of us that we need to be friendly. This one’s tough for me (Remember, I said I was shy?), but my children are proving to be good accountability for me!

3. Making things for people, especially cards of thanks. My daughter also loves to string beads to make bracelets for others.

I have two great ideas from Raising Respectful Children in a Disrespectful World by Jill Rigby. We’ve been working on these just recently:

4. Teach your children to say, “Have a good day!” to grocery clerks. My two kids and I gave this farewell to our Walmart clerk this week, and I think her smile stretched halfway across the store. Also, it made her laugh! She was laughing for as long as I could turn around and still see her. Our first attempt at this one was definitely rewarding!

5. When you pass an accident on the highway, pray with your children for the people involved.

What ideas do you have for teaching your children to love and be concerned for others?

I have two beautiful children’s Christmas books to recommend to you. If you’re looking for nice art and a wonderful message, check out these:

Great Joy by Kate DiCamillo

The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey by Susan Wojciechowski

What are your favorite children’s Christmas books?

If you’re wanting to buy your daughter a doll for Christmas, I’d recommend looking at Target. I’ve been very pleased with a few dolls that are exclusive to Target stores.

First, the Our Generation series of dolls: Click here to see the dolls and associated products. These dolls seem to be a spin-off of the American Girl doll series. They’re the same size as AG dolls, but you can get one for $20, as opposed to $90+.

And if your daughter likes Barbies but you’re a bit uncomfortable with Barbie, check these out. Only Hearts dolls are just a bit smaller than Barbies, but I think they’d work fine with Barbie-type accessories. These dolls look sweet and youthful, and they cost around $15. They have soft, malleable bodies, which could be a plus or minus, I guess.

(Disclaimers: I’m sure I don’t like ALL the accessories for these dolls. I could do without the “rocker” accessories, for instance, and I haven’t read the books that go along with the dolls. Also, I haven’t tested these dolls for quality or durability…yet.)

I’m giving Target a big thumbs up, my recommendation to others, and my business for designing and selling dolls that look sweet and are dressed appropriately. You go, Target!

Love it- hate it. That’s sort of how I felt about my thanksgiving meal this year. We had 15 special people squeezed into our kitchen. It was a mixture of family and close friends, and we surely had a feast! There was the 20-pound turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, squash, peas, broccoli quiche, homemade rolls, cranberry sauce, I’m-probably-forgetting-something-else, and 6 pies! After we all ate, it seemed that the bowls piled high with food were hardly less full than before the meal began. As the saying goes, we could’ve fed an army! I kept thinking about how the meal was like God’s goodness and mercy–full and overflowing. Plenty. Unending. And we had the most special time of giving thanks that I can recall ever at a Thanksgiving feast. We sat around the living room, some of us on the floor, sharing how God has been good to us. One talked about God’s comfort after the loss of a sister. Another shared thankfulness for the limited amount of sight he still has. Everyone had something to share about God’s goodness.

Well, we ate turkey sandwiches that night, and the next night we had another Thanksgiving meal with the leftovers. And then those plastic containers in my fridge and those foil-covered pie plates really started to become a nuisance. Any other time I would’ve savored a piece of pumpkin pie or a bowl full of sausage stuffing. But I was tired of it. And I learned it wasn’t just me. At church on Sunday I heard friends talking about how tired they were of turkey. They wanted chili, fast-food, anything other than the leftover turkey that was screaming “Eat me!” from the fridge.

Read the rest of this entry »

When my daughter was six months old, we packed up all our belongings and moved from our small home in South Carolina to Kansas, where my husband was to begin his doctoral studies. We were full of feelings of adventure and also of uncertainty about what the next few years held in store for us. We decided to move onto the property of a small Christian camp where one of our best friends was the director. In exchange for helping out, we would receive free rent and utilities. The only problem was that both the house and mobile home on the camp property were already taken. So, we decided to make a home out of what was known as “the nurse’s station.” It was a two-room area underneath some cabins that had the potential to become a small apartment. We installed some kitchen cabinets, a sink, a stove and a refrigerator, and our apartment was well on its way to becoming livable. After making a curtain to divide the second room into the semblance of two separate bedrooms and adding our furniture and some wall hangings, our new little home became quite cozy, and we were very happy. In fact, a year later when we had added one more child to our family and it was time to move into a more spacious living space, I was, surprisingly, a bit regretful and sad about leaving our little home where I could hear all my favorite people breathing each night.

I’ll never forget the look on a friend’s face when I showed her around our little apartment. She put her hand over her heart, looked at me with a pitiful look, and said, “I’ll definitely be praying that God provides another place for you to live.” I was amused with her response, because I didn’t feel nearly so desperate about my situation.

There have been times in my life when I’ve had more creature comforts than I did in that 400-square-foot apartment, and yet I’ve been unhappy and discontent with my situation in life. I’ve often wondered, “How could I have been so happy in such a cramped place with no dishwasher, washer, dryer, hardly enough room to fit three of us around the table, and very little space for my daughter to play?”

One thing that I know contributed to my contentment was that I was grateful for many, many things. I was grateful that we had a place to live that cost us nothing. I was grateful that I could stay home with my daughter and didn’t have to take on a job in order to keep my husband in school. I was grateful for the beautiful grounds. I was grateful that we always had enough groceries. I was grateful that we had wonderful, godly friends also living on the camp property. I was grateful for the opportunity we had to minister at a Christian camp. I knew that God had been very good to us, and I was grateful.

