Today is the happy 6-year anniversary of my marriage to David -- a "youngish" widower raising five great kids.  Today is also the 1-year anniversary of my mother's near-death, and gradual recovery to something like a stable condition in assisted living. 

When I was engaged, a friend suggested that I reconsider the wisdom of marrying because the demands on the "sandwich generation" (those caring both for children and parents) would distract me from my larger cultural calling (the Veritas Forum, in particular).  To credit my friend's foresight, I really didn't quite grasp what I was signing up for, either in marriage or in parenting.  (I'm sure David didn't, either).  Nor did I request a crash course this year in geriatric endocrinology, cardiology and nephrology that help keep my mom closer to me on this side of heaven, while I was working, and while two of the children were finishing high school, one entering college, one marrying, and another giving birth.  Nor, for that matter, do I remember ever signing up for any course, or life, of adulthood in any real form at all.  

The truth is that I'm not much of a Giving Tree ... 

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   Glenn kindly asked and so I’ll share that I’ve just finished co-editing A Faith and Culture Devotional.  It’s a treasure book of God’s glory from 70 believers who are, themselves, treasures. Dallas Willard, Walter Bradley, Dick Keyes, Frederica Matthewes-Green, Erwin McManus, Scot McKnight, Os Guinness, Bill Edgar, Bruce Herman, Catherine Claire Larson, John Eldredge ...

   They’re helping me see God’s glory as I learn about ancient empires, DNA, Tolkien & joy, flight, Rockwell, the search for intimacy, String theory, J.S. Bach, the Periodic Table, the fall of Rome, Quantum physics, Dylan, Dark matter, U2, Paradise Lost, T.S. Eliot, the genius of Jesus, the Great Awakenings and the Resurrection. 

   Somehow I’d missed that Rembrandt painted his Return of the Prodigal after losing five of his own children, and two wives. I didn’t know that missionaries (and the Gospel) so impressed Charles Darwin on his early voyage.  Who knew that Oscar Wilde read Pascal’s Pensees while Wilde was in jail for “crimes of gross indecency” then came to Christ for mercy (thus he could write the end of Dorian Gray as an offer of salvation).  I missed that Picasso was such a cad, though his tragic late-in-life confession does have the merit of sincerity.

Faith and culture?  Why bother?  In one day a tsunami, or band of terrorists, can devastate decades of culture-making.  Including countless human lives.  Some of us are in slight shock, if not in mourning....Read more

In my last post, I was pondering, How to grow a family culture? I'm finding that it can't be forced. It can likely only be modeled. And that I have to first attend to my own internal "culture" or garden and "Guard [my] heart. It is the wellspring of life."

Well, I'm a kid at heart, the youngest of 2 brothers and 5 step-brothers (and 10 uncles), and I always wanted to play. My husband calls me "The perpetual college student" who worked with grad students for years, in part because I could easily find a game of volleyball or Ultimate Frisbee. (Granted, I also want to help save the world along with people like grad students but that's a bit heavy for this post).

The problem is that once I hit my late 30's, I stopped playing very much. With a mortgage, an aging car, marriage and five kids, well, I started to act and sound like a grown-up. Even to feel like one at times. A lifelong bird, I finally became a tree. But a "Giving Tree" (great book) who too often was a grump.

Now, I'm not at all against adulthood so long as it is not by definition a bummer.

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Rich Mullins once said, "A faith that moves mountains is a faith that expands horizons.  It does not bring us into a smaller world of easy answers, but into a larger one where there is room for wonder."

Faith opens up our horizon of possibilities, thus faith yields creativity and thus, well, culture. As Ken Myers said, and Andy Crouch (and many of us) like to explore and discuss, "Culture is what we make of the world... in both senses." The STUFF we make from the raw materials God bequeathes us, and also the MEANING we make of this world that God so loves. (Thanks Ken, Andy, N. Wolterstorff, etc.) Faith expands our sandbox and tools and friends within it, so that we might enjoy creating -- doing the right thing and doing it well.

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(photo, Esther and Kelly)

My good friend’s daughter, Esther, is the middle child of nine (yes, 9, same mother and father). Esther is a pure-hearted girl who loves good books, adventures, order in the home, and bunnies. I think she was born with her love for bunnies. I was there to witness Esther’s emergence ex utero and she may have been disappointed to find humans, rather than rabbits, as her siblings and parents.

She’s always had a stash of stuffed bunnies and began raising living bunnies before her first birthday — as soon as she proved she could toddle over to a cage with food and water. Her first 4-H project for the county fair? Raising bunnies.

At age four, while at a camp in northern Michigan, Esther lost one of her three stuffed bunnies with whom she slept every night as a somniferous necessity. The bunny’s disappearance was discovered at bedtime, begetting several hours of meltdown and sleeplessness. A “Missing Bunny Bulletin” was issued, naturally, and suddenly dozens of adults with flashlights and tick-repellent took to the wooded paths of the UP of Michigan until the bunny was found, quite miraculously, a mile from camp and returned to its four-year old mother and stuffed siblings. All was well on the earth.

At age seven Esther, three of her siblings, several bunnies and I sat in near-silence, for nearly an hour, in a paddle-boat on a pond, observing translucent powder-blue dragonflies all around us in the reeds. This fact doesn’t advance my story, but it might give you a memory or inkling of the joy of being with children in God's creation. It does for me. Back to the story.

Before long Esther (age 9) was working at a horse farm in Ohio where muckin’ stalls for a morning might get you a free trail ride that afternoon. But Esther’s favorite job was feeding and showing the bunnies in cages. She’d overseen the proliferation of about ten of them.

