"Your body is the first thing any child of man ever wanted. Therefore dispose yourself to be loved, to be wanted, to be available. Be there for them with a vengeance. Be a gracious, bending woman. Incline your ear, your heart, your hands to them.... To be a Mother is to be the sacrament - the effective symbol - of place. Mothers do not make homes, they are our home." from Bed and Board, Robert Farrar Capon

Thursday, August 22, 2013

I never thought I'd be doing this...

... quoting from "The Message" Bible translation of all things,

but last night on our back porch my just under thirty-year-old married nephew (the one who's a foot taller than everybody ((who, I heard later, got this text from my just under twenty-year-old niece who's a foot shorter than everybody)) ;)  said, "Oh, you gotta hear this."

Then he began to read 1 Corinthians 1:26-31, which, as the members of our local church know, has long been our congregation's touchstone definitive chapter and verse, according to our pastor.
But I'd never heard it said quite like this before. You've got to imagine it being read in a serious "contemporary youth pastor style" voice -

"Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. 
I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, 
not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose 
men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, 
chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? 
That makes it quite clear that  none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. 
Everything that we have— right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—
comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, 
“If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.”
( 1 Cor. 1:26-31, from The Message translation


So, um, you're not really getting the feeling that we're the brightest and the best, high society group, etc.?  Yeah, me neither.  Just nobodies. Good.
Anyone else out there?

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Well Put

I just happened upon this article this morning and thought it a clearly laid out list of wise and practical points on training young children.