Tag Archives: spirituality

rest.

Posted on by
3

I’m taking a class on Sunday nights at church called Life Keys: Discovering Your Design. Basically for every session we look at a different personality evaluation and think about where we fit on its given spectrum, but it’s all done through the lens of having been created by a Designer for a Purpose. So as we figure out things about ourselves, we’re able to examine what that might mean as far as a vocation, as far as leisure time, and as far as relationships with our spouses, friends, and family. I’ve been feeling a bit at loose ends lately, so I’m hoping doing some of this soul searching will give me some clarity, or even just peace about why I am the ways I am.

I missed last Sunday’s class, but I got together with the instructor for coffee to talk about the lesson. It was on values, which the book defines as things that:

  • feel important to you,
  • define your fundamental character,
  • supply meaning to your life and work,
  • influence the decisions you make,
  • compel you to take and stand, and
  • describe atmospheres where you can be productive.

The exercise walks you through a list of values and has you rank them into a list of 8 that are very important to you. My eight ended up being:

  1. competency
  2. control
  3. efficiency
  4. fairness
  5. financial security
  6. productivity
  7. organization
  8. stability

Sensing a bit of a theme there? My instructor did, and as we were talking about what competency, control, and productivity meant to me and how I lived those values out, he looked at me and said, “How do you rest, Laura?”

I squirmed a little and then I said, “Cooking? To which he pointed out that if that’s my rest, then even my rest involves doing. It’s true, although I still think it can be a form of rest. The kitchen is definitely one of my happy places.

I read a lot, and I suppose that is a way of resting, but I don’t approach my books in a restful manner. Unless I’m completely engrossed, I’m often thinking, “I really could/should be doing x, y, z right now instead of enjoying this book.” And more often, I use reading as a reward: “I’ll sit down and read after I finish cleaning the bathroom and get dinner in the oven.” But the list of things I have to do first often grows and grows, until it is bedtime and I have yet to pick up my book. So I guess it’s clear that I struggle to prioritize rest, and in fact can hardly think what rest would feel like or look like for me personally.

On Saturday, I spontaneously decided to go see the newest Twilight movie. I actually really like going to the movies by myself. I splurged on a Diet Coke and a popcorn, and as the lights went down and the theme music poured out of the speakers I thought, “Ah! This feels sort of like I’m maybe resting.” I was completely taken away by the movie–this  might belong to a different post, but for what it’s worth, I found the emotions much more real in this one, and something about those darn CGI wolves just tugged right at my heartstrings! I thought the ending was well done and the end credits were pretty epic. ANYWAY, as I practiced escapism in its truest form, I realized I felt rested. I should do that more often.

BUT, as a list-maker, organizer, and doer, adding any “shoulds” to my repertoire could be dangerous. Once something becomes a should, I’m likely to make time for it–but at that point, will it even be restful anymore?

At church yesterday, as the pastor introduced communion and invited us to the Lord’s table, he said, “Brothers and Sisters, come take your meal and find your rest.”

Whoa.

It gave me pause to hear the table described like that, and also the timing for his particular invitation was uncanny.

I clearly don’t have the answers about rest, but I’m sure hoping to find some, because I think I need it, especially going into the busy-ness of the holiday season.

How do you rest?

Book Review: A Year of Biblical Womanhood

Posted on by
2

A couple of weeks ago I was selected through Rachel Held Evans’ blog to be part of the launch team for her newest book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood.

The book officially launched a week ago, so you may have heard about it by now. Rachel has appeared on numerous talk shows and been featured in magazines and on radio segments. The book is currently #2 on Amazon in the “Theology” category and not far behind that in Spirituality and Christian Living. It’s making decently-sized waves in evangelical as well as more liberal Christian circles.

I’ve been reading Rachel’s blog for several years now so was able to follow along with frequent posts as she executed the project. Here’s the gist of it: Rachel grew up in a conservative Evangelical church where women were not allowed to preach and were encouraged to assume traditional roles in their homes and marriages. Rachel grew up and started asking hard questions. She got married, and she and her husband Dan found that they somewhat inadvertently eschewed all the traditional roles they had assumed they would embrace and created for themselves an egalitarian marriage. Rachel started delving into these issues and found a whole wealth of literature espousing the “Biblical womanhood model,” which she came to view as a misinterpretation of the Bible she loves. So, she embarked on a somewhat kooky project: for one year, she would follow every edict in the Bible that said something about women. She ended up doing things like wearing a headcovering, calling her husband Master, praising him at the city gates, cooking through a Martha Stewart cookbook, and caring for a computerized baby. (You can read more about it here and check out some FAQ’s.)

