Why a Funeral Is Not the Time to Rejoice

A funeral is, most certainly, a time for reflecting on and being reminded of the Christian hope; the Book of Common Prayer calls for a prayer that asks God to confirm in each heart the ancient truths of our faith:

“help us, we pray, in the midst of things we cannot understand, to believe and trust in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection to life everlasting."

Yet even if we have unshakeable hope in the Resurrection, death shakes us, especially when death occurs suddenly, violently, or to a young person. But even when someone very old or very sick and death ends their great pain, death is no friend. Paul calls it an enemy.

English priest and poet John Donne wrote a famous sonnet to Death (“Death, be not proud”) which puts death in the context of resurrection-- “one short sleep past, we wake eternally/And Death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.” While I love this poem, I wonder if its message was one needed more in its own time than in ours. Donne’s wife, Anne, bore 12 children in 16 years of marriage before dying in childbirth; two of their children were stillborn, and three died before age 10. They did not need to be reminded of death’s horror. Indeed, what they needed to hold fast to was the promise that in the scheme of eternity, death was merely a “short sleep.”

We have absorbed this message a bit too well. I have been to a number of Christian funerals that were blithely referred to as “celebrations,” as “homegoings,” as “graduations,” with the assumption clearly throughout that the only story we Christians can tell about death is that “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord”--which, though true, does not tell the full story. In our own context, most of us do not have to face death as bluntly and as frequently as did John and Anne Donne. When the arrangements are made by professionals, when sleek “life celebration” photo displays are created, when bodies are trussed and trimmed to look as if they’re lying in bed, insisting that Aunt Jodie is “in a better place,” that Uncle Joe is “no longer suffering,” or that baby Jane is “in the arms of Jesus” can hide from us the ugliness and decay and (almost) irreversible loss that death represents.

Theologian N.T. Wright warns readers not to assume that Jesus’ disciples expected for Jesus to rise from the dead. They didn’t. For them, Jesus’ death was a devastating loss, not simply of a dear friend and teacher--which would’ve been bad enough--but also the loss of the hope of the peaceful kingdom they’d hoped that he would establish. They weren’t tapping their fingers waiting for Sunday morning. They were mourning. If they expected to see Jesus again, their expectations would have been mouldering corpse rather than glorious Christ. It’s this--this bursting forth from life from a place of mourning--that Christians have ritually reenacted for millennia in the observance of Lent and, especially, of Holy Week. The fasting of Lent makes space for the feasting of Easter; wallowing in the horror of death makes space for glorying in the hope of the Resurrection.

And so, I think, we Christians should not be afraid to grieve. If death grieved the Son of God, why should it not grieve us? Death separates parents from children, and children from parents, lovers from beloveds, and friends from one another. It is frequently painful. It is ugly in a way that no amount of floral arrangements can fully disguise.

(“I’m the [grimace, pause] undertaker,” a funeral professional apologetically told me when we shook hands at my friend’s funeral.)

C. S. Lewis wrote:

“It is hard to have patience with people who say... ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.”

Who would sneer at celebrating the birth of a child? (“Oh, another person. We’ll she’s going to die someday and then get raised at the last day. Why bother getting excited?”) Such a position would be ludicrous and in total violation of all that we experience as human beings. We are not called to wander through our lives tapping our fingers until the Resurrection as if all our experiences don’t matter, even if the Resurrection is the hope and promise that shapes our lives--as well it should. Instead we are called to live and to love well--which includes grieving well. We need not fear powerful grief, but we do need to pray that it will make space for profound gratitude toward the God who raises the dead.

Duke It Out for Them: Why Kids Need to See Their Parents Fight

I stormed into the house, stopping only to shake the snow off my boots before hissing at my husband as he poured his coffee: “I cannot believe you didn’t fill up the Yukon yesterday.”

“You always take the Corolla when you drive the kids,” he shrugged. “That has gas.” He turned away to help our 5-year-old son pour his cereal.

Arg—true. But still: I stomped closer, maybe pointed a finger: “You knew we were going to get snow and that I’d take the truck! How many times do I have to remind you that gas-in-the-car is my love language?”

And so it went: Mr. “It’s Not Empty Till It’s Below The E” trying to avoid the argument, Ms. “It’s Empty When It’s On the E—Especially in a Gas-Guzzler” trying to press it, all within clear earshot and vision range of our son.

You tell me: Who was the better parent in this case? Who was the one more effectively showing our child how to navigate the rough waters of interpersonal communication in even the most loving relationships?

Me, naturally! (Would I be writing this if it were him?)

You think avoiding fights like certain people avoid the gas station is a good approach? Think again. Well, at least try to think like the 44 percent of us married folk who believe that arguing at least once a week is good for a marriage, who believe it “opens up the lines of communications,” according to a recent survey.

That 44 percent has a number of marriage counselors backing up their beliefs, including Bernie Slutsky, who told the Chicago Sun Times that “all things being equal,” he’d rather that “couples yell at each other than ignore each other.”

“At least they’re trying to reach the other person,” he told Scripps Howards New Service. “Sometimes it’s a case of ‘You’re not listening to me so I’m going to tell you louder,’ and we have to tone that down. But it’s still better than if they just sit there and stonewall each other. That’s a lot more destructive.”

Truth be told, this is nothing new. At least not to me. Back when I was managing editor of Marriage Partnership magazine, I read that fighting in front of kids wasn’t the problem. Fighting nastily—calling names, belittling, outrageously accusing, picking fights—was the problem. That, and not letting kids see you resolve the argument.

My husband never fully believed this. He had grown up never seeing or hearing his parents fight, and as an only child, he didn’t really have people to fight with. Not like siblings can. My husband equated fighting with hating.

I grew up in a fighting family. My parents fought (yes, they are divorced today. But they fought for 35 years before that happened!) and fought well. My brother and I would see them argue and storm off and come back to resolve—generally. I grew up with a good understanding that fighting and loving could go hand in hand. So, although my much-younger brother and I generally got along, we fought. And I fought with my parents. Though sometimes I’d overstep and my “tone” would get me in trouble, my parents didn’t discourage my pushing back. They considered it growing and knew I loved them all the while.

On The New York Times’s Motherlode blog, Elizabeth Weil writes about some other benefits she’s discovered by her daughters seeing her and her husband fight: it helped them find a safe place—family—to learn to move past passivity and take a stand. “I do love it that my girls are seizing the conviction of their feelings,” Weil writes. “I’d rather they sounded a little gruff—I’d even take rude—than that they shy away from explosive topics or turn anger, pain or sadness in on themselves.”

Amen.

Christian parents—especially—should take heed of this. If we want to raise our kids to transform this world for Jesus, to fight injustice, to live mercy, and to love our neighbors and our enemies—they have to know how to fight, or, more important, how to fight and still love.

The ability to understand that fighting and affection can live harmoniously opened up my world. It’s that understanding that allows me to have friends or even simple conservations with people of all political stripes, of different religions or worldviews or even of different temperaments without feeling like we had to agree to be cordial or friends. It’s this understanding that allows me to share my thoughts and feelings, to take stands and to speak up on controversial topics, where I know I’m going to start some debates. If not full-on fights.

And this ability has extended into my life in the church. Goodness knows that there’s plenty to fight about within any church. And fight I have. While there are most likely elders or deacons or pastors or various church leaders who may not be my biggest fans for my willingness to pipe up as often as I do—for putting up my dukes when needed—I say in all honesty: I love my church like family. Which means we sometimes need to fight like family.

If my kids never saw my husband and I do this, how would they know what this can look like? What would then end up missing out in life?

Not five minutes after I blew up at my husband for his “thoughtlessness,” I apologized. That time (this one time) I was wrong. I picked a fight where there needn’t have been one. But all was not lost. My son saw us spat a bit, saw Mama apologize and Daddy forgive, and then Daddy apologize and Mama forgive, and then moved on.

Frankly, I consider this my ministry.

Caryn Rivadeneira is the author of Grumble Hallelujah: Learning to Love Your Life Even When It Lets You Down (Tyndale, 2011) and a regular contributor to Her.meneutics. Visit Caryn at http://www.carynrivadeneira.com.

‘I’m Dad, the Babysitter,’ and Other Cultural Myths

For almost six months, Coach Selby and I have lived with mild tension about our sons’ music lessons. The oldest boy began violin two years ago, and while he won’t be playing Carnegie any time soon, he’s good. The twins are a different story. It took almost four months for them to learn to hold their bows, and they still haven’t mastered the art of not dropping delicate musical instruments. Coach wants to pull them out, while I want to keep at it, acknowledging they will work at their own pace.

Finally, I said to him, “I am the ‘designated parent;’ you are merely ‘childcare arrangement.’ My opinion trumps all.”

Okay, no, I didn’t really say this. But if I had, the United States Census Bureau would have backed me up. According to the “Who’s Minding the Kids?” report, when both parents are present, the mother is the “designated parent.” Hence, when father goes to work, it’s assumed that mother is watching the kids.

The study, first released in 2006, sought to discover what happened to the children now that “maternal employment has become the norm rather than the exception.”

In 2010 fathers were the primary “child care provider” 32 percent of the time. How often is mother the “child care provider” when father works? Well, since she is the “designated parent,” and therefore the one responsible for the kids, we apparently need not worry about that.

This is a dangerous picture of family life in America. Studies like this send the message that when Father does the work of parenting, it’s a job—“childcare.” But when Mother does it, she doesn’t “work,” but rather “stays home” with the kids (a belief reflected in the common question, "Do you stay home, or do you work?").

It’s not just the Census Bureau either. I am a work-at-home freelance writer, and, for now, we do not employ childcare. Hence, my husband regularly cares for our boys while I write. Almost every single time (two to three times a week) he comes home fuming about someone commenting on his “babysitting,” “giving Mom a break,” or “boys’ day out.”

“I am their Dad,” he says to them. “This isn’t babysitting. It’s parenting.” (Yes, he says that to complete strangers.)

Over the years, Coach has also cared for our children while I traveled to Central Asia and Africa, to conferences and retreats, and regularly at those aforementioned violin lessons. Does he do this because he’s “helping” me, giving me a break from my non-job of parenting to work on my “real” job of writing? Of course not. He does it because he’s their father, and it’s about time fathers began to take a serious part in their children’s lives.

The good news from the Census Bureau study is that, apparently, they are. Over five years, the bureau tracked a 6 percent increase in the number of fathers that cared for their children while mom worked, growing from 26 percent in 2005 to 32 percent in 2010. My husband is not alone in his role as an involved dad. In fact, in an informal poll of my writers guild, almost every member worked in partnership with her husband, providing income and childcare.

So, why is it so surprising? We still seem to have the image of the working father and the stay-at-home mother of the 1950s. (For the record, I have yet to wear heels and pearls to vacuum.) Yet in this Facebook generation, where college dropouts start multibillion-dollar companies in their dorm rooms, we are hardly earning money the same ways.

Moms and dads are both beginning to work at home more. Companies better understand the benefits of flex time and telecommuting for both parents. Plenty of people are eschewing corporate life altogether and working for themselves out of their home. This creates a different dynamic in the home on a daily basis. Whatever the reason—recession, postmodernism, feminism—the culture of the dual parent home is beginning to more often include the father.

That is only good news for the kids, and not just so they can attempt to play one parent off the other. Studies show that children with involved fathers are more patient and ready for school in kindergarten, and they are more emotionally secure than children without involved fathers. Adolescents also benefit from active dads, exhibiting increased verbal skills and intellectual functioning.