Last winter we made a fire, popcorn, and watched the inspiring film, Miss Potter, about Beatrix Potter, the English author and illustrator, botanist, and conservationist,who painted Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny into our lives.

Esther had been collecting Peter Rabbit china and books for all of her now eleven years. But last week her mother called to say that their house had caught fire, injuring neither child nor cow nor chicken nor bunny, but the fire and smoke appeared to have destroyed many things.Read more

My marriage came with five children. At present, on a good day, all of us are out of diapers and the kids are now in their teens and 20s.

After a busy school year, I wanted some down time. After some meetings in Boston last week I snuck off, alone, for a few days on Cape Cod and then caught a ferry to hear a friend sing in a Nantucket jazz series. We were kindly invited to lunch at the local yacht club, where I soon found myself admiring the boats both moored and in motion.

Sailing is complicated, of course, especially at sea where the risks contend with the rewards. There’s much to think about — currents, wind, storms, unfurling sails, tacks and reaches, booms and blenders, and avoiding rocks and other potential collisions. William Buckley once quipped, and I paraphrase, “Sailing is like standing in a cold shower while ripping up $100 bills.” (That was thirty years ago. Inflation translation: $500 bills.).

Given the domestic routines, and expenses, of living in community/family, I’m pondering sailing as a metaphor for keeping a home and raising children, or nurturing a community of any kind. Of course the joys are worth the ride, but I’ll save those for other CGO entries.

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I awoke yesterday to a birthday surprise.  David convinced me to go for a hike this week.  We need it.   I guessed — the hills of southern Ohio?  He said — the mountains of North Carolina.  Four hundred miles away.  Right.  Why not get away for a change.  We quickly covered our family, work, and teaching commitments — well, all but one.  I’ve been waiting all year for Holy Week -- to show my English Lit students the opening scene from The Passion (Icon).  It’s when Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, submits his will to his Father’s and then suddenly, authoritatively, forcefully crushes the serpent beneath his foot.  That moment, that fulfillment of the Genesis 3:15 prophecy, will turn my English course’s year-long meta-narrative from tragedy to redemption – the Second Adam in the second garden, finally fulfilling the ancient curse on the serpent...Read more

Journal Entry, February 18, 2007:  Sabbath in Winter  —  A stream of consciousness trying to thaw.

Glenn says, just share something you’re experiencing about faith and the living of life.  Even a journal sketch is fine.  But nothing I could say is worth hearing now.  My life is a struggle for order and that’s old news to anyone who knows me.  It seems to never end.  These things, “To Do.”

To Do List:  (abridged)
Unpack
Prep to teach Englist Lit
    End Dorian Gray (tragedy); begin Cry, the Beloved Country (redemption)
Visit mom, snowed in.   Visit hospital, Poppi sick.
Wood in / shovel drive / Joshua.
CGO deadline, Sunday. 
Schedule roof replacement (after hail storm) / David
Open mail and email, respond
Finish book proposal
Sledding / skiing with kids?  Square dance.
Voice and piano lesson, Michelle & Joshua.
Prep/pack for Boston / Veritas Forum / research Harvard history

It is Sunday.  Lord, order my life.  First things first.  Can I not stop, for one day in winter, to be re-minded, to become sane, to remember —  to feel held by Truth?  After all, we’re to abide in one another.  I am fighting for order.  I am fighting to abide.   David and the kids are on “pins and needles” around me and my “to do” list.  I’ll disappear for their sakes as well as for mine. Read more

Little did we know what our party with a purpose might become —  treasure hunts in research universities.  For example, a  combined Carnegie-Mellon and University of Pittsburgh Veritas Forum included a tour through the art museum and various science and engineering labs.  An engineering team demonstrated their very impressive remote-controlled reconnaissance helicopter.   

After hearing about their multi-million dollar grant, and seeing what it produced, a student asked, "Do you study and learn from flight in nature, such as bees and birds?”  One of the engineers said that they do try to learn from nature, but that there’s a lot more that they have to accomplish than pollinating a flower. 

Another student asked, “Could you replicate a hummingbird for example?"  The team looked at their project leader who resembled a deer caught in the headlights.  Slowly he answered, "No, a hummingbird is extremely complex." 

She then asked,  "How about a sparrow?"Read more

     I continue to serve in the U. S. Army as a Rear Detachment Chaplain for the 80^th Division.  We have over 700 Soldiers in Iraq training the Iraqi Armed Forces.  I had expected—and some of my biographical information still says—that I would go to Iraq this year.  This is not going to happen.  I will continue to serve here in Richmond.  The next big mission for me is to travel to a Joint Military Training Center in Indiana where our Soldiers will return from Iraq and have a few days to decompress and prepare to return to their ordinary life.  I will be a part of that decompression process.

     As I continue to serve and watch my colleagues serve, I am struck this month at how true the old adage is:  it’s what’s on the inside that matters.  Last month Connally Gilliam offered a great essay comparing herself—her worser self—with a hollow, chocolate Easter bunny.  Sweet and formed on the outside, but quietly hoping no one notices the emptiness at the core.  It resonated with me.  Of course, we’re not empty people.  But we can neglect the inner man and prioritize the outer.  How easy that is!  Without a thought it happens!  Without an intention!

     The Army exacerbates and the tendency.  You wear the uniform.  You’re a nametape and a rank.  Even as a Chaplain, it is very little about being “Tim McConnell” or even being a Presbyterian minister.  The exterior dictates my identity.  But, the truth is that the exterior is just that—exterior, superficial, passing away.

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