Looking Back and Looking Around

Looking back, I can see how far my husband has come in healing. He has been in therapy, group and individual, for almost a year now. He is receiving medical treatment for depression as well, which is making a huge difference. It's not that he never slips back into blaming, abandoning behaviors, but he doesn't stay there long and it is happening farther and farther in between. The actual aggression is a thing of the past.

Looking around, I can see how much improved all of our family is, both in a personal sense and in our relationships. My son is really enjoying life now, taking on new hobbies, setting academic and personal goals. He's losing weight and getting strong.

My daughter is shining socially now, a whole new thing in her life. Every week she is growing and accomplishing new goals she has set for herself. We rarely argue. She calls me just to talk, sometimes for advice. She invites me to do things with her and accepts my invitations too. It is a relationship I now enjoy.

I am much happier now. I have more peace, and more joy. I actually have thoughts and feelings about my own life now. I am not always worried for my family and praying for them, because I know things are going to be okay. It's wonderful to have the freedom to think about my self, my future, my happiness. n_n

My husband smiles often now. Not always. Occasionally the depression takes over still. He is working through a lot of personal things from his own childhood in therapy, and it still casts a cloud now and then. BUT it used to always hang over his life, unrecognized and unacknowledged, driving him to alternate between withdrawing from everyone and striking out in seething resentment, mostly to me. That rarely happens now.

It's a relief and a blessing. My blog may change focus and direction as my own life changes focus and direction. I may even shut it down after a season, if I think it is not really serving a purpose anymore.

When I started this blog, I didn't know if we were going to make it or not. Now I am as close to sure as I think I will ever be about anything in this life. "Life is what happens while you're making other plans", so I am no longer one hundred per cent certain about anything these days. Age and experience will give you that perspective! =)

My spiritual journey is taking turns I never expected. I more fully want to follow Jesus than ever before, if that's possible. I have less confidence that organized religious institutions help much in that journey. I guess what I mean by that is that I don't believe pastors or preachers or seminary grads are any closer to knowing and walking in the truth than any other disciple.

I will always go to church: to share in corporate expressions of gratitude (worship), bear one anothers burdens, rejoice with those who rejoice, and remember the Lord's great love for us all by sharing communion with the saints. I will honor the work of the Holy Spirit in the church by allowing the Lord to minister to me through the gifts and insights He has placed in others, including the man standing up front. But certainly not limited to the man standing up front, or exalting God's work through him to a higher status than God's work in the "least of these my brethren".

I am digging into theology and broadening my field of inquiry. I am leaving fundamentalism behind. I recognize that it only hinders my walk with God and hinders the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ on the earth. I can accept fundamentalists as my brothers and sisters in Christ, well loved by Jesus, but reject their doctrines as rules taught by men that crush lambs and drive away all but the most resilient true sheep.

I hope my readers have been helped by following this crappy home school marriage's path out of misery and on to the path of healing. If anyone is informed to make good decisions, reject damaging doctrines and practices, and helped to a better life in any way, then I am glad I blogged so honestly about such private matters.

Peace and good will to all who read here, SS.

Darcy Said It

Darcys' Heart Stirrings

I will be silent and let a younger, wiser person write. =)

Across the Spectrum

I am currently reading Across the Spectrum by Gregory A. Boyd. I highly recommend this book to everyone, but especially home school parents and teens!

I remember asking my father-in-law once about fundamentalism. The media seemed to really have a beef with that word, and fundamentalists were getting blamed for all kinds of hypocritical, mean-spirited, ugliness in politics and society.

I thought I was a fundamentalist, yet I was none of those things. So I asked my seminary educated father-in-law a question. "I guess I'm a fundamentalist, aren't I? I mean, all it means is that you believe that the Bible is fundamentally true, right?"

Maybe it's because I am a woman, and I needn't bother my pretty little head about such things, but my father-in-law told me that "yep, that's what it means all right." Very simplistic and patently untrue in all that was left unsaid.

My father-in-law and I apparently meant very different things by "fundamentally true". I meant affirming the Apostle's Creed. Unity in essentials, liberty in all else. What my father-in-law meant was pre-trib, dispensational, Armenian, six day Creation, young earth, male supremacy, and substitutionary view of the atonement.

These are all areas where evangelical, Bible-believing Christians disagree. But most of us have only been taught one point of view, the belief of our parents and/or denomination (or non-denomination, for those who don't affiliate with other congregations) promoted. The Christian home school curricula out there is full of apologetics, yet always promotes their own doctrinal stance as Divine Truth. I have yet to see a Christian curricula yet that explains that there are any other Christian beliefs on the matter besides the one they are promoting as The Truth.

