Sunday, June 28, 2015

Home: June 22 - 28

For the sake of my brothers and friends, I will say, "Peace be within you." For the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your prosperity. 
Ps. 122:8-9


We're celebrating our home's third anniversary this week (or our home is celebrating three years of sheltering us), so I'm thinking a lot about the meaning of a place, the sense of home that is communicated through creaky floorboards and crooked doorways and ceilings and windows. Or even through a whole town, busy streets and uneven sidewalks and the scent of a meadow or a garden or an ice cream shop. Over the years, many places - mere sets of coordinates - have tacked down threads of my heart, tying me forever to addresses literally across the globe. Perhaps you feel the same. How does a dot on a map become knitted into the fabric of a heart?

Yes, three years later the hydrangeas were blooming on the same week of June again this year!

Already, and I'm only 28, I ache for homes lost: the houses of my grandparents, the vacation town we'll probably never visit again, my college campus, the house I called home for three months when I lived overseas, even my childhood home which is still owned by my mom and dad, but seems different to me now. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I walk the halls of these places in my memory, the only revisiting I'll ever have the chance to do. I fall asleep with my body in one home and my mind in another.

This week we spent a day at Cairn University, which was Pete's home for four years of undergraduate college and where he took a week-long grad course this summer. The place was so familiar to him, and even though it wasn't to me, it still evoked a sense of being at home, somewhere safe and restful and comforting. While Pete had class, Henry and I walked along the broad sidewalks (Henry skinned up his knee on the concrete), sat in the shade by the pond, and wandered through empty student lounges. We made the campus our home. It became our haven for the day.


This week I meditated on Psalm 122 which talks about going to Jerusalem and praying for the peace and safety of that city. I had trouble connecting with this sentiment. Israel and Jerusalem don't mean much to me. Am I to take literally the suggestion to "pray for the peace of Jerusalem"? Without debating the place of Israel in God's time-sweeping plan, I think I can safely tune this psalm to sing a slightly different thesis, one I think is also correct. As David prayed for Jerusalem, he longed for safety for God's people, for peace in the place where God resided. Praying for peace and security in the places where God's people live today, seems to fit well with David's desires for Jerusalem. Thinking about homes this week, about the deep connections our hearts forge with specific locations, I'm encouraged to turn that passion into prayer.

At the same time, I'm reminded that this world - and every set of coordinates on it - is not my true home. Though I can fall deeply in love with a house or a street address or a town, it will ultimately leave my heart aching. Maybe I will move away and it will be a place of my past, or maybe it will literally cease to exist - the residence hall being torn down or the donut shop being washed away in a flood. Maybe it will grow into a new identity, one I'm not interested in sharing. Or maybe bad memories will poison the good so that its sweetness melts away. In some way, every place I love will eventually crumble.

Praise the Lord that the new Jerusalem - the place where God has lived forever, lives now, and will someday welcome us to join him - stands forever in unshakable perfection. No bad memories, no cataclysms of weather, no moving sale, no bulldozer can ever change the safety, security, prosperity, and peace of that place. When all the tethers that pin me to the corkboard of this world have been snapped, I'll be bound forever to a far more permanent home.

Grateful this week for: 
garden cucumbers
pack n play
art
my Bible journal
honesty among friends
hand-me-down clothes
library books

Thursday, June 25, 2015

MidWeek Mini: Other Lives


Henry and I have been taking more frequent walks over the past week or so. To the library or around the streets and blocks to the south of us, deeper into town. One night I smelled somebody's spaghetti and meatballs from a kitchen window. Sometimes I see an arrival home from work, hear the car radio shut off as a commute ends. Yesterday a couple with white hair was sitting on a porch swing as I walked by. On the weekends, lots of people mow lawns and work on cars.

In every home I pass, men and women and children are carving out a life, chipping away what's unimportant and polishing the things that matter most to them. All I see is a front yard, a porch or garden or clothesline, a car in the driveway. It's just the threshold of a whole world.

Somehow neighbors have a different effect on me than my friends and acquaintances. With people I know, there's always a level of comparison. But as I walk through my town, instead of feeling like I have to measure up - though some houses I pass put my own shaggy gardens and peeling paint to shame - I feel freed from comparison. Seeing real houses where real other people really live and eat and sleep and quarrel and laugh and make plans and pay bills, draws me into the collective story that we all share. It doesn't matter if the house is shabby or immaculately groomed. It's the center of somebody's world, the place where somebody wakes up and starts each new day, the place where dreams are born.

