Creative Counterpart, Book Recommendation

If you women would like to read a good book with practical ideas and advice for becoming a wife who stands behind her husband and enjoys the tremendous benefits of fulfilling her mission next to him (sub-mission, get it?), I have a book I think you will enjoy.

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Creative Counterpart was first published in 1977 in that era where so much about women’s traditional roles had become suspect and were tossed out. Linda Dillow has a kind, no-nonsense writing style that is firmly grounded in the Scriptures. She is a voice encouraging woman to think about the consequences of their attitudes and choices, both for their marriages and for their children’s futures. I appreciate her emphasis on developing the gifts God gives each individual. Women who say, “I am just a housewife,” or “I don’t have a job. I am just a stay-at-home-mom,” infer that they feel this is an unavoidable but somewhat inferior position to hold. Mrs. Dillow makes it clear that creativity, learning to excel in one area at a time, making things lovely, unleashes an excitement about growing and living well with your husband, in your home. There is no “just” in the job description.

I had never heard of this book until I stumbled onto my copy at a book sale for just a few dollars. Creative Counterpart  was an enlightening guide for me, an older woman teaching the younger in the years when Gabe was going back to school and I wanted to support him wholeheartedly, “but what about me?” In fact, I found Addy’s ultrasound pictures tucked into it when I pulled it off the shelf to do this review. The book was republished in 2003 with a study guide included. I think you will enjoy it. 🙂

Anatomy of an Excuse

I am not sure what happened to yesterday’s post, but all good excuses have three parts, as my children have demonstrated very ably through the years: The Reason You Need One, The Excuse for What Happened, and The Action to Fix It.

The Reason in this case was that I committed myself to a daily post in February. I let you down, my friendly readers who depended on me for at least some morsel, inane or otherwise, to prove that I am a woman of my word. I had planned to do a book recommendation. It was even started in my drafts folder.

The Excuse is long and convoluted. It was Sunday morning, Valentine’s Day. Somehow the morning got swallowed up in prepping food for a fellowship meal and combing three little girls with the wispiest, unruliest hair and stacking the cereal bowls quickly before heading out the door for church. I left my freshly pressed coffee on the counter, untasted for lack of time. Somehow the usher seated us up where only people with well-trained or grown-up children should sit and I ended up with three who weren’t exactly doing so well without a personal bubble of space while Gabe happened to have the two that behave themselves on his side. We shall have to strategize better in future.

I already had a dehydration/tension headache before lunch, then unwisely sampled the dessert bar because I knew my life would be better with one of my friend’s annual luscious salted caramel shortbread bars. It was a lovely dessert, and I paid for my sugar rush with an escalating headache during the afternoon service. I kept dabbing my Chill Out essential oils onto my temples, very surreptitiously, of course, while the speaker inspired us with visions of heaven. On the way home Olivia longed for a bit of the bar I was taking home for my Valentine who had already left for work. We decided to share it and not tell anybody.

With Gabe gone I didn’t have a guard at my bedroom door to ward off needers while I tried to nap. The rest of the day was spent moving very carefully so my head doesn’t decide to drop off or even worse, split right in front of the children.

I have lived with headaches for years and migraines were an unsettlingly regular part of life. Right after my pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving last year I decided to go off sugar and see what happens. After the initial withdrawal symptoms, I noticed something. It wasn’t weight loss, more’s the pity. I wasn’t having headaches anymore. For a while even one cookie would bring on a warning feeling that was enough to sober me up. I have been cheating in fits and starts the last month and thought maybe my prolonged sugar fast had sort of cured me of my sensitivity to it. Not so. Boohoo. I am cheerfully resigned to occasional lapses of poisoning at fellowship meals or birthday parties.

My children, bless their hearts, tucked themselves into bed early and I slept off the ache and wakened quite fresh. There you have The Excuse.

