It's Life, Not an Interruption

I am sure our HUGE following (that's right, all three of you :-) have been checking your computers diligently every morning in hopeful anticipation of another post here, and wondering where we have disappeared to. (wink, wink)

We've disappeared straight into normal life. Sometimes in the midst of doing the laundry, sweeping the floor, cleaning the bathroom, dressing children, kissing owees, cutting tiny finger nails, washing windows, making our husbands lunch, actually stopping and talking to our husband, sitting down to read a book to our children, kissing sweet baby faces, changing stinky baby diapers, cooking dinner, etc it is hard to find the time to write a blog post about "vocation" or "normal life" but we're right here living it. :-)

Just your everyday, run of the mill trip to the grocery store

When it fits into these vocations it IS fun to post on this blog - but in the long periods of blog-silence you can know that we're "right there with you", in the same position as you, fulfilling the same vocations, living the life of "continual interruptions", and serving the Lord by serving our husband and children. Peace to you as you are in your home, where the Lord has placed you, living the life with the people He has placed you with.

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis

Lucidity, Where Art Thou?

"Human intellect is incurably abstract....

Yet the only realities we experience are concrete - this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man.

When we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, 
we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain, or Personality.... 

This is our dilemma - either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste - 

or, more strictly to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience 

or to lack another kind because we are outside it.

As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about;

as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand.

The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off:

the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think."

Myth Became Fact, C. S. Lewis  (reprinted in God in the Dock)

Gerrit Dou, Girl Chopping Onions, 1646

Hey, wild-eyed lady in the painting, surely that's a perfect time to think, right?  

I mean, you're just chopping onions? What's so hard about that? 

Well (apart from the flood of tears and smeared mascara that would grace my face at such a time) there's also the little boy, saying, "Mom? Mom? Could I have this onion for an experiment?"

And then you try to think. You try. Can he? What experiment?  I don't like experiments. Why does he make me have to think about this right now, when I'm getting ready to instruct the little person setting the table about which side to put the fork on, for the tenth time. And listening to that same wrong piano note from the other room. Can he? Think... think.

Homemade Kindness

Just because they're my children does that mean I shouldn't say "Please" or "Thank you" to them?
Just because I'm their mother, does that mean I have the right to be short-tempered and rude to them?
Do I speak more kindly and patiently to a visiting niece, nephew, or neighbor child than to my own? 

I have acted many times as if I assumed a "yes" to each of those questions, but I am purposing, by God's grace and with His help, to be more aware of my tone and attitude in speaking to my children, and praying that I learn to be as kind, tenderhearted, and forgiving with them, for Christ's sake, as I would endeavor to be to any other person I encounter.

There is a passage from C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves that often comes to my mind on this subject -

"We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation... but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.

....[Parents'] ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously.... provide an easy answer to the question, 'Why are they always out? Why do they like every other house better than their home?' Who does not prefers ability to barbarism?"

Lewis goes on to explain how people excuse their bad manners with,  

".... [O]f course we don't want company manners at home. We're a happy family. We can say anything to one another here. No one minds. We all understand,"  to which Lewis explains, "Once again it is so nearly true yet so fatally wrong. Affection is an affair of old clothes, and ease, of the unguarded moment, of liberties which would be ill-bred if we took them with strangers.  But old clothes are one thing: to wear the same shirt till it stank would be another.

The more intimate the occasion [at home every day], the less the formalization; but not therefore the less need of courtesy.  On the contrary, Affection at its best practices a courtesy which is incomparably more subtle, sensitive, and deep than the public kind.... 

Affection at its best wishes neither to wound nor to humiliate nor to dominate....
You may tease and hoax and banter.... You can do anything with the right tone and in the right moment - the tone and moment which are not intended to, and will not, hurt. The better the Affection the more unerringly it knows which these are (every love has its art of love)."  (from pgs 42, 43, 44)

The little people that are growing up in my house, under my charge for a time, are God's children first before they are mine.  My sons and daughters will grow up to be men and women and will, God willing, have families of their own.  Much of the sensitivity and gentleness they will have toward their own spouses and children they will hopefully have learned at home. 

"She opens her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness." Proverbs 31:26

Quote for the Day

“Don’t be too easily convinced that God really wants you to do all sorts of work you needn’t do. 

Each must do his duty ‘in that state of life to which God has called him.’  Remember that a belief in the virtues of doing for doing’s sake is characteristically feminine, characteristically American, and characteristically modern: so that three veils may divide you from the correct view!  There can be intemperance in work just as in drink.  What feels like zeal may be only fidgets or even the flattering of one’s self-importance.  As MacDonald says, ‘In holy things may be unholy greed!’ And by doing what ‘one’s station and its duties’ does not demand, one can make oneself less fit for the duties it does demand and so commit some injustice.   Just you give Mary a chance as well as Martha!”

C.S. Lewis, Letters to An American Lady