I expected to love the book. I really did. I was excited about it from the first wind I caught of it on Rachel’s blog. It seemed like a really interesting experiment that could make a lot of bold claims about the role of women in Christianity. But honestly, I had trouble getting through it. First of all, the projects Rachel chose seemed odd to me. Many of the rules she followed were from the Jewish culture, and she even made an orthodox Jewish friend who directly guided her through many of them. Yes, I am well aware that Christianity grew out of Judaism and that the culture in which Jesus preached and lived was Jewish. I am well aware that the entire Old Testament follows the story of the Jews. But to me, if Rachel was trying to refute the likes of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, choosing Jewish customs was not the track to take, because I don’t feel like these are the scriptures that people get hung up on.

Secondly, while the projects themselves were fascinating, in practice the book felt disjointed to me. Rachel tried to tell us about so many projects that I felt shorted on most of them. An entire experience had to be boiled down to just a page or two. Perhaps I’m spoiled because in reading her blog I’ve gotten a more fleshed out, longer term view of things, but I wanted more detail about fewer projects–maybe the ones that impacted her the most, for example.

And my final concern is that this is not the book that is going to convince a Christian who ascribes to a patriarchal worldview to change his or her mind. I expected to have a lot of “ah hah!” moments while reading this book, but in fact I had very few. And if that was my experience, as someone who already mostly agrees with Rachel’s stance, I can’t imagine what someone deeply entrenched in the notion that she has to be a silent wife and homemaker would make of it.

Here’s where I often run into problems with feminism: if the point of feminism is to allow women the freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives, than what of the women who decide to be homemakers and stay-at-home moms? I often feel like those women are belittled by the staunch feminists as simply being part of a partiarchal hierarchy that they need to escape. But you know what? I believe, as unpopular as it may be, that men and women are different. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be paid the same or have the same rights, but I think that at root, we have some fundamental differences, and I also believe that’s Biblical. And I think that a woman choosing to live out what she feels to be her deep calling is beautiful. Just because men and women are different doesn’t also mean that all women and all men are the same as each other, but I think there are things we each are better suited for. Not all women who stay at home or choose to be the primary homekeeper are doing it out of a sense of obligation to the patriarchy or because they’ve been forced to. I work, but I also cook dinner every night, do all of the laundry and much of the cleaning, and pour Andy a beer occasionally when he gets home from work. I do these things because they bring me great joy and because I feel that I am well-suited to keeping our home pleasing. Am I less of a woman because I have chosen to be this way? I don’t think so. So I’m tired of feminists making me feel like I should want more for my life. I have crafted a life that makes me happy, and will continue to craft it as my circumstances evolve, and I don’t think it’s worth any less just because some of my choices happen to line up with a conservative viewpoint of marriage and the family.

So, all that said, I think A Year of Biblical Womanhood is a great rallying cry for a specific subset of people: women who grew up in conservative churches or families that they’ve since pegged as oppressive who have changed the way they live to a more egalitarian position for women and men. Plenty of bloggers and tweeters that I follow are in that category have shouted hoorays over this book. But for people like me who perhaps straddle the fence, and especially for people who haven’t toed up to the line at all, I’m not sure what the book will do.

I’m sounding terribly harsh, and I don’t particularly want to be. I’ve come to feel that I know Rachel from reading her blog, and I like her, and I think she’s doing great things in the world. The writing in the book has moments where it absolutely shines and passages that assert truths in a manner that can’t be ignored.

And some of her conclusions are absolutely irrefutable to me: that “The Bible does not present us with a single model for womanhood, and the notion that it contains a sort of one-size-fits-all formula for how to be a woman of faith is a myth.” She also writes, “If love was Jesus’ definition of ‘biblical,’ then perhaps it should be mine.” And this: “We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we reading with the prejudice of love or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed?”

