Enjoying God's Creaturely Gifts

"...In believing that  'All things are pure to the pure in heart,'  Luther's faith was simple enough to trust that after a conscientious day's labor, a Christian father could come home and eat his sausage, drink his beer, play his flute, sing with his children, and make love to his wife -- all to the glory of God!..."

 Quote from From Luther on the Christian Home by William H. Lazareth.
Painting: Fredrick George Cotman (1850-1920) One of the Family

Heaven Came to Earth

Heaven Came to Earth
by Second Chapter of Acts

Heaven came to earth in a small package,
for a child was born, a gift to men.
Yes, the living light came to the darkness,
Wore the harness of mankind.

Laid His body down to be sin for us,
Gave His earthly crown so we could be kings.
Yes, He came to break the yoke of darkness
That would harness all mankind.

This morning star of love still shines, and shines.
We buried Him within our sin but He rose again.
Gave His heart away so we could find it,
Changed our night to day, so we'd live in light,
Tore the veil between the light and darkness,
Broke the harness of mankind.

This morning star of love still shines, and shines.
We buried Him within our sin but He rose again.
Let our hearts rejoice in Christ our Savior,
Let us come before His throne with grace.
Let us pray for peace so we'll break the darkness,
Melt the hardness of mankind.

Just call me Mrs. Deadman

I once heard a certain husband say, “The only good wife is a dead wife!” Oh really! I thought, as I continued my argument with him – oh wait, strike that. We all know that “christian” husbands and wives don’t argue, right? Anyway, by now you may have deduced who I'm talking about. Yep, good old yours truly. But where do we go from here? As with most truths, sometimes God needs to “wring it out of us.” We get pushed into a corner, brought to wits end, and finally get it right. I am dead to sin. What do I have to defend?

"Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?  ...  For he that is dead is freed from sin.  ...  Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord." excerpts from Rom. 6

I am dead to sin. It is impossible to argue with a corpse!

In an interview I recently watched, Dion (the singer from Dion and the Belmonts) told a story about how before he was saved he would (subconsciously) start an argument with his wife so that he could then feel justified to storm out of the house and take drugs or drink alcohol. However his wife got to the point where she just wouldn’t argue with him. She would agree with him about her faults, then inform him that she needed to get a bottle for the baby or take care of the kids. Now whether or not this is the exact interpretation the interviewer or even Dion himself meant to put on this, I will now step into the role of "Decipherer." The wife was "dead", dead to defending her old sinful self, so instead of arguing (as I usually do) she agreed quickly with her husband and then joyfully went about her vocation of cleaning, cooking and child raising. I know that's a bit of a stretch in the interpretation line, but you get the point, right?

In case you, like me, think “O wretched woman that I am, who shall deliver me?” then I have good news for you.  “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” Col 3:3

The good news is that you, like Dion’s wife, are dead. Have you ever seen a corpse rise up to defend its reputation? Instead of defending our sinful ways, we can agree and then go about our vocations. The laundry is piling up, our husband’s work shirts need ironed, and I’ll bet the children’s diapers are dirty. We have been relieved of proving to God what a good housewife we really are and now can focus on what’s right in front of us - that holiest of holy vocations of diapers, cooking and cleaning. There is such rest and peace in that.

“I will therefore give myself as Christ to my neighbor,  just as Christ offered himself to me.”  Tuomo Mannermaa Two Kinds of Love

Everything’s Going My Way

Oh what a beautiful morning,

Oh what a beautiful day,

I have a beautiful feeling,

Everything’s going my way!

Remember the opening song from Oklahoma? Rodgers and Hammerstein sure knew how to write of that golden day. I heard that song at a wedding this past weekend and it sure sounded nice. But really, when has everything gone my way? And then our Pastor stood up and interpreted that phrase in a new way. Once again the Word changed the way I thought about something 180 degrees.

 “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” Romans 8:28. If all things are working together for my good then isn’t everything really going my way? Even if I don’t totally see how it’s all working together.

