Mommy Brain

Well, He cried when He was hungry,
Did all the things that babies do.
He rocked and He napped on His mother’s lap
And He wiggled and giggled and cooed.
There were the cheers when He took His first step
And the tears when He got His first teeth.
Almost everything about this little Baby
Seemed as natural as it could be.

Chorus:

But this Baby made the angels sing.
This Baby made a new star shine in the sky.
This Baby had come to change the world.
This Baby was God’s own Son,
This Baby was like no other one.
This Baby was God with us;
This Baby was Jesus.

And this Baby grew into a young Boy.
He learned to read and write and wrestle with Dad.
There was the climbing of trees and the scraping of knees
And all the fun that a Boy’s born to have.
He grew taller and some things started changing,
Like His complexion and the sound of His voice.
There was the work to be done as a carpenter’s son
And all the neighbors said He’s such a fine Boy.

Chorus:

But this Boy made the angels sing.
This Boy made a new star shine in the sky.
This Boy had come to change the world.
This Boy was God’s own Son,
This Boy was like no other one.
This Boy was God with us.
This Boy became a man:
Love made Him laugh, death made Him cry.
With the life that He lived and the death that He died,
He showed us heaven with His hands and His heart.
Cause this man was God’s own Son.
This Man was like no other one,
Holy and human right from the start!

Chorus:

But this Baby made the angels sing.
This Baby made a new star shine in the sky.
This Baby had come to change the world.
This Baby was God’s own Son,
This Baby was like no other one.
This Baby was God with us;
This Baby was Jesus.

Words and music by Steven Curtis Chapman

This is a great book. I don’t have the time or energy to actually write a review right now, but here are some passages I wanted to remember:

“A long time ago I went to a concert with my friend Rebecca. Rebecca can sing better than anybody I’ve ever heard sing. I heard this folksinger was coming to town, and I thought she might like to see him because she was a singer too. The tickets were twenty bucks, which is a lot to pay if you’re not on a date. Between songs, though, he told a story that helped me resolve some things about God. The story was about his friend who is a Navy SEAL. He told it like it was true, so I guess it was true, although it could have been a lie.

The folksinger said his friend was performing a covert operation, freeing hostages from a building in some dark part of the world. His friend’s team flew in by helicopter, made their way to the compound and stormed into the room where the hostages had been imprisoned for months. The room, the folksinger said, was filthy and dark. The hostages were curled up in a corner, terrified. When the SEALs entered the room, they heard the gasps of the hostages. They stood at the door and called to the prisoners, telling them they were Americans. The SEALs asked the hostages to follow them, but the hostages wouldn’t. They sat there on the floor and hid their eyes in fear. They were not of healthy mind and didn’t believe their rescuers were really Americans.

The SEALs stood there, not knowing what to do. They couldn’t possibly carry everybody out. One of the SEALs, the folksinger’s friend, got an idea. He put down his weapon, took off his helmet, and curled up tightly next to the other hostages, getting so close his body was touching some of theirs. He softened the look on his face and put his arms around them. None of the prison guards would have done this. He stayed there for a little while until some of the hostages started to look at him, finally meeting his eyes. The Navy SEAL whispered that they were Americans and were there to rescue them. Will you follow us? he said. The hero stood to his feet and one of the hostages did the same, then another, until all of them were willing to go. The story ends with all the hostages safe on an American aircraft carrier.

I never liked it when preachers said we had to follow Jesus. Sometimes they would make Him sound angry. But I liked the story the folksinger told. I liked the idea of Jesus becoming man, so that we would be able to trust Him, and I like that He healed people and loved them and cared deeply about how people were feeling.

When I understood that the decision to follow Jesus was very much like the decision the hostages had to make to follow their rescuer, I knew then that I needed to decide whether or not I would follow Him. The decision was simple once I asked myself, Is Jesus the Son of God, are we being held captive in a world run by Satan, a world filled with brokenness, and do I believe Jesus can rescue me from this condition?

