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Friday night, the day after Thanksgiving. The college kids will, mostly, be gone.=(
Also Friday Night, December 12th.
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(Updated and expanded)
Taking a wee break from the 'being poor' series because I just came across this quote and had to share it:
corrected link
"Because the church is the community of people whose humanity has been rescued from its self-destructive tendencies, the New Testament repeatedly calls believers to honor the contours of our created and redeemed nature. The ethics of the Kingdom do not call us to abandon our humanity, but to fulfill (in Christ) all of its capacities. ... Since we were created to delight in the truth, local churches should be havens from whatever patterns of mendacity the world honors. And since we are made in the image of the Logos, created by a speaking God, surely Christians, of all people, should strive to display the best and brightest patterns of speech."-Ken Myers
The local church cannot be a haven from whatever patterns of mendacity the world currently honors if the individual Christians are merely passively reflecting or actively living that culture instead of deliberately developing and nurturing independent lives that reject it.
Mendacity: deception, falsehood
Some patterns of mendacity our world honors.....
those who are opposed to abortion don't care about women.
Those opposed to gay marriage are bigots who are denying equal rights to others.
Those who suggest that the biblical teaching that those who will not work should not eat is still true are judgmental.
buy your way to a better you.
It doesn't matter what you watch on television or listen to on the radio, it's just entertainment.
the world is overpopulated and we need to see to it that there are fewer people in it.
It's okay to love the Lord, but you don't want to be weird about it.
Being weird, in fact, is worse than being a sinner.
Etc.
But it's very hard to spot the world's current pet mendacities- we absorb them with our air and water, we take them in as unspoken assumptions without ever knowing what we've swallowed or what's wrong with it.
See C.S. Lewis
"...Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it.
...None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. ... Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction."
The Bible, of course, is the best 'old book' cure for our contemporary blind spots. |
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Yes, the wedding is in six days. I know I should say something about that, but I don't know what to say. We're excited, we're pleased, and I suppose we're stressed but I am in denial about that. I am not stressed, the rest of the family is just uncooperative, strangely emotional, a little grumpy, and silly. *this might be what the head doctors call 'projection.'
I am not sad or anyway experiencing bittersweet and tender emotions, but at this point that feeling of unsadness is so pronounced that I am now reminded of the way I feel when one of the children has a traumatic accident- like when she knocked her four front teeth not out, but up and reversed in position inside her gums, or when she needed 27 stitches in her face after a pillow fight resulted in her being knocked off the bed onto a drinking glass a very bad mother left out where it should not have been, or when my son was 21 days overdue and my strongest feeling was some annoyance at the midwife for wanting to induce.
That feeling is not so much calm as it is disassociation, limbo, that of a dispassionate observer from a planet where emotions are seldom experienced.
My experience tells me that I shall either disgrace us all at the wedding itself by unexpectedly bursting into loud, disturbing wailing. I might be able to hold off until the last guest leaves on Monday. I hope to wait.
Left to do:
More cleaning (there is always more cleaning)
Decorating some pillars and bird bath pedestals for plant stands
I need a hat band for my hat
cooking, cooking, cooking
Locating a hot water/coffee dispenser or three
transplant a pansy that is outgrowing it's pot
trim the grass in their pots
put out the thanksgiving decorations even though NOBODY else in my family is being very supportive about this goal, and I suspect that the reason I feel so VERY strongly about it (do y'all hear me?) is because it's one more way of denial, life is normal, nothing is changing, and It's MY LAST time to do Thanksgiving decorations with all my chicks under my roof still sharing my last name.
Which means, I have lots to do today and I should go. And oh, look, I posted about wedding stuff after all, and never got around to what I had to say about ephemera.
Some other time, when I'm less preoccupied with how very calm cool, collected and unemotional I am when my baby's getting married in a six days. |
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Singing at our house, Friday October 31.=) |
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This morning I got up at 6:30 to do what multiple gravida mothers over 40 generally have to do first thing in the morning. I looked out the window and saw a beautiful, perfect morning sky. There was a streak of brilliant pink in the east, and the air was filled with a hazy mist just light enough to cover the world with a sheer silver veil, making it seem more mysterious and more beautiful. The bare trees for a moment seemed Narnian, quivering in the secret light and waiting for the word that would wake them.
I thought to myself, "I have got to take a picture of that." But I had something else more urgent to attend to first. I took care of that, and then I spent a few minutes looking for the camera. I didn't find it right away so I went back to the window to look at the gladsome sky, but the dappled dawn had continued its birth without me. The scene had changed. It was still lovely and a thing of beauty to gladden the heart, but the moment I'd wanted to hold in my hands forever was gone.
Being a mother is like that, too. So many times in my mothering walk I have wanted to grab time with both hands and make it stop forever at this or that perfect moment, but time keep rushing on, dragging me breathless along with it to other perfect moments (and sometimes, yes, less than perfect moments. But we never ask time to stand still for those).
I have wanted to clutch my children to me and shout "Stop growing right now! This is perfect, this is where I want us to be forever." But if I'd had my way, I'd have missed other equally perfect, beautiful, joyous moments, even other children, moments which were also the ethereal gift of time, a gift of growth, a gift that only comes when we appreciate the moments that make up the individual beads on the strand of pearls that is mothering.
Appreciate each moment. Look at it with all your attention and imprint it on your heart and mind. And then move on with joy. The best is yet to come. |
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