By the time I push the stroller back into the driveway, I think of my own life a little differently. When the sun rises into my bedroom window, it's rising in hundreds of others too. When I'm cooking dinner, dozens of other ovens are also heating up. The weeds in my garden are spreading seeds across the neighborhood, making weeding work for gardeners blocks away. The story of my days is just one among a million stories, all crossing one another in tiny intersections that I may never see.

Perhaps this is obvious for you. But sometimes I get embarrassingly wrapped up in my own life. Thankfully, all it takes to gain a little perspective is a walk across town.


Sunday, June 21, 2015

To Fathers: June 15 - 21

The Lord will keep you from all harm - he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forever more. 
Ps. 121:7-8

It's Father's Day, of course, and if facebook is any indication, most of the women I know (the men don't seem so sentimental today) think they have the 'best dad ever.' I won't contradict them. But if I may offer my own version of the 'best dad ever,' let me give you a tiny glimpse of my own father.


If you know anything about me and my dad, you probably know that what we have in common is bicycling. Ever since I was a little girl, pedaling with all my puny strength up the hill toward our street and feeling dad's strong hand give me a hefty shove to reach the top, I've known that if he thinks I can do it, I can do it. There's nothing sturdier for a daughter than her dad's confidence. The faith I have always had in my dad mirrors the faith I can put even more deeply in my heavenly Father. And a few of the ordinary life lessons my dad taught me have some heartier meanings as well.

Whoever bleeds is the winner, he would say when he took my sister and me out for a bike ride. In other words, scraping up your knee might hurt, but it means you've been playing hard that's worth a few bandaids. Now, as an adult, I don't often need to worry about injuries, but dad's maxim encourages me not to be afraid. Some endeavors have risk attached, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try them anyway.

Boys are bad, he said, with the hopes of keeping my sister and me from heartbreaks. I think he failed there, quite honestly, but his quip touches the surface of something deeply true: we're all bad. We're all bound to break hearts and have our own heart broken. I doesn't mean you give up on loving and trusting others. It just means you recognize that they can't ever fully satisfy you.

It's probably cancer, he would say, a self-proclaimed worrier to the core. He handed down the worrying gene to me, and I've learned to sift through worries that are worth the energy and worries that aren't. Taking note of the worst possible outcome has some value, though, and whenever I want to stop worrying about something I just tell Dad about it. He'll worry enough for both of us. 

I know there are many who find such a celebration of dads painful, either because their father is absent from this earth today or because he spent a whole lifetime absent from what mattered. I am in the undeserving position of having spent my entire life with a loving, present, sacrificial dad who's still with me today. He's why I know a hickory from an oak, a tortoise from a turtle, a wing nut from a washer. He's why I love old cemeteries and fishing and cycling and plants and reptiles. And he's given me unconditional love (though, he'd be the first to admit, imperfect love at best) every day of my life. Thanks for being among the best, Dad. I'm who I am today because of you.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Summer Dayze: June 8 - 14

I call on the Lord... and he answers me.
Ps. 120:1

With a more relaxed summertime schedule, I feel deliciously like I'm always on vacation. My total office hours per week are about the same, but they're organized differently, and a simple shift in schedule can bring a huge shift in perspective. Now I can sit on a blanket in the magnolia's shade in the front yard, reading, while Henry gathers up magnolia seeds from the grass. Now I can "sleep in" until 7:00. Now I can weed the brick patio when it's convenient - or skip weeding the brick patio, if the sun's too hot. Now nothing seems urgent. Weeks roll over onto weeks, instead of the short weekend feeling like a moment to pant for air between fast furious sprints. Summer, if you work in an academic setting and operate on a school calendar, is a long, long runway of freedom. No more rules. No more deadlines. Just popsicles and swimming parties and sunburn and endless reading for months on end.

OK, so there are definitely still deadlines. And of course, it's never quite as free as it seems. As scrumptious as this week was, next week is a hairy mess of appointments, phone calls, and errands. Not the summer bliss I might have imagined. So I find, only one week into summer vacation, that it doesn't measure up. I longed for stress-free days layered with lemonade and library books, but instead I'm scribbling in my planner and wondering when I'll fit in a shopping trip for groceries.

