I was recently telling my husband how surprised I have been to realize how many young Christian college women are feeling at sea when it comes to understanding what it is they are doing. What is an education for? We used to view an education as preparation for life. Now it is viewed as preparation for a career.
My husband pointed out that there are no cultural cliches to reinforce the calling of the wife and mother at home. All the cultural cliches today are the savvy, sexy career woman, married or not. And it doesn’t much matter how many sermons women hear if they don’t have any cultural reinforcement. They need to see the value and potency of the calling of wife and mother, and they are not going to find this in films, sit-coms, or magazines. Women have been successfully driven out of their homes in our culture, creating a vast vacuum in Continue reading ‘Cultural Cliches’
This is the speech I delivered to the Trinitas Christian School Class of 2010 at their commencement Thursday night in Pensacola, Florida.
Good evening, Mr. Trotter, board of trustees, faculty, parents, grandparents, students of the Trinitas graduating class of 2010, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to be your commencement speaker tonight. It is an honor to address this graduating class of eleven young women. Thank you, Mr. Trotter, and thank you, senior class, for inviting me to be here. It has been a pleasure to get to know some of you, and Doug and I have enjoyed your gracious hospitality.
I’d like to speak to you young ladies tonight about your future (now that’s a novel idea for a commencement address, don’t you think?) but, more to the point, the kind of women you want to be in that future.
You live in a time when women of all ages are hungry for purpose and direction in their lives. And it’s not just the young women who are flailing about trying to find their bearings. Even Christian women can be confused. The lies of the feminist story have had more than a whole generation in which to ripen and bear fruit, and it turns out, it is a bitter and barren fruit. Continue reading ‘Dangerous Women’
“Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
This is quite likely the one and only wise thing that man ever said. And nowhere is the principle more clearly evidenced than in my laundry pile.
The surest and speediest way for me to get radically behind on the laundry is for me to say smugly to myself, “There now. All caught up on the laundry. How lovely.” The instant I do that is the instant the trouble sets in. It only takes about 36 minutes of laurel-resting for my dirty clothes hamper to look like this. You’d think that one of these days I’d learn that the point of doing the laundry is not in order to “be done.” You’d think that one of these days I’d stop sitting on the stupid laurels.
I’d love to really delve into this question and analyze themes from Ecclesiastes and thresh out the possible incipient Platonic assumptions in my approach to life . . . but I obviously have some laundry to do.
My son points out quite nicely in Tilt-a-Whirl that God wastes all kinds of glory and beauty on us all the time. We miss the stunning artistry He displays in each and every little snowflake. We glance at the rainbow and move on. We pass by the flowers and clouds and icicles nonchalantly when we ought to be thunderstruck in amazement all the time. And many of the outrageous views He has made are not even seen or appreciated by anyone at all. Take all the sunsets that only the birds and insects see. Why does God waste so much of His artwork on us? He must love us very much, and He must enjoy bestowing His good gifts even on a deaf and blind and bored audience.
And yet we imitate Him in this in very small ways. Think of parents moving the new baby into his room. Does the newborn appreciate the new crib with the matching quilt and bumper pads? Or the freshly painted walls in the nursery? Is the baby impressed with the handmade blanket from Aunt Susie or the quilt that has been lovingly passed down for generations? Of course not. But the giver is blessed. This is one of the ways Mom expresses her love for her new baby, though baby knows nothing of it. This is a concrete way of giving, loving, bestowing, welcoming. We obviously get this impulse from our wise Creator who made heaven and earth and then lavished loving kindness into every nook and cranny, ladling it out and sloshing it all over the place.
We ought to rouse ourselves from our stupor from time to time and take in some of the glories we find ourselves knee-deep in. Then with thankfulness, we can turn to our own homes and bestow some of this reflected glory in expected and unexpected places. Tiny ladles to be sure, but sloshing over nonetheless.
Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook; a school-mistress, but not a competitive school-mistress; a house decorator, but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women. Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades. But the woman’s professions, unlike the child’s, were all truly and almost terribly fruitful.
You really must read the whole essay “The Emancipation of Domesticity” which originally appeared in What’s Wrong With the World and is included in the book Brave New Family.
A couple of weeks before the Merkles left us for the UK, Bekah made this beautiful dessert for our Sabbath dinner. Under the whipped cream is a chocolate pot de creme, and the big, fat blackberries were from a friend’s back yard. The espresso cups seemed just the way to serve it. Delish!
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