Thankfully, it seems that many 20- and 30-somethings are onto this. While a new generation of parents may be having fewer kids, husbands and wives seemingly both take seriously the task of raising them.

Fathers matter for a child’s faith, too. A 2006 Crosswalk article cites a Swiss study on children’s faith, based on participation by each parent. While the faith of both parents affected church activity in children, the variance of the father mattered significantly more. Those children with faithful fathers were always more likely to continue church attendance as adults.

Of course church attendance is not always a measure of faith in God, but this small study indicates something we all know deep-down: We care about what our dads think. A faithful father, active in his children’s lives, will help his kids take steps of faith they may not otherwise.

My point is not about who should stay home and who should “win the bread.” It’s not about “dad-moms” or other nonsensical labels. It’s about the changing times and new normals. In this economy, and with the ability for people of either gender to receive education and opportunities, it should matter more that families survive in any way they can. It’s a bonus that this survival means both parents are more involved in child-rearing.

Dads are parents, not babysitters. It’s good news that more families realize this than in the past and are living it out. For once, a cultural trend that is good for everyone: mothers, fathers, children, and an entire society.

Monica Selby is a freelance writer and member of the Redbud Writers Guild. She has written for Her.meneutics about antidepressants. Connect with her at her blog (www.inthewhisper.com), on Facebook, or on Twitter.

Role Reversal: The Problem of the Increasing Marginalization of Men

A world away, a men’s rights movement is afoot.

Welcome to the matriarchal society of Meghalaya, India, where, in a vast reversal of traditions the world over, property names and wealth are passed along from mother to daughter instead of father to son. Women have the luxuries, opportunities, and advantages typically enjoyed by men. Even the preference for baby boys is gone; as one Khasi man told the BBC, at the hospital, “If it’s a girl, there will be great cheers from the family outside. If it’s a boy, you will hear them mutter politely that ‘whatever God gives us is quite all right.’”

And the Khasi men are experiencing the crippling prejudice, discrimination, and oppression that women throughout history have known all too well. Keith Pariat, a leader in Meghalaya’s men’s rights movement, told BBC reporter Timothy Allen that they "do not want to bring women down….We just want to bring the men up to where the women are." According to Allen, Pariat was “adamant that matriliny is breeding generations of Khasi men who fall short of their inherent potential, citing alcoholism and drug abuse among its negative side-effects.”

The story is depressing and frustrating.

I am troubled by the injustices and oppression that Meghalaya’s men experience. I desperately hope they gain equal rights and that women’s attitudes toward them shift from contempt to appreciation. If Khasi women speak up for these nearly voiceless men instead of taking advantage of their traditions, the men’s movement stands a chance.

Yet I am realistic. I know that such cultural shifts occur at sloth-like speeds. No doubt during the in-between, the male suffragettes will face bitter opposition. No doubt Khasi women and even other Khasi men will heap moral scorn upon them, accusing them of upsetting the natural order, defying God’s will, and of being ungrateful for their divinely appointed lot in life. I am sure many Khasi men will cope by forfeiting their hope altogether and resigning themselves to the apparent futility of fighting the deeply entrenched system. With broken spirits, perhaps they regard their gender as a crippling curse and feel consigned to second-class citizen status.

What a moral tragedy these Khasi men face. And, if we are to believe reports about current trends, American men are facing their own tragedy.

Of course, men in the West still enjoy vast preferences in most sectors of public life, including in professional hiring, government leadership, and, some charge, the church. They aren’t experiencing anything close to what their Khasi brothers are. But if recent reports and cultural analysis are to be trusted, men here seem to be on the decline. They no longer dominate in business and higher education. Why this is so remains a matter of debate. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo suggests it’s due to arousal addictions: excessive internet use, gaming, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for porn. Theologian Roger Olson suggests that the American public schooling system has shifted in a way that seriously disadvantages boys.

What can be done to prevent a Khasi-like tragedy for men in the West? In her landmark Atlantic essay, “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin writes:

Researchers have suggested any number of solutions. A movement is growing for more all-boys schools and classes, and for respecting the individual learning styles of boys….Most of these special accommodations sound very much like the kind of affirmative action proposed for women over the years—which in itself is an alarming flip.

It is fabulous to see girls and young women poised for success in the coming years. But allowing generations of boys to grow up feeling rootless and obsolete is not a recipe for a peaceful future….the men’s-rights groups that do exist in the U.S. are taking on an angry, antiwoman edge….Far from being celebrated, women’s rising power is perceived as a threat.

Perhaps the dire situation in which American men find themselves is partly fueling the recent shrill chatter about gender in evangelicalism. Perhaps this is why prominent pastors push for what some call biblical masculinity (as fellow Her.meneutics contributor Rachel Marie Stone so thoughtfully covered). I believe these sincere pastoral pronouncements miss the mark, failing to consider the entire testimony of Scripture. But as Rosin indicates, there is reason for both men and women in the church to be alarmed over the portrayal of men as dopey, brainless dolts—slaves to their sex organs, sports, and video games—and over the forecasts of men’s demise. Like Meghalayan culture, the church cannot flourish at the expense of men.

However, like the Khasi women who dismiss the plight of the Khasi men, thereby contributing to their oppression and demoralization, many men (and women) within the church still dismiss or outright malign godly women who decry prejudice and marginalization. Women especially who cry foul are demonized and have moral scorn heaped upon them. They stand accused of being unbiblical, of upsetting the natural order, of defying God’s will, and of being ungrateful for their divinely appointed role in life.

Must the flourishing of Christian men in the church entail the limiting of women’s roles? Must those women who are gifted by God be forbidden from employing their gifts for the edification of the body of Christ, prohibited even from teaching men in Christian colleges and seminaries? How many Dr. Kloudas have to be unjustly fired or never even given a chance simply because of gender? Why can’t we revel in the goodness of God and delight in how he has scattered his gifts abroad?

Let’s bid adieu to the men-versus-women mentality, and to our contest for dominance. Let’s embrace biblical notions of shared power, humility, mutual submission and sacrifice, and the unfettered use of our spiritual and natural gifts within the family, church and world. May men continue to speak out on behalf of women—and vice versa—so that the church and society can truly thrive.

Coveting Cover to Cover: Why I Gave Up Vogue for Lent

My junior year of college, I gave up Vogue for Lent.

Some people fast for forty days. Some give up sugar, or pray for someone daily, or get really crazy and give up Facebook. I gave up a pretentious, ad-filled, once-monthly magazine. And since Lent is forty days long, that amounted to . . . one issue.

Writing that now, it feels pathetic. But in so many ways, it changed my life.

I love fashion. I write about it a fair amount on my blog, and Oscar night is like Christmas to me. And I think that’s okay. Cliché though it may sound, what you wear can be a great expression of who you are, what mood you’re in, what interests you.

But I had gotten to a point with what I read in Vogue and other magazines that I found myself, in my free time, thinking about how I could expand my already-large closet, and how I looked in comparison with the people in those pages and the people around me.

More than wanting certain things, I had grown to want a certain lifestyle. It wasn’t just the $400 cashmere throws or gorgeous jackets that cost ten times our monthly rent. It was that I wanted a lifestyle that would provide me with whatever I want, whenever I wanted it. I grew to believe that this lifestyle would provide real security, especially against the anxiety that I’ve struggled with most of my life. If anxiety could be measured in units, I would simply buy them away, one boutique purchase at a time. After all, the people in the glossy pages of these magazines looked so happy! So contented by their overstuffed white furniture and handmade leather boots and month-long trips to the Amalfi Coast. If I could just have what they had, surely I would be happier, more at peace.

And now, I know why not coveting is important enough to have made it into the Ten Commandments. It will eat away at your heart. Nothing (and more importantly, no one) will ever be good enough for you, because you live in a world that doesn’t exist. Coveting is the business of, as my mom has often said, comparing your insides to someone else’s outsides.

This may not be Vogue for you. It may be who brings the best cupcakes to the neighbor’s birthday party, or how clean your house is, or how well you do relative to your colleagues at work. We all have our unique issues – and mine, I have learned, goes beyond clothes and appearance much more deeply into image.

In John 21, Jesus makes a post-Resurrection appearance to some of the Disciples and asks Peter, in a lovely echo of Peter’s earlier denial, if he loves Jesus. Three times, Jesus asks, and three times, Peter responds. Jesus continues the conversation remarking on how Peter will die. (This is very uplifting stuff.) Peter, in his poignant and earnest and eminently relatable humanity, looks back at John and says to Jesus: “What about him?”

It is a question I have spent much of my life asking. What about him? What about her, the woman whose wardrobe I envy? What about him, the friend whose ease with others is a source of jealousy for me? What about them, the people who have what I want (or what I think I want)?

What about me?

“What is it to you if I allow him to live until the day that I return?” Jesus responds to Peter.

The sin of comparison, while certainly not unique to women, does seem to be one of our favorites. But we live with and worship and are transformed into the image of a God who says things like “What is it to you?” and “Do not concern yourself with what you wear” (Mt. 6:25) and calls us to venture largely on a unique journey with him. The more time we spend comparing and coveting, the less we are able to identify, use, and live out of our core giftedness and personhood in Christ.

It's a new Lenten season, and I still read an issue of Vogue from time to time. I still struggle with the sins of comparison and coveting, and I suspect that I will for some time. But I am learning in deep and large and small and daring ways that there is a richness to life outside of wanting what other people have. There is freedom there. And where there is freedom, there is God.

Marriage, War, and Lent: Practicing Love During Separation

Among other heart-shaped headlines last week, the world’s most famous newlyweds spent their first married Valentine’s Day separated by an ocean, courtesy of a military deployment.

This was week two of what’s expected to be six weeks solo for Kate Middleton, whose helicopter-pilot husband, Prince William, is training in South America with the Royal Air Force. How does a duke tackle February 14 when he’s nearly 8,000 miles away from his duchess? According to Kate, William had taken enough time out of his search-and-rescue flight schedule to mail a card across the pond and arrange a flower delivery. They’re the sort of gestures that have become almost expected on such a day, and to some they might even seem less than noteworthy.

Those of us who’ve been through a military deployment or two, however, are hesitant to minimize the significance of one note, one phone call, one bouquet, one brief moment of attentiveness.

If unwanted separations prove anything, it’s that effort is vital to relationship. As a military wife, I see this every day in my time away from my husband—and if I’m honest with myself, I know the principle applies critically in my relationship with God as well.

Here's what I mean: The convenience of sharing a home with one’s spouse makes many relationship-efforts seem effortless. You bump into each other whether you’re trying to or not. Dinner happens at the same table, sleep happens on the same mattress, laundry gets tumbled in the same load. You glimpse expressions on each other’s face and sense whether it has been a smooth day, a harried one, or something in between. Through simple interactions like these, trust is fostered, familiarity is developed, and understanding is built—yet many of us miss the significance of these moments. We miss it because we rarely have to miss the moments.

In most military marriages, this is not the case. For instance, my husband Nathan’s most recent Marine Corps training exercise lasted four weeks. In that time, he and I were able to speak once, for 15 minutes, which was how long his cell phone signal lasted before abruptly cutting out. The training exercise before that was two weeks long; we could intermittently e-mail that time, but we didn’t speak at all. This is the necessary culture of infantry and infantry training: for the safety of others and himself, he must be alert to the mission at all times, he always has more work on his plate than time to do it, the work is potentially life-and-death, and it happens in remote areas far from cell towers.