Naturally my ideal “beautiful morning” would be waking up to a hot cup of tea. I would walk out side to our front porch seat and enjoy the birds’ morning songs. After half an hour or so of pleasant thoughts about our perfect children, my perfect husband, and some holy thoughts about God, I might then go inside and read the Bible. Then, after I've had a long, warm shower, the children would start waking up, each one about 20 minutes apart and all in a wonderful mood… oh and with dry diapers. Well, I don’t know about you, but that “beautiful morning” has not happened yet for me.

Now a more typical morning for me would go something like this. I didn’t get my caffeine/tea because all three kids woke up early and none were in a good mood. Paul, our youngest, is teething and feverish and he just wants to be held. Lucy, who is being potty trained, doesn’t seem to care if I have to wash all 8 pairs of her training pants EVERY day. At about this point, I think I’ve had all I can take, and then Helen, our two year old, decides right now would be a good time to start throwing up.

I can’t take any more! Lord! Where are you? This is not a beautiful morning or day. Going my way? Not a chance!  These complaints are voiced, but as usual no voice from the heavens thunder down a response. Instead some of the scriptures our pastor and my husband have reminded me of come to me.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” Romans 8:28

“Who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good?” 1 Peter 3:13

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39

As Gerhard Forde writes, in On Being a Theologian of the Cross, we naturally "call evil good and good evil". I think anything that appears as an inconvenience to “my plans” is bad, and good is when things go the way I planned. Yet, thinking back, when has anything ever gone the exact way I planned? Not ever that I can remember, but in it all Christ has been working. A preacher once said, “Nothing bad can happen to me!” (1 Peter 3:13)
What else could God use to get my attention besides tribulation? With the slightest hint of success comes pride and it takes me away from God and back into my own strength, but He is still there working in me to will and do His good pleasure. This so called trouble becomes my salvation! I am brought to being in need of a Savior and there really is no better place for us to be… poor, needy and wretched. Then he enjoys showing Himself strong on our behalf. (2 Chronicles 16:9)

So, back to the wonderful children God and blessed us with. There is nothing else I’d rather be doing than raising my children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Sick or healthy, happy or whiny, large or small; these are a joy to take care of. God is pleased to use them to bring me closer to Him, and I am pleased to take care of them while He is taking care of me.

“And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed” Romans 5:3-5


Glory in throw up, dirty diapers, and spilled cheerios? Yes! For through these mundane things, I am learning patience, experience, hope. He takes away my sin and shame and brings me back to the most beautiful thing in the world… My neighbor.

Beware of the Back Door Tactic

My sister-in-law found *this article* and I like how it exposes the subtlety of one tactic Satan uses aiming to separate and destroy relationships within the church.

Here's an excerpt -

"This is how it works! Satan gets another Christian to sin against us in deed or word. 

It pleases Satan if a person with spiritual significance or authority, such as a parent, pastor, 

spouse or leader in the Church sins against us. Their spiritual status, their office, magnifies 

their offense and intensifies the damage that it does. 

This is a kind of ritual abuse, the misuse of holy things against us.

After the offense has occurred, Satan gets us to brood over it, like a stuck track or a video loop, repeatedly and obsessively in our minds, with every greater emphasis on the gravity and 

injustice of it. As we process the offense and its effect on us, Satan gradually distorts our remembrance and our assessment of it. He uses this offense to encourage us to bring our mental accusations against the offender in the court of our minds. There he presides over the proceedings as we hold a secret trial in which we both prosecute and pass judgment on the wrongdoer...."

Has anyone else out there had Satan try to get in their "back door" with this method?
Well I have, and it is every bit as damaging and corrosive as the article points out. Exposing these tactics of our Enemy makes them lose their power as we become aware of their source, their goal, and the damage they are causing. We are in a spiritual war, we mothers at home.  Any evil thinking we allow in our own minds against any member of the body of Christ will be picked up by our children and will affect the state of the church, for we are all members of the church, one Body, present and future, and we always need to hear and speak words of conviction that help keep us clean, over and over.