If life had a climax, which it must in order for the element of climax to be mirrored in story, then Christian spirituality was offering a climax. It was offering a decision.” p. 33-35

“There is something quite beautiful about the Grand Canyon at night. There is somethng beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. Of course, I had always known He was, but this time I felt it, I realized it, the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined Him looking down on this earth, half angry because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk with love for her.” p. 100

“Here’s a tip I never used: I understand you can learn a great deal about girldom by reading Pride and Prejudice, and I own a copy, but I have never read it. I tried. It was given to me by a girl with a little note inside that read: What is in this book is the heart of a woman. I am sure the heart of a woman is pure and lovely, but the first chapter of said heart is hopelessly boring. Nobody dies at all. I keep the book on my shelf because girls come into my room, sit on my couch, and eye the books on the adjacent shelf. You have a copy of Pride and Prejudice, they exclaim in a gentle sigh and smile. Yes, I say. Yes, I do.” p. 140

“The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me.” p. 182

“I began to understand that my pastors and leaders were wrong, that the liberals were not evil, they were liberal for the same reason Christians were Christians, because they believed their philosophies were right, good, and beneficial for the world. I had been raised to believe there were monsters under the bed, but I had peeked in a moment of bravery, and found a wonderful world, a good world, better in fact, than the one I had known.

The problem with Christian community was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in Christian community, but it was conditional love. Sure, we called it unconditional, but it wasn’t. There were bad people in the world and good people in the world. We were raised to believe this. If people were bad, we treated them as though they were either evil or charity: If they were bad and rich, they were evil. If they were bad and poor, they were charity. Christianity was always right; we were always looking down on everybody else. And I hated this. I hated it with a passion. Everything in my soul told me it was wrong. It felt, to me, as wrong as sin. I wanted to love everybody. I wanted everything to be cool. I realize this sounds like tolerance, and to many in the church the word tolerance is profanity, but that is precisely what I wanted. I wanted tolerance. I wanted everybody to leave everybody else alone, regardless of their religious beliefs, regardless of their political affiliation. I wanted people to like each other. Hatred seemed, to me, the product of ignorance. I was tired of biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them. I was tired of Christian leaders using biblical principles to protect their power, to draw a line in the sand separating the good army from the bad one. The truth is I had met the enemy in the woods and discovered they were not the enemy. I wondered whether any human being could be an enemy of God.

On the other hand, however, I felt by loving liberal people, I mean by really endorsing their existence, I was betraying the truth of God because I was encouraging them in their lives apart from God. I felt like there was this war going on between us, the Christians, and them, the homosexuals and environmentalists and feminists. By going to a Unitarian church and truly loving those people, I was helping them, I was giving joy to their life and that didn’t feel right. It was a terrible place to be.

This was, at the time, my primary problem with Christian faith. With all its talk about pure love, in the end it shook down to conditional love. Again, this is a provocative statement, but I want to walk you through the emotional process I went through.

How could I merge the culture of the woods and the Unitarian church with Christian culture and yet not abandon the truth of Scripture? How could I love my neighbor without endorsing what, I truly believed, was unhealthy spirituality?

My answer did not come for many years, and as for that summer, I became very confused. I gave in to keep the peace. I stopped going to the Unitarian church, I shaved, I cut the hippy act and made friends, good friends, friends whom I loved and who loved me. From time to time I would overhear comments by my friends, destructive comments about the political left or about homosexuals or Democrats, and I never knew what to do with those comments. They felt right in my head but not in my heart. I went along, and, looking back, I think we all went along. Even the people who were making the comments were going along. What else was there to do? Truth is truth.” p. 215-217

“And that’s when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dislodged from my arteries. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. Professor Spencer was right, and not only was he right, I felt as though he had cured me, as though he had let me out of my cage. I could see it very clearly. If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps, we feel they are priceless. I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did.” p. 218

“When I am talking to somebody there are always two conversations going on. The first is on the surface; it is about politics or music or whatever it is our mouths are saying. The other is beneath the surface, on the level of the heart, and my heart is either communicating that I like the person I am talking to or I don’t. God wants both conversations to be true. That is, we are supposed to speak truth in love. If both conversations are not true, God is not involved in the exchange, we are on our own, and on our own, we will lead people astray. The Bible says that if you talk to somebody with your mouth, and your heart does not love them, that you are like a person standing there smashing two cymbals together. You are only annoying everybody around you. I think that is very beautiful and true.” p. 221

“I know our culture will sometimes understand a love for Jesus as weakness. There is this lie floating around that says I am supposed to be able to do life alone, without any help, without stopping to worship something bigger than myself. But I actually believe there is something bigger than me, and I need for there to be something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who has everything figured out.” p. 237

….to all you Bloglines users. I added a “Commonplace Book” category for all those book quotes I want to remember and keep in one place, and since I re-categorized some older posts, Bloglines users will be flooded with posts from me that show up as new, but really aren’t. Sorry!