I think that a grateful spirit is one of the biggest keys to contentment. The apostle Paul links gratefulness to contentment in Philippians 4:10-11:

But I rejoiced in the Lord greatly, that now at the last your care of me hath flourished again; wherein ye were also careful, but ye lacked opportunity. 11 Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. (KJV)

Matthew Henry’s commentary says this about the passage:

“Paul had a grateful spirit; for, though what his friends did for him was nothing in comparison of what he deserved from them and the obligations he had laid upon them, yet he speaks of their kindness as if it had been a piece of generous charity, when it was really far short of a just debt. If they had each of them contributed half their estates to him, they had not given him too much, since they owed to him even their own souls; and yet, when they send a small present to him, how kindly does he take it, how thankfully does he mention it, even in this epistle which was to be left upon record, and read in the churches, through all ages; so that wherever this epistle shall be read there shall this which they did to Paul be told for a memorial of them.”

I think it’s easy for women especially to think that if we just had a bigger house, more money to give our kids more opportunities, or a nicer car, we would be happy. But it’s just not true. Charles Spurgeon said, “You say, ‘If I had a little more, I should be very satisfied.’ You make a mistake. If you are not content with what you have, you would not be satisfied if it were doubled.”

We just moved into a new house that’s much bigger than the 400 square foot home I lived in a few years ago, but I know better than to think I’ll be any happier and content here than I’ve been anywhere else. True contentment can only be found by being satisfied with Christ and grateful for all that He has given you.

I Tim 6:6 –10 “But godliness with contentment is great gain.”

I recently finished two books that I’d like to recommend to you:

Calm My Anxious Heart by Linda Dillow: I expected this book to be more about anxiety, but it is actually an excellent and challenging study on contentment. I had just finished writing an article on contentment before I began reading this book (to be posted here and on SharperIron on Monday, Lord willing), and as I delved into the book, I started to feel silly for even attempting to tackle the topic, because this book is so much more thorough than I could be in an 800-word essay. Most of us struggle with contentment in some way or other, and I recommend this book to you.

Don’t Make Me Count to Three! by Ginger Plowman: If you like Ted Tripp’s Shepherding a Child’s Heart, you’ll like this book too. Plowman is somewhat of a disciple of Tripp and borrows from him, as well as Lou Priolo’s Heart of Anger, often. But she’s a woman, and she writes like a woman, complete with humor and helpful illustrations. The most helpful advice for me from this book was that we need to not only tell our children what not to do, but we also need to guide them in what they ought to do instead. For instance, when we tell our kids not to fight over a toy, we need to explain to them what they need to do instead, and then make them practice doing it right then. It’s the put off/ put on principle. This book was just the encouragement I needed as I’m trying to be the right kind of mommy for my two toddlers.

Happy reading!

When we moved from Kansas, we left behind a very dear friend of our family, Becca Linville. She ate most meals with us, shared our burdens and joys, and babysat our kids when we went on overnight trips. Our kids were sad to leave her, but they were delighted when we learned we had a sweet teenage neighbor named Becca– Becca Knoll. The “new” Becca babysat our kids a couple of times and has become a good friend. Yesterday my 3-year-old said, “God took away our old Becca and gave us a new Becca. Because God is nice. But I can’t see Him. But I want to give him a hug.” I was struck with the truths Leah unintentionally revealed in her little statement: When God takes away, He’s still good. May I never forget that! I’m thrilled that Leah has a right view of God (at least….in some respects!) and I pray that her knowledge of God continues to grow and that she will love and serve Him with her life.

(I wrote this article quite awhile ago, and it never found a home, although I tried to submit it to two magazines. If you’re a teenager, remember your teenage years, or know teenagers well, I’d love to have your feedback on this article. And if you think someone might benefit from it, feel free to pass it along!) [And, by the way, please forgive the big spaces...I messed with this article for too long and still have some formatting issues. Sorry!]

Fighting Temptation with Faith

Romans 1:17 “The righteous will live by faith.”
II Cor. 5:7 “We live by faith, not by sight.”

My best friend in high school, “Jenny”, was pretty and fun. We loved the same things: laughing hard, shopping, clothes, and dreaming about the future. You might say we were a bit boy-crazy, but really, we just talked and dreamed a lot about having godly husbands someday and having families of our own that were Christ-centered. We didn’t know any godly guys in our small town, but we knew they existed. Together we had gone to Christian teen rallies and visited a Christian college where we saw godly, handsome college guys in action. And I knew, deep-down, that if we waited for God’s timing, He would give each of us the desires of our hearts by sending us godly mates.

Jenny and I grew apart, though, my senior year, and we ended up taking different paths. She withdrew her reservation from the Christian college we were both planning on attending and bought a brand-new car with her savings instead. In the meantime, I was saving my cash for college. She started dating guys that weren’t Christians and soon lost her virginity to one of them. It all happened so fast. Before I knew it she was saying “I do” to a guy who I knew wasn’t saved, and her life took a turn completely opposite of what she had always hoped for. Read the rest of this entry »

We left Kansas on Sunday morning, and I was more sad about it than I had expected to be. For months I’ve been so excited about moving back to SC and living in our own home, so I didn’t anticipate the sad feeling in my stomach as we said goodbye to KU, our beloved camp, and our dear friends from church. Our years in Kansas were wonderful. I’ll never forget the beautiful farmlands, the unpretentious dear people who call Kansas their home, the simple country life we enjoyed, the friends who became family at Amazing Grace Baptist Camp, Dan’s wonderful experiences with the students and faculty at KU, or the culture and incredible food along Massachusettes Street.

But here we are, back in SC, renewing friendships with our dear friends we hated saying goodbye to three years ago. Their kids are strangers to me now, but we’ll catch up. Things are going great. We love our new home and all the closet space we have (Wow!). We love having the summer free from camp responsibilities to do do “summery things”–gardening, swimming, sleeping in, playing in the water hose, visiting the ocean… We love having family one mile away. Overall, it’s wonderful to be back home. But still, there’s a part of me that will always call Kansas “home” too.