There’s no avoiding the separations or the limits on communication, so we’re learning to accept them when they come and to be grateful like crazy in the times when we can interact or be in the same place. I’m not sure I could adequately express how incredible it is, after a long separation, to hear the actual sound of my husband’s voice, to stand in the same room with him, to witness his behavior up close, to observe his priorities in action. I’ve come to marvel at and appreciate these everyday interactions, only because I’ve had to spend time getting by without them.

Here is the turn and the contrast. When it comes to the other great love in my life—the only capital-L Love—I’m clearly willing to tolerate distance and limited interactions, even when they’re not forced upon me. Despite God’s full availability to me, my availability to him often happens in the form of a lapsed prayer pattern, a faded excitement for Scripture, apathy for worship, and cynicism about the his body, the church. There are times when you could look at my life and assume spiritual separation were normal, even expected. It’s as if I’ve forgotten that God lives right here with me all the time—his Spirit in me. It’s as if I never got used to having God around.

It’s no mystery how this type of separation happens. I forget because I’m not doing the daily work of remembering. If I would set up my life so that I’d meet God every day—if I would make it more natural than not to sit with him at breakfast and talk with him in the hallway and simply listen for a bit at the end of a day—I would see so much of his glory and goodness that I couldn’t help but be caught up.

The official term is spiritual disciplines: regular habits of interacting regularly with God, carving out time and focus so we can experience him and respond with the grateful obedience that results. Put simply, it’s being with the one you love, and not merely by happenstance. Do you bump into God on occasion, or do you know him deeply because the two of you are living under the same roof?

Lent, which begins today, is a timely opportunity to develop the spiritual disciplines that make God familiar to his followers. It's a season in the traditional church calendar in which faithful Christians the world over will practice denying themselves in some way: denying a favorite snack, denying meals, denying habits and behaviors that steal life. Cravings will inevitably result; they will be tangible, bodily reminders of our human limitations and depravity. They’ll help us be mindful of God and the scope of his sacrifice on our behalf. A simple act, an important remembering.

The mystery of fasting—whether from food or something less tangible—is that somehow God becomes present in the midst of it, right there in the fridge or in the cupboard or in the checkout aisle at the grocery store. We become more aware of him, more attentive to him, until we find we should’ve been missing him all along. Think of the possibility—to find that he is not far-off but close at hand, like a husband under our very own roof.

Lisa Velthouse chronicled her own six-month fast from sweets in the memoir Craving Grace: A Story of Faith, Failure, and My Search for Sweetness (Tyndale House.) A writer and speaker, Lisa blogs regularly at LisaVelthouse.com.

Want to Follow God? Go to Sleep

I’m fanatical about a lot of things: coffee, books, clothes, work, running—not necessarily in that order (in case my employers are reading this). But more than any of these activities, I’m fanatical about sleep. Like Brooke Shields and her Calvin Klein Jeans, nothing gets between me and sleep.

I used to think this refusal to burn the candle at both ends, even for the sake of church, work, or home, was selfish. Not anymore.

In the first year or so of our marriage, my husband and I were lassoed into chaperoning a youth lock-in at our church—you know, the Christian version of a rave except the kids play games like Duct Tape Head rather than dance all night and get high on sugar instead of Ecstasy. I learned something about myself that night (well, I learned quite a few things, but only one is pertinent to this article): I need sleep.

Eager to please both church and spouse, I tried to make it through that all-nighter. And I got so close. But by 5 a.m. (I’ll spare the gory details), my husband was begging me to go home and go to bed. Feeling like a failure, I did.

I’m not sure why I thought I could (let alone why I should) make it through the whole night. Since childhood, having had barn chores most of my life since then, I’ve been an early riser and, consequently, an early-to-bedder. I never pulled an all-nighter in college. And although I had my share of late nights while sowing my wild oats, I’ve always had a natural body clock that needs closer to 9 than 8 hours of sleep, and preferably sooner rather than later.

For a long time, this kind of embarrassed me. But I’m over that embarrassment now. Way over it.

Whether you’re a morning person or a late owl, when you sleep is less important than your amount and quality of sleep. Sleep is so important, in fact, that the Centers for Disease Control is increasingly monitoring U. S. sleep behaviors because the effects of sleep-deprivation on public health are so dramatic. Poor sleep patterns are linked to stress, depression, memory loss, weight gain, lower attention, increased accidents. Good sleep habits, on the other hand, are associated with longer life, weight loss, increased creativity, athletic stamina, and higher grades in school. No wonder Shakespeare called sleep “Nature’s soft nurse.”

We know all this, yet as a culture, many of us continue to lead sleep-deprived lives.

I was once invited to speak at a women’s dorm meeting and, told I could speak on any topic, I chose sleep. Perhaps in working with college students, chief among the sleep-deprived, my perspective is skewed, but I find sleep far too low on the scale of priorities. I’ve even seen sleep-deprivation used as a self-punishing behavior linked to eating and other disorders.

Fatigue has become as American as apple pie. In history’s most comfortable society, being tired has become the sacrifice du jour, and sleep is treated as a reward rather than a prerequisite for good work.

This is why I found refreshing a recent article examining the spiritual aspect of sleep. Rightly exempting those whose circumstances—parental, financial, or other temporary states—render diminished sleep a necessity rather than a choice, chaplain Lynn Casteel Harper insightfully addresses the spiritual significance of our collective disdain of slumber: sleep challenges us to give up control, to accept our limitations, to attune our bodies to natural rhythms, and to face our mortality.

Poets call sleep “death’s picture,” a daily reminder of that eternal rest to come. If we ignore our need for good rest at regular intervals—whether daily, weekly, or yearly—we ignore no less than our mortality. As Lauren Winner has noted, our need for rest is so central to our humanity that God set aside one day a week for it. In fact, one third of our lives is spent in sleep. Yet it seems to get far less attention and concern from experts and authors than food or fitness. Indeed, rest is often treated less like friend and more like foe. We are never more vulnerable than when we sleep. Perhaps that’s why we resist it so.

The17th-century metaphysical poet George Herbert offers a beautiful and truthful depiction of rest in “The Pulley,” which depicts God at the moment of creation, pouring all of his blessings on man. At the last moment, God withholds the blessing of rest:

    "For if I should,” said he,
"Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature; 
    So both should losers be." 

This need for rest, the poem then says, tosses man back to God’s breast; it is “the pulley” that draws us to him. Sleep, as D. H. Lawrence writes, allows us to awake each day “dipped again in God, and new-created.” Sleep is not the enemy but rather, as Shakespeare says, the “chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

Consider that one of the most dramatic events in the ministry of Jesus—and a great test of the disciples’ faith—begins and centers on Jesus’ sleeping through a storm. Not only does Jesus admonish us through this story to have strong faith, but his example teaches us also to sleep well.

Clothing in Church: Why It Matters

My little brother is one of my favorite people. He is patient and gentle and considerate and funny. (Although I would never tell him that.) He is in his last year at Westmont College, my alma mater, and for the past few years has been putting his music composition major to use by playing in the band at a local church on Sunday mornings. He enters into worship with a grateful heart and works hard to cultivate a space where other people can do the same.

And he does all this without wearing shoes.

He just doesn’t care. He’s always been an incredibly casual dresser, wearing shorts and flip-flops all through the freezing months of winter in the Midwest. So showing up to church barefoot and in a T-shirt is not only normal for him, but to dress in anything nicer would, to him, be a violation of conscience in the eyes of the God who bids us come as we are.

Last month, Duane Litfin, former president of Wheaton College, wrote an interesting op-ed for Christianity Today called “Clothing Matters: What We Wear to Church.” In it, Litfin makes the case for a thoughtful approach to dressing for public worship services. Framing his argument in terms of offering God our best, our first fruits, that which is sacrificial, Litfin suggests that we display an attitude of awe and reverence when we enter into communal worship. He cites Scriptures like 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 and Romans 12:1, where we hear about our bodies being living sacrifices to God. The most convincing part of all of this, though, comes when Litfin says “I do wish to raise a question about the notion…that when it comes to public worship, our clothing doesn't matter.”

In a great post on the Cardus blog, Kyle Bennett calls fashion “an exercise on virtue.” Fashion is relevant here because, like our faith, it speaks to the soul. As Christians, we have not only a right but also a responsibility to attend to anything that claims such important territory, whether we agree with its place or not. How we respond to issues of clothing and dress can speak a great deal about our heart toward God. In the words of Abraham Kuyper, "There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, 'This is mine! This belongs to me!’”

On this point Litfin and I agree: Our clothing is not neutral. We dress ourselves every day (hopefully!) and in doing so, we make some kind of statement. The way we dress is frequently an external expression of an internal reality, a way for “the body, or even the self, to communicate itself to society,” in the words of theologian Tom Beaudoin. In his simple and austere dress, Shane Claiborne clearly communicates a concern for and solidarity with the poor. Businesspeople dress in dark-toned suits and sensible shoes in order to be taken seriously in their world. We can all think of singers and actresses and teenage girls who frequently dress with the sole purpose of attracting sexual attention. (This brings to mind my ill-fated run-in with a midriff-bearing halter top in eighth grade; I still shudder to think of the temporary blindness my porcelain stomach inflicted on innocent passersby.) Clothing matters because, as part of human culture, it either points to or obscures the glory of God in creation, and what we wear reveals our deep values and orientation toward the world.

With this issue especially, we see divides along class and generational lines. Would we ask people who can’t afford to buy new, nice clothing to do so anyways and consider it part of their sacrifice to God, the equivalent of the widow’s mite? This is Litfin’s argument, and one that I have a hard time with. Perhaps, though, we can chalk that up to the generation gap: As a 26-year-old (and a Californian at that), there is rarely a formal event to which I am invited where a pair of nice jeans would not stand up to the task. Weddings and funerals notwithstanding, I can actually run the risk of being overdressed while wearing jeans. As a commenter named Jon pointed out in response to Litfin’s article, “Dr. Liftin encourages us to give our ‘best’ to God. What he doesn't seem to realize is that for a younger generation, their ‘best’ includes their ‘best’ jeans and ‘best’ sandals.” How much does context apply here? Is the old guard mostly nostalgic for a bygone era of fedoras and peplum dresses, or can we give God our very best in shorts and T-shirts?

With all of that said, what do we make of what we wear to church? Is it important? Yes, absolutely. Is it everything? Certainly not. Can what we wear contribute to God’s redemptive action on this earth and in this moment? It feels a little silly to say, but yes. I believe it can. Regardless of your fashion history or background, we can all benefit from remembering that what we wear can help us to move closer to God and closer to others. As we prepare for worship, we can consider how our clothing might influence the community we are a part of, might bridge class divides or show honor even in jeans and flip-flops. When I dress in order to mask myself and my vulnerability, I create division within my community and hold my brothers and sisters at bay. When, however, I dress with awareness of God’s goodness and beauty in all of its manifestations, I am contributing to his kingdom.

Fractured Fairy Tale: The Appeal and the Danger of 'Once Upon a Time'

ABC’s big surprise hit this year doesn’t feature lawyers, police officers, doctors, or any other primetime staples. It features princesses, imps, talking crickets, magic mirrors, and an evil queen.