The Action: I will be doing a giveaway to show my appreciation for your forgiveness for my breach of trust(tongue firmly tucked in cheek here). The giveaway will actually be just because I like you all. You are helping my February fly by fast as anything. Stay tuned.

 

 

It’s in the Air

I could hardly suppress my amusement as I stood in the Hallmark card aisle and shamelessly eavesdropped on a phone conversation the young man next to me was having. He kept pulling out cards, replacing them impatiently, talking to his friend, “So how much would that cost? Eighty bucks??? I don’t have that much with me!” There was a pause while his friend gave him further advice and he restlessly plucked out more cards and replaced them. “Look,” he said, “I have only been going out with her for five months. I don’t want to be all smarmy. And I only have like thirty dollars on me.”

At this point I had an urge to pat him on the head reassuringly. He was shorter than me. No joke. But he had a little beard, so I didn’t think I was old enough or he young enough for me to tell him what I was thinking, “It will be easier when you have found her, Sonny. When you have walked life together for a while and you know she hates coconut candies and loves vanilla anything at all.”

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It’s hard to define love. Lots of people have done it well. I will just aim at one of my lists here. Love does things. Things like

  • buying salami and turkey for humdinger sandwiches so that he doesn’t go hungry his whole shift
  • stopping at Aldi’s for the stuff on her list, even though you are dog-tired and would rather just go straight home
  • plotting out the gardens and disagreeing about eggplant
  • clearing the coloring books off the couch so the other can sit to drink coffee
  • cleaning up the mess the dog made because it makes her really mad
  • buying sheets that don’t get pilled in the laundry because he hates how that feels
  • never eating pretzels in bed
  • kissing in front of the children
  • prioritizing some foods you don’t personally enjoy, like olives, for the other person’s sake
  • cleaning out the family car, even though she mostly drives it
  • dealing with the offspring’s issues because she is showing signs of strain from a day of too many spats
  • treating aching feet with peppermint lotion
  • listening without even laughing… at least until he/she thinks it is funny too
  • knowing exactly which books she will swoon over at the library sale
  • disagreeing kindly
  • remembering the hilarious things that happened throughout the day so that you can tell him about them
  • holding hands to pray

There. I wasn’t too smarmy, was I? 😉 There used to be these little gum packs with “Love is…” cartoons in them. I thought they were cute and terribly cheesy. But there was a lot of truth. Sometimes love really is a phone call in the middle of the day, just to say hi. There is so much ordinary life that fans the love affair of a good marriage. Gabe says his friends at work tease him about his lunches because they know I pack them, and I pack the best lunches I can because I love him. Somehow it all ties together, if you get what I mean. I want everybody in the world to see that this is my man and we intend to stay together all of our lives. Why not expend my energies to make it a pleasant journey?

And now, because one cannot have too much Pride and Prejudice:

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Stepping off the Chili Soup

My Blogging instructor says I should fiddle with my theme today, try some others, see if I like them better. I have a seasonal theme called Sunny Day or some such, which I picked because it was bright blue and cheerful on the summer setting. Every once in a while I remember to change it when the seasons change, but I did notice that there are still falling leaves at the bottom right now. I never will be a savvy blogger with all the bells and whistles, making money off publishing my ideas. Well, never say never.

Recently I have been made aware that the ad bar at the bottom of my posts is displaying some distinctly bottom-feeder ads, to “help defray the cost of a free blog”. I never see them, so I cannot complain without a screen shot to prove my complaint to the higher ups who are defraying costs. If you see an offensive ad, please message me or send me a screen shot at the email address on my About page. Maybe I will just need to shell out the bucks to remove all ads.

Still, as the people who have to look at the theme, what do you say? You ought to have a voice here, don’t you think? How much does it matter to you how a blog looks? My personal preference is for little clutter and nothing blinky. I love beautiful photos and clean lines but I like artsy stuff too. If you open the site one day and woah! everything looks funny, it’s just me messing in the back somewhere, finding my “voice”. No, wait. The voice is the way you convey ideas in blogese. I will be looking for the right ambience.

