My friend, Amy B., is putting together a New Parent Survival Basket for her brother-in-law and his wife. They are expecting their first child in a few weeks. Amy wondered if I had any ideas and I immediately emailed her back:

Sleep-in-a-Bottle

Ok, so beyond sleep and food, what does a new parent need? If you received a basket like this, what would you want in it?

I’ve started a blogroll on my sidebar for Moms of Onlies. I would like to find other blogger moms who have onlies. If you are one and would like to be added, please leave a comment. If you know a blogger who might like to be included, would you let her know about this so she can leave a comment if she would like to join?

The only stipulations are: it has to be a family-friendly site and you have to be the mom of an only. I’ll leave it up to the moms to decide if they want to be included if they have an only but may have more.

Looking forward to meeting some new friends!

David and I have decided to take a few days and get on top of our abundance. We’ve got little neat piles here and there throughout the entire house of things that need to be taken care of. His work is very slow right now and my need to get these things taken care of is high so now is as good a time as any. So I’ve planned simple meals and we’re going to get on top of all these things and cross them off our mental lists.

I’ve been pondering my abundance even though I haven’t written about it as much as I’ve wanted to lately. One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is… what good things have been taking the time that needs to go to the best things? I haven’t taken the time to write out a list on paper, but I’ve been going over such a list in my mind. I’ve been thinking about all the “extra” stuff I do beyond my basic responsibilties as a wife, mother and homemaker.

One of the “good” things that I’ve decided needs to go is the Blogs of Beauty Awards. Although I have enjoyed doing them the past two years, they take a lot of time and energy. Both years I’ve ended up dealing with people who are upset with me because of the parameters I set for the awards. I could care less if people don’t like me because I take a stand for what I believe is the truth. But it still is draining just the same. I think the awards served a useful purpose, but I don’t feel compelled to continue them.

One of the upsides of the awards has been the large increase of traffic to my blog. Of course it is nice to see your sitemeter numbers skyrocket. It’s fun to see so many hits coming through. But there is a downside as well and that downside is feeling like my blogging life is not manageable. When I first started blogging back on Blogger (anyone still around from then?), I “knew” most of the people who commented on my blog. I got to know them through comments. I struck up online friendships with some of them. But the more traffic I’ve had at my blog, the harder it has been to even keep up with the comments and emails. My email account for AGH (not my personal or business emails) has been stuck well over 100 for a couple of months. Maybe that isn’t a lot for some big name bloggers, but that is staggering and overwhelming for me. I’ve had people write me the kindest letters, the most heartwrenching letters, etc. and I just continue to struggle to do justice to responding. I hate that. I hate not being able to manage this.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I don’t appreciate my readers. I do! That’s the problem! I want to get to know the people who already come here a lot better, not do things that drives more traffic here. (Maybe the memes are counterproductive to that end…) That’s one of the reasons I haven’t joined any webrings or blogrings. I would just like to enjoy what I’ve already been blessed with.

Well, I hope that makes sense.

The other thing I’ve decided I’m going to do is quit Bloglines. On the one hand, I love it. It makes it so easy to keep up with blogs I want to follow. But that is also the bad thing. It makes it so easy to keep up with the blogs I want to follow. So I “follow” way too many blogs in a superficial way, skimming their entries instead of really enjoying what they have to say each time they write.

The other thing I’ve realized I don’t like about Bloglines is that I don’t go to the blogs themselves. Maybe some people who use Bloglines do, but I usually just read them on Bloglines and rarely click through to the actual blog. This is unfortunate because then I miss out on enjoying the unique design of each blog and all the little extras that bloggers put on their blogs.

So I’m going to spend some time deciding which blogs I really want to read and bookmark them in my browser. Then I’ll cancel my Bloglines. I haven’t decided if I will do a daily reads list on my blog. I continue to go back and forth about that one.

So those are some ways that I’ve been celebrating my year of abundance. If you are also celebrating this year, please feel free to leave a link to your most recent post about your abundance.

I have some of the nicest online friends in the world. (And, no, I’m not trying to butter people up for the previous post on National Delurking Week!)