But to be honest, this book has me all confused, because I’m finding myself typing this post out of a much more conservative stance than I thought I had in me. When I read the section of A Year of Biblical Womanhood that dealt with Proverbs 31, rather than feeling freed by Rachel’s conclusions about it (“The woman [...] in Proverbs 31 is not [an] ideal [...] she is present in each of us when we do the smallest things with valor”), I felt cheated. I thought, “But wait a minute–I kind of WANT to be that woman!” So now I’m just all in a tizzy and I’m not sure what sort of woman I am, or why. If nothing else, the book has got me standing back at my proverbial drawing board of Self, and that can’t be a bad thing.

I guess I can rest in one of Rachel’s conclusions, that “One does not have to understand to be obedient [to God]. Instead of [...] that intellectual understanding which we are so fond of, there is a feeling of rightness, of knowing, knowing things which you are not yet able to understand.” Hopefully, with the “prejudice of love,” that will get me somewhere.

The Kingdom of God

Posted on by
9

My church has these groups called missional community groups that are made up of people from the same geographical neighborhood who are interested in doing things together in order to serve their immediate community. The groups are pretty autonomous, and each one has its own projects and agendas (which is the point), but every once in awhile the church trickles down some curriculum that they’d like each group to discuss. Recently we were given a handout on the topic of the person of peace (which is probably a whole post in its own right) that included an exercise to draw what you picture the kingdom of God looking like.

Normally I hate drawing prompts. I would just as soon tell you in words, and in fact could probably do a much more detailed job in that manner! (This is why I’m a blogger.) But I had fun with this thought exercise. Here’s what I drew:

Everyone is happy (even the sun, apparently!) and gets along, and there are no more tears. (That’s always been one of my favorite verses in the Bible about the kingdom: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes.”) There’s a table full of really good food that I’m sure gets replenished frequently, and there is music and singing all the time. There are infinite books and nice places to read them. And God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are up there hanging out with us.

Now, obviously, this is not literal, nor is it theologically correct. But it was fun to think about some of the nice things in this world that I imagine would only be magnified in the next. I have no idea what the infinite kingdom of God will be like, and I honestly don’t think about it that much. But perhaps the most beautiful part of all of it to me is in thinking about how we can bring this kingdom about here. Because the Bible tells us that’s our call. Sure, there are parts of eternity that simply can’t be fulfilled on this broken earth with broken people leading the charge. But the calls to love, give, and serve radically can happen now. I can do it. You can do it. And that small piece of heaven is the real representation of God’s kingdom.

How do you picture the kingdom of God?

invigorated by life

Posted on by
2

On Saturday, Andy and I finally replanted our balcony planters. They had been filled with the dead remnants of last summer’s plants for far too long. But as I posted about recently, I was not really feeling the whole gardening thing! Part of my issue with it is the lack of space. We pretty much have to use the floor of our apartment to get it done, because our balcony is an open grate.

The mess was unappealing to think about.

But Andy really enjoyed having the plants last year, so he took the lead on getting some plant suggestions from my mom and making us go out to get them. To be honest, I was  slightly reticent up until the morning of our outing.

But once we started rolling through Home Depot and seeing all the plants, I started to get more excited. There’s just something invigorating about the thought of cultivating new life.

I remembered how nice it was to look out the window and see green things and flowers waving in the air between me and the other steel building across the street.

Andy did the actual physical planting, and I do have to admit that I didn’t mind that at all. I channeled Anne Taintor and said, “Boy, not gardening is so much fun!”

The herbs will be put to good use, though, and I hope the flowers will continue to bloom. And as I care for these beings, may I remember where they come from.

On that note, a poem that popped into my head as I walked that afternoon:

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

~”Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to planted things!

Made to Be Courageous

Posted on by
3

Last Thursday, A. and I went to see Courageous. It’s a movie by a Christian film production group called Sherwood Pictures that has produced several other movies in recent years, including Fireproof and Facing the Giants. It’s based in Albany, Georgia, and is a ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church. In other words, it’s far removed from Hollywood, in more ways than just location. For the most part, with the exception of Kirk Cameron in Fireproof, the actors in Sherwood’s movies are no-names, and many are members of the church, meaning they have down-home Georgia accents and probably little to no theatrical training. I think the first Sherwood Pictures movie I saw was Fireproof, which A. and I also saw in the theater. It’s about a sinking marriage that is rescued by a hearty dose of faith and love in action. I watched Facing the Giants on DVD and, I have to admit, loved it. It’s about a high school football team, so I was predisposed to enjoy it. It, too, was infused with messages of faith, which is the purpose of Sherwood Pictures.