Meanwhile, would you like to know what I should be doing? I should be feeding my chicks their breakfast. We need to be very quiet this morning since Gabe got home from his shift at 4AM. Cold cereal is quiet. Yay! The children are used to the drill. They drift into the living room sleepily, pick up books and whisper because anything more gets a fast and loud, “Shhh,” from Mama.

After the silent cheerios crunching, :/ (seriously, I struggle so much with annoyance at the noises of people eating cereal) it’s downstairs to do school. I need to write out Gregory’s assignments for the next week. Usually I do them 5 days at a time and a week goes faster than you can believe. We started this system of assignments written down in a notebook by the day, where they have to show me a completed row of checkmarks at the end of the day before they may move to the next one. This has helped a lot with missing homework. It’s all homework around here, but I mean science questions not answered, English paragraphs not written, quizzes not done. (It happens.)

On my kitchen counter I have ingredients for a big pot of chili for lunch. Gabe’s parents plan to stop in and he will be awake by then. I really should be chopping an onion about now, as well as making sure the coffee cake gets baked in my oven that is slowly letting me down by taking longer and longer to preheat. If I want to get it done by lunchtime, I had better go turn on the oven.

I have a lot of steps to get in today, too. Gabe got both of us those personal fitness trainer wristbands that sync to an app on your phone. We are counting steps and trying to be more active. It’s February, you know, and not particularly fun to go outside here in PA. I walk around my house a lot, though, just picking up stuff on the floor and keeping an eye on things in general. Haha. Yesterday I logged over 8,000 steps which is about 4 miles. I didn’t think that was too bad for a SAHM! Still, it’s not fair to compare, because Gabe did over 12,000 and passed me up while I was either sitting in church or sleeping. Olivia suggested that I go to the bathroom really often during the meeting last night at church. 🙂

Gotta jog along!

 

 

Notes to my Younger Self

My assignment today is to pick a person and write to them specifically. I picked myself, 10 years ago when I had a three year old and a toddler and my days seemed to be much ado over very small stuff. I am writing this as it pops into my head. It’s definitely not some holy writing or aged-to-perfection and prayed-over piece.

