Journal Prayer

Have you ever written something really personal but ringing with so much truth that you just know you have to share it with others?  Yeah, that happened yesterday morning.  I'd just finished reading the chapter about God's eternity in A.W. Tozer's Knowledge of the Holy.

"O God, I am but a vapor on this Earth!  I feel it daily--the constant, unrelenting passage of time.  I want so desperately to grab hold and stop it for awhile, but it pays me no mind.  As the days and seasons slip past, the urgent question presses against my consciousness, 'Am I accomplishing anything that will not pass away, as I will?'  Has eternity taken note of my life in any way, or am I only living to live and be gone?  While I despair of a positive answer to my questions, I hear Your Spirit whisper in my ear.  "Yes, and there is more to come."  My hopeless soul leaps for joy and breathes again.  Eternity knows my name, and the Eternal One has further plans for me to be recorded therein.  How do I find them?  How can I ensure I do not miss an opportunity to make my mark on eternity?  Again comes that sweet voice, "Faithfulness."  So that is it.  Steady obedience to the call of the Eternal One.  So may You grant that my life is."

So may He grant that Your life is as well.

Writing and Pulling Teeth

Hi, guys.  It's been awhile.  In case you were wondering, the summer was fantastic.  I really enjoyed my jobs, the people I had the opportunity to work with, and all the crazy busyness that comes with summer camp.  That's not what I'm here to talk about, though.  I'm more interested in telling you what the last month and change has been like and what I am doing this year.

It all started when God began to put it on my heart to move back in with my dad this school year.  I thought it was a terrible idea at first.  After all, everyone says that moving back into your parent's house once you've been out is a recipe for disaster.  However, God will be God, and here I am, living in my old room with a two-month old kitten.  It's actually pretty great.

What am I doing with my time?  I'm so glad you asked.  A large part of my week is taken up by school.  I started my Associates Degree last fall, and I am scheduled to finish it at the end of April.  The real reason that I am living here is my writing.  I have been writing novels since I was about thirteen years old.  That's about eleven years.  I always wanted to publish, but my work either wasn't good enough, the market wasn't right for my genre, or I didn't have time to find a publisher.  Now I have time, and I have decided to self-publish.

Are you sure?  Yeah, I am.  I could go into all the reasons why, but that would be mostly boring.  The important part for you to know is that I need a fan base.  That starts with you--the few, the proud, the people I already know.  I just opened a facebook page for my authorly self, and you can do me a big favor just by liking it.  If you really want to go above the call of duty, invite your friends to like it.

What are you working on now?  Another excellent question.  Where do you guys come up with these?  At this moment I am writing a stand-alone short story about a prince who doesn't want the throne but can't abdicate, so he runs away.  It's a fascinating tale of identity, growing up, treason, and rebellion.  The target audience is 16 to ancient.  It began as a wedding present for my brother, but the characters demanded a larger audience, and they'll have my head if I don't agree.  I hope to publish it as an e-book in the next 2-3 weeks.

Your facebook post talked about incentives?  Yeah, I was just getting to that.  If you guys can get me to 100 likes by the end of the weekend (midnight on October 4th), I will release a snippet of the short story.  If at least ten of your friends message me and tell me that you referred them, you can get a copy of the final version for free.  Deal?

Here's a link to the facebook page.  https://www.facebook.com/Hannah-Rebekah-808225129322949/timeline/

Why is this blog post almost over and you still haven't mentioned teeth?  Oh yeah, good catch.  Because when you don't write regularly for three years, writing is like pulling teeth.  I know it will get easier as I stick with it, but right now it's frustrating to not even come close to how much I could usually write on a good day before I stopped.

See you on the flip side.  Happy reading!

My Friend, the End

So this is it.  My last full day on seasonal staff at Camp Barakel.  Tomorrow night I become summer staff, workshop begins, and all the people start arriving.  I walked in the office yesterday and found that my mailbox label was gone.  I am bad at endings.  I don't like them.  Even when the end of seasonal staff means that it is the start of summer, I struggle with it.

I was reading C.S. Lewis' space trilogy a month or so ago, and something he said hit home.  One of the main characters in the third book comes to the realization that he has been spending his whole life jumping from one "in" group to the next, always finding that it was not quite so wonderful as he had hoped.  I have been doing the same thing.  Finally I was part of that elite, prestigious group known as the resident staff at Camp Barakel.  Sure, my time here was defined, and theirs was not, but I was still in.  I was so excited when I received my name tag back in September.  It said "Seasonal Resident Staff."  I was in.  Something in me said, "This is it.  The big one.  You've finally done it."  Maybe it wasn't conscious, but it was there.  More importantly, it was wrong.