I have taken formal apologetics classes, but these also have only taught one point of view, other than perhaps mentioning opposing arguments against the other side(s) in passing. I have taken formal comparative religion courses through Christian sources, and they never told me the history of fundamentalism. (Did you know it did not exist before the beginnings of the last century? That it is wholly an American invention? That fundamentalism was birthed by a set of reactionary pamphlets against the modernist liberal German school of thought, which denied the miraculous? Sort of like "I see your Sadducee and I counter with a boat load of Pharisee!! Ha! Take that!")

In those classes I learned the history of Mormonism, Jehovahs Witnesses and other world religions. Over and over growing up I heard what was wrong about Catholicism. I heard about the beginnings of the Protestant faith in Martin Luther's brave dissent. But I never, ever was taught the historical beginnings of fundamentalism and what it meant exactly and how it differed from other Christian beliefs.

This book is a treasure because it presents all the evangelical positions on many of these issues. Everyone should know what the basic Christian evangelical doctrines really are, and the supporting and opposing arguments for each position. If you want to teach yourself or your students true apologetics, start here. Let them see the rich variety of opinions and also the strong agreement between the world of evangelical believers.

If you are going to teach your children apologetics (and I think every Christian should!) do so honestly. Teach the whole spectrum of doctrine and belief in the evangelical world. Do so without prejudice or bristling if your students decide the other side rings more true to them. Let go of rigidity, and let freedom ring. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty!

Faith Suicide (or is it homocide?)

This blog post started as a response to this blog post at The Wartburg Watch. The author of that post coined the term "faith suicide" for the phenomenon that the Barna group recently uncovered. The cold hard truth revealed was that 61% of young adults stop going to church once they leave their parent's home. Here is my reply on that blog. Comments that I added later as I edited it for my post are all in italics:

I am both horrified and and strangely encouraged by the term “faith suicide”. Horrified for what should be obvious reasons, since my relationship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is life itself to me. Strangely encouraged because at least some few people are starting to understand that it is the fundamentalist rigidity and poor reasoning that are responsible for what is happening to our youth.

I am a Christian home school mom. I started home schooling (as any home schooling purist would say! ;-) ) on the day my first child was born. I was attracted to home schooling as a nurturing, creative, possibility-filled, liberating way to raise and teach a child. All of this is possible for a home school, and many people choose to home school for this reason.

(I am a Christian, and passing my faith on to my children is as important to me as any Christian parent. However, it was never my primary motivation for home schooling, as home schooling is not necessary to passing on the faith. A genuine living relationship with the Living Lord of Love is the only thing necessary to passing on your faith. That is something all Christians should live daily, regardless of who teaches their children their ABCs.)


BUT, once you start exploring the religious branches of the home school sub-culture, especially the “Christian” support groups, curricula, seminars, etc., you quickly find that it is a rigid, doctrinaire, fear-based lifestyle. Ken Hamm rules in this world. Apologetics are taught in every spelling lesson, math workbook, history text, and especially in what passes for science education. The most popular high school science textbooks supplier is even called Apologia.

I am a curious person, and I watched closely the families that had gone before me. One thing I began to notice after only a few years in the home school community, was that children were not turning out to be the principled holy warrior world changers the home school prophets were promising. I noticed quite a few home school grads starting families awfully young and not according to script, i.e. out of wedlock, and certainly outside of mom and dad’s master plan for the lives of their young people.

So what was the religious home school community's answer to this? More control! Vision Forum sprang up, and scared parents willingly shelled out the money and started putting a stricter milieu control into the lives of their children.

And now, what am I seeing? Starting a family young and outside of mom and dad’s master plan is the least of the home school community's problems. (That can hardly even be called a problem, if one believes in a God of grace and a life of faith, now can it?)

Cutting, eating disorders, suicide attempts, substance abuse, and atheism are (some of) the products of this impossible to survive religious paradigm. These are real problems. The insanity of trying to live up to impossible standards destroys hearts. The madness of denying the realities of life and trying to distort it all to fit into the doctrinal constraints of fundamentalist demands takes a toll on young minds. The spirits of these children are starved for the unconditional love Jesus spoke of, yet is rarely manifested in the daily experience of rigidly religious families.

It is this rigidity of thought and coldness of heart that is destroying the faith of our children. 61% of our young people are leaving the church? Jesus said in John 6:37 “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.”

So who IS driving these children away? Clearly it's NOT Jesus.