  • It doesn’t really matter what else is going on, soul care is still the most important care. You might feel crosseyed in all your places from the weariness of not enough sleep and being a food source and having to constantly be everywhere, but if you keep your soul fat, you will be fine. This is not a season of heavy Bible study. Just let that go and find a promise for a lifeline for this day. Listen to an inspiring song until you know all the verses and they loop through your head the whole day long. Pray short prayers that come from your heart. “Help me, Jesus,” is a great start.
  • Lighten up. If you have never learned to laugh at yourself or at life, you had better start now. Maybe you find yourself fuming about the dribbles on the toilet ring. Think about it. You, the smart and capable woman who knows exactly where the Lysol wipes are, having a fit about something that will take 5 seconds to wipe away. It’s hilarious, isn’t it? As a bonus, your children are endless sources of amusement. They haven’t learned how to be sophisticated. Like the time your little girl asked if she could have some peaches. You were occupied at the moment and told her she can get some, and she sidled up a bit later and said, “Mama, my belly feels quite plump full of peaches.” That’s when you realized that she ate the whole quart. You had a choice of either having a conniption or just being chill about it. Who knew that a very small girl can hold 4 cups of peaches anyway?
  • Learn to kneel down to the level of short people. Take a walk and be okay with every stick and shiny rock is that is of such absorbing interest. “You are right, son, that stick does look just like a gun. What are you going to shoot?” Look at the jelly bread with the bite out of it and say, “Sure enough. It is a hippo!” Who really cares if they scrutinize their bread one methodical bite at a time? Don’t squish the joy just because you are such a grown up.
  • Slow down, like way, way down.  Telling a toddler to hurry with his boots is like saying, “Here is a great handle to pull Mama’s chain.” It is commonly known that children become all thumbs as soon as you start to scurry around. They can’t find anything and have to go potty and need a drink, etc. etc. Does getting to church on time really matter as much as a wounded spirit in a small person? If you have a time sensitive appointment, give yourself a half hour per child just to get out the door. It’s all right if it takes all morning to get to the store and buy groceries. Perks of the job: you take all the time it takes.
  • Accept the fact that you will fail sometimes. It is much better to apologize to your child promptly than to castigate yourself all day because you messed up and are such a loser mom. You may feel like saying, “You kids just really got on my nerves, and I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”  That’s a rationalization for your sin, not an apology. Instead you should say, “I was wrong to yell at you when you pulled the curtain down. I am so sorry. Will you forgive me?” Help your children to understand how to keep the air clear in your home by demonstrating repentance yourself. You will not lose face. You will gain respect.
  • You will be much happier once you stop looking for praise. Remember that day you tallied up the approximate number of snaps you had done up for your onesie-wearing, sleeper-clad babies in their lives? You were exasperatedly proud of that number but nobody else seemed impressed. This job is never-endingly repetitious and nobody else notices (the baby certainly doesn’t care) that you just wiped all the goo off the highchair for the third time today.  They really have no idea how hard it is to wipe things all the time. (Laugh at yourself right there and go eat some chocolate.)
  • Give it all freely, the face washing and the cup of water and the storytime with the same favorite book you read 20 times already. You wanted to be useful in God’s kingdom, didn’t you? Well here you are, grown up and useful as anything but it doesn’t feel like you expected it to feel. There is a verse just for you in 1 Cor. 15:58.  “Therefore, my dear… sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” Maybe it still seems odd to you to say, “Lord, in your name I offer this snack of fish crackers and milk in a sippy cup. Be pleased to accept it with my love.” But that is the reality and you will freely receive for everything you freely give.

I write these things to my younger self, but here’s the thing.  Every day I am still learning, and I have been working at it for over 13 years. It has gotten easier, just like any other job where you practice daily and get better at your work, but I am still learning and expect to keep on until I die. Mothering is not a sprint. It’s the marathon of a lifetime. I have a very patient Life Coach who loves me enough to not let things be easy all the time so that I grow stronger. I wish like crazy that the learning curve wasn’t so steep for new mothers, but just know that you will be given exactly what you need in the moment when you need it. He promised it. You are not alone. We are all in this together. Keep going, for Jesus’ sake!

And just for fun even though it’s not mother’s day, because it actually is if you are a mom:

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The Present That Is Today

It’s a giddy feeling when the day stretches out, ready for anything. What I mean is that we aren’t doing school lessons today, since the boys are on a field trip with their dad. It’s just the girls and I and our whole empty day! I vacillated between cramming it full of projects or sitting in a chair and reading for hours while the girls watch nature documentaries and snibble absolute mountains of papers with their clever little hands.

First things first, the lunches got packed, a very unfamiliar sensation for home-schooled kids and their mothers. It was a celebration! They mixed up grape juice for their thermoses. They put food coloring in their plain yogurt. They lovingly thought out and executed sandwiches. After the guys left I thought of the laundry and hustled a few loads in and out of appliance doors. In the eyes of the pioneer woman, I am already hopelessly idle. Surveying my domain, I realized that I should probably do dishes, since my bigger helpers are gone for the day. Then I started looking around and cleaning the place in my head. I am not falling for it, though. If I scurry around productively, I will not get to open the present that is today.

Coffee, I thought. Make coffee and write for a while. I bought a French press last year because I needed something small and easily stored in a little cupboard corner. Then I figured out how to use it, and in the process I found out I was quite edgy in my coffee making choices. Oh, just standing here, grinding my beans, you know. Why not start making it bullet proof? At this point I am equally happy with cream in my coffee, but there is an extra sharp crease in the day because I just blended it with butter. You may laugh. I just did.