Not a Mood, But Reality

The passage below is of much comfort to me because it is a confirmation that regardless of what feeling or lack of feeling for God or repentance I can or cannot muster on any given day, no matter how "anguish of soul" takes shape in my inmost being, the Body and Blood of Christ that I take during Communion every Sunday morning WORKS!  It is an act of God taking place here and now.  Period.

"What is it that gave to Luther's conception of Providence an immediacy, 

the freshness and vitality which had not been there since the days of the prophets and Jesus? 

Nought else but the experience of this which he calls the forgiveness of sins. 

We easily miss this connection, because in the main, 

forgiveness of sins is for us a much less fruitful word than it was for Luther. 

For us it tends to become either a doctrine which we in faith "apprehend to ourselves," 

or else a purely subjective "experience"; for Luther it meant something far beyond: 

a real act of God, the living God, through Christ, the living Christ. 

As I lie there in deepest anguish of soul, he himself comes, and this not as a 

pictorial description of a shift in my subjective mood, but as an altogether actual reality,

 to accomplish that blessed exchange with which Luther speaks about in his book on Christian liberty:  
He, all my sin, I, all his fullness."

from "Our Calling", by Einar Billing, page 7 

I am clean.  I am forgiven. That is reality. 
What I "feel" at the time of receiving the Sacrament or at any other time is irrelevant. Thank God.

Why Have Children?

I came across a great article in World Magazine the other night.  It is called Metaphysically Deceived, by Mindy Belz.  In it she quotes a small passage from a wonderful 1993 essay by theologian and ethicist Gilbert Meilaender called "The Meaning of the Presence of Children," which I then found and read in its entirety, and I'm so glad I did.  (For some reason I cannot create a link to it because it was a PDF download, but you can type the article name into Google and download the PDF for yourself if you're interested), and I think it is well worth reading.
It is so good that I just have to put up this (rather lengthy) excerpt:

 The Meaning of the Presence of Children, by Gilbert Meilaender -

 There is, I claimed at the outset, a certain pathos in the question, Why have children? 

It suggests a loss of spontaneous confidence in life and an impoverishment of spirit. This does not mean that such a question is unreasonable, particularly for those whose circumstances make hope difficult, though we may doubt whether they are the ones always most likely to raise the question. In any case, I do not seek to judge the difficulties facing any particular married couple or their special circumstances; rather, I seek to reflect upon the social significance of our attitude toward the presence of children. 

The formation of a family is most truly human, a sign of health, when it springs from what Gabriel Marcel called “an experience of plenitude.” To conceive, bear, and rear a child ought to be an affirmation and a recognition: affirmation of the good of life that we ourselves were given; recognition that this life bears its own creative power to which we should be faithful....

The desire to have children is an expression of a deeply humanistic impulse to be faithful to the creative power of the life that is mysteriously ours....

 But granting all such provisos, there is still a sense in which planning alone cannot capture the “experience of plenitude” from which procreation, as its best, springs. There is, after all, no necessity that human beings exist—or that we ourselves be. That something rather than nothing exists is a mystery that lies buried in the heart of God, whose creative power and plenitude of being are the ground of our life. That life should have come into existence is in no way our doing. Within this life we can exercise a modest degree of control, but we deceive ourselves if we forget the mystery of creation that grounds our being.  To form a family cannot, therefore, be only an act of planning and control—unless we are metaphysically deceived. It must also be an act of faith and hope, what Marcel termed “the exercise of a fundamental generosity.” 

To the extent that we moderns have understood the family as a problem to be mastered, and not a mystery to be explored faithfully, we have quite naturally come to adopt a certain attitude toward our children. They have been produced, not out of any spontaneous confidence in life, but as the result of our own planning. We are, therefore, tempted to suppose that we must— and can—become their protectors, the guarantors of their future. Paradoxically, having lost the metaphysical underpinnings of procreation as a participation in the Creator’s own gracious self- spending, having lost much of the real significance of the family, we make of it more than it is.