I wasn't wrong about being "in".  No one excluded me from anything.  No one told me that though I was here, I wasn't really a part; it was just the opposite.  What I was wrong about was what it meant.  I was wrong about it being the pinnacle of achievement.  It didn't make me superior to anyone who has not worked here for more than a summer or a weekend or two.  It did not fill any kind of vacant spot in my heart.  It does not change my identity in any way.

My identity is set.  I am already a part of the most important "in" group in the history of the world.  And what's more, I didn't do a thing to earn it, and I can't do a thing to stay in or get out.  I am chosen and loved by the Creator of the world.  He makes me who I am.  He defines me.  The reason for being part of any group is not so that I can be fulfilled.  It is not so that I can feel better about myself and prop up my self esteem or pride (which is at all times both falling hopelessly and miserably unbreakable).  It is to shine.  It is to live out that identity that Christ has set for me.

Now all that is not to say that this has been any kind of a failure.  I have enjoyed it immensely.  I have learned a lot.  I have grown in many ways.  I think I feel a list coming on!

• I started college.  Including the credits I earned retroactively through Ascent, I have finished 39 out of 63 credits for my program (Associates in Leadership and Ministry).  It has been both difficult and rewarding.  I spent most nights after work and days off at the office, writing assignments or procrastinating on writing assignments.
• I learned how to be joyful on a regular basis and that I have most likely had persistent depressive disorder for a lot of years (very eye opening and still a struggle, but at least now I know what I am up against and a good way to fight it).
• I learned and am still learning how to more easily accept change and see endings as new beginnings rather than as the end of the world.

• I landed a job as an editor for a professional writer (okay, so it's my brother, but he has a degree in it, and he's been published, so it counts).

I learned a lot of random camp skills, too, but you don't have time to read that list, and I don't have time to write it.

This next school year I will be moving back in with my dad and a new step-mom (they'll be married sometime this summer).  I intend to finish my degree, edit my brother's writing, write gobs of my own, and try my hardest to publish my first novel.  After three years of living away, it'll be an adventure, that's for sure.  But God's on my team, and I'm "in" on His.

Freedom

The other day I was having a conversation with a coworker, and he admitted to me that he does not like the "normal" Christian radio station music.  No big surprise.  What stuck out to me, though, is that he prefaced this statement by saying, "I probably won't go to Heaven for this, but..."  Of course he wasn't serious, and we laughed, but it got me thinking.

The last four weeks, I've been studying worldviews.  Something this has driven home for me is that Christianity is the only worldview/religion where we can have absolute certainty of what will happen when we die.  We know that God loves us infinitely, and we know that if/when we trust in Christ as the redemptive Savior of our souls, we get our names in the Book of Life, and we will go to Heaven someday.

Nobody else has that.  Either they haven't thought about death, they believe that death is extinction, or they believe that they have to earn their way to Heaven (this includes certain "Christian" circles).  So while we joke about whether or not we'll go to Heaven because of little things, people all around the world are seriously thinking that way.  They can't mess up or go against the guidelines of their religion, or their eternal destiny might be in jeopardy.  Islam also falls into this category.

So then thinking about that made me think about this: what do we do with our freedom?  If Christ has set us free and guaranteed our salvation, how do we spend this life?  Just food for thought.  It made me think, so I'll make you think.

A Living Hope

Sometimes I write blog posts and never post them, whether because I didn't have internet at the time then forgot about them or because I decided that the topic was too much of a rant or too personal.  Last April I wrote one that I forgot about but found recently.  Though a lot of the stuff in it is dated, there are still timeless truths I want to share.  So here's a #tbt post from April 2014.

This past weekend I had the marvelous opportunity to go back to Grace Adventures for a visit.  I didn’t intend to work (mostly because there was not a group in that weekend), but come to find out, Ride-a-Thon was on Saturday, and I couldn’t pass that up.

A little backstory to set this up: I haven’t been to Grace in five months, not since the FUEL Conference in November.  As I told someone at church Friday night, far too long to be away from home.  I’ve been aching to go back for months, and it was finally going to happen next weekend, but God surprised me with a visit a week early as well.  I could not have been happier.  When we hit Oceana county driving in, my face was permanently stretched in an absurd smile backed by so much joy.

So anyway, I spent the weekend catching up with so many people and playing with kids and crashing in the Vander Kodde’s basement.  I can’t describe the joy of some of those moments, like when AJ, my three-year-old best buddy told me he’d missed me.  On Saturday, I showed up at the ranch to see if there was anything I could do to help out and found that all but one of the Ascent interns from last year were all going to be there at some point.  I got to spend a large portion of the day with one of them, which was such a blessing.