Rigid ideologues are driving their own children out of the faith. They are doing so by relentlessly insisting on a more and more stringent belief system. YE creationism is at the heart of this movement, but is only one example of doctrinal demands trumping truth and damning any deviation from the family party line.

Ironically, the tighter controls they are taught are necessary to keep their children in the faith are the very thing that is causing their children to reject the faith. These youth are not rejecting Jesus, they are rejecting the false Jesus and his ridiculously narrow and mean- spirited dogma that their parents are presenting to them.

These same parents insist that anything less than complete agreement with the whole paradigm is apostasy. So when broken and discouraged young people finally realize that there is no earthly way possible to be happy and healthy in that paradigm, they choose apostasy. The teaching allows for no other options.

Tragically, those late-comers to this fear based lifestyle are calling for the rest of the church to follow in the footsteps of these home school train wrecks: Why Young People Are Leaving The ChurchThis author thinks parents need to dominate their children's thought and social lives more completely, and that will solve the problem. Insanity.

YE creationsim is responsible for creating more atheists than Darwin himself, from where I sit. And that is just the beginning of the problem. Total subordination of women, adults living as children under their father’s “authority” for the rest of their lives, no birth control, women can’t work outside the home, college is evil, it’s considered sinful to work for anyone other than yourself, the medical community can’t be trusted- the list of verboten thoughts and practices just keeps getting longer and longer.

Total milieu control and attempted total thought control of our children will not produce disciples in love with Jesus and passionately devoted to Him for a lifetime. When successful, it will produce automatons who parrot back what their parents and church taught them to say. Only God knows if that can even be called "faith". If you have never had any real choice about what to believe...

But mostly it will fail, and produce angry, defiant, hurting and broken people who will logically conclude, if faith in God is so weak that it requires total isolation and continual indoctrination to survive, then it’s a sham.

Well, I have gone on long enough, but it is a subject I am passionate about. It is very encouraging that others see how damaging and destructive this rigid ideology is to the future of the church.

Let's Hear from Another Home School Grad

More and more home school grads are blogging about all sorts of things. Like every other human undertaking, home schooling is not a perfect endeavor. There is a lot to learn from hearing what home school graduates have to say about their experience in home school. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so grab a spoon and dig in!
Kiery's Notebook

Saved

I finally watched the movie Saved, with Mandy Moore.

I had managed to ignore it for a very long time. When it first came out, I was still living under the guidance of Focus on the Family, handing over to the fundamentalist establishment my decisions about movies and television. I was still living under the ethic of avoidance outlined in Mark Buchanan's book Your God is Too Safe, chapter 11, The Ethics of a Dangerous Faith.

Ironically enough, that was already one of my favorite chapters, although I was able to apply it only within some pretty strict parameters. I was enlightened enough to put into practice what I meant to be an ethic of involvement that brought the gospel of grace into a broken world. I think I succeeded on some levels. I hope I did.

But I still was pretty much living under an Us vs. Them mentality. The world was very much not me, not one of us. "In the world and not of it" means something very different to me now than it did then. At that point, advancing the kingdom of God meant underscoring the difference between saved and not saved. I still had some idea that it was important to convince people of the truth of my religious convictions, and that, while praying the sinner's prayer was important, what really meant it had "taken" was their whole-hearted jumping into American religiosity with both feet.

I saw nothing dangerous or wrong in American religiosity, other than a penchant for self-righteousness. So I had no interest in seeing Saved, a movie which (I was told) made all Christians seem like self-righteous Pharisees who had totally mucked up the faith.

My resistance to seeing this movie was so strong that even after my son saw it, and told me I would love it, I bristled inside at the thought. Uh, no way. Besides I never sent my children to Christian school, so why should that movie be of interest to me? Totally irrelevant to my life, I thought.

Last week I saw the movie. I won't spoil the movie, but I will tell you that I did find it totally relevant. I found it so relevant, I encourage all Christian home school moms to see the movie. And here's why: the movie shows clearly that our children see our lives and our doctrine from a literal perspective, and it is often not at all what we meant to convey.

Oddly enough I found myself full of compassion for the antagonist of the movie, who is trying with all her heart to be a young woman of superior virtue but finds the reward she expected elusive. She works very hard to put into practice everything she is taught, but reaps no reward. In the end her frustration at doing everything right but having nothing go her way, leads her to jump in there and do for herself what God would not- take down her competition, remove the sinners from her world, so that she will finally get the life she has been told righteousness reaps.