In love a man and a woman turn from themselves toward each other. They might, however, miss the call of creative fidelity to life and be forever content to turn toward each other alone, to turn out from themselves no more than that. But in the child, their union, as a union, quite naturally turns outward. They are not permitted to think of themselves as individuals who come together only for their own fulfillment. In the child they are given a task. Their union plays its role in a larger history, and it becomes part of their vocation to contribute to the ongoing life of a people....

In many respects this is the most fundamental task of parents: transmission of a way of life. When the son of the ancient Israelite asked, “‘What does this mean?,” his father told again the story of the mighty acts of God, the story of their common life as a people....  Parenthood is not just biological begetting. It is also history—a vocation to nurture the next generation, to initiate it into the human inheritance of knowledge and obligation....

And until we rediscover the inner meaning of the venture of parenthood as a mystery to be lived rather than a problem to be controlled, we will be ill equipped to deal with the ills we confront."

Crying for the Absolution

Do you ever just feel like crying? Even without a good reason? Well I was having that kind of day. Most things that were probably normal just didn't seem that way. I like to blame it on being 8 months pregnant and having two girls aged two and under running around. I could even blame it on the cold that is going around to the two runny noses that just don't seem to know when to stop. I can hear my husband's  voice in my mind, saying, "Just slow down. Think, what is the worst that can happen?"  Hmm, well, maybe I don't get to vacuuming and the carpet gets even dirtier than it already is. Not so bad. I don't do laundry and we all run around naked. Getting a lot worse. I don't make any food and we all starve to death. See, I knew this was all a life and death matter! Ok, maybe I should make lunch before I go any further down that road.

The problem is, when I am crying I don't usually slow down and think, I react. If you find a woman who can be an emotional wreck, and slow down to think logically, I would nominate her for the Nobel peace prize. Or better yet, maybe the sister suffragette “badge of courage beyond the call of duty.” But being as there probably isn't one, then we will descend from our flight of fancy - down, down, to ... Yes, two more dirty diapers. When you’ve gone through two Costco packs of diapers in less than a month, God must being trying to say something.

What could it be that He is trying to tell me? “You’ve been bad”? No even in this state of mind, I don't think God is punishing me through dirty diapers. “You need to try harder”? Again, I don’t think that’s God’s hidden message to me.

Then my phone rang. Now I think that sometimes there is nothing so lovely as that ring, a chance to talk to another human being who has a vocabulary that includes more than 6 words. But my phone also has the habit of ringing right when I’m in the middle of some mess or jackpot (bad phone!) so I almost didn’t answer it this time. However, there is one thing worse than leaving a big mess to answer the phone, and that is the guilt that comes when you see the person whose phone call you ignored and you’re wondering if they guessed that you had simply ignored them. That being said, I answered it this time. A heavenly sound came across. My husband’s voice asking “Hi Honey, how is it going?"

How is it going? How is it going? Well let me tell you. I started with the smallest problem of all, that I'm hopelessly fat and will probably never lose any of it after the baby is born, but once a confession starts, it seems to all just spill out. It may be more like a volcano or perhaps old faithful, but there is it. Now I am crying all over again and have a headache to boot. But at one point in this conversation come the most cherished words in all of history, "I forgive you of all of your sins." Is that really the answer to the unswept floors and counters that need dusting? Yes! Now the truth begins to take hold of me. It isn't the thing itself that makes me crazy, it is the lack of hearing the absolution. I need to hear it every day. God sends trouble into my life, and the absolution finds me in the muck and toil. "I forgive you  of all of your sins." The absolution washes away the grime, and even diapers begin to reek of holiness. I am right where He wants me to be.

Then the secondary confirmation can continue this absolution. My conversations with my husband, friends, and neighbors affirm this forgiveness on a daily basis. It’s not only limited to Sunday morning, but He is broken for me today, here, now. Baptism (or exorcism – whichever you prefer to call it) happens over the telephone and I am once again clothed and in my right mind.

So what is God trying to say? Here is my beloved daughter in whom I am well pleased.

The Washing Water of the Word

Catechism is about creating 
a whole atmosphere; 
like a child in a womb surrounded by water, 
we're surrounded by the water of the Word.