I know summer can't ultimately satisfy. Neither can Christmastime or the most autumn-colored October or any day or month or year. Satisfaction comes from days that honor Christ and lives that see eternally instead of putting too much stock in the here and now. My first week of summer vacation reminds me of this.

I'm an organized girl, though, and I know the peace that some simple orderly habits can bring, both when the summer sun makes you so carefree that you forget what day of the week it is, and when the calendar is booked up for days straight and you forget what a free afternoon is like. Here are a few simple ideas, that can help keep summer lovely, keep (some of) the stress out of life, and keep the days feeling vacation-yummy all year round.

1. Slice off the first part of the day for the Lord. Most days, I still wake up before Henry and Pete and take the first half-hour of the day for quiet time. A night's sleep often leaves me anxious and irritable (is this true for anyone else?), so taking time to pray, reflect, and remind myself of the gospel realigns me to what's true and important before I embark on the day.

2. Do not let the budget spreadsheet get behind. Do you keep track of your spending? We do, but when I let the receipts pile up, doing the budget paperwork is a beast of a task. And in summer-mode, it's especially easy to let things pile up on the desk. The best policy is to record purchases, and bill payments, on the day that they're made. When the spreadsheet is up-to-date, I don't have to wonder how the month's money is working out as I pull out my debit card at ALDI.

3. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: keep those photos organized. Instead of toting around an iphone full of uncatalogued photos (which subtly stresses me out, but maybe I'm just obsessive), drop your pictures onto a computer harddrive, sort and name them, and toss blurry ones, duplicates, or the ones you really won't ever need to see again. Better yet, take time regularly to put together photo book pages in an album on snapfish or shutterfly. By December, you'll have a family yearbook you can order when they run a year-end sale.

4. Make a list of easy meals and try to keep the ingredients on hand. Is there anything worse in life than food shopping? OK, maybe packing lunches. Take some of the misery out of meal planning and carry index cards listing favorite easy meals and the needed ingredients. If you've stocked up ahead of time, grabbing a package of chicken and a green pepper might be all you need to have fajitas for dinner.

Sometimes life gets in the way of life. I don't want to let the pesky parts of life ruin the pretty parts of life. As summer vacation stretches out ahead of me, I want more of this:


Here's to a simple summer.

Grateful this week for: 
frozen strawberry pie
fireflies
ceiling fan
day lilies
a pedicure
manila envelopes
email
best-ever burgers
swiss cheese
watching my baby cousin marry his dream girl
windshield wipers
storm clouds
garden lettuce
mint water
yard-walking
superstar husband washing the dishes
three days in a row at the pool
edging into first place in our roof contest!

Friday, June 12, 2015

Extreme Housewives



Homeward Bound, Emily Matchar
Simon and Schuster, 2013, 250 pages


You’re a female college graduate. Smart, creative, efficient, organized. You’ve had a great job, loved it, and then you’ve fallen in love. Gotten married. Had a baby or two. And in a matter of just a few years, your priorities lurch off your well-planned course onto one you didn’t expect. No longer do you have a passion for staying late at the office and fine-tuning reports. You spend lunch meetings texting the babysitter under the table. You wonder more and more about the safety of jarred baby food and long for time to puree your own in the kitchen.  

This is just one of many stories that send working women across the nation packing up their office desks and setting up shop as homemakers. These are the lives Emily Matchar explores in Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity. Matchar takes a look at the arenas in which women are recently returning to the home and the reasons for the growing trend. With a healthy mix of history lessons, anecdotal evidence, and diplomatic opinion, Matchar’s book reads smoothly enough for poolside lounging, but is hearty enough that you’ll find yourself hmm-ing thoughtfully throughout.

So why are women today - in the post-feminist world - finding the tasks of homemaking appealing again? If your social media feeds are anything like mine, your friends are baking their own bread, growing their own veggies, canning jam, making soap, sewing clothes, raising chickens, and using cloth diapers. Is a young woman’s future today redefined as we experience a swing from our parents' generation, that saw the dawning of vaccines and microwave meals and two-earner families, to the extreme opposite, in which any help from "the man" is seen as risky and all of life is funneled through a DIY filter?