Once Upon a Time has consistently scored high in the ratings this season with its unique mix of classic fairy tales and modern mores. The story begins with Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison), a no-nonsense bounty hunter, being found by the son she had given up for adoption. Young Henry (Jared Gilmore) tells Emma that the town of Storybrooke, Maine, where he lives, is full of fairy tale characters who are under a dark spell that only she can break.

Naturally, Emma is disinclined to believe his theory. But meeting Henry’s adoptive mother, Regina (Lana Parrilla), convinces her that something is wrong with his situation, and that she needs to figure out what it is. Meanwhile, flashbacks reveal to us that Henry has, in fact, stumbled upon the truth: The residents of Storybrooke are indeed enchanted fairy tale characters, most of whom have no memory of whom they really are. Regina is actually the evil queen from Snow White who, out of spite and hatred, cursed these people to a life disconnected from their true identities.

It’s an intriguing premise, cleverly executed. But is that enough to account for its success? I think there may be something deeper at work here.

Many of the people of Storybrooke are unhappy with their lives for reasons they don’t fully understand. The curse placed on them has ripped apart relationships and left individuals stranded without each other. Though the writers probably didn’t intend it that way, it’s reminiscent of another curse that Christians are familiar with—one that disrupted the life that we were meant to live, and infects our lives and relationships to this day. In this respect, Storybrooke, filled with lonely, restless, searching people, is a microcosm of our own world.

At the heart of the story are Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), who were married with a newborn daughter—Emma—when the destructive curse took effect. In Storybrooke, Snow is now Mary Margaret Blanchard, a single elementary-school teacher, and Charming is David Nolan, seemingly married to another woman—though when it comes right down to it, he can’t actually remember marrying her. When Emma Swan shows up in town, neither of them realizes that she’s their child. Neither of them can even remember that they have a child.

Yet Mary Margaret and David are powerfully drawn to each other. They make a lovely couple, but the moral calculus required to root for them would give Archimedes a migraine. David’s married to someone else—only he really isn’t—but he thinks he is—but technically, by thinking he is, he’s cheating on his real wife, Snow/Mary—but he doesn’t know that, so he’s essentially cheating on his supposed wife . . . you get the picture. In the fairy tale world that we see in flashback, these two had a wonderful marriage; in the modern world, the only relationship they can have is a guilt-ridden and secretive one.

This too says something, I think, about why the show speaks to so many people. In a society where more of us are single than ever before, the divorce rate is soaring, and an unprecedented number of children are raised in broken homes, we long for fulfilling relationships like Snow and Charming’s. And we sympathize with those characters’ modern incarnations, Mary Margaret and David. For them, as for too many people these days, a happy and lasting marriage sometimes seems like something that could only be achieved in a fairy tale.

With that in mind, a shattered family slowly being drawn back together against all odds becomes a very exciting thing to watch. (I do have some reservations about how the show handles the topic of adoption, with Henry’s biological mother having to swoop in and save him from his evil adoptive mother, but that’s a discussion for another time.) The idea of a love so strong it can survive anything, even a memory-destroying curse, has enormous appeal. It feeds a hunger within us, created by the God who designed us to live in relationship with Himself and others.

Yet that same concept is a double-edged sword. Love can bring great joy and inspire noble deeds, as it does for Snow and Charming. But it can also tempt people to selfishness and betrayal, as we’re starting to see in Mary Margaret and David’s story.

Intentionally or not, Once Upon a Time demonstrates the danger of elevating human love above all other considerations. It illustrates C. S. Lewis’s words in The Four Loves, when he wrote about the idolization of Eros: “The god [of love] dies or becomes a demon unless he obeys God.”

And that truth is likely to have implications for the show as a whole. While it’s supposed to be all about the battle between good and evil, the worship of romantic love threatens to blur the lines between the two.

Though I’ve had occasion in the past to criticize “princess theology,” I’ve always been fond of fairy tales. As Mary Margaret says in the first episode of the show, stories are “a way for us to deal with our world. A world that doesn’t always make sense.” They can simultaneously reflect the broken reality we live in, and the ideal that we long for. But the lesson I take away from Once Upon a Time is that the ideal isn’t enough, for love doesn’t transcend good and evil. It can’t be truly inspiring, fulfilling, and all the other things we want it to be, unless it is subject to the One who made it.

Unplanned Parenthood: The Blessing of an Inconvenient Pregnancy

About a year ago my husband and I began to consider expanding our family. We spent countless hours thinking, talking, and praying about this giant step. We are both in school with little income to speak of, so we weren’t sure how it would all come together. But God’s leading seemed very clear: It was time to take the leap.

At first, I felt sure of our decision. We had prayed about it and my husband was incredibly supportive. But my confidence didn’t last long. About a month after we made the decision, I freaked out. “How is this going to work? I am a doctoral student for Pete’s sake!”

I began asking questions like, “Am I going to be a ball of stress for the next three years? Is this basically a death knell to my future as a student?” And perhaps the biggest questions of all: “Will I be a good mom?” and, “Will I even be able to get pregnant?”

It is ironic that my fears oscillated between uncertainty about having a baby, and fears about my ability to conceive. But that was a clue about my spiritual state at the time. In deciding to grow our family, we were surrendering a large amount of control to God. And I never give up control easily.

As a woman, I have found that fertility and childbearing highlight my addiction to control more than almost anything else in my life thus far. Women are, after all, trained to control our bodies. Managing one’s appearance and conducting one’s body in a way that honors God are common female virtues in the church. Added to that is the resource of birth control, with which we can control our biological cycles.

This control has extended beyond pregnancy prevention into the realm of pregnancy facilitation. Women are now waiting longer to have children, some because they must, others because they can.

In truth, the control we have over our bodies is an illusion of power that inevitably comes crashing down. For me, the illusion crumbled when I began to think seriously about having children, and recent media stories reveal that I am not alone.

In the past six months, many news outlets have featured stories about the downsides of delaying pregnancy. What is particularly interesting about these articles is the common shock among older women that their fertility has an expiration date. MSNBC featured a story about a 43-year-old woman who realized, too late, that she had been terribly uneducated about her fertility. She confessed, “Most women aren't taught — and don't learn — basic facts about fertility and aging. . . . It’s not that we’re stupid. It’s that we’ve been misinformed.” NPR featured a similar story about a woman in her early 40s who was equally surprised by her decreasing fertility. In disbelief she said, “It just seemed so fashionable to have kids in your 40s these days.”

This widespread misinformation should not be surprising. Every year, celebrity magazines announce the latest pregnancies of actresses in their 40s. With few exceptions, these women seem to conceive without a hitch and on their own schedules. Their presence in the public eye makes it easy to believe women really can have it all, at any age.

When faced with the reality of fertility statistics, it is not only surprising but terrifying. The numbers confront women with the fact that for all the control we try to have over our bodies, there are real and sobering limits.

In a touching reflection on her recent miscarriage, blogger Laura Ziesel captured her own lesson on childbearing and control in a post titled, “Miscarriage, Fertility, and My Broken Body.” As she wrestled with her body’s “performance,” she shared her husband’s challenging question to her: “Do you realize that you're expecting your body to act like a machine?”

Of course we women are not machines, nor did God design us to be. He created us to be warm-blooded, full-hearted human beings. Yes, we will always experience the repercussions of the Fall, and Genesis 3:16 makes explicit the pain and uncertainty we will face. Yes, many women will have unplanned pregnancies; others will struggle to get pregnant at all. And yes, delaying pregnancy carries risks that our culture must not overlook.

We do not have control over our bodies.

But God does.

In a culture of womanhood that prizes autonomy and self-determination, Christians can offer a different kind of witness. You see, the constant striving after control has an ugly flipside. When our stability comes from our own ability to control, we submit ourselves to a terrible master. In a world of uncertainty, control demands an unending commitment to a fragile and complex balancing act. When we step in as god of our own lives, we cannot rest for a moment. And when we do lose control, we are devastated.

God promises to liberate us from that bondage, but fertility and childbearing test the true extent of how faithfully we are accepting and living into that freedom. Are we living in the freedom of God’s loving sovereignty, or are we gripping tightly to whatever shreds of control we can grasp?

In the interest of full disclosure, I discovered that I was pregnant shortly after deciding to write this post. I am incredibly grateful that my husband and I were able to conceive, but this blessing has not removed all my fears. I continue to wrestle with the fear of miscarriage, concerns about our baby’s health, and the uncertainty of my future as a student. Control is an idol that continues to haunt me, but I will also continue to fight it. Not only because personal control is a prison from which Christ came to set me free, but because millions of other women are still trapped in that cage. As a disciple of Jesus, my life should testify to a better way.

The Problem with Westminster Kennel Club's View of Pet Adoption

In some ways, the story made a decision much easier for me. No longer would I be tempted to duck out of a family birthday celebration early to catch Westminster Kennel Club’s (WKC) 136th Annual Dog Show. Now I would gladly miss it.

Why? The WKC’s decision to part ways with longtime sponsor Pedigree. The reason? Because the ad campaign famously highlights and encourages the adoption of shelter dogs in its often sad-eyed—but beautiful—commercials.

“We want people to think of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show as a celebration of the dogs in our lives,” David Frei, the club’s director of communications and the host of the show, told The New York Times. Frei felt the Pedigree ads shamed people (a technique I have also criticized) instead of celebrated dogs.

The Pedigree folks see it in a different light, of course. Melissa Martellotti, a brand communications manager for Mars Petcare US, the makers of Pedigree, told The New York Times, “They’ve shared with us, when we parted ways, that they felt that our advertising was focused too much on the cause of adoption and that wasn’t really a shared vision.”

That the WKC didn’t share a vision with rescue organizations is something I have long realized. Where humane societies urge the adoption of homeless dogs of all ages and stripes, sizes and mixes, the WKC encourages the purchase of purebreds from reputable breeders or adoption of purebreds from reputable rescues. Where humane societies rightly celebrate the wonder of all dogs—purebred or pure mix—the WKC dog show celebrates the best of the best: particular, specific, Kennel Club–ordained breeds.

Having the pro-adoption Pedigree ads appear during the show helped me make peace with these discrepancies of “vision.” It made me believe that dog lovers of all ages and stripes, sizes and mixes could maybe come together in a shared love of both the dog show world and the rescue world.

While my dog-loving heart will always belong first to those involved in animal welfare and rescue, I always had an affection for the dog show circuit—even as I’ve always found plenty to criticize about dog shows like Westminster Kennel Club’s. I hold them somewhat complicit in the over-breeding of dogs and even the abuses at puppy mills, and I certainly scoff at some of their ridiculous frivolity (for more on this, see Christopher Guest’s hilarious Best in Show).

But still, there’s something I love about these dog shows, something the “celebration of the dogs” that WKC’s David Frei spoke of. There’s something quite wonderful about a competition that doesn’t focus on appearance for appearance’s sake and that doesn’t really even make participants compete against one another. Instead, in a dog show, the dogs (and bitches, since, of course, dogs are technically only the boy ones) compete against their “breed standard.” The breed standard holds the ideal specifications for coat, teeth, gait, size, temperament, and so on that presumably ensure that breed can best do what it was meant to do. The dog-show world groups and judges according to gifts and purpose and doesn’t put one set of gifts or purpose or even gender in competition with the other ones. Each dog is judged against its ideal.