Here is the plan as it stands now. In one hour we will walk out the front door, close it gently on the rubble that is inside, and head over to my Mom’s house because she is back from a month in Florida! Tea. Cookies. Chatting. Just chilling. I have decided on my version of a field trip. Have a great day, everyone. Don’t forget to celebrate something!

Blogging 101, Assignment 1

It was with a bit of trepidation that I signed up for these assignments from WordPress, seeing as I usually only write when the phrases start scrolling through my head. Sometimes it’s the middle of the night and sometimes it is while I am on a solo walk that I get inspiration. A bit of discipline is a great thing though, so I will introduce myself to the world today, along with my blogging goals, as I have been instructed. 🙂

As a little girl skipping to the Amish school where my formal education started, I had no aspirations to be a writer. I just wanted to learn to read those letters that fascinated and scared the wits out of me whenever I looked at a book without pictures. I was fairly certain that reading would be too hard for me. Fortunately for all of us, we had an amazing teacher who pulled out our strengths. Even though she had about 30 students in four grades, she noticed us individually and managed to pull us all together in a joyous quest for knowledge. Once I could decipher the puzzling groups of letters in the books about Reuben and Rachel, I galloped along reading everything I could lay my hands on, including cereal boxes and shampoo bottles. Literacy was for me a portal with endless vistas to explore.

It has been about 30 years since the Amish school days, but I still think of myself as a learner. We are all apprentices of life, whether we like it or not. I have failed a lot of exams in my life, but I get to do them over until I pass. There are plenty of activities for my hands to do and unending conundrums for my head to figure out just here in my little house with my family.

My husband is my best friend and my encourager. When we got married 14 years ago, we didn’t know much, but we did know that whatever comes, we are in it together. I stand by him and he stands by me. Don’t try to get between us or we will raise our hackles and fight. We are blessed with five children, ranging in age from 4 to 13. Those life exams I referred to are mostly courtesy of the children. 🙂

Some may think the life of a stay-at-home mom to be impossibly restricting, and I have to admit, it is harder than I ever imagined. While my children are smallish I am “keeping” our home. I mean that both in the Biblical sense of a woman who stays at home and in the contemporary sense of someone such as a zoo keeper who keeps the habitat pleasant and cares for the animals. I consider this my life work, worthy of all my consideration.

Part of that consideration is homeschooling our children. Some days I love it and some days I hate it, but it does work really well with our lifestyle. My husband is an RN with odd 12 and 8 hour shifts and mandatory weekends as well. Our school days are flexible and vacations are always off-peak season so we can stay a family unit. Speaking generally, we like learning about stuff together. Research reports are a little “meh” says my oldest son. My personal enthusiasm for practicing the writing craft has not yet translated to my children.

I process life through writing. When I started blogging eight years ago, it was mainly to stay in touch with distant family members. Then I realized that I really liked having this record of our lives and the developments in them. Eventually it sort of became a record of God’s work in my heart, and now my blogging is a mash of all of the above.

One night I needed a new title, since my first blog “Living and Learning” was not working out. I sat at the computer, sorting through the innards of my shiny new WordPress site and got an idea. There was a bookcase of children’s books right beside me. What better way to give a nod to my insatiable love of books than to play with a title? “Make Way for Ducklings!” I thought. Alas, every variation of the title was already taken. How about “Mrs. Tiggywinkle”? Nah. She was too prickly. I wanted something easy to remember, which is how I came to “Wocket In My Pocket”. Thank you, Dr. Seuss. I like that wockets are anything. We have wockets everywhere around here. Lots of them are fun to write about.

I chose my tagline “looking for the unexpected in the mundane” because that is what I do. It takes conscious effort not to settle down among the clods in the mind-numbing mundaneness of laundry piles and sticky floors. I am trying to dust off the ordinary and find the shiny bits in life.

