A Brick in the Valley

Not only can family be an idol, it may be the most common idol amongst Christians in the West.

And, remember this – - making something an idol is a sure-fire strategy for destroying the thing you idolize.

Pastor (and Iowa native) Steve Dewitt suggests ways family can be an idol.  Read his thoughts here.

My wife, Jamie’s, dad, Jack Limbaugh, came home from World War II in 1946 and lived the American dream.  He received an engineering degree from Iowa State and polio at about the same time, but by God’s grace, he and my mother in law survived and had a Christ-centered home.

Over sixty years later Jamie has a family the size of many small countries.  (She is the 7th of 7 and they have all been prolific; Jamie is the great aunt below feeding twins).

We’ve outgrown any one home, so we now celebrate Christmas at Thanksgiving in a hotel.  Our niece Katie summarized the event.  Each of these facts attest to how God has blessed our family.

35 women, 37 men

72 people including Grandma, a visitor & 2 significant others

3 pastors

1 missionary family

1 US Marine

1 legally blind man, who is a great Rook partner
3 named Jack, 2 Jeremys, and 2 Michelles
4 middle names ‘Jack’

3 college students

1 High School Senior

1 Published Author

7 babies who are Hayden’s age or younger

3 former University of Nebraska Athletes

1 Nurse

9 women who are taller than 6′

4 Tire guys

Representation from Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Minnesota

Metropolitan Areas represented: NYC, Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis

3 nights in a hotel

1 Great Aunt showing off her mad babyfeeding skills

4am Black Friday shopping

Read more: http://johnstonbabyfactory.blogspot.com/2009/12/thanksmas-2009.html#ixzz0YYDNxr4O

Take a few moments to watch this.

HT: Z

Both the Church (consisting of local churches) and the family are central aspects of God’s created order.

The Church (again I’ll say meeting in local churches) is God’s plan for this age.  We are a chosen people, a royal priesthood (Peter 2:11-12).  Indeed, the local church is as much God’s plan for this age, as the Ark was for Noah’s (Ephesians 3:10).  Recall that Jesus taught that a commitment to Him takes precedence over even immediate family (Luke 14:26).

At the same time, the family is part of God’s created order and continues to be singularly important.  Ephesians 5:22-6:4!

It is, perhaps, because the Church and the family are both central to God’s purposes, that we easily confuse one with the other.  Indeed, all of us are probably prone to one of the two below mistakes.  In which direction do you lean?

Either of these errors, misunderstands God’s plan for our lives and can result in tragic consequences (Galatians 6:7-8).

See also this post on the local church, as well as this one.

After we had Reuben sandwiches and a toss salad with cherry tomatoes and mandarin oranges, my family profited from this Bruce Ware quote and the chapter in which it is found.

Or think of it like this: because the Bible is what it is (it is the Word of God), it can do what it does (it is profitable to help us grow and be equipped for every good work).  But if the Bible were not really the Word of God, we could not be sure that it would work in these positive ways to help us to grow.  What the Bible is (the Word of God) enables it to do what it does (help us to grow).

Bruce Ware, Big Truths for Young Hearts: Teaching and Learning the Greatness of God, “God Talks—The Bible is God’s True and Lasting Word,” page 23

This daisy-chained into our 11 year old Ben wanting to know how it is logically sound to say that the Bible is God’s Word because the Bible says it’s God’s Word.  We talked about how if we used something else to prove the Bible, then what we used would be authoritative.  For example, if we proved God’s Word scientifically, then science would be authoritative.  Science supports the truth of God’s Word.  But, our confidence in the Word of God is not predicated on scientific proof.

Rather, Scripture is the self-authenticating Word of God.  When we prayerfully read the Bible, the Holy Spirit gives confidence that this is the very Word of God.  There is no higher authority.

We didn’t answer all Ben’s questions.  There were dishes to be done.

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As a family, we have a very simple approach with this book.  We read the chapter together, briefly review it, share prayer requests, pray around the table, and sing one song.  Ez-peezy-lemon-squeezy.