Part of what I love about dog shows is that I wish the human world was like this—or at least our churches. Imagine if instead of wasting our time fighting over who was allowed to do what, we simply celebrated the gifts we’d each been given. Imagine if instead of judging ourselves against people created with different gifts and purposes, we focused on the gifts we’d been given and judged ourselves against our own “breed standard.”

Of course, our breed standard shouldn’t be anything a committee or clubs debates and decides. Instead, our breed standard can be found in the life of Jesus Christ and in the Word of God.

In Romans, we read: “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.”

In short, whatever we were “bred” to do, we should do it—and do it as Jesus would. Not measuring ourselves against each other, not comparing ourselves to the different “body parts.” We are to measure ourselves only against the standard of Jesus—with a heaping helping of grace, that is.

Of course, one of the areas where this analogy falls apart brings us back to the WKC’s desire to keep viewers from seeing the sad reality of millions of dogs living in shelters.

In the Christian arena of life, though we are to keep our eyes on Jesus, this shouldn’t ever blind us from needs of the world. In fact, keeping our eyes on our own Breed Standard means we must keep our eyes on what we Christians were made to do first and foremost: love our neighbors. And loving one another means remembering one another—staying mindful of those who are suffering, lonely, or who are waiting to be loved and rescued. Even, especially, when it interrupts our celebrating.

On Valentine’s Day, Praying for Men Who Buy Sex

Her.meneutics isn’t in the habit of encouraging thought experiments, but try this one for a moment.

If you kept a log of all your thoughts and remarks about men in a given day, what types of statements would be listed? Or, put another way: How many words can you think of to describe a man you disrespect? Now how many can you think of to describe a man you esteem?

As soon as I asked myself these questions, I thought of two or three dismissive nouns to which I could reduce a guy who angered or frustrated me. But I struggled for positive counterparts, and the ones I thought of (prince and, um, prince) seemed derived from the world of fairytales and fantasy — words I couldn’t really use in any honest way.

Were you much different?

That pattern, I suspect stems from our incomplete knowledge of others. As a consequence, we’re constantly filling in the gaps, taking what we know and then adding sin or perfection. So we construe Mr. X based on selfishness, lust, or sloth (cue disgust) or on the wit, sensitivity, and Rogaine that we think will render life together pain-free and easy (cue unrealistic expectations). Worse, our projections for Mr. X aren’t even about what kind of man the mythical he is, but the special ways he could please and satisfy us — or is sure to fail in doing so.

This, I think, is why we see such brokenness displayed in the industrial complex of Valentine’s Day. It’s not about the glorification of self-giving, other-serving love, but the demand for another’s love to serve and gratify us.

The Bible offers a different way to think about romantic love in light of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And I’d like to suggest that it also offers a different way to conceive of our brothers.

The tendencies described above suggest that we tend to imagine men as either wholly depraved and under sin or angelic and free of sin. But what if we imagined them under grace and living by the power of the Cross? To do so is to uphold and affirm both men’s fallenness under the curse, and their potential to image the God who created them and empowers them to help bring his kingdom on earth.

Try it for a moment. Think of a man you tend to disgust or scorn and imagine what he would be like if God really got a hold of his life. What would he be like “on” Jesus (in the parlance of that old, Reagan-era anti-drug commercial)? Not the Jesus of greedy TV preachers and seven-day conversions but the Jesus who transformed John Newton from a slave trader into a preacher who penned one of our most enduring expressions of grace. The Jesus whose love so radically transformed a zealous and murderous persecutor of the early church that he became one of its most passionate defenders and exhorters, preaching and writing until he himself was put to death. What if that Jesus got into the man you can’t stand? What would he be like? What traits and skills of his, if redirected by love and humility, could become a means of blessing and serving others instead of causing harm and destruction?

To me, that kind of creative imagining is hoping on behalf of our brothers. And when pursued to the extent of asking God to help men achieve their potential for good, I submit it can be a way to love them.

That’s why, when I got the idea to organize a day of prayer for men, I immediately thought of Valentine’s Day. However distorted or commercialized it is, the holiday’s core is still, ostensibly, about love. No other observance throughout the year has quite the same association. And because the day also connotes sex and romance, it seemed especially suited for a day of prayer for men in the grips of deep sexual brokenness—those whom society considers the pinnacle of male depravity.

I’m talking about the johns, as they are called in this country: the men who pay for sex.

Pray for the Johns Day came from two threads in my life: nearly four years of praying and fasting about singleness and marriage, as part of a group that’s ultimately asking God to heal relational brokenness, and a growing exposure to the issue of human trafficking, most recently through my Her.meneutics interview with Faith Huckel, director of the anti-trafficking group Restore NYC.

For whatever reason, I came away from Huckel’s and my conversation haunted by the men who drive the demand for commercial sex. When that sense of burden bled into my next Monday fast and I asked God how to pray in response, the idea I got was Pray for the Johns Day.

What does praying for men who buy sex look like? Depending on your schedule, it could mean praying for a few minutes on your commute, taking lunch to fast and pray or even prayer walking through an area of your neighborhood or community where there are sex shops or strip clubs or have been arrests for prostitution or sex trafficking. (Not for Sale’s Slavery Map can help you locate such areas.)

I’m suggesting you pray two things: 1) that men who pay for sex would repent and turn from their ways; and 2) that they would be transformed into people whose lives would bless others and bring good. The event website includes additional resources and suggestions, including a sample prayer that churches can use to pray for the johns.

Whether or not you join me in praying for the johns this Valentine’s Day, I encourage you to try praying on behalf of the next guy who prompts you to curl your lip in disgust. See what happens when you actively hope for God’s love to transform his life.

Anna Broadway is a writer and web editor living in the San Francisco Bay area. She is the author of Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity and a regular contributor to Her.meneutics.

Why You Could Be in a 'Sh*tuff People Say' Meme

Have you seen Into the Woods? The musical, written by Stephen Sondheim, opened on Broadway in 1987 and has been produced uncountable times since then. The play weaves together the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack (of Beanstalk fame), and Rapunzel, among others. It begins with the narrator’s decisive proclamation: “Once upon a time!” followed by Cinderella, Jack, and the wife of Little Red’s favorite baker singing, “I wish…” as they confess their most intimate longings.

I wish I had a child.
I wish the walls were full of gold.
I wish a lot of things…

Getting lost in the woods. Being entrapped by a witch, or a wolf, or cruel stepsisters. These timeworn images are totems, calling up whole volumes of meaning. And the lines “I wish” and “once upon a time” are catchphrases we expect to hear from the likes of Cinderella and Jack. They are, to be sure,“Stuff People in Fairy Tales Say.”

You’ve likely heard of the Internet meme with a similar name. Its origin is a Twitter feed created by Justin Halpern in 2009. Halpern, then 27 years old, was a writer who had moved home to live with his parents. His Tweets documented his father’s humorous – and belligerent and lewd – observations. We feel we know this man’s personality and the generation of which he is a part after reading Halpern’s Tweets:

· “Oh please, you practically invented lazy. People should have to call you and ask for the rights to lazy before they use it.”
· “Your mother made a batch of meatballs last night. Some are for you, but more are for me. Remember that. More. Me.”
· “I hate paying bills…Son, don’t say, ‘Me too.’ I didn’t say that looking to relate to you. I said it instead of ‘go away.’”

$#*! My Dad Says went, as they say, “viral.” Halpern published a book that was adapted into a short-lived television series. He continues to Tweet and to date nearly three million people follow him on Twitter.

Halpern’s work has spawned numerous imitations. Look on YouTube and you’ll find dozens of “things people say” videos. By the way, for our purposes here, we’re employing words such as “stuff” and “things” to stand in for the stronger, and more commonly used word in these videos. If you are offended by what my fourth grade daughter calls “the ‘s’ word,” you’d best not walk into the woods of YouTube to follow this trend. Also be forewarned that a number of the videos posted there are crass and humorless. Others, in my opinion, are inventive, charming, and crammed with insight. They illustrate, time and time again, that what we (repeatedly) say reveals our deepest beliefs, prejudices, and yearnings. (I wish…)

Take for example:

What people say to homeschooled kids.

· “Wow, you must be a genius!”
· “What’s nine times six?”
· “You would have so many friends if you went to school.”

What Crunchy Mamas Say.

· “Who’s your doula?”
· “You use regular deodorant?”
· “Oh, we don’t have a crib!”

What Christian Girls Say.

· “I’ll pray for you!”
· “I should journal.”
· “I just love coffee and the Word.”

You can spend all day watching people parody themselves or others in this genre. What Girls Say, What New Yorkers Say, What Presbyterian Seminarians Say, and several varieties of What Christians Say to Atheists are entertaining. There’s even What Downton Abbey's Dowager Countess Says for fans of that program. I’m fond of the videos that play on reversals and upend our expectations, such as What Monks Say, What Birds Say, and, especially, What Nobody Says.

Why are there dozens of new “What ___ Say” videos cropping up, it seems, by the day? Some critics chide the videos for being bigoted, petty, and for promoting stereotypes. I’m sure some are guilty of such crimes, but this is too significant a fad to write off merely as mean-spirited nonsense.

What can we learn from watching them? What do they teach us about ourselves?

How others see us? Our prejudices against others? Don’t some of these videos validate our experiences of being misunderstood (as in, perhaps, the homeschooler’s video)? Don’t they make us cringe at our own thoughtlessness, superficiality, or falseness, as in the “What Girls Say” and “What Christian Girls Say” spoofs?

I listen to and I hear myself differently after watching what I think is a credible send-up in “What Girls Say.”

· “Can you do me a huge favor?”
· “Can you turn it up a bit?”
· “Can you turn it down a bit?”
· “I’m not even joking right now.”

As I cringe at the verisimilitude of that one, I think of my two daughters. What am I modeling for them? Being empowered to speak the truth? Uncertainty? What do they hear me say over and over, say so often that I don’t even notice I’m speaking the words?

What would they say if they were to make a parody of their mother’s oft-repeated phrases? Am I chattering on like a stabbing sword – to reference Proverbs 12:18 – or is my speech wise and capable of healing? What’s worth talking about?

At the conclusion of Into the Woods, the witch reflects on having raised Rapunzel and sings the chilling lyrics:

“Careful the things you say.
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see and learn
Children may not obey, but children will listen…”

“Things” we say reveal the condition and yearnings of our souls. I appreciate the “What People Say” videos for their humor – and for the needed reminder they provide: What we find ourselves saying most often is a window into the state of our hearts.

Jennifer Grant is the author of Love You More: The Divine Surprise of Adopting My Daughter and the upcoming MOMumental: Adventures in the Messy Art of Raising a Family. Find her online at jennifergrant.com.

Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament: Nancy Guthrie on Her Newest Bible Study

For some, the prospect of studying the Old Testament appears daunting and quite boring. But in recent years, theologians, pastors, and Bible teachers have for laity begun connecting Christ to the Old Testament, seeing him in everything from the Levitical laws to the laments of the Psalms. Nancy Guthrie has undertaken the task of showing how the entire Bible centers on the hope of the Messiah, currently writing five 10-week Bible studies called Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament.

An accomplished author, Guthrie attends and teaches at Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, and contributes to The Gospel Coalition. In addition to her writing, Guthrie and her husband, David, also host Respite Retreat for couples who have experienced the death of a child. She graciously spoke with Her.meneutics about her most recent study, The Wisdom of God: Seeing Jesus in the Psalms and Wisdom Books, the second in the Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament series. The study will be available from Crossway Books at the end of this month.