I have received quite a few encouraging and thoughtful notes (and comments) in the past few days. Some of them had to do with my Vision Forum post. Some had to do with the post I did about our family size. Others had to do with my blogging in general. I have TRULY appreciated every one of them. I wanted to acknowledge that I had received them and that they were so encouraging as I try to find time to respond.

This continues to be the hardest part of blogging for me – keeping up with comments and emails. I don’t say this to make anyone feel badly for emailing me or leaving a comment. I love it when people do! I just find it hard to respond in the way I want to. When someone takes the time to leave a comment or write a letter to me, I appreciate it so much. And I feel so rude if I don’t reply thoroughly and promptly.

So bear with me as I keep working on this issue!

Has anyone heard anything about her? She’s expecting her first baby around the end of January and she hasn’t posted on her blog since late October. David and I were both thinking of her and wondering if she was ok. Anyone know her in real life and if she is ok?

Thanks!

This week’s carnival celebrates The Beauty of Forgiveness. Please take a few minutes to be refreshed and challenged by these thoughtful contributions being hosted by Blair.

Enjoy!

…what do we do about it?

I tried to not write tonight because I have so many other things I need to do, but I absolutely could not stay away from this computer. There have been some things brewing in my head and they went into overdrive today when we got home. So I have to do a post tonight or I don’t think I will be able to sleep.

When I got home today, I had a message on the machine from a friend who wanted to tell me about an article she had found online that she knew I would appreciate. When I sat down to get online and checked my Bloglines, I saw the Spunky had already written about the same article today.

Must be a sign.

But, first things first…

A few weeks ago JollyBlogger put up a “humorous” piece called Billy Sunday on Card Playing. He followed it up with a post called Totem to Temple: When Personal Ideology Becomes Moral Crusade in which he points the readers to a post at Totem to Temple called I Have a Problem, Therefore You Must Have the Same Problem. They are each worth reading and all relatively short. But the main point is that Christians are so prone to making a personal conviction over some problem into a measuring stick by which they measure others. The example used was the fact that Billy Sunday had a problem with alcohol so therefore everyone must have a problem with alcohol so therefore alcohol must be completely done away with. As Totem to Temple explains:

We see a man very influenced by Charles Finney in his early walk with Christ but also the first of the fundamentalist preachers who turned a personal struggle into the fight that all must fight against to be considered “real Christians”.

I have experienced this a number of times, as I’m sure many others have as well. David will give the example from the 1980’s when Operation Rescue was in full swing in the USA. David remembers people in his church telling others that if they didn’t go out and do rescues, they must not be real Christians because a true follower of Christ would never stand on the sidelines in such an important fight. For me, one example that stands out was when I was involved with campus ministry. One of the leaders in our area became very involved with racial reconciliation and it was pushed heavily on both the staff and the students. I think it is a great ministry and one that is certainly needed. However, I did not feel particularly called to invest great amounts of time and energy into that area of ministry. I had been called to do work with sorority women and other women in chapter leadership. There was only so much time and energy to go around. And yet I distinctly remember feeling that I was looked down upon and, yes at times, even judged because I did not take the need for racial reconciliation “more seriously” and get wrapped up in it.

The bottom line is that a call that God puts on my life does not necessitate a spiritual crisis on your part. And vice versa. Just because God has given someone else a great burden for some aspect of ministry or has brought conviction for some area of sin into a person’s life does not mean that all of the sudden I have to have the same problem.

So I’ve been thinking about these ideas lately after reading those posts and just hadn’t gotten around to writing about them. I have written about some of these issues in recent times such as our search for a church and why we could not become members of a church where the vast majority of people held staunchly to the supreme importance of certain secondary issues. I’ve also written about the tendancy people have to take an issue and run way too far with it.

So those ideas were already kind of swirling around in my head lately. And then I read this article today: Solving the Crisis in Homeschooling. It is a long article, but I would beseech everyone to read it whether you are a homeschooler or not. While it is about homeschooling, yes, it is about the principles involved in raising children and he makes so many good points whether you are a homeschooler, private schooler, or public schooler. Even if you don’t have children, it is just a good article to read so you can discuss these issues with your friends and family members who do have them.