The biggest part of the weekend had to be church, though.  Since circumstances have conspired against me to keep me out of church during this internship, it meant so much more than it would have to be able to go to the Good Friday and Sunday morning Easter service at a church with people I know and love and who care about me and have invested time and energy into my life.  To worship and listen to Pastor Mark teach and fellowship….  It was an amazing experience that was exactly what I needed.

On Sunday morning, Pastor Mark spoke on 1 Peter 1:3-4 – not your typical Easter Sunday message, but it was quite possibly the best I’ve ever heard.  He talked about how Christ’s resurrection has bought us a new birth, a living hope, and an incorruptible inheritance.  He talked about how Christ has beaten death and shared stories of martyrs who gladly went to death rather than feared it.  What did they know?  What knowledge did they have that made them kiss the burning stake and pray for gladiators before they died?  A living hope.  Accurate perspective.  Striving after the only thing that does not fade and is not empty.  They knew they were only strangers and foreigners in this land; they knew who their king was; they knew what lay on the other side of death.  And they lived.  Too often, the fear of death keeps us from living.  We play it safe and walk the shoreline, afraid that the waves might get too high if we venture in or that sharks may prowl below the surface.  The reality is that sometimes they do.  But the swim is worth the risk because what can they do but kill us and send us to our savior?

I often struggle with fear of all different kinds.  But I’ve found that life is always more fun, worth more, more impactful, more joyful, and all around better when I conquer those fears and just live like only Christ matters and nothing anyone does can touch me, when I live like there is a living hope inside me.  Because there is.

How BIG is God?

There has been a lot of talk over the last several years about whether God exists and, if He does, whether He is relevant to our lives.  Last year, Rob Bell compared God to an Oldsmobile—useful in its time but out of date in today’s society.  I think what is actually irrelevant to culture is our version of God, not God Himself.

The moment we reduce God to an equation or explainable phenomenon, what we understand and imagine is no longer God.  That’s not to say that we cannot have any knowledge of God, but we cannot understand Him, not really.  His ways are unsearchable.  Who can know the mind of God? (Job 36:26)  But we have tried.  In an age of exploration and science, we have attempted to explain away the unexplainable.  Let me give you a few examples of what I’m talking about.

•    God is eternal—never ending and never beginning, always existing (Deut. 33:27, Exod. 3:14).  Wrap your brain around that.

•    God’s justice is perfect, yet He is incomprehensibly loving (Deut. 32:4, Job 34:12, John 3:16, Exod. 34:6, 1 Kings 8:23).

•    God has chosen before the foundations of the world who has been and will be saved, and yet it seems to us that we have chosen Him (Eph. 1:4, Psalm 105:6, Isa. 41:8-9, Matt. 22:14, Acts 1:2, Rom. 11:5)

•    He is one God and yet three persons (Matt. 28:19).

•    He is perfectly holy and yet amazingly patient with sinners (Rev. 4:8, Rom. 2:4, Rom. 9:22)

Can anyone really explain these things?  To our finite minds, these seem like contradictions.  I have tried to explain how they are in perfect harmony before, but I can never reason it perfectly.  I have often come to conclusions about God and then had them blown to pieces by scripture and experience.  I don’t think many of the attributes of God are meant to be explained fully.  We are not like God.  He is outside our realm of comprehension, and that is the way the world should be.

I believe one of the failings of Christians in recent years is that we have not taught unexplainable things like those I mentioned because we did not understand them.  We told our children not to bring them up because it may cause arguments.  Instead of standing in awe of what we could not comprehend, we belittled God and made Him fit in our box of convenience.  As a result, people now see the God we serve as weak and unimportant to daily life.  For many, maybe he is.

As Christians, do we rely on the strength of our God every minute?  Are we constantly aware of His presence and will?  Do we believe that He is not only capable but actually handling and orchestrating every moment of our lives?  Do we trust our most secret and difficult things to Him?  What about our most mundane?  If we believe that our God is as big and amazing as He says He is, won’t the gigantic struggles of this life fade to tiny blips on the radar of eternity?

I can’t say that I have mastered a high view of God.  On the contrary, such a thing would be impossible.  Our view of God should be ever expanding, because He is infinite.  But I can say for certain that as my knowledge of God increases, so does my trust in Him.  And as my trust increases, so does my hope and joy.  I don’t have to understand and comprehend everything I learn.  I do have to stand in awe.  Because He is amazingly big.  As Steven Curtis Chapman put it, “God is God, and I am not, so I’ll never understand it all, for only God is God.”

