a beautiful mess

Life is busy. Full of good things and hard things. The business of living is messy sometimes. But this kind of mess is the kind of mess that I like to see. I look beyond the mess in the pictures and see that our table was surrounded with 4 chattering boys, 3 moms, and 2 baby girls. I see food that was cooked with love, delivered to our door, and waiting in our freezer. I see the friendships that are growing. The encouragement I receive from women, with different backgrounds and stories, who are walking the same path that I am. I see the lessons my boys are learning about loving other people. I see laughter and shared lives.

I love having our table surrounded by people and the beautiful mess it creates.

Jealous love

Sometimes, in the midst of the crazy and busy and frustrating and just plain exhausting, hope shines through bright and brilliant and breathtaking.

The past few weeks I have been feeling great discouragement in the mothering of my children. Challenging behavior has left me breathless in it's intensity and lost in my inadequacy. I have struggled in prayer and consistency. I say over and over again, "Your behavior is a reflection of your heart, son." And the behavior leaves me hurt and sad because of the depth of selfishness and sin that it reveals. Which of course leads to self-condemnation because it is my job, after all, to be the picture of the gospel that my children can see. And if they aren't showing the fruit of the Spirit it must be because the fruit of the Spirit is not in me as well.

This morning I was singing the words,
He is jealous for me
Loves like a hurricane, I am tree, bending beneath the wind of His love and mercy
When all of a sudden, I am unaware, of these afflictions eclipsed by glory
And I realize just how beautiful you are and how great your affection is for me.
Praying and pleading to feel this truth as I changed wet underwear (for the 3rd time this morning), strapped on little shoes and zipped up puffy winter jackets.

Jeremiah stops me in mid stride.
"Mama, what does that mean? He is jealous for me."
I pause. There are things to do and places to be. I pull a knit cap over Nathaniel's ears.
"Well, what does the word jealous mean?" I ask back. I have learned that this son prefers to discover on his own.
"It's when you want something some one else has." The answer is quick. He knows this one, we have talked about it before.
"That's right. But, do you think that God wants our stuff?" I ask another question.
"No." The tone reflects that absurdity of the thought.
"So what do you think it means. That God is jealous for me?" I let the question linger. Snap down Nathaniel's coat.
I glance up at Jeremiah's face. He is grinning. His eyes lit up with wonder.
"It means that God wants ME! All of me!"
In that moment the beauty of truth in my child's heart blinds me. Because I see that this son, who prides himself on always having the right answer, is overjoyed by the truth of the knowledge and not simply by the correctness of the answer.

I pull him close. "Yes son, I whisper. He loves you so much that He wants all of you."

The self-condemnation of the past few weeks slips away because I feel this truth, He loves my son. I can trust the inner-workings of the heart of my son to the One who loves him jealously.

The evolution of a decision

One day we decided: No more of our money is going to be spent at Wal-mart.

The decision didn't come on in one blinding moment of insight. It evolved really.

When we first started getting serious about budgeting we tried to squeeze every dime out of our grocery budget. In order to stretch our precious dollars we shopped almost exclusively at big-box stores which promised to have the lowest prices. We bought into the mindset the cheaper was better. Because of course cheaper was better for us.

But then we started to notice things.

The arrival of a Wal-mart in our town caused the closure of the small mom-and-pop run stores on our quaint main street and square. Traffic and business was sucked from the center of town to the outskirts where new and ugly little strip malls were quickly built (and now stand mostly empty thanks the the "economic downturn"). When at Wal-mart I regularly got frustrated. They had few selection options and were usually out of at least one item on my list. The employees were generally not helpful. I started dreading going to Wal-mart. It was always a stressful experience.

Then we started to get educated about certain things.

I read The Story of Stuff. I learned about consumption and how our nation's drive to consume developed. I learned about how our corporate and individual consumption effects not only the environment but people too.

We watched The Future of Food, Food Inc., and Food Matters and learned about the change in agriculture in the past generation and how this is effecting not only our individual health but our global health. We learned about genetically modified foods and how the large food distributors are forcing small farmers out of business. We learned about pesticides and herbicides and the patenting of seeds. We learned about how we really and truly are what we eat. And the premise of the book In Defense of Food, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." started to make sense to us.

I stumbled across information on chocolate. How a very large percentage of commercial chocolate comes from cocoa harvested by child slaves in West Africa. And no government seems to want to do anything about it.

We learned about jewels that come from conflict zones. People are dying so that the wealthy can wear shiny rocks on their fingers. How diamonds are actually not rare jewels but part of one of the most effective marketing schemes ever in which society bought into the fact that "a diamond is forever" and that a large diamond is a measure of love and a symbol of social status.

Finally, we watched Wal-mart: The High Cost of Low Price which opened our eyes to poor working conditions in other countries, low wages and lack of benefits to workers here in our country, the impact of Wal-mart (and consumption) on community, and the unethical business practices of Wal-mart executives in the name of capitalism.

Through all of this awakening to new information, God was working in our hearts. We began to read the verses about justice differently. We began to feel that God was not only concerned with how well we budgeted our money but how and where and on what we spent that money. Maybe the way we spent our resources was a direct way of furthering social, economic, and environmental justice?

We started to become convicted that we didn't want to just be cogs in the commercial, materialistic, consumer driven machine. If our desire for cheap chocolate, or clothing, or food is going to put someone else into slavery or strip the earth of it's resources or line the pockets of already wealthy executives while taking away the living of hard working farmers and small business owners, then we don't want to be a part of it.

Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered. -Proverbs 21:13

The truth is that we are rich. We may gripe and complain and wish we had more. But we are fabulously, gloriously wealthy compared to 90% of the rest of the world. And the Bible tells us that the way we use our resources is a direct reflection of our faith.

This process is tense, uncomfortable, and inconvenient most of the time. We are mostly bumbling along asking lots of questions and doing nothing perfectly. The war between our flesh (which desires more stuff and comfort) and the Spirit (who calls us to give without thought to the cost) is fierce and sometimes, honestly, it's exhausting. It's also encouraging. I get a small thrill when I stand in the aisle of a grocery store and choose to advance justice by making the small choice to buy "organic" or "fair trade" chocolate.

That is the beginning of our journey. I hope to share with you in later posts about some of the specific issues we are learning about and how we are changing some things in our lives. I also want to share resources that we are finding, because for me one of the hardest parts of this process is finding good and helpful information so that I can make informed choices.

Is anyone else experiencing anything like this?

Snow break

It has been a strange week. We woke to 6-8 inches of snow on Monday morning. Snow in Georgia means that everything grinds to a halt. Schools are canceled for the rest of the week and most businesses are closed too. The stores that are open are devoid of the basic eggs, milk, and bread. So we have been comfortably ensconced here at home with no where to go and nothing to do.

I especially have been thankful because I spent Sunday feeling a horrible cold coming on. What a treat it has been to actually be able to rest in bed and work on getting better while Aaron is unexpectedly home! I spent most of Monday and Tuesday sleeping!

Aaron took the boys out in to the snow on Monday. They went on an expedition through the field in the back to the park a block down. Both boys came back cold and wet. Nathaniel had snow all down his pants! The excitement of the snow was over after that and they have had much more fun playing here with their papa. I feel really bad that we don't have any pictures of "the big snow" but my energy is lacking and now it is bitterly cold.

The snow still lies deep around the house. I love looking out of the window and seeing the white blanket. The peaceful scenery is opposite of my chaotic and whirling thoughts lately.