“If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.” p. 7

“At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance. It is exactly this intellectual helplessness which is our second problem.” p. 24

“That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of fatih. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape.” The young sceptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.”" p. 25

“Keeping to one woman is a small price to pay for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one is talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind.” p. 49-50

“It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.” p. 52

“The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.” p. 73

First of all, congratulations to Bethany! She won the Celtic Woman Christmas CD. So, Bethany, watch your e-mail box for a message from me and reply with your mailing address so I can get it in the mail in time for Christmas.

I’m in a rush – just baked a birthday cake and cleaned the whole house. In an hour or so, we’re heading to a play date (which will have the added benefit of keeping the house clean) and tonight Natalie’s party. Here are a few links before I go do the lunch and baking dishes and head out:

~I have to admit I was a bit skeptical when I heard that Sylvester Stallone had become a Christian and was marketing the new Rocky movie as a faith-based film. After reading this, I’m intrigued and can’t wait to see it.

~Three is my favorite of Ted Dekker’s Christian thrillers (it is a page-turner) and it has been made into a movie. You can watch a preview here.

~Remember that electric guitar version of Pachelbel’s Canon in D that came out a while ago? Well, here’s an acoustic version that is just as impressive.

~And if there was a good music/bad music spectrum, the MP3 link in this post at Author Intrusion belongs on the exact opposite end. I laughed so hard I cried.

~Katy at Fallible has a wonderful post about the God who gave us Christmas.

~This post at Think Christian is a great suggestion on how to deal with all the anti-Christmas protests going on.

Have a great weekend!

Her birthday was actually yesterday. I didn’t forget, it’s just that we’re having her party tomorrow night – Friday night being a much better night to have a best friend sleep over.

She turned 10 yesterday. Ten years old! I can hardly believe it. It seems like only yesterday….. Well, all you moms out there know how it is. I posted Natalie’s birth story last year for her birthday, and as I read through it again today it does not seem possible that ten years have passed since then.

Natalie is growing up into quite a beautiful young lady. She loves to laugh, she enjoys being all girl, and yet will get down and wrestle with her brothers. She likes to watch mushy movies with me – I’m so glad there’s at least one more female in the house! Just a couple of weeks ago she fixed dinner for the first time, and next week she will be a great help with the Christmas baking. Her ballet lessons are helping her to become more feminine and graceful as the weeks go by. I am very proud of her, and very honored that God chose to give her to us.

Happy Birthday, Nan! Your mom and dad love you so very much, and we are so proud of the young lady you’re growing into.

As most of you already know, Spunky is calling it quits. The day she announced that she was retiring from blogdom, she was also nominated for Best Education Blog in the Weblog Awards. Those are the big ones, folks. And how incredible would it be for a homeschooling blog to win! So even though Spunky Homeschool is no more, head on over to the Awards page and vote for Spunky. You can vote once a day. As of a minute ago, she is in second place and closing fast.

I put this book on my reading list for this year because it was recommended by so many people – most of all, of course, by her. I stayed up late night-before-last finishing it, and immediately added the other three Crosswicks Journals to my master to-read list.

Before this, the only L’Engle book I had read was A Wrinkle in Time. I re-read it this year – aloud to my daughter, and didn’t quite love it as much as I had remembered when I was young. Probably because I’m not anymore. Young, that is.

Ms. L’Engle is an honest Christian. At one point, she recounts a conversation she had with a student. The student had asked, “Do you really believe in God, without any doubt?” Ms. L’Engle replied, “I believe in God with all sorts of doubts.” That’s honesty.