It creates an atmosphere
 that's a combination
 of poverty and gift.
Trouble. Crying out. Deliverance.
Psalm 107

It may not seem like a gift, but it is.

It's just not cool in the World today to have a lot of children. You are definitely "sinning" against the World's system, the planet, and society by having them, they say. It's downright shameful in their eyes! But this Mother's Day we get the gift of being dead to this world and alive to Christ and alive to his Word and his being the only definer of what is good for his world, his planet, and society.

Not only that, we also get this totally awesome bonus gift:
to be counted worthy to suffer shame for His name.  Hurray!   *Cough*

We, who bow ourselves under the cross of our God given vocations, who deny the "my will be done" lifestyle that the world highly esteems, and who, by God's grace, and within the holy ark of His Church, say "Thy will be done," submitting ourselves to the Word of God, reverencing our husbands, and by the mercies of God presenting our lives as living sacrifices, being willing to bear and love and train children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, will never be loved by this wicked and adulterous generation.  Never! 

We just need to know that, so we are not shocked when it dawns on us that there is no "cool" way to  put this lifestyle, not even to my own sinful flesh - the Biblical chaste obedient meek humble fruitful multiplying surrendering your will lifestyle. But hey, Jesus never said it would be.  If he is (not was) despised, won't we be also, if we are his disciples?

So when we are called names like uncool, fools, demeaned, wreckers of the planet, stupid, unintelligent barefoot and pregnant housewives, or whatever else, we can rejoice, knowing that our master Jesus Christ was called much worse, and we can go away...

 "... rejoicing that [we are] counted worthy to suffer shame for his name."
 Acts 5:41

So, Happy Mother's Day tomorrow!

Sorry, I'm not trying to be morbid.  I'm just saying this world is not our home, especially for Christian mothers these days. God is our home.  And until we are with him in glory, where he has promised we will be, we, like our Lord Jesus, will not be loved for our obedience to God.  This is the cross we bear in this world - the shame and scorn of those to whom the cross is foolishness.

"To speak more clearly of it, you should not take the cross of Christ to mean this or that 

wood on which Christ hung suspended: but the cross of Christ is the shame and the great 

indignity which Christ innocently suffered....

This is why true Christians must be dubbed heretics and evil doers.
They must be condemned, despised, and judged by all, that everybody wipes his feet on them."

What Luther Says  #1045

Here are some flowers for us.

From Small Talk to Absolution

An excerpt from “Handing over the Goods”, an article by James Nestingen

“So, I suppose marriages and families are made of small talk. There are all kinds of routine information that gets shared. Carolyn and I are talking - everyday… She tells me about the weather, and she tells me about our dog, and who’s sick, and she tells me about her secretary who is visiting and what they’ve done, and I am very interested in that information. But, the magic always happens late in the conversation, and I know enough to wait for it. She expresses herself to me, and I express myself to her.

You see, that’s how love works. Love takes possession of the details. Love takes those little clichés, the minutiae of the day and turns them into gifts. All of a sudden, out of the routine, out of the small stuff, Christ Jesus is breaking loose in the words. So the information, while it is helpful and essential, is really preparatory to this… your sin is forgiven. I’m going to raise you from the dead. No power is going to ever hold you. There, Christ Jesus is making love to you. He’s speaking his Word to you. He’s breaking loose again, you see, he is saying it. And that is what the Word does. The fundamental characteristic of the Word in Christ Jesus is its power."

           ~           ~           ~           ~           ~           ~           ~           

That's what we are longing for every day. Jesus breaking loose in the midst of the details, diapers, and dialogue of every day life. The forgiveness of sin, woven in and out of conversations about which brand of diapers is the best, or who can watch the kids when it's time to go to the dentist. "Your sin is forgiven" is what enables us to enjoy our vocation as mothers, taking care of all those details and the small talk. "Your sin is forgiven" is the best news every day. And it is a wonderful thing, to see it happen, again and again. 

The Lost Virtue of Steadfastness

 
I read this article in the latest Touchstone magazine and I found it comforting, especially in terms of motherhood. 