Fundamentalist Homeschooling and Abuse

            For the last five weeks, I have been taking a college writing course.  Our final project was a research essay that we had been working on in some way or another the entirety of the class.  I put the finishing touches on mine earlier today, and I thought I would share it with you.

Fundamentalist Homeschooling and Abuse

            “I love that I can just stay in bed and do school in my room.”  This was my typical, somewhat comedic response to public school kids who asked me what my favorite part of homeschooling was.  For parents, I had a more structured, logical response, but the other kids I just wanted to make jealous, because clearly I had the better deal.  As I have grown, though, I have learned that my experience with homeschooling was not the same as everyone else’s.  It is not the perfect methodology I was taught it was.  I have come to realize that my family lived on the fringe of a very dangerous side of the homeschooling movement.  Homeschooling Fundamentalists have placed their children and themselves in the very precarious position of living on the borders of child abuse, if not inside its ugly limits.

            Homeschooling is a very popular and growing movement.  According to Ray (2011), “There were an estimated 1.73 to 2.35 million children (in grades K to 12) home educated during the spring of 2010 in the United States.”  Because it is so vast, homeschooling is also very diverse.  Thanks to research by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (2012), we know that in the 2011-2012 school year, 68% of the approximate 1.8 million homeschooled were White, 15% were Hispanic, 8% Black, 4% Asian or Pacific Islander, and 5% combined or other.  In addition to ethnicity, reasons for homeschooling are also diverse and include a desire to provide religious or moral instruction, a concern for the environment or academics of traditional schools, and special needs of the child (NCES, 2012).

            These reasons for homeschooling may seem very sound and caring, but there are other reasons that are less admirable.  There are parents who homeschool to hide physical abuse or as a form of manipulative mental abuse.  Even those who start homeschooling with all good intentions may find themselves down a dangerous and unwanted path.

            Before diving into the bulk of my topic, allow me some definitions.  These are not technical definitions but what I mean when I use certain words.

·        Physical Abuse: Any physical harm done to a child, including punishment or violence that results in lasting marks such as bruises or cuts, hair-pulling, intentional or unintentional neglect, physical torture, or confinement for more than a day.

·        Sexual Abuse: Any sexual misconduct toward a minor, including sexual grooming, inappropriate touching, and rape.

·        Mental or Emotional Abuse: Any mental harm done to a child, including insulting or demeaning to the end of making the child feel worthless or incapable, manipulation tactics, instilling terror or high amounts of fear, or psychological torture.

·        Exploitation: Using or manipulating a child for personal gain or benefit, whether monetary or otherwise.

·        Abuse: Any of the above.

Though it is not the only time abuse occurs within homeschooling families, extreme Fundamentalism seems to be a major contributor.  As defined by Miriam-Webster dictionary (n.d.), Fundamentalism is “a movement in 20th century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching.”  While Fundamentalism may have had a sound beginning, in the last several years, the term has been associated with such beliefs as the strictest modesty and courting practices, complete patriarchy, high school only education for daughters, extreme pro-life (known also as quiverfull), corporal punishment, and homeschooling.  It is to these types of families I am referring when I say “Fundamentalist.”

How does extreme fundamentalism relate to child abuse?  It creates the perfect environment for it.  Examine patriarchy for a moment.  Libby Anne (2012) puts it well when she says, “Christian Patriarchy is the belief that God has ordained a specific family order, and that this family order must be followed. The husband leads, the wife submits, and the children obey.”  To anyone who has grown up Christian, this probably sounds biblical.  Children obeying their parents is certainly taught in the New Testament.  Just look at Ephesians 6:1 and Colossians 3:20.  Adherents to the patriarchy movement, however, strictly enforce the part about authority and immediate obedience and often forget that those same passages go on to say that fathers are not to provoke or embitter their children.  I know from personal experience what happens when a father is unrelenting in his expectations for perfection and submission – provoked and embittered children.  The authority of the man was never designed by God to be absolute, but as history has proven, people will take power wherever they can, and they will misuse it.

