Now that's enough

   ...give me neither poverty nor riches,
    but give me only my daily bread.
 Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
    and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’
Or I may become poor and steal,
    and so dishonor the name of my God.
~My father's prayer from the sayings of Agur recorded in Proverbs chapter 30

Growing up my dad would periodically tell us that his prayer was to have just enough and not too much. To be honest, as a teenager this seemed like shooting for mediocrity. Ah, how nice to no longer be a teen.

As I grow older and observe the world around me and observe the role of money in the world, I think I'm going to have to agree with my dad. Actual poverty is a grinding, difficult state (different from voluntary simplicity). And actual wealth guarantees nothing. I have directly observed that the rich don't always stay rich. The rich are not necessarily happier, and the children of the wealthy are not protected from being screw ups.

So what's the middle road? Well, I don't think it's an income level. Instead it's a heart thing. In Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount, he instructs people to not store up treasure for themselves on earth but in heaven because "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

Growing up, my brothers and I thought we were on the lower end of the money totem pole with our thrift store clothes, no Nintendo, and the careful way my mom bought groceries. But as an adult looking back, I see that my parents made a conscious choice to invest in things greater than "treasures on earth". Even when their income was small, my parents sacrificially supported their own parents, their local church, missionaries abroad, and us their kids. We didn't have new clothes, but we did have a meaningful Christian education for the first 8 years.

Contentment in our material life is a heart issue that's independent of what we own. The question we have to ask is who are we living for? Are we looking out for ourselves or are we "seek[ing] first the kingdom of God"?

I have a number of wealthy uncles, but one stands out. He's literally the millionaire next door with his Honda Accord, threadbare undershirts, and furniture not quite old enough to be retro. His latest venture? Going to seminary and becoming a pastor for a church an hour from his home because there's a Chinese community that needs one. While pastoring might be his swan song, he's lived a lifetime consistently serving others even in the busy years of growing his company.

Living with these examples, N and I are conscious that we have choices too. Where are we storing our treasures? Are we seeking God's kingdom first? So far we've come up with a few lines of defense in a world of unsatiable wants. First, we give unemotionally. We pray and then we lop off a percentage of every paycheck for our church and missionaries around the world. This amount increases with every pay raise. Second, we shun advertising/window shopping. I don't let the stuff in my inbox and N keeps it out of our mailbox. Third, we don't prematurely retire things that are still working. We've got cars, appliances, and computers that are getting long in the tooth, but we keep them running and are saving for when they do die.

So, dear reader, what's it like for you? How do you get to just enough and not too much?

15 minutes

I remember once before I had kids telling a mom who did have kids that I didn't know how to get anything done if I didn't have a 2 hour block of time. And she just kind of looked at me. And I looked at her back.

I am just not a very fast person. One of the reasons why I woke up early in the morning as a teenager is that I needed about 2 hrs to be ready to roll out the door for school. It was the getting dressed, thinking, eating breakfast, thinking, packing my backpack, thinking, fighting with my brothers, thinking. It was very slow and very comforting. Waking up and rushing out has always been unpleasant to me.

So I had kids. At the beginning, any two hour stretch I had was for sleeping. To get 2 hrs to myself, I have to pay for childcare. And I did that sometimes, but generally since I didn't usually have 2 hrs for anything, I didn't get anything done. Or I got things done just barely.

So, dear world, I have finally learned what everyone probably already knows, the power of 15 minutes. I used to fritter away 15 minutes as if nothing of consequence could be accomplished in 15 minutes. But the past 2 months, I've learned a lot about what I can get done in 15 minutes.

Every morning (just about) for the past 2 months, I've written 750 words of whatever. That takes me 15-20 minutes. So I've now accumulated 35-40 THOUSAND words. I've used this space to process thoughts in general but also for my research and other parts of life that need some planning. The practice of writing has made it a bit easier to write my current research project because I'm simply more accustomed to sitting at my computer and spewing words. Writing articles used to be very laborious because I labored over every word. Now I put them down with the expectation that I'll go back through and edit.

Also, I've been lifting weights in my garage for 15 minutes every weekday. After being accustomed to hour-long workouts in the gym, I wasn't sure that 15 minutes would be very useful, but I figured it would be more than nothing. Well, after six weeks of lifting every day using less-than-maximal weights, I tested my maxes. I set personal records on all the lifts I had been doing beating even pre-surgery records.

Obviosuly, there are actually two things going on. First is that 15 minutes is small enough to squeeze around my kids' lives. I write before they wake up. I lift while they are safely tucked in their rooms for quiet time.  Secondly, I'm doing these frequently, basically daily. And 15 minutes a day adds up. 750 words a day is 5250 words a week. 20 squats a day is 100 squats a week.

Vacuuming and mopping used to be huge mental hurdles until I timed them and realized they were 10-15 minute tasks. Now I think, it's not that hard to squeeze that in.

I'm still not a very fast person. I still like a lot of thinking breaks. I certainly don't string together 15 minute tasks into an HOUR OF PRODUCTIVITY!! But I think I've at least learned to value 15 minutes, actually treasure them as little bubbles of awesome. Better late than never.

Toilet Training

Dear Children,

You may wonder when you're older what it was like for me to earn my Ph.D and quit working to be a stay-at-home-mom in the same year. Well, it was hard. In my social circle, it wasn't done. In the larger society, people were writing articles about how women who received advanced degrees