Matchar finds a few key motivators. A backlash of feminism found women feeling trapped in the much-longed-for role of a wage-earner. Instead of feeling triumphant as top-tier managers, women discovered they no longer knew the things their grandmas did – how to make soup from scratch or knit a scarf – and they were no longer satisfied being ignorant about the domestic arts. Couple this with a recession that hit nearly every sector of the economy, and women had fewer and fewer reasons to desire work outside the home. They headed home in droves and changed the face of homemaking. “The symbolism around homemade items began to shift,” Matchar says. “If a jar of home-canned tomatoes was once a sign of poverty, it now became a sign of an enlightened attitude toward food and the environment. If an apron was once a symbol of oppression, it was now a kitschy-cool reminder of the joys of cooking.”

Moms were particularly inspired to leave the workforce, especially considering that “the United States is the only country in the developed world without guaranteed paid maternity leave.” The unfriendliness of the American workplace toward the American mom left disappointed women across the nation. “Feminism raised women’s expectations for career satisfaction, but the larger culture didn’t rise up to meet these expectations,” says Matchar in a chapter called The Emergence of the Hipster Homemaker. 

While so-called “DIY Parenting” is one expression of the New Domesticity – homeschooling, co-sleeping, natural childbirth, homemade baby food, extended breast-feeding, eschewing vaccines – a DIY lifestyle not just for moms. Childless women also find the return to homemaker status satisfying. Earning a living from internet-based businesses like Etsy, setting up an off-grid homesteading lifestyle, or just taking a little more time to live self-sufficiently appeal to women with any number of reasons to reject the American Dream. Distrust for the FDA, the CDC, and the corporate sector make carving out your own living seem much safer than relying on American culture and industry. Matchar sums up the DIY life: “This new style of home-focused, sustainability-minded living seems to offer an answer to the opt-out question for creative, educated women… New Domesticity moms imbue their days with meaning and purpose in doing not only what’s right for their family but what the believe is right for the entire world.”

My response to all this is necessarily couched in my own experience: a college-educated woman who graduated in the 2000’s, a wife and mom who cut back to part-time after the birth of my son, a fridge homesteader who grows veggies in the backyard and buys local whole (but not raw) milk for my little boy to drink. Before looking objectively at the trend, I stamp down the temptation to dismiss domesticity simply because I haven’t drenched myself in it. Mommy Guilt is real. Homemaker Guilt is equally real. Though most women in my age category have at least dipped their toes in homemade domestic life, the idea that all-in is the ideal way to live can leave guilty women hiding storebought cereal high in the cabinet when friends come to visit. So I’ll tease out my reactions and try to leave emotions behind.

Firstly, some red flags go up when I read quotes from career women turned homesteaders like “When you start producing your own food, even the simplest plot of potatoes, your life regains some of the authenticity we’ve all forgotten about.” Homegrown potatoes fried in butter make an awesome breakfast, but if your life’s authenticity depends on harvesting vegetables, you’ve missed something crucial. Matchar points out the overlap between Mormons, lesbian couples, Christian wives, and end-of-the-spectrum political liberals, all of whom find themselves drawn by the pull of new domestic life. Christian wives might not expect to find solidarity from such a diverse group of peers. I fear that many, though, put the homemade life on the pedestal that should be reserved for a Christ-made life. When value and meaning are found in shelves lined with home-canned jam and handmade soap, the domestic goddess has overstepped her bounds. Like any obsession, domestic living can become life-consuming.

Secondly, and I take this point from Matchar’s concluding chapter, the New Domesticity is most often connected to the upper-middle-class who have the luxury to quit their jobs and sustain their own homegrown lifestyles. Women in lower-class settings “don’t have time to breast-feed for three weeks, let alone three years.” Wives who canned tomatoes as “just another chore for women whose fingers were already worked down to the bone” won’t see the do-it-yourself foodie-ism with the same romantic nostalgia as wives who left a successful boardroom career to live off a quarter-acre garden. It’s important to acknowledge this if we self-righteously refuse to buy a jar of Smucker’s.