Okay, I am the one who has aged.

There has never been a prettier bride than on 8/12/89.  I am so thankful for Jamie.

Every year before our children start school, I meet with them individually, share one truth, and give an associated gift.

For example, when Allison started kindergarten, the bullet was, “God made you, and you belong to God.”  I gave her a little milk shake making device.  I told her, “When you make milk shakes with this, they’ll be yours.   Likewise, God made you.  You belong to him.”

When we got home, Jamie asked Allison, “What did dad talk to you about?”

She responded, “He gave me something to make milk shakes with, and I don’t have to share them with the boys.”

One can only hope my preaching is more effective.

All of which is to say, that I met with Mary Beth today to talk first grade.  The first grade meeting is my favorite.  First grade is when the great adventure of reading begins.  Mary Beth and I ate Snickers Ice Cream bars on a bench in Ropp park in Stillman Valley, IL and I spoke as eloquently as I possibly could to a first grader about reading:

Reading is the great adventure.  You can travel to distant lands or fly through the sky.  When I was a little boy I was Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone.  You will dream little girl dreams.  But, reading will open such wonderful worlds for you.  And, never forget, there is no book like the Bible.  Nothing else like reading God’s Word.

I gave her a little book.  She read it once to me.  I read it to her.  We came home and took a picture.

The observant reader will notice a package on our front door step, just beyond MB’s outstretched hand.  It’s a book I ordered that arrived today.  My reading adventure continues.

The values vision set forth by the Little House books is one worth showing our children.  But, as adults who live in the long shadow of the little house, we should probably also know something about the trajectory of the stories.  This might spare us from unduly romanticizing small living on the big prairie of modernity.  And, it might help us raise the right questions about the Little House series (Philippians 1:9-11).

I especially wonder about a deficient doctrine of the church, and, “yes,” I remember that Ma was excited to go to church.

Your thoughts?

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Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.

The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees.  As far as  man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods.  There were no houses. . .

So, begins Little House in the Big Woods.  I listened to my mother read it, plowed through it myself in my elementary years (though I liked Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone better), and have read it to children.  I’ve recommended it as a pastor.  Still do.

(Sadly, I watched the television series in which Melissa Gilbert played Laura and Little Joe played Pa.  I view any admission of having watched television as a sad one).

Given my investment in the Little House series, I was interested to read Judith Thurman’s article, “Wilder Women: The Mother and Daughter Behind the Little House stories,” in The New Yorker.  The article focuses on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s complex relationship with her daughter Rose.  I found myself reflecting on the influence of the Little House books on evangelicals.

Here is my question.  Those of us who were spoon fed the Little House books could easily list virtues the books teach: the importance of the traditional family, loving discipline, hard work, and perseverance.  But, I wonder how much we have ever critiqued the series.  How explicit is the Gospel, for instance?  What do we have to say about the restlessness of Pa?  How developed is the doctrine of the church in the series?  And, what part does a deficient doctrine of the church play in the direction things took for Laura’s daughter?  If we tell our children the Ingalls saga, should we also tell our children the Wilder saga of Rose? 

Whether or not you interact with my question.  Judith Thurman’s essay, “Wilder Women,” is worth reading.  It would be best to click through on that link.  But, if you insist on excerpts, it begins:

In April of 1932, an unlikely literary débutante published her first book. Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was a matron of sixty-five, neat and tiny—about four feet eleven—who was known as Bessie to her husband, Almanzo, and as Mama Bess to her daughter, Rose. The family lived at Rocky Ridge, a farm in the Ozarks, near Mansfield, Missouri, where Wilder raised chickens and tended an apple orchard. She also enjoyed meetings of her embroidery circle, and of the Justamere Club, a study group that she helped found. Readers of The Missouri Ruralist knew her as Mrs. A. J. Wilder, the author of a biweekly column. Her sensible opinions on housekeeping, marriage, husbandry, country life, and, more rarely, on politics and patriotism were expressed in a plain style, with an occasional ecstatic flourish inspired by her love for “the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.” A work ethic inherited from her Puritan forebears, which exalted labor and self-improvement not merely for their material rewards but as moral values, was, she believed, the key to happiness. Mrs. Wilder, however, wasn’t entirely happy with her part-time career, or with her obscurity. In 1930, she sat down with a supply of sharpened pencils—she didn’t type—to write something more ambitious: an autobiography.