Here is a selection from the opening:

‘In the last couple of years, I have heard from multitudes of troubled homeschool parents around the country, a good many of whom were leaders. These parents have graduated their first batch of kids, only to discover that their children didn’t turn out the way they thought they would. Many of these children were model homeschoolers while growing up, but sometime after their 18th birthday they began to reveal that they didn’t hold to their parents’ values.

Some of these young people grew up and left home in defiance of their parents. Others got married against their parents’ wishes, and still others got involved with drugs, alcohol, and immorality. I have even heard of several exemplary young men who no longer even believe in God. My own adult children have gone through struggles I never guessed they would have faced.

Most of these parents remain stunned by their children’s choices, because they were fully confident their approach to parenting was going to prevent any such rebellion. Some were especially confident, because as teens these kids were only obedient. Needless to say, the dreams of these homeschool parents have crashed, and many other parents want to know what they can do to prevent their own children from following the same course.

When my three married children were young, I was overly-confident in my approach to parenting. I was convinced that my children would grow up godly, and that they would avoid significant struggles with sin because of my parenting. I was absolutely certain that since I was training them “in the way they should go”, and I was doing most everything I had written in my book, I would be a success as a parent. However, I had yet to discover it wasn’t all about ME and MY success. In fact, I had yet to learn that the parent who thinks it’s all about THEIR success is often contributing to their children’s struggles. (Revelation #1 – proper parenting is about the children not the parent. I’ll explain in point 1.)

As each of my three oldest children reached adulthood I was shocked to discover that they did not conform exactly to the values I had sought to give them. They had retained much of what I had given, but not everything. Instead of being perfect reflections of my training, they each turned out to be individuals who had their own values and opinions. I had wrongly thought them to be exactly like wet clay, me being the potter with total control over what they would become. I was not prepared for their individuality, nor was I ready to see them as fleshly beings. As I watched them each face off with the Lord and have their own struggles with the flesh, like I had when I was their age, my homeschool dreams crashed royally.

After several years of examining what went wrong in our own home and in the homes of so many conscientious parents, God has opened our eyes to a number of critical blind spots common to homeschoolers and other family-minded people. Bev and I still stand behind what we have taught on parenting in the past. However, we urgently add to it the following insights.’

Let me tell you, as a woman who is seven weeks away from giving birth to her first child, sometimes the thought of the responsibility of raising this child and shaping her character and faith scares me spitless. I mean, eighteen years of hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year of helping her understand God, Jesus, the world, salvation, holiness, godly living, money, relationships, what it means to be a godly woman, etc. If that doesn’t strike a little fear into someone’s heart… well, I just don’t get it.

Most of the time I’m not fearful about it though. I think because of what David and I have learned over the past ten years, we feel a lot more at ease about becoming parents. We’ve had the luxury of watching others who have subscribed to many of the popular teachings promoted by the Christian community and seeing what kind of fruit they are bearing. In some ways, we are extremely fortunate that we are starting our family now and not ten years ago. We have the great blessing of learning from the successes and mistakes of the first generation of homeschoolers.

Having this extra time has also allowed us to step back and decide what we will do and what we won’t do. One thing that we have decided not to do is follow a certain ideology in raising our child. I have to admit that I’ve been surprised that no one has asked me straight out on my blog if we are going to follow attachment parenting or Babywise. Both topics have come up on my blog over the past few months as people have left comments about various pregnancy related posts, but if no one has noticed, I have purposely not gone there. The truth of the matter is, we aren’t going to follow either method. I’ve done reading about both of them online (too cheap to buy the books right now) and I see bits and pieces of each that I like. There are things that make sense to me about each method although I will admit that the orderly firstborn in me (and my husband) is drawn more to the idea of scheduling and if we “err” on one side, it will be toward establishing a schedule.

But we aren’t going to religiously follow either method. Instead, we are going to do exactly what David’s Aunt Gail told us to do when we first found out we were pregnant – trust our instincts because God gave them to us for a reason to raise this particular child. It isn’t that we don’t think we can learn anything from anyone else. Of course we want to learn from others. I’m already asking others for advice and insight because I trust their character and their experiences. I ask for advice here on my blog. What we aren’t going to do is go into raising Peanut with the mindset that we are “Ezzo parents” or “attachment parents”. We are Peanut’s parents and we’re going to do our best to figure out what that means, taking into account who she is as an individual and how God has wired the three of us to function best as a family under the authority of Christ.