Finally, I think cultural feminism, which argues that “some gender inequality is actually just ‘gender difference’ and that we should honor women’s (and men’s) natural, inherent natures,” actually aligns properly with the Christian ethos of feminine skills. A biblical worldview would never suggest that women should be banned from business or confined to a round-the-clock job of knitting, baking, and gardening. But it’s clear that women and men are created differently and the New Domesticity appropriately recognizes that. Women climbing the career ladder or delaying child-bearing because they love their jobs aren’t necessarily making a wrong choice. But if and when they find themselves fed up with the American workplace or without enough hours in the day to balance mothering and working, there should be no shame in reorganizing life to resemble the traditional housewife. On the other hand, there should also be no shame in a lifestyle that includes dinner at Wendy’s every once in a while. No woman need feel guilted into extreme domestic life. With kindness and fairness, Emily Matchar pries open the doors on the lives of today’s young women and gives a neutral assessment of the twenty-first century housewife’s successes as well as the potential dangers of diving in too deep. Grab a glass of homemade iced tea and take a fresh look at New Domesticity this summer with Homeward Bound.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Fewer Words: June 1 - 7

Let me live that I may praise you, and may your laws sustain me.
Ps. 119:175

This was the last week of school. Stress was high, to-do lists were long, and I couldn't wait for Friday's sun to set so we could take in deep breaths of summer vacation. As I checked exhausting day after exhausting day off my list, I tried to take special notice of happy things.

So today, after a few weeks of publishing heavy, wordy posts on Fifty-Two, I thought we might need some breathing room. It's not profound, but it's real life. Little tiny bites of this sweet life.

Simply a "Grateful this week for:" list, in snapshot form. 

Wild honeysuckle.


Red-letter words for not-so-red-letter days.


Our book lover.


Garden sugar peas.


Bathtime bliss.


Lettuce row at the school garden.


Mornings like this. 


Those eyes.


Welcome, dear sweet summertime! 

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

MidWeek Mini: Just Believe


I'll be honest: I’m writing today with an agenda. We need votes in order for our home to win a new roof and I’m going to be asking for yours. We’re one of four finalists in Berks County to win a free new roof installed by Mast Roofing and Construction. Three weeks of voting will determine the winner.


We bought our home in 2012 and it was clear from the first time we set foot inside that owing it would be a dream come true. It’s exactly what we love: historic, full of slanted floors and high ceilings and behemoth radiators and tons of charm. But lest you think it’s purely dreamy, let me assure you that we’ve had our share of nightmares. Flooded basement, bats in bedrooms, scraping old paint from the gingerbread front porch, clogged drains, mice in the pantry, fallen gutters, and a leaking roof. We’ve been overwhelmingly blessed with solutions for most of these issues and have been given so much help in upkeeping our precious dinosaur of a home. But the need for a new roof is one we don’t think we can manage alone. We don't know exactly what ours would cost to replace, but with two main roof sections (one of which is veeeery high) and two porches, we know it would be pretty steep. No pun intended.

If our house were smaller - and closer to the ground - we would reshingle it ourselves with friends as volunteer labor. We tried to get some insurance money for hail damage, but were told that most of the damage up there is not from hail. It's just an old, tired, weather-beaten, dying roof.

For months now, I’ve been called back again and again to the passage in Mark 5 about Jesus raising the dead little girl. While Jesus is on his way to heal her from an illness, the messengers bring word that she has died. They tell the grieving father, "Don’t bother Jesus anymore. It’s all over now." The dad, I imagine, feels his heart break. His last thread of hope is snipped in a single second.

But Christ ignores the naysayers. I picture him cupping the dad’s crying face in his hands, forcing him to meet His eyes. "Don’t be afraid. Just believe," He says. In the absence of an easy solution, He promises something better. He essentially says "What looks like death to you is actually a chance to show off my power." And He rolls up His sleeves and you know that whatever happens next is a miracle. So we've put the crushing burden of our dying roof into God's hands and asked Him for a miracle.

Maybe this contest is our miracle. Maybe it's not. If we're not the winning house on June 21st, then we know there's another answer to this desperate need.

But as we pray for an answer - any answer - I ask you to vote. As of today, we're in second place and there are 18 days of voting left. You can cast one vote per email address here. And if you're willing, please share this post, or the voting link, with your friends and family members and communities and ask them to vote.  

And when your hope is lost and you're about to quit, listen closely and you'll hear Him tell you the same thing: "Why are you discouraged? Why are you giving up? Don’t be afraid. It's not over. It's all just about to begin. Just believe."