You are a prolific author. How did your newest Bible study series come about?
I grew up in church, worked in Christian publishing for over 20 years, and have been in Bible studies for as long as I can remember. But I began to grasp the big picture story of the Bible only a few years ago, when I became gripped by a scene described in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 24:27). It caused me to reconsider how I have understood the Old Testament for most of my life. I spent a year working through the Old Testament, which developed in me a passion to create materials for Bible study groups to understand how Jesus is pictured in its people and patterns, how he is anticipated in its celebrations and songs, and how he is the answer to all of its unanswered questions and unmet needs.

This is your second book in the series. What led you to choose the Psalms and Wisdom books for the second study?
Genesis and Psalms are favorites for small-group Bible study. The narrative story of Genesis is very different from the drama, poetry, and proverb of Wisdom Literature, so this second study reveals Christ in very different but in compelling and beautiful ways.

We tend to see the Bible’s wisdom literature, especially Proverbs, as a moralistic guidebook for living. What and who influenced your understanding of all the wisdom literature as really being about Christ—the wise one?
I have discovered a number of incredible theologians and Bible teachers who have a solid grasp on biblical theology and are gospel-centered, as opposed to a mostly moralistic or doctrinal approach to the Bible. My best help on this particular book seemed to come from preachers with foreign accents, such as Graeme Goldsworthy, John Woodhouse, Liam Goligher, Andrew Jones, Christopher Ash, and Sinclair Ferguson. [Reformed blogger] Kevin DeYoung doesn’t exactly have an accent like the rest, but his sermon series on Ecclesiastes was very helpful to me.

Many Christians refer to the Psalms as proof that believers ought to honestly vent our emotions to God. But you believe the Psalms “also show us that God intends to change how we feel.” Why do you feel like this explanation is important, especially for women who participate in this study?
Most of us easily accept that God intends to change what we believe, how we think, and what we will do and not do. But we tend to think of feelings as outside the realm of God’s redemptive purposes. We think that we just feel what we feel and that feelings can’t really be changed or commanded. The amazing thing about the Bible, and especially the Psalms, is that it not only presents us with thoughts to think and beliefs to embrace but also with feelings to feel. It challenges us to forsake our despair to embrace hope in God, and to replace our fear with confidence in God.

Your Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament Bible studies include a section each week connecting the particular passage to what is yet to come when Christ returns to establish the new heavens and earth. Why do you include that in each week’s lesson?
For most of my life, I’ve thought of heaven primarily being a place away from here, where our spirits go to be with God forever after we die, which is the typical evangelical understanding. But the story of the Bible shows that history is headed toward the redemption not just of humanity but of the entire creation, so that we will live forever in God’s presence on a redeemed earth. To reorient how we’ve understood heaven and eternity, we have to see it not just in a handful of passages about the return of Christ and “end times,” but rather throughout the whole of Scripture, and in fact every part of Scripture. When we see it from various angles as we work our way through Scripture, it completes the storyline of the Bible and solidifies our grasp on what is revealed about what is yet to come.

How has your own personal and teaching experience prepared you to apply the text to the lives of the people you are teaching?
I love sound theology, and I also love being real about life’s struggles and questions. When those two things intersect, real impact is made. So as I search out how a book or passage presents Christ, I’m always looking for how that aspect of the person and work of Christ meets a very real need that we all have. I figure if it is a need or struggle I have, I’m probably not alone. Sound theology, which is right thinking about God, provides a solid basis for the most compelling personal application.

John Piper and the Rise of Biblical Masculinity

We’ve been hearing a lot about masculine Christianity lately.

By now we’re used to hearing Mark Driscoll campaign for more masculine church leaders and expressions of Christianity; late last year, Reformed pastor Douglas Wilson invited Driscoll to his church to speak at a Grace Agenda conference—a gathering that tactfully segregated women by offering a separate pre-conference just for them. In turn, Wilson spoke at John Piper’s Desiring God Pastor’s Conference, which this year had an explicitly masculine theme: “God, Manhood & Ministry: Building Men for the Glory of God.” No stranger to strong statements in the blogo-twittersphere, Piper again drew attention by declaring that “God has given Christianity a masculine feel.”

The insistence that Christianity ought to be muscular is often traced to American evangelists of the early 20th century, such as Billy Sunday and D. L. Moody, who emphasized sports and physical strength to counter the perception that Christians were soft and docile, in other words, feminine: a concept attributed to the 19th-century idealization of women as keepers of home and hearth and nurturer of the family’s spiritual well-being. But even then, the perception of “spirituality” as “feminine” was itself a relatively new idea. For millennia, Western ideology tended to understand women as being grounded in body and matter, while men dealt in the realm of the mind and spirit.

If nothing else, it’s clear that masculinity and femininity are not fixed and eternal sets of attributes, but are by and large culturally defined, and always changing. For example, blue was once more closely associated with “feminine” while pink was associated with “masculine.” In parts of Europe, it’s still not unusual for men to greet one another with kisses; in India, you might see two male friends walking arm in arm. And we have many examples of renaissance poetry—essentially love poetry—written by and for non-homosexual males who were close friends. By looking to other times and other places, we can see that masculinity is a way of behaving culturally that looks different in different times and places.

In their 1990 book, What’s the Difference?: Manhood and Womanhood Defined according to the Bible, John Piper and Elisabeth Elliot acknowledge that the cultural forms of masculinity and femininity can change, but insist that Christians ought to respect, not challenge, these cultural codes, including things like, “Who speaks for the couple at the restaurant?” and “Who drives the car? . . . Mature masculinity will not try to communicate that such things don’t matter.” I doubt such displays of masculinity—driving the car, speaking to restaurant staff—held much more cultural sway in 1990 than they do today, so it’s worth asking: Why do Piper, Wilson, Driscoll, and other neo-Reformed leaders feel the need repeatedly to defend masculinity, often stridently?

I think it’s because they see the handwriting on the wall. Women are half the church (maybe more than half), and women’s voices are being heard loud and clear in and out of pulpits around the country. While gains for women are uneven, most studies show a slow but steady increase for women in church leadership. And that’s just inside the church: Outside, U.S. women are outperforming men in higher education and the workplace. When men did represent the dominant voice in Christianity—as they have for most of church history—there was no need for these public performances reinforcing both male leadership and cultural notions of masculinity.

As to Piper’s specific claim that “God gave Christianity a masculine feel,” which personally, I take as a kind of whistling in the dark, I join many others in regarding this as patently untrue. Leaving aside Piper’s conviction that churches must be led by males—a concept that some Christian scholars believe to be rooted in the New Testament’s cultural context—none of the eight marks of leadership Piper referenced in his speech could be considered specifically “masculine.” Attributes like bravery in the face of criticism and boldly teaching scriptural doctrines in ways that press forward to wise application in life even when those truths are hard to hear cannot be persuasively put forth as qualities that are masculine rather than feminine.

A prominent Reformed church I once attended prohibited women from “teaching or holding authority over [men]” yet made a curious exception: the pastor of disability ministries was a woman. Consider the implications of this: Disabled men in the church were put into the category of women and children. And yet, the Old Testament does privilege physically perfect males as the only ones who could serve in the temple. However, as Thomas Hentrich points out in a scholarly paper on masculinity and disability in the Bible, Jesus’ ministry is marked by healing and inclusion. He reaches out and ministers not to “perfect” males but to society’s most reviled, in specific reversal of Old Testament laws and of society’s expectations. The King came as a poor boy to an unwed mother with a checkered ancestry including foreigners and prostitutes, appeared to smelly shepherds, was followed by smellier fisherman, was crucified and risen again, to present himself to women first, establishing a church in which the divisions of race, class, and gender ultimately are erased for “Christ is all, and in all.”

I don’t believe God has given Christians a mandate to preserve and perpetuate cultural notions of masculinity and femininity any more than God wishes us to adopt Ancient Near Eastern (or Greco-Roman) blindspots about (dis)ability, race, and social class.

I do believe God in Christ has given Christianity a redemptive, inclusive, good-news-for-the-least-of-these kind of feel. And that is glorious.

The Power of Choice in 'Downton Abbey'

On the last episode of the wildly popular PBS drama Downton Abbey, one character tells another: "You've broken the rules, my girl, and it's no use pretending they're easily mended."

The popular British import, set in World War I, portrays the aristocratic Crawley family and the cadre of cooks, maids, and butlers who tend to them, in all their relational and class-based drama. The show is all about rules, whether bowing to class structure or honoring commitments from the past. The rules present the extraordinary obstacles in this show . . . except that they’re not so extraordinary, really, and that’s one of the many reasons this show works.

Downton's surprise success is often chalked up to an unrealistic sense of nostalgia over an intriguing and lavish lifestyle at the turn of the 20th century, borne out by the inevitable market surge of "inspired by" books, clothes, food, and jewelry. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's easy to understand why this show is considered a soap opera that appeals mainly to women.)

But my favorite aspect of Downton is its emphasis on humans’ agency and accountability despite social and economic barriers. The characters are never excused for their choices by circumstance, class, gender, time period, or even the unfairness of the rules to which they so tightly cling.

Part of Downton’s popularity is its resonance with Jane Austen’s books and the movies inspired by them. As in most Austen adaptations, the lives of the heroines in Downton--women dress for dinner and idle away the day--demand improvement. The daughters cannot inherit their family's estate (a common theme of Austen’s), and society demands that they aspire to marry money because they cannot make their own and must preserve their family’s station.

But in many ways, a more apt comparison for the show might be the popular sitcom The Office (now in its eighth season), which nevertheless portrays the choices of characters who are resigned to work within a frustrating system rather than determined to rail against it. The world of Downton revolves around the stewardship of the Earl of Grantham, much like the corporate office, where the boss dictates the environment.

On Downton, both “upstairs” (titled) and “downstairs” (servant) characters' responses--to circumstances, to others--dictate their situations more than the obstacles or the attitude of the supervisors (particularly the earl but also the butler and housekeeper), who wield great power over the lives of other characters.

For example, one of the earl's daughters, Edith, turns bitter and unsympathetic as she rehearses her tightly held record of suffered slights and limitations. And the maid O'Brien, so certain in her expectations of mistreatment and indifference, is ruthless in her determination to do unto others before they do unto her. The earl’s eldest daughter, Mary, makes a mistake so shocking (proving that after all, she is no Austen heroine!) in raging against her social structure that it looms over her attempts to find happiness throughout the second season.

Downton might be a melodrama, but it is one where the characters are allowed to truly stumble.

In the second episode of season 2, which began airing in the United States last month, the earl’s youngest and most proactive daughter Sybil tells Edith, "There's something you do better than the rest of us. Find out what it is and do it. It's doing nothing that is the enemy."

It is a rallying call for personal agency.

Until that point, Edith had accepted that her circumstances, or the comparison between herself and her sisters (Edith is “the other one,” as Saturday Night Live put it in a recent skit), defined who she would be; she effectively chose apathy. But similarly, Mary, who knows what she wants, feared losing it and so dithered from fear and lost it anyway.

These mistakes provide simple lessons, though hardly trite since many women today are facing them. Many of us feel locked into situations where we are unhappy, either at work, in romance, in our family structures, or in our churches. We rage against “the system,” perhaps, against the attitudes of people around us, the opinions of those whom we care about, or against our own wants and fears. But our circumstances matter less than our attitude: our response to the obstacles we encounter. Whether we work inside the home or out of it, whether we are married or single, surveys and stories deal with the fact that women (and men) call themselves “unhappy” or “unsatisfied” with life.