God's Place and Ours: On Mutability and the Lost Virtue of Steadfastness   

by Anthony Esolen

Here are a few excerpts:

"Something of [the] longing for what is not here, this joy of the pilgrimage, has set deep roots in the soul of Western man.  But it has become detached from an end to the pilgrimage.
We thus lose a sense of home, both the eternal and the temporal....

We are under compulsion of perpetual mobility precisely because, without God, to settle means to acknowledge defeat, and to rest means to die within.  The metaphysical condition of such a life is divorce. We change towns, we change schools, we change houses, we change husbands and wives, we change churches, we change faiths.  We go off into the distance, as we set at a distance those nearby things we still pretend to cherish, as, for instance, our children.  We look down upon women who "stay at home," thinking of them rather as creatures who are stuck in mud.  We almost treat as pious heroes those who are determined to leave their homes and never return, yet who still claim some tenuous and sentimental attachment to what they have abandoned.  We invert the wisdom of St. Paul.  We discard all things as if we discarded them not."

"We are not angels, we are not disembodied wills.  Jesus never instructs us to love "humanity."
He instructs us to love the all-too-physical neighbor."

"The metaphysical condition of the faithful Christian is not divorce, but marriage, not mobility and mutability but steadfastness.  'Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?' asks the Lord. 'Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee' (Is. 49:15).
Consider the image.  The child longs for the mother, for her breast; he feeds from her very substance.  It is that intimacy of place and person that expresses, in more than a metaphor, the steadfast love of God for his people.  For the Lord 'hateth putting away,' says the prophet (Mal. 2:16).  On what grounds may a man divorce his wife?  Jesus dismisses the motive behind divorce entirely.  A man moves from his father and mother so that he may 'cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh' (Matt. 19:5).  The young man who has squandered his inheritance in that ever-seductive 'far country,' when he comes to his senses, did not say, 'I must leave this pigsty and follow my fortune elsewhere.' He said, 'I will arise and go to my father' (Luke 15:18).  The Lord is the Good Shepherd who seeks the one sheep gone astray.  'Jerusalem, my happy home,' sings the poet, 'when shall I come to thee?'"

"There is a difference between being in a location, and dwelling; between remaining, with its sense of being left behind by the more adventurous, and abiding, with its sense of devotion and full-hearted peace.  'How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!'"

"It is doubtful whether, without steadfastness, without devotion to this place, this work, this spouse, this land, we can enjoy even a decent human life.  A tumbleweed is not only rootless.  It is directionless.  It is blown about by the chance of the wind, quitting here, divorcing there, forgetting here, abandoning there.  In following our own purposes, regardless of the claims of steadfastness upon us, we lose our purpose, and turn with every turn of the fickle heart."

"We are not all monks.  But we are parents, and children, and neighbors, and citizens.  God has given us one another, and our homes, as worthy objects of our steadfast love, and as the grounds for preparing ourselves for the eternal home, the city of everlasting foundations.  That Jerusalem is illuminated neither by the turning sun or moon, not by the electric static of the news, such as it always is, but by the eternal glory of God, and the Lamb."

This has everything to do with being a wife and mother.

"What is the essence of the cross that each Christian must of necessity carry willingly, even joyfully?

Jesus defines it for us with all its flesh-piercing splinters and slivers.  He defines it in such a way that there could never be a time when an aware Christian would be unaware of his need for the compassionate Christ, who gives rest to the weary and refreshes the burdened.  

The essence of the cross in every stage of life and in every changing circumstance is this:  

Self denial.

He tells us, 'If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.' (Mark 8:34)

Again, with what mastery Jesus sums up the whole matter in Mark 8! 

Self denial will always be difficult, will always be a struggle.

Hence, to undertake such is to take up a heavy, flesh-ripping backbreaking cross.

For what is it that everyone wants by nature?

What is it that is at the very heart and core of each one of us?

Each wants to save his life and not lose it.  And to fallen man the essence of saving life is not 

merely the continuance of bodily functions.  It is rather that one's own will be done.

To do the will of another or to have one's own will denied is to lose life."

The Theology of the Cross, pg. 13

by Daniel Deutschlander