Regarding Laura’s daughter Rose:

The transformation of a barefoot Cinderella from the Ozarks into a stylish cosmopolite who acquired several languages, enjoyed smoking and fornication, and dined at La Rotonde when she wasn’t motoring around Europe in her Model T is, like the Little House books themselves, an American saga. Rose’s published writing was sensationalist, if not trashy, but her letters and her conversation were prized for their acerbic sophistication by a diverse circle of friends which included Dorothy Thompson, a leading journalist of the day; Floyd Dell, the editor, with Max Eastman, of The Masses; Ahmet Zogu, who became King Zog of Albania; and Herbert Hoover, despite the fact that he had apparently tried to suppress an embarrassing hagiography that Rose and a collaborator had cobbled together in 1920.

And concludes,

Last June, Anita Clair Fellman, a professor emerita of history at Old Dominion University, in Norfolk, Virginia, published “Little House, Long Shadow,” a survey of the Wilders’ “core” beliefs, and of their influence on American political culture. Two streams of conservatism, she argues—not in themselves inherently compatible—converge in the series. One is Lane’s libertarianism, and the other is Wilder’s image of a poster family for Republican “value voters”: a devoted couple of Christian patriots and their unspoiled children; the father a heroic provider and benign disciplinarian, the mother a pious homemaker and an example of feminine self-sacrifice. (In that respect, Rose considered herself an abject failure. “My life has been arid and sterile,” she wrote, “because I have been a human being instead of a woman.”)

Fellman concludes, “The popularity of the Little House books . . . helped create a constituency for politicians like Reagan who sought to unsettle the so-called liberal consensus established by New Deal politics.” Considering the outcome of the November election, and the present debacle of laissez-faire capitalism, that popularity may have peaked. On the other hand, it may not have. Hard times whet the appetite for survival stories.

Click here to read the whole thing.

HT: Challies

What is the minimum age for marriage?

Mark Regnerus in Christianity Today:

What to do? Intensify the abstinence message even more? No. It won’t work. The message must change, because our preoccupation with sex has unwittingly turned our attention away from the damage that Americans—including evangelicals—are doing to the institution of marriage by discouraging it and delaying it.

And,

Unfortunately, American evangelicals have another demographic concern: The ratio of devoutly Christian young women to men is far from even. Among evangelical churchgoers, there are about three single women for every two single men. This is the elephant in the corner of almost every congregation—a shortage of young Christian men.

Try counting singles in your congregation next Sunday. Evangelicals make much of avoiding being unequally yoked, but the fact that there are far more spiritually mature young women out there than men makes this bit of advice difficult to follow. No congregational program or men’s retreat in the Rocky Mountains will solve this. If she decides to marry, one in three women has no choice but to marry down in terms of Christian maturity. Many of the hopeful ones wait, watching their late 20s and early 30s arrive with no husband. When the persistent longing turns to deep disappointment, some decide that they didn’t really want to marry after all.

Given this unfavorable ratio, and the plain fact that men are, on average, ready for sex earlier in relationships than women are, many young Christian women are being left with a dilemma: either commence a sexual relationship with a decent, marriage-minded man before she would prefer to—almost certainly before marriage—or risk the real possibility that, in holding out for a godly, chaste, uncommon man, she will wait a lot longer than she would like. Plenty will wait so long as to put their fertility in jeopardy.

Read the whole thing here.

Ken Myers:

One of my favorite subjects lately has been the relationship between the fifth commandment and youth culture. The fifth commandment seems to me to presuppose that human societies flourish most when there is intergenerational continuity and unity. So the very idea of youth culture is an attack on the assumptions about reality that are embedded in the fifth commandment.