Nobody was more astounded than I was when I started to get loyal readers. It is the best part of blogging: getting feedback, hearing that what I wrote connected with someone else, feeling that putting my heart out there may have cheered another person on. Blogging is scary enough that I have considered quitting altogether many times. But here I am, still getting up early or staying up late to try to string words together in a compelling way. Thank-you for reading.

Just Brilliant

What percentage of your days would you describe as stellar? I am talking about the days that went so well you don’t even feel like you need sleep at the end of them. I am referring to that span of time where everything felt choreographed to happy music and you just did a brilliant job.

As a stay-at-home teacher-mom, I can tell you that a lot of my days feel like I am stumbling over rocks instead of dancing on the beach. We have our brilliant moments at our house, where everybody likes the food, joins in to the conversation and laughs at the same things. “Ahh, this is wonderful!” I think. Then somebody gets their feelings hurt and I step out of the brilliance and deal with the earthbound problem of an unkind joke or an oversensitive person who can’t laugh at themselves. It would be more fun if the high spot wasn’t so slippery.

That’s life. It’s up and down and in and out and flat on my face crying for mercy and standing in awe with hands raised in worship. Remember Joshua? It happened to him too, and to pretty much every other person, ever.

Here I go making a lot of general statements. We crave excitement. We love the spotlight. We are important. We want to feel good about our lives. We need a lot of money to do the things that make us feel happy. We pine to go back to the beach the week after we got home. We want noble work.

We know we are made for brilliance. This makes it a little difficult to accept the very muddy world we live in, where the sparkle keeps rubbing off.

I asked Gabe how many ordinary sick people come through the ER doors for every spectacular chance to save a trauma victim. His conservative estimate was one hundred. Just routine broken arms, flus, addicts looking for a high, and then one person who is dying and truly needs the training and skills of the ER staff to pull him back into life. All the other people need them too, but they aren’t as exciting.

School teachers work this way too. For every child who really wants to learn and gets excited about a new lesson, there are a few others who have to be coaxed along in the very same lesson. They don’t get to quit just because  it feels like they are sliding backwards instead of gaining ground some days.

Anybody who ever came home flying high from Bible school or a missions trip knows how hard it can be to be kind to the commoners at home. They are so exasperatingly stuck in their own ruts and so mundanely humdrum and their needs are so silly.

Even newly-weds who vow they will never become dull and prosaic toward each other find themselves, at some point, working hard at their marriage to keep it fresh. According to research, the constant euphoria of the honeymoon would literally frizzle the life out of a body if sustained for years at a time.

Apparently brilliance isn’t sustainable this side of heaven. It isn’t the goal we should be working toward. Instead we need to lean hard toward faithfulness. The assignments in our lives will be really boring in some ways and nobody may even notice that we deserve a star for our chart. We act like little children, pulling the covers up over our bed in a slip-shod fashion, then begging for a piece of candy as a reward for our hard work. Really, the only reason we made the bed at all was for the candy.

Faithfulness does the steady, hard work because God is pleased by the heart that bows to His plan. We wouldn’t see any need to get up and keep on going if the crowns were handed out now. The brilliance is coming; we even get to see little bits of it now. It really is coming, but not just yet.

Joshua’s promises had a condition. Look at chapter 1:7-9.

7 “Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. 8 Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful. 9 Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid;do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”

It was pretty important that he follow his instructions, wasn’t it? I don’t know what yours are for this day, but they are right in front of you. Mine? I go to cook cereal and brew coffee. I will leave the tiara behind. Join me?

“Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho”

Most people have heard the children’s song and it is what pops into our minds immediately when we think of Joshua.

Listening to the record of Joshua recently, I noticed how much of his life was up and down. There were astonishing high points and some seriously discouraging lows. This was the Commander of the host of Israel! The one who led them into their promised land also took the time to write a book of how it happened and he was quite honest about the process.