One of the things that comes through in this article above is that it is so much easier to try to rely on a system rather than rely on Christ. I know this firsthand because I am wired to want to know exactly what to do so I can have a guaranteed outcome. This is exactly the trap that Reb Bradley is talking about in this article. It is so much harder to wait on Christ and the leading of the Holy Spirit, but it really is the only peaceful path.

The problem is that if you don’t follow a particular “system” you are quite often judged by those who religiously follow said system. I’m sure that just the fact that I wrote that we would “err” on the side of scheduling made some people reading this entry squirm in their seats. I mean, haven’t I read all the terrible things about Ezzo parenting? (Yes, I’ve been to all those websites and read the stuff.) As Reb Bradley talks about in his article, it is amazing the amount of pressure people will put on themselves and others in order to “get it absolutely right” and get the “perfect results”. And you do that by following the system – whichever system that is.

So what’s the bottom line in all this tonight?

I guess the bottom line for me is that I want to live a Christian life that allows others the grace to follow God as He calls them. I don’t want to impose my agenda on others. I don’t want to impose my convictions on others. Sometimes this has been hard for me. My spiritual gifts are such that it is natural for me to speak out strongly about biblical issues. I have strong convictions about some secondary matters. But they are my convictions, not biblical mandates (as far as I can tell). That is a very, very fine line to draw. How do I hold to my convictions without judging others by them? How do I take opportunities to get people to think about these areas if they haven’t previously considered them without sounding like I am demanding that they subscribe to the same views? It takes wisdom from the Holy Spirit.

David and I have been judged harshly over the past ten years in secondary matters. There are family members and friends who will no longer speak to us or associate with us in any way because we will not subscribe to what they feel are vital matters of faith – modesty, dresses, KJV, women silent in church, no contraception, women working, homeschooling, voluntary poverty, speaking in tongues, etc. Because we will not subscribe to their convictions about these things, they will not have anything to do with us.

I do not want to judge others in this way. You won’t find me speaking about many of these secondary issues here on my blog. It isn’t because I don’t have convictions about them. I do have strong feelings about many of them. But I save my strong words for the things that are vitally important. Will I take heat for excluding Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists from the Blogs of Beauty Awards? Yes. There are incredibly important biblical principles and doctrines at stake in these issues. Will I take heat for a lot of other issues? No. In fact, the way I would sum it up is this way:

Am I willing to go to the stake over this issue?

Am I willing to go to the stake over any of these issues? Are you?
Dresses only
Immersion vs sprinkling
KJV vs everything else
Homeschooling vs public schooling
Breastfeeding vs bottle feeding
Baptism vs dedication
Women working outside the home
Headcoverings
Watching TV
Going to the movies
Charismatic vs dispensational
Drinking alcohol
Drums vs organ
Playing cards
Dancing
Whole foods vs packaged foods
Cloth vs disposable diapers
Nursery vs cosleeping
Attachment vs Ezzo

Really? I mean would you really go to the stake over any of these issues? Do you believe that Christ would call you to lay down your life over Kraft Macaroni and Cheese vs homemade bread freshly ground from organic wheat? How much water is used during a baptism? Whether a woman wears a doily on her head or not? If we don’t think Christ would call us to die over these issues, then why do we think that it is ok to judge others as less godly or even doubt their very salvation if we disagree with them?

In a few weeks a couple of my long-time friends are giving me a baby shower. You could not pick a much more diverse group of three. One friend is a lifelong member of the Nazarene church (a Wesleyan/Arminian denomination). The other friend is a member of a Vineyard Church. I would probably label myself as a Reformed Baptist. The three of us span the theological perspective in a lot of areas. But they are my sisters in Christ and love the Lord just as sure as I’m sitting here typing this. We’ll spend eternity together with Christ and it won’t matter what churches we belonged to here on earth. In the go-to-the-stake issues, I know what they believe and I know that they belong to Christ. In the rest of it, we agree to disagree. None of those other issues are important enough to go to the stake over so they certainly aren’t important enough to hinder a friendship.

May we all go forth in the days ahead seeking to build the body of Christ on the true foundations of the faith while extending love and grace to each other in the rest of it.