Not only is demanding strict and immediate obedience from children unbiblical, it is unhealthy.  Robin West explains:

Child-raising that is relentlessly authoritarian risks instilling what developmental psychologists call “ethical servility”: a failure to mature morally beyond the recognition of duties of obedience. In the most devoutly fundamentalist households, ethical servility might not be regarded as a bad outcome; it may be the desired goal. (West, 2009)

When a parent demands obedience and it is not given, in the Fundamentalist system, some form of corporal punishment is used.  This varies from household to household, but usually the desired end is breaking or “conquering the child's will.” (Pearl, 1994).  In many cases, this is attempted by ever-increasing punishment until the child repents.  The book by Micheal and Debbi Pearl called To Train up a Child is a popular fundamentalist child-rearing manual, and it has come under fire in recent years for advocating some of these practices.  Following is an excerpt:

Don't be bullied. Give him [the rebellious or unrepentant child] more of the same. On the bare legs or bottom, switch him eight or ten licks; then, while waiting for the pain to subside, speak calm words of rebuke. If the crying turns to a true, wounded, submissive whimper, you have conquered; he has submitted his will. If the crying is still defiant, protesting and other than a response to pain, spank him again. If this is the first time he has come up against someone tougher than he, it may take a while. He must be convinced that you have truly altered your expectations. (Pearl, 1994)

            One of the biggest problems with this type of training (aside from being biblically wrong) is that it can escalate so easily.  A parent who only intended to spank their child once may find him or herself beating them in an attempt to bring them into submission.  If he or she believes that they and their instrument of discipline are the only things standing between their child and hell, they will be all the more committed.

            In addition to an authoritarian lifestyle implemented by the father, many fundamentalist households also adhere to the belief that all forms of contraception and “natural family planning” are unbiblical.  They “preached [that it is] the duty of women to submit, bear as many children as God would give them, and train them up as dedicated culture warriors, arrows in a divine quiver (Goldberg, 2013).”  They essentially believe it is their duty to out populate non-Christians, so as to win the culture war.  This philosophy ends, though, with children raising each other and not being cared for by their parents like they should be.  Cynthia Jeub, a former reality television child and third of sixteen kids speaks about this in her blog:

I used to read about big families and how the older kids raised the younger kids, and I thought it was all nonsense. Of course I changed diapers, and of course I spent half my time babysitting. That was just life in a big family. People on the outside wouldn’t understand that we all felt like mom gave us individual attention, the dynamic just looked a little different.

Now I remember with more perspective. I know how ignored we were. I know I did more work than my parents, both around the house and in the office working on the family business. I’ll always have back pain because I learned to carry children on my hips before I properly had hips. I’ll always have memories of getting up in the middle of the night to take care of a sick or restless toddler. (Jeub, 2014)

            The stories of children raised with abusive methods ranging from physical to financial and emotional are overwhelming. The problematic thing about homeschooling in these scenarios is that it effectively hides abuse. If a child does not attend school, there may not be anyone outside of the home that knows him or her well enough to see when their situation has turned abusive.  There is no one to notice the bruises.  Twenty-five out of fifty states have simply notification requirements or no regulation at all (Home School Legal Defense Association, 2014).  In these states, a parent only needs to pull their child from school, and no one will ever notice the pain the child is in.

            The lifestyle of homeschooling Fundamentalists is ripe with factors that have been linked to abuse.  Alone, having a large family is not cause to suspect abuse, neither is homeschooling, patriarchy, Fundamentalism, or basic corporal punishment.  Combined, however, these elements place parents in a precarious position.  It only takes one slip to begin down the road to abuse, and once you are on that road, it becomes harder to see the truth of what you are doing.

References

Anne, L. (2012). What is Christian patriarchy? An introduction. Retrieved from:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/02/what-is-christian-patriarchy-an-introduction.html

Fundamentalism [Def. 1a]. (n.d.). Merriam-Webster Online. In Merriam-Webster. Retrieved

November 23, 2014, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fundamentalism.

Goldberg, M. (2013). Homeschooled kids, now grown, blog against the past.  Retrieved

November 23, 2014, from http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/04/11/homeschooled-kids-now-grown-blog-against-the-past.html

Home School Legal Defense Association. (2014). State laws. Retrieved from

https://www.hslda.org/laws/

Jeub, C. (2014). ‘I’m sorry you lost your kids.’ Retrieved from:

http://cynthiajeub.com/2014/10/im-sorry-you-lost-your-kids/

National Center for Education Statistics. (2012). Parent and Family Involvement in Education,

            from the National Household Education Surveys Program of 2012.  Retrieved from:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013028.pdf

Pearl, M. & Pearl, D. (1994). To train up a child.  Retrieved from:

web.archive.org/web/20101104141241/http://www.achristianhome.com/to_train_up_a_child.htm

Ray, B. (2011). Research facts on homeschooling. Retrieved from:

http://www.nheri.org/research/research-facts-on-homeschooling.html

West, R.L. (2009). The harms of homeschooling. Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly, 29(3-4) 7-12.