Of course all that brings into her life is exposure and shame, the very things she wanted for those she saw as enemies of the faith. I loved, absolutely loved her final scene, which I interpret as a smashing of her fundamentalist idols. I like to believe it was the beginning of a new freedom in Christ for the character, that she would finally start to understand that God has bigger plans for our hearts than inhabiting a Christian sub-culture where everything is in its place and people play their prescribed roles without deviation from the fundamentalist script.

Other characters in the movie, particularly the protagonist, portray other ways our children misunderstand us. Actually, they understand better than we do exactly what we are saying and they put it into practice without all the dissembling and double-speak that keeps their elders from putting into practice all they say.

I am teaching a class in British Literature right now, and the martyrdom of Thomas Becket comes to mind. The king asks rhetorically, "Won't someone rid me of this man?" and his knights take him literally and go murder Mr. Becket.

I think a lot of the religious rhetoric we parents throw around is on the same level. In the movie, the protagonists boyfriend tells her that he thinks he might be gay. The heroine, believing that homosexuality is an abomination that sends people to hell, also believing her whole life should be dedicated to "saving" people, decides that God has called her to save this young man from damnation. How else to do this than by turning him to heterosexuality? She has come to believe, by giving equal weight to all she has been taught, that being heterosexual is as important to salvation as any thing else the Bible teaches.

I won't go into all the other ways the message the adults think they are giving out is not the message the kids are internalizing. Or rather it is what the kids are internalizing, but without all the nuance, experience, mental trumps and denial in which adults are so well-versed. (Like the pun? =)

Focus on the Family should have given this movie a thumbs up for parents and older teens at the very least. There is a lot that evangelical Christians can learn from this movie. It is a critique of Christian subculture, and as such it does expose the weaknesses without highlighting any of its virtues, but that is the whole point of the movie. It's a drama, not a documentary. I think it gets the message across well.

The message? It is far more important to live the Great Commandment than to load our children down with doctrines and rules to keep them from sin. Real life is too messy for a list of rules, and knowing which spiritual premise trumps which rule is not something we can anticipate and teach with doctrine. Better to teach and live the greatest of these: love God and love people. Treat them how you would want to be treated. Accept one another just as Christ accepted you, and not to argue. Major on the love God has for all people, the message of reconciliation of which we have been made ministers. Major on the message that brought joy to each of us when we first heard it.

At least that's the message I got. You may find something else. Certainly other messages are that Christians live messy complicated lives like everyone else in the world, and adults capacity for denial is larger than we want to admit. Both of those messages are supported by the movie as well. Take what you need! =D

Religion-less Home Schooling

I am still home schooling this year, my last student's junior year. As I sit here and write, my teens are in the living room watching a cheesy zombie movie from the '80s. If you told me ten years ago, when my children were in elementary school, that there would ever come a day that my kids would watch zombie movies in my house, I would have been very offended. Perish the thought! I was much too righteous for that! 0.0

Funny thing, my son is much happier as a home schooled high school student than my daughter ever was. That's because there is so much less religion in our lives than she grew up with. Oh this is a Christian home, so it stands to reason it will never be religion free. But less religion? Definitely. There is conversely a lot more of a sense of the presence of God, but isn't that like God? When we stop going about to establish our own righteousness, we find He was here beside us all along.

When my daughter was in her elementary years, there was religion everywhere in our lives! Morning, noon and night- religion. I used a major religious home school publisher for the background of our academics. I bought the Victorian era collections of moral stories for sale at the home school conventions, and we read them! I bought the Anabaptist moral stories too, and we read those. I also spent a ton of money at the local Christian book store, buying up all those evening devotional guides for children.

We studied the history of the peoples of the Bible first, before we looked at any other ideas about early man and early civilizations. That was our first set of morning devotions. As if that and the Christian readers and the evening devotions was not enough religion, I also sent my children to AWANA every week, in addition to Sunday school and church services. Of course television was very limited, but Christian videos and story tapes were encouraged! And yes, the radio was set only to the Christian station, naturally.

After AWANA Bible memory, we would have our own times of scripture memory. We would pantomime whole chapters of the Bible together as a family. I remember Luke 15, Proverbs 3 and 1 John 1 as favorites. Those family times were actually a lot of fun, and those words will no doubt be a light to my children's paths as long as they walk this earth. I wish I had limited scripture memory to those family times alone. Memorizing with laughter, fun and family connection was way more productive than memorizing scripture for stickers, patches and public honor.

Some of this religious activity honored God and drew us closer to home. Some of it would have been salt in the flavor of our lives, enhancing our relationships with God, each other and the world around us. But just like one can overdose on salt and ruin a dish, we overdosed on religion and it became very unpleasant.