  • He was commissioned by God to lead and given amazing promises. If you were told by God that you will inherit every place you set your foot upon, and then told, “Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened,” at least three times in a row, wouldn’t you assume there may be some hard times ahead?
  • He was assured by the people that they would obey his command “just as we obeyed Moses in all things, so we will obey you. Only be strong and courageous.” If you knew that your incredible predecessor had died with only a glimpse of his fondest wish because of the sin of frustration with his disobedient people, how reassured would you feel by this?
  • The spying mission on Jericho, the enemy city, was successful although a bit hair-raising.
  • The whole camp crossed the Jordan by a miraculous dry route right through the river. If you were told to get stones out of the river bed to set up as a memorial on the bank, wouldn’t you assume that this miraculous river crossing wasn’t going to be happening on a daily basis?
  • He made flint knives as he was commanded and had all the males circumcised to shake off the reproach of Egypt. Now all his fighting men were lying around the camp, moaning as they recuperated. Can’t you see yourself, keeping a close lookout in case any of the heathen decide to use the chance to create some havoc while your men were weak?
  • Weeks after all the amazing promises, they were still in camp, observing Passover. And then the manna stopped falling from heaven and they were on their own to find food in the land. There was plenty. It wasn’t that big a deal, just daily food for maybe 2 million people or so.
  • Joshua got to meet the Commander of the Army of the Lord, made visible to reassure him of God’s presence. It was a pinnacle in his life, with Joshua worshipping flat on his face.
  • Finally they got to march around Jericho. No fighting, just a long queue of silent walkers for six days and then again six times on the seventh day before anybody was allowed to shout. It was a glorious victory! Every other enemy in the land felt his heart melt in dread. This- This is what commanders want! Victory!
  • Flushed with success, Joshua’s advisors suggested they just send a small detachment of soldiers to take the next small city, Ai. “We got this, Joshua!” Unfortunately God could not prosper the mission because already there was disobedience stinking in a hidey hole under a tent in the camp. The attempt on Ai turned into a disgraceful rout by the enemy as the casualties piled up and now all the hearts of his own loyal people melted while the enemies perked up. Wouldn’t you weep and wail WHY? And then you find out you have to kill Achan and all his household.
  • The next big development was the alliance with the deceitful Gibeonites who really turned out to be near neighbors who were going to prove a pain in the neck for Joshua. If this were your strategic mistake, wouldn’t you just want to keep kicking yourself for a few weeks at least?
  • At last came the day that the sun didn’t set and gave them another span of daylight to finish the fight with the five combined armies of the Amorites, the day that God joined in by throwing large stones from heaven. At last another glorious victory!

I will stop there, the highs and lows of the first half of the record Joshua kept from those days. I just want to make a point here and I think it’s fairly obvious. Life is not one continuous rarified high point on the mountain top. It isn’t even supposed to be. As a teenager I always dreaded someone picking that song “living on the mountain, underneath a cloudless sky…drinking at the fountain… feasting on the manna from a bountiful supply… for I am dwelling in Beulah land.” I couldn’t sing it honestly and the theology is all skewed but I wouldn’t have minded living on the mountain top (Bible school or volunteer work in a short term mission team).

So what if the graph of your life seems to have a steady up and down trend? Joshua was a great man, not because he saw the whole story of his life ahead of time and decided it was worth going for it. Joshua was faithful. He dusted himself and a whole multitude off and kept on doing what he was supposed to do over and over and in the end it became a pretty amazing story.

Underwriting his entire story is that phrase from the Lord, “I will be with you. I will not leave you or forsake you. Do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” If this were you, wouldn’t it give you backbone to get up when you mess up? Maybe it would help you not to look around at the frightful array of the enemy and just look up and keep swinging your sword. This might be the day God gives you extra sunlight or chunks your enemy on the head with rocks or this might be the ordinary day you just keep walking through, doing the next thing.

 

… I know this is a bit of a dangling post but it’s Sunday morning and I will try to finish what I started tomorrow.