These two little hooligans are going to give the birds a real run for their money this cherry season. Or they would be if the cherries were actually ripe and the birds were interested. But we are just honing our cherry picking skills. Practicing spitting pits, climbing ladders, and other very important backyard business. Balancing on a lawn chair in the wagon is tough, and you’ve got to practice. Turns out the cherries don’t need to be ripe for any of that!
If I was an indulgent mother, my children would be amidst the cherry tree all day long, dawn until dusk, eating unripe cherries. Blaire cruises the ground level, and snags their cast offs and chews on those. Perfect. But I am not an indulgent mother, so we are only putting in half to three- quarter time in the cherry tree.
I’m a little late getting this link up for you to Rachel’s latest post on mothering over at Desiring God’s blog. It’s another wonderful and nourishing word for hungry moms. (And my excuse for being late is that Doug and I have been traveling today and just reached Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where we’ll be this weekend.)
I loved Mom’s post about the sociological events, and just felt compelled to add my little two bits. When things like this happen, there are a few things that growing up in the home of a faithful pastor taught me.
First of all, don’t get involved if you are neither part of the problem or part of the solution. Long distance judgments never profit anyone. Sometimes you might feel like you are involved, but the truth is that someone has just shared a grievance with you. Accusations and serious sounding things do not a full story make.
This brings me to the second thing. Pastors are very uniquely vulnerable to assaults like this, because (especially when they are respectable men), they cannot fight back in the same way. Someone can gallop around the Internet accusing a pastor of being rude and selfish and generally nasty. The pastor is not at liberty to stand Continue reading ‘One more thing….’
From time to time a well-known Christian leader either steps down or is removed from office because of some flagrant immorality or some other scandalous sin. But other times, as in the case of John Piper last year, a minister takes a leave of absence for a time to sort things out, either personal things or ministry things. It is a leave of absence, not a resignation. It is a time-out to rethink how everyone is doing, off camera. For someone with an internationally known ministry, I can easily imagine that this could be a tremendous help. A minister of a small to mid-size church might be able to take a week off and regroup; but when you are the head of a huge ministry, things go public in a big way. It just comes with the territory.
Recently, C.J. Mahaney has stepped down from his position as head of Sovereign Grace Ministries in order to sort out some misunderstandings, headbonks, and whatnot. I am not going to address the particulars here, because, frankly, I don’t know what they are, and that’s not my point in writing.
A strange thing happens when a minister comes under fire. All the discontents from the past ten or twenty years Continue reading ‘Sociological Events’
I would like to commence by saying a quick, “Preach it, Mother!” Her advice on journaling was spot on . . . and I’d like to just throw out a casual thought that perhaps a pastor’s wife of 35 years who has counseled many a woman through all manner of tragedies may perchance have a perspective on things that is worth listening to. Her list of “things that might get people into trouble” has a lot of years of experience behind it. Quite honestly, sometimes I feel like a pastor and his wife are a bit like the doctors in the ER. They’ve seen the car crashes that come through the door every single Saturday night because people WILL persist in thinking that nothing will go wrong if they try to drive themselves home from the bar. The doctors who have to clean up the mess are a bit more cynical.
Anyway, that is neither here nor there. I frankly felt that I should share, for everyone’s edification, my career in journaling.
It all started when someone, I don’t remember who, gave me a birthday present. I imagine I was probably eight or nine, but I don’t know for sure. The gift was a tiny, green Garfield the Cat diary – probably two inches tall, with a little strap that snapped it shut. I never wrote anything in it – except perhaps my name. It sat in my room for months, untouched. It wasn’t that I wasn’t allowed to write in it – I just never did.
Then, one day, some people came over to visit. I don’t remember exactly why, but midway through the afternoon I got cranky at life and began to stew quietly to myself about how I was being unduly harassed by everyone and everything. You know how it is when you’re cranky – everyone in the world is to blame but yourself. Suddenly, in the midst of my mood, I had a flash of inspiration. This here was exactly what that diary had been waiting for all this time. I went and shut myself in my room, opened up my little Garfield the Cat book, and scribbled out a terse little entry that went something like this: Continue reading ‘My Career as a Journalist’
Recent Comments