Loathsome, even.

I never thought I would ever come to say that I regretted cramming religion into every facet of my children's lives (especially my daughter's early years) but I do. Do I love the Lord Jesus less? Not at all! Jesus is my life! He is the friend who sticks closer than a brother, my Savior, my Counselor, the Lover of my soul. I love Jesus more than ever.

But what I thought was life to my children, was not life at all. It was the letter of the law that kills, not the life giving Spirit. (2 Corinthians 2:6)

As I commented on Quivering Daughters:

Hillary, I love your writing style. It's so poetic and comforting. It helps to soften the blow I often take to my heart when I read your work.

You openly explain so much my daughter wanted to say to me, but feared my defensive reaction too much to speak. Instead she retreated into depression and despair, and I spent years trying to coax her out again. Slowly she opened up, and as she did, she became defiant, deliberately challenging us parents, "You love me, huh? Well how about if I do this? Do you still love me, huh?"

Painfully, shamefully, repeatedly - my pride broken, all my dreams of creating the perfect Christian child dashed- I would affirm- "yes, even still I love you".

I am crying as I type this. What was life to me- the wonderful Word of God- became death to my daughter. I think of Saul insisting David wear his armor to face Goliath.

That's what all the devotions and character training and constant quoting of Bible verses was to my child. I put an adult's armor on her tiny frame, and expected her to march around in it. I expected her to grow into it, and one day be a Giant slayer because of the godly training in righteousness she received.

Instead, the visor kept her world dark and constrained her ability to see the beauty around her. The weight of the armor limited her range of motion and wearied her constantly. Defeated, despondent, she simply stopped moving and collapsed, numb with failure.

Ashamedly I confess that I first saw this as rebellion. I would yell at her- get up! get moving! why are you so resistant?! Finally a friend mentioned depression, and I looked it up on the internet and BINGO. My precious daughter was depressed.

Well, it was the beginning of a road to healing, one in which I had to (and still have to) chunk out all my expectations of the "godly girl of virtue" I held dear. I had to (and still have to) remember our frame, that we BOTH are but dust, and that Christ came for sinners, not the righteous. This includes me, as I knew all along.

But it also includes my daughter, which by my training I had sought to make righteous. Imagine had I succeeded, how would she ever come to know grace?

Grace is not something we can train or teach. It is experienced, and it is only experienced by those who need it.

Well, I've gone on long enough. Thanks for writing, Hillary. Keep it up!

September 17, 2010 8:25 AM

My hope in writing this is that other Christian mothers starting down the path of home schooling will not make the mistakes I made. My hope is that they will not isolate themselves into "Christian" home school support groups, choosing only "Christian" curriculum, "Christian" activities, "Christian" television and movies and sports teams and museums and (as Steven Taylor wrote in the 80's) becoming so relgious that we'll "only drink milk from a Christian cow".

There really is such a thing as overkill in the attempt to share your faith with your children. I urge you all to think of your overt teachings about the faith as salt. You need it in your home. It is a must have. But it must not be overdone.

The covert sharing of your faith, the life-giving Spirit, is what you can't overdo. You can't be too gentle, too kind, too loving, too joyful. When your children see you joyfully singing songs of praise while you wash the dishes, that is the life-giving Spirit. In other words, be a living epistle known and read by all in your family (2 Corinthians 3:3). Let them memorize the feel of your hug, the way you delight in their play, the sight of you serving the Lord and your family with peaceful satisfaction. Above all, as Hillary wrote, remember that both we and our children are but dust: delicate, temporary, yet very precious to God.

A final thought to consider for all the Christian home school moms zealous for God who might be reading here, not yet convinced that my life experiences are in any way inevitable for all who choose religious overkill. Do you consider yourself totally committed to the Lord?

Did you get there by a steady, continual diet of religious instruction as a child, or by experiencing the love of God in your moments of weakness in life? Who influenced you most, a Christian who showed you mercy or a master theologian? Even if that person had a lot of Bible knowledge, was it their knowledge or their love that drew you to the faith?

If you, then, became a committed Christian because of the mercy of God to you in your time of need, then does it not stand to reason that massive amounts of religious instruction are not necessary for a person to come to love Christ? Take heed from Jesus' warnings to beware the leaven of the scribes and Pharisees, those professional believers who studied God's Word all day, every day. Their continual study of scripture blinded them to the reality of God in their midst: they didn't recognize the Messiah in front of them because they were blinded by their love of scripture. They loved their scripture/religion more than they loved Life itself.

Selah.