Surprisingly, for me, Downton is a timely, and perhaps refreshingly down to earth, reminder that apathy is also itself a choice, and it’s just another name for indifference. The Bible has some choice things to say about indifference: the quality between hot and cold that God spits out. Jesus died to ensure our right to choose--mainly to choose life in him--and that is an inheritance (in Downton it would be called an entail) that we are given each and every day.

Watching (okay, greedily consuming) the first season of Downton, I frequently compared myself to the characters and concluded which ones I did not want to be. The undesireable characters were not the servants or the lovelorn, but those who faced with difficulty became spiteful or caustic.

Sometimes the only choice left when faced with obstacles is to continue holding fast to our faith. That's defined as an act of patience in the Bible: a choice, not a code word for passivity.

Fortunately, God’s promises are not just a riveting storyline. (One of my favorites: where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.) There is much more security to our faith in them than in believing Mary and Matthew will find their way back together.

Though I totally believe they will, and I can’t wait to watch.

Scared to Death of Death: Facing More Than Gramma’s Mortality

And Gramma makes three.

Almost.

Over a year ago, my mother and father moved across the country to live with my husband and me. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was supposed to come with them. But Gramma fell and broke her hip just before the move. She has not recovered enough to continue being cared for at home, as she had been before the fall. This meant being left behind by my parents when they relocated, much to my mother’s despair. But finally, months after my parents arrived, we were able to bring Gramma here—just not in accordance with our original plans. Instead of moving her to the room designed for her in the little home my husband built for my parents, we moved her to a nursing facility.

These events—waiting months for a space to open in the nursing home, followed by the nightmare of transporting across the country a frail 97-year-old woman in need of an airline-approved oxygen tank, an accompanying nurse, and proper identification documents (apparently, government agencies are not very sympathetic to the ways of the world a century ago, and those ways do not include the ubiquitous and standardized paperwork of today)—have given me a glimpse into recent headlines in my community predicting a shortage in services for the growing population of the elderly.

But more important, having my grandmother so near, within walking distance, also means that for the first time in my life, I have an up-close view of aging, death, and dying. Because my immediate and extended family members have always been spread out across the country, I’ve never really witnessed these things.

And to be honest, it really scares me.

It scares me to see this person—someone who once milked cows, churned butter, dug hands into soil, grew vegetables, hayed fields, stacked wood, raised hens, trekked two miles and back to church each Sunday (before she and my grandfather owned an automobile), and accompanied my grandfather’s trombone with the piano—now confined in her last days to a quiet, air-conditioned space with beige carpeting and peach-colored paint and wallpaper.

It scares me to help whittle down all of my grandmother’s worldly possessions—which once included a farmhouse, 140 acres, a tractor, a pond, a dozen Guernsey cows, a hog or two, a henhouse, goats, barn cats, a Boston Terrier, a piano, a station wagon, and decades-worth of accumulation that only those who lived through the Great Depression can understand—to just what fits into a 3’ by 5’ particle board closet, a bedside table, and a bulletin board.

It scares me to watch someone who loves animals, and who built an entire life around them express such visible, mute pleasure at the little stuffed dog in her room, the only animal she can have now.

It scares me to witness a once-feisty, robust woman—with whom “conversing” meant simply hearing impassioned, opinionated monologues punctuated by table slaps and boisterous cackles—become a quiet, docile listener who smiles and nods a lot.

It scares me to know that this strong woman—whose greatest outrage has always been that the card she was dealt from the deck of life was being a woman in a man’s world—has, finally, become like a child.

It scares me to see, every time I visit her, not only my grandmother, but room after room, row after row, of people like her, wheeling, in slow motion, ever-diminishing, toward death.

It scares me, in short, to see the process of decay and dying so close.

Yet I recognize that my fear and pain are not only about my grandmother, although they are certainly that. This fear and pain are also very much about someone else I love: me.

It scares me, whose clothes and shoes and books occupy rooms, to think of funneling all my earthly possessions into a portable closet; whose every moment at home is surrounded by dogs who never leave my side, to think of a life bereft of animals; who has labored with my husband in the years-long restoration of our beloved old farmhouse, to think of a life confined to half a room and a hallway; who runs 35-40 miles every week, to think of spending each day in a wheelchair; who was born a woman in a woman’s world and is glad of it, to think of losing my independence; who finds so much of God in the life of the mind and the body, to think of the erasure of both.

Yes, as I witness my grandmother’s journey toward her savior and mine, I am filled with fear—for myself, mainly.

But I know that watching her, being near her, offering merely my presence to her, is a gift—more so to me than to her. For I know that in witnessing the end of her life, I can learn how better to live my life. In watching my grandmother’s slow surrender of her life to death, I realize that only by surrendering all now can I be joyful and content when it is no longer mine to surrender.

Why the New Planned Parenthood Controversy Raises Old Questions

If you’ve been paying attention to recent events involving Planned Parenthood and Susan G. Komen for the Cure, you probably have whiplash by now.

First, Komen—the world’s best-known breast-cancer-fighting organization—decided to stop giving funds to Planned Parenthood. Two reasons were given: Komen’s policy against supporting organizations under investigation, and the fact that PP does mammogram referrals rather than actual mammograms. Said Komen founder Nancy Brinker, “We have decided not to fund, wherever possible, pass-through grants. We were giving them money, they were sending women out for mammograms. What we would like to have are clinics where we can directly fund mammograms.”

That story was greeted with a storm of protest by the pro-choice movement, and loud cheers from pro-lifers. Many of these pro-lifers, who had long been deterred by the PP connection from giving to Komen, started opening their wallets and checkbooks for the organization for the first time.

Then, this morning, Komen released an apology. Their official statement read, in part: “Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. . . . We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.”

(The investigation in question deals with, among other things, covering up and even enabling the exploitation of minors—an accusation that has dogged Planned Parenthood for many years. If that’s not criminal, I’m really not sure what is.)

While pro-choicers celebrated, many pro-lifers rushed to stop their checks. But wait, say some—it’s not quite that simple. The Post’s Greg Sargent wrote early this afternoon, “I just got off the phone with a Komen board member, and he confirmed that the announcement does not mean that Planned Parenthood is guaranteed future grants—a demand he said would be ‘unfair’ to impose on Komen.”

Pro-life activist and blogger Jill Stanek added on her own site, “[Komen’s] statement represents nothing new. . . . Nancy Brinker had already stated they would continue to fund Planned Parenthood’s existing grants through 2012 (one through 2013). . . . This is Komen’s attempt to get the abortion mafia off their backs.”

What is one to make of all this? One conclusion appears inescapable: The power Planned Parenthood wields is out of all proportion to the services it actually provides for women. When Nancy Brinker is on the front page of the Washington Post one morning pointing out that Planned Parenthood doesn’t even do mammograms, and by noon her organization is apologizing for having upset PP and its supporters, the question arises: Is this really about women’s health?

It’s not a new question; on the contrary, it’s one that pro-lifers have been asking for years. It’s long been a source of frustration to many supporters of the fight against breast cancer—I’m one of them, having watched my own mother go through it—that we can’t give to the leading organization in that fight without being asked to check our consciences at the door. Planned Parenthood’s tainted agenda includes the conflating of abortion with “women’s issues,” and they’ve done this so aggressively and effectively that they’ve hoodwinked millions into believing that it is the women’s issue of our time, inseparable from the issue of women’s health in general. Hence the widespread notion that for Komen or anyone else to defund PP, the largest abortion provider in the country, for any reason is to hurt women. Even if, as it turns out, all that most PP clinics usually do regarding breast cancer is to serve as an unnecessary middleman.

As an editorial in National Review Online explained this morning, “Planned Parenthood has worked diligently to associate itself with contraception and cancer screening, non-controversial and positive things in the minds of most Americans.” That mainstreaming has helped one of the world’s bloodiest businesses gain such a veneer of respectability that many Americans practically think of Planned Parenthood in the same category as mom, apple pie, and baseball. It’s a triumph of propaganda—and a tragedy for women, who are being fed a distorted, diminished view of what womanhood is about.

So Komen’s vow in today’s statement to keep politics out of future funding is sadly ironic, considering that that’s just what they were about to do for the first time. How their latest statement will play out in this highly charged atmosphere remains to be seen. But as we watch Komen, like so many other institutions before it, bend over backward to placate Planned Parenthood, it’s hard to avoid the thought that it’s all just business as usual.

Gina Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint.org and Dickensblog and author of ‘Bring Her Down’: How the American Media Tried to Destroy Sarah Palin.

Parenthood: Moving Beyond Facebook Envy to Reality

Over Christmas break, I became obsessed with the idea that I wanted another baby even though my soul knew this to be untrue.

I did not want another baby, but I'd read a blog that made me think I did. On the blog, a woman had described her birth story as an experience so spiritual it bordered on holy. A process that strengthened the bonds between herself, her husband, and God.

And here sat I, knowing full well that birth for me had never strengthened my bond to anyone but my anesthesiologist and Preparation H.

Her idealized description of giving birth had confused me so much that it led me to believe I wanted things that I didn't actually want.

In short, it made me jealous.

It wasn't an isolated occurrence. Countless times I've logged onto Facebook, Twitter, or my favorite blogs only to see vintage-filtered vignettes of other people's seemingly perfect lives. There are my friends, on tropical vacation (again). There are my favorite bloggers, wearing artsy duds, sitting in their homes that look like exact replications of the Anthropologie catalog. And there are their children, perpetually glossy-haired and rosy-cheeked and smiling.

Meanwhile, here I sit in my untidy home in the cold of January, wearing an old college t-shirt. My kids are fighting in the background. Reading these blogs, seeing these profiles, often feels like browsing a fashion magazine. It's fun to look at, but afterward I feel inferior and inadequate and ugly and fat.

The problem is that so often people's Facebook photos and status updates capture fleeting moments of happiness and, by nature of social media, pin them down like that one perfect moment represents what life is like all the time. I walk away thinking that if only I could do what this person has done, I would be as happy, always, as they were in that moment. Like all my problems could be solved by the perfect glittery scarf or a beautifully photographed craft hour. Like there's something wrong with the truth of a messy, un-photogenic life.

It's not that I don't understand the urge. As we learned from Facebook's IPO filings this week, it seems nearly everyone is on Facebook—people I went to high school with, former teachers and professors, current coworkers. My mom. And dozens of people I never see in real life. Of course there is the instinct to present one's best self. But all of us, collectively, posting only rosy images has added up to a great cultural misunderstanding. A place where we all believe that other people are having a better time than we are. That our Facebook friends have lovelier homes, nicer vacations, and children with lower propensities for tantrums and flinging the contents of their diapers than ours do.

There are times when social media exaggerates the pressure our culture puts on women to fit the elusive ideal of the Good Mother, to be nothing less than giddily over the moon with joy for parenting at every moment. I find a strange tension at times talking to other parents. We are willing to say that "parenting is hard," but there is a reluctance to go beyond that. A fear that we can't have it both ways—that mothering can't bring tears from its beauty as well as from its frustrations. That by copping to one, we are eliminating the possibility of the other. It feels threatening to say, “There are times when motherhood makes me want to book a one-way ticket to Paris, alone.”