Here are some other favorite portions:

“Love can’t be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can’t be proved, any more than anything else important in life can be proved. Love is people, is a person. A friend of ours, Hugh Bishop of Mirfield, says in one of his books: ‘Love is not an emotion. It is a policy.’ Those words have often helped me when all my feelings were unlovely. In a summer household as large as ours I often have to act on those words. I am slowly coming to understand with my heart as well as my head that love is not a feeling. It is a person.” p. 45

“We often respond to the rejection and contempt of youth towards parents by such thoughts as: Why would my child feel or act this way? I’ve always given him everything he wants. I’ve made do with less just so he could have a good allowance and all the clothes and cars he wants. I haven’t made harsh rules; he can stay out as late as he likes, and I never question who he’s with. And this is the thanks I get.

Happily, more and more of us are coming to realize that such a parent is an ogre to the under-thirties. This kind of parent has given the child all the material goods of the world and not enough of the structured and disciplined love that would make the child truly free. Such a parent has earned, instead of the respect and admiration he was trying to buy, nothing but distrust and contempt. He is the “ugly adult” the child does not want to become.

What about the mothers who loathe the thought of getting old, who think it is a disgrace to look or act their age, as though becoming mature were something to be ashamed of instead of rejoiced in, mothers who pride themselves on dressing like their teenage daughters, and consider it a compliment when people say they look like sisters. Perhaps the daughter doesn’t want a sister; perhaps she wants a mother. Here I am grateful for my resemblance to the giraffe – this is one temptation not available to me. On the rare occasions when someone, thinking to flatter and please, has made the ‘more like a sister than her mother’ remark, my reaction has been rejection. I’d far rather be a reasonable-looking fifty-one than a raddled thirty.

And what about the men who made a fetish of being hearty pals to their sons? What sixteen-year-old boy wants a forty-year-old man as a pal? I’m not talking about friendship; that’s something else again. Maybe he’d rather have a father instead, a father who, with love, says, You may go this far and no further, a father who makes rules and sets limits, who, when he says no, means no. Friendship, regardless of chronology, is based on mutual respect.” p. 112-113

“When I do something wrong I tend to alibi, to make excuses, blame someone else. Until I can accept whatever it is that I have done, I am only widening the gap between my real and my ontological self, and I am thus excluding myself so that I begin to think that I am unforgivable.

We need to be forgiven:

to be forgiven in this time when fish are dying in our rivers; in this time of poison gas dumped on the ocean floor and in the less and less breathable air of our cities; of children starving; being burned to death in wars which stumble on; being attacked by rats in their cribs…

we need to be forgiven in this grey atmosphere which clogs the lungs so that we cannot breathe, and breathless, spiritless, can no longer discern what is right and what is wrong, what is our right hand and what is our left, what is justice and what tyrrany, what is life and what is death.

I heard a man of brilliance cry out that God has withdrawn from nations when they have turned from Him, and surely we are a stiff-necked people; why should He not withdraw?

But then I remember Jonah accusing God of overlenience, of foolishness, mercy, and compassion.

We desperately need the foolishness of God.” p. 232-233

“If the Lord’s table is the prototype of the famly table, then, if I think in terms of the family table, I know that I cannot sit down to bread and wine until I’ve said I’m sorry, until reparations have been made, relations restored. When one of our children had done something particularly unworthy, if it had come out into the open before dinner, if there had been an “I’m sorry,” and there had been acceptance, and love, then would follow the happiest dinner possible, full of laughter and fun. If there was something still hidden; if one child, or as sometimes happens, one parent, was out of joint with the family and the world, that would destroy the atmosphere of the whole meal.

What is true of the family table is, in another sense, true of the conjugal bed. Twin beds make no sense to me. I can understand an occasional need for a separate room, but not separate beds. If a man and wife get into bed together it is very difficult to stay mad. Both Hugh and I have tried, and it hasn’t worked. The touch of a hand is enough to dissolve me into tenderness; the touch of a cold foot enough to dissolve me into laughter. One way or another, reparation is made, relations restored, love returned.

Only a human being can say I’m sorry. Forgive me. This is part of our particularity. It is part of what makes us capable of tears, capable of laughter.” p. 235