I first heard about Courageous months ago when I saw an episode of 19 Kids & Counting in which the Duggar boys and their father were extras in a scene depicting a father-son 5K race. I’ll be honest: I put the premier date of the movie on my calendar all the way back then. I knew it would likely be a powerful story that would make me think and that would spark good discussion with others. So, here I am discussing! Because while I enjoyed the movie, it’s not one that I can simply take at face value as an enjoyable experience. And again, I think that is a large part of Sherwood Picture’s purpose.

Courageous centers around several men who are sheriff’s deputies in Dougherty County, Georgia. One big kudos I will give to the film is that I found all of their situations believable, and I found all the characters to be like people I could meet in my real, day-to-day life. I won’t give away the entire plot, but suffice it to say that a major life event triggers one of the men to evaluate his performance as a father and find himself lacking. With the help of his pastor, he embarks on a study of what Scripture has to say about fatherhood. He uses this knowledge to write up a resolution, which he and the other men sign in a very solemn ceremony. The rest of the movie follows them as they all strive to live out the ideals listed in the resolution, including goals for fatherhood and personal integrity.They all encounter successes and failures, and they depend on their relationships with each other for increased accountability. The movie ends with a Father’s Day church service during which one of the men preaches and puts out a call for the men of courage to stand up and join them in the resolution.

The movie packs a powerful punch. I think it’s especially poignant that the men involved are law officers, men who see people at their absolute lowest and come to realize that they, as fathers, have a huge responsibility for shaping their own children to be upstanding citizens. In one staff meeting, the deputies are told of the statistics: children with absent fathers are hugely more likely to drop out of school, commit violent crimes, and even commit suicide. These are all true statistics that are impacting our country today. So the characters in the movie see these effects all around them and finally choose to seek better for their own families.

The message of Courageous is an important one, and I know churches and Sunday school classes all over the place will be adopting its resolution and teaching and preaching on themes from this movie. I think that’s a great outcome for a piece of popular cinema to have (though I think there are also plenty of “secular” movies that can also spur great discussions). In that sense, I think what Sherwood Pictures is doing is great for Christians. Their movies offer a call to examine yourself and dig deeper into your faith, truly living out what you believe rather than giving mere lip service to a church or cause. But what I wonder is how these movies come across to people who are not already a part of the church.

All things considered, I thought the movie was very well-produced, even better than the other two Sherwood films I’ve seen. I don’t think there would be much for anyone other than an erudite film critic to scoff at here, cinematically. In one scene, a mother is crying over a tragic event, and I really believed her tears. There was no bad fake crying. And since everyone is really from Georgia, the accents are authentic. But I found the emphasis on evangelism in this one to be a bit heavy-handed. Obviously the whole thing is founded on faith and a belief in Jesus Christ. Otherwise, the men wouldn’t have taken so seriously the calls from Scripture to be better fathers. I just wonder, though, whether men really go around quoting Scripture at each other. That’s the part that I think people who don’t already believe would find hard to swallow; I can’t imagine them sitting through this movie and being able to take the parts that are raw evangelism seriously. I wonder, though, if that’s even the point at all.

I think it’s a fine line that Sherwood Pictures is walking, and I think they’re doing an admirable job. If the “only” thing their movies do is encourage conversation and commitment among Christian groups (as the Love Dare from Fireproof has done), then that can hardly be called a bad thing. And if their movies are enjoyable enough as entertainment to help bring some of this “Christian rhetoric” to the mainstream, then that can hardly be a bad thing either. As Christians, we’re told to be in the world but not of it, and to expect to be maligned for our beliefs sometimes. If anyone shies away from a Sherwood Pictures film because it’s Christian, or berates it for any of the reasons I just stated, then I think that can hardly be a bad thing, either. The point is still being made. By making these movies and releasing them to mainstream theaters, rather than straight to DVD or through a Christian publisher, Sherwood Pictures is saying, “We’re here, we’re Christian, and we can make movies, too.” So for all I might pick on these movies for being cheesy, I enjoy them, and I think they serve a great purpose. I guess you could say the movies themselves, are, well, pretty courageous.

What do you think? Have you seen any Sherwood Pictures movies? Would you go see a movie that unabashedly includes Christian themes?

It doesn’t hurt that these movies have great soundtracks. Check out this song by Casting Crowns, aptly titled “Courageous,” that goes along with the movie.