After a few days of a confused spirit, I finally snapped out of it. Of course I was coming up short; I was comparing the whole of my life to one selected sliver of another's. It wasn't doing me any good. I had to trust that what was best for another's life wasn't what's best for mine. That my life was everything it should be, messy and complete, right now.

Nobody's life is as perfect as it seems on Facebook. At times when I've posted my own idealized accounts, I suspect that deep down I was really trying to prove my happiness to myself. Ultimately, it never served me, and it didn't serve others. When I start trying to prove how great my life is, I'm acting out of insecurity and feelings of inferiority. I'm acting out of the desire to keep up with others, which sometimes makes them, in turn, feel driven to keep up with me. It's a vicious cycle.

I can stop it by remembering I am not served by any pretensions. My hope is not for Facebook to become the opposite extreme—a place to dump my every negative emotion or petty frustration. The truth is that all of us, every life, has highs and lows and is mostly comprised of the moments in between. As mothers, as women, as humans, we are only strengthened by remembering—and by helping others remember—that not a single one of us is in this alone. That we are all whole in our imperfections. That we have all dodged our share of dirty diapers and dreamed our share of tickets to France. What serves my spirit is remembering the truth: every life has its own unique difficulties and that mine, while imperfect, is beautiful. Beautiful maybe because of my imperfections.

Beautiful in my acceptance of them.

Learning the Spiritual Disciplines from a Mormon Blogger

Jana Riess discovered she’d been changed by her attempts to practice the classic spiritual disciplines such as fasting, service, and prayer when she received a phone call informing her that her father was dying. He’d abandoned the family while she was growing up. She hadn’t seen him in 26 years.

“Here’s what I learned from my father’s sudden reappearance and death: all of those unsuccessful practices, those attempts at sainthood that felt like dismal failures at the time, actually took hold somehow,” Riess writes in her new memoir, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor (Paraclete). “They helped form me into the kind of person who could go to the bedside of someone who had harmed me and be able to say, ‘I forgive you, Dad. Go in peace.’”

The call came shortly after Riess--known best for her long-running Beliefnet blog (which just moved to Religion News Service) and Bible-tweeting project--had spent an entire year sampling spiritual disciplines, one per month, accompanied by her reading of appropriate companion spiritual classics. The result, Flunking Sainthood, made the 2011 Publisher’s Weekly Top Ten list in the religion category.

Riess writes with honesty and wit about auditioning these spiritual disciplines. During the month of October, for example, she elected to adopt a vegetarian diet, writing, “I’m going to spend a month avoiding my good friend, Mr. Porterhouse.” Though a concern for animal welfare sparked the decision, she decided to explore vegetarianism as a spiritual practice. She read Bonaventure’s bio of St. Francis, one of the most famous animal lovers of them all.

Riess learned that in spite of his animal-loving ways, Francis wasn’t exactly a vegetarian. She learned the same thing about herself:

After two weeks of semi-virtuous eating, I am seriously craving a burger . . . I don’t want any more waif food, no greens or granola. . . . I want fried chicken, and if I can’t have that, I’m going to have (the Golden Corral’s) macaroni and cheese along with green beans that were probably boiled with a nice chunk of ham for flavor. The specter of ham technically violates this month’s principles, but since it is only a suspicion, maybe I’m not morally responsible for the welfare of Wilbur, or whichever pig might be gracing my vegetables today.

Riess tackles Sabbath-keeping, hospitality, generosity, and more. Some practices root bits of themselves into her life as she moves through her year. Others, not so much. Her June experiment with Centering Prayer was an exercise only in frustration. Midway through the month, she writes, “Although I’ve failed to varying degrees at the five spiritual practices I’ve tried so far this year, I’ve never stopped cold turkey before. I am exhausted by the artificiality of trying to pray this way.”

Flunking Sainthood is a balm for Christians who’ve attempted various spiritual practices in hopes of becoming more like Jesus and discovered that transformation is neither quick nor convenient. Riess cheerfully admitted that a month’s trial wasn’t enough time for any of these disciplines to effect noticeable change, yet she was gratified to discover that change came anyway.

Riess’s experience shines a helpful light on the long-term commitment required to pursue spiritual transformation. I read Richard Foster’s classic Celebration of Discipline as a young believer, and sampled the various disciplines as if I were trying on clearance-rack shoes at an outlet mall. It didn’t take me long to figure out that there are no shortcuts to a disciplined life.

First-person accounts of the challenges and questions raised by a dedicated pursuit of spiritual transformation is an evergreen topic in books about the Christian life. Think Augustine’s Confessions, Henri Nouwen’s Genesee Diary: Report From A Trappist Monastery, or Lauren Winner’s Mudhouse Sabbath, to name a few. Accounts of re-forming our lives in order to re-shape our souls have been a teaching tool since Jesus first said, “Follow me” to a couple of pairs of fishermen.

Riess, who attended Princeton Theological Seminary, converted to Mormonism as an adult but knows the orthodox Christian landscape well. There are a couple of oblique references to LDS practices (such as not drinking caffeineated beverages), but her Mormon faith is not the focus of the volume. Instead, she emphasizes her desire to recapture the zing of a brand-new relationship with Christ, one that began during high school. She writes, “I just didn’t know then that it would be impossible to maintain the same passion for God I felt at that singular moment.” She came to her year of living Jesus-ly hoping she could somehow rekindle the flame.

Almost every major faith teaches practices designed to help adherents gain acceptance in the sight of God. Dallas Willard notes that for the Christian, however, the disciplines are simply a response to what God has already done for us:

“When we understand that grace (charis) is gift (charisma), we then see that to grow in grace is to grow in what is given to us of God and by God. The disciplines are then, in the clearest sense, a means to that grace and also to those gifts. Spiritual disciplines, ‘exercises unto godliness,’ are only activities undertaken to make us capable of receiving more of his life and power…”

The disciplines in themselves can not relight the fire. But they can re-form us so that when the phone rings and the crisis happens, we are able to access and release the charis of God. Flunking Sainthood is a valuable read for all of us who need a reminder that God’s mercy is bigger than even our most valiant efforts to honor him. Riess’s desire to reconnect with the Jesus she met in her youth is a prayer we in the church can affirm for her, even as we pursue Christ, failures and all.

Why I Let My Kids Cry It Out: A Response

After reading Elrena Evans’s thoughtful Her.meneutics post, “Should You Let Your Baby ‘Cry It Out’? A Christian Response,” it was clear that Evans and I absolutely agree on one thing: unfortunately the so-called “Mommy Wars” are alive and well. I firmly support Evans’s decision to parent the way that works best for her family. But in a spirit of peace rather than war, I want to offer a different perspective on the cry-it-out controversy.

There are two camps that use the term “crying it out,” and it’s essential to distinguish between the two. One approach imposes a strict parent-driven feeding and sleeping schedule upon very young infants. The medical community by and large opposes this approach, due to the risk of stress and malnourishment for infants (see American Academy of Pediatrics abstract and article) and because of the profound discouragement it creates for many new moms. So let me be clear: When I’m talking about “crying it out,” I’m not referring to this approach.

But there’s a second approach to letting kids “cry it out” that’s worked well for my family. The AAP advises that a parent “respond promptly to your infant whenever she cries during the first few months.” When an infant younger than 4 months is crying, it’s usually because she needs something. Parents ought to always do their best to respond to these cries. However, around the 4-month mark, parents can discern between a cry expressing real need (“I’m hurt! I’m hungry! I need to be changed!”) and a cry of protest (“I don’t want to be in this bed! I want your constant attention!”). I believe there’s some latitude in how we respond to protest cries.

Right around the 4- to 6-month mark for each of our three kids, we let them “cry it out” at bedtime in order to learn to fall asleep at a reasonable hour (see physician Marc Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child). Our approach involved several evenings of agonized listening, waiting for the protest cries to end and for baby to self-soothe and fall asleep (until the first nighttime feeding). With each child, within a week or so, we had a good routine—peaceful sleeping for baby, and some moments of peace and a return to quasi-normalcy for Mom and Dad.

God cares deeply about babies and their emotional well-being, but what often gets lost in the various parenting debates is this equally significant truth: God cares deeply about mothers and their well-being. From my experience, women can find profound freedom in being able to put baby to bed, even if the falling asleep ritual involves protest crying. Freedom for a woman to affirm that her marriage matters (time to relax with hubby), her emotional health matters (some space to ponder, process, be), and her physical health matters (time to get more sleep!). Parenting requires ongoing self-sacrifice, but that sacrifice ought to always fit within a theological framework that upholds biblical self-care: honoring the body, allowing space for prayer and reflection, receiving God’s gift of Sabbath rest, and so on.

 “God in his infinite mercy does not leave me alone to cry,” Evans wrote; and, speaking about her infant, “In time, I will introduce her to a Heavenly Father who is always there for her, immediately, every time she cries.” This is beautifully put and captures the experience of many believers. I heartily agree with Evans’s desire to communicate God’s loving character to her child through her parenting techniques.

The problem, though, is that God does sometimes let his people “cry it out.”

Alongside comforting Psalms and stories of deliverance, Scripture includes examples of God’s people receiving no response when they cry out to him for help, comfort, deliverance. There are times in Scripture—and in our own lives—when a heartfelt, gut-wrenching cry appears to be answered by silence, by distance, by nothing. The sentiments of Jeremiah’s lamentation and the psalmist’s plea are echoed throughout the Bible. Many devoted followers of Jesus have experienced a similar dark night of the soul—an enduring, painful sense that God is distant or altogether absent. (Read one woman’s powerful dark-night story here.)

My point is certainly not that we should make our children feel desolate and alone since many Christians sometimes do in their relationship with God! Rather, the comparison reveals the inherent danger in viewing God’s divine parenting as the model we parallel in our homes. Though we certainly should aim to embody godly characteristics, theologically speaking, we must tread very cautiously in comparing God’s divine parenting with our own limited efforts.

As a mom of three, I’ve come to rely on two essential survival tools for parenting: salt and grace.

The salt comes in our approach to the myriad parenting philosophies and theories clamoring for adherence. You are a good mom if . . . If you really love your child, you’ll . . . If you want to parent biblically, than you must . . . Enough already! Taking it all with a grain of salt, or maybe a farm-sized saltlick, enables moms to glean valuable information, discard what doesn’t work for their family, and move on in freedom.

And the grace: Of course we need and rely upon the grace of Christ, but I’m talking about grace for oneself as a mom. Way too many moms secretly struggle with feelings of guilt and failure. Parenting decisions can be messy and unclear at times, but have grace for yourself. If needed, toss the parenting books out the window, and simply love on your kid.

And don’t neglect to love on yourself. Motherhood is extremely taxing, adding intense and ongoing sleep deprivation to the roller-coaster emotions, post-pregnancy hormone fluctuations, and relationship-topsy-turvy that come after having a baby. It is okay—existentially, theologically, physiologically—to let your kid protest cry at an appropriate age in order to train him to sleep, so that you can lean back on the couch, snuggle up with your husband, laugh at a corny sitcom, before getting some sleep of your own.

Kelli B. Trujillo is the author of The Busy Mom’s Guide to Spiritual Survival and Faith-Filled Moments: Helping Kids See God in Everyday Life. She lives with her family in Indianapolis where she works from home as a freelance writer and editor and blogs about spiritual formation and family life. Managing editor of downloads for Kyria.com, Kelli is also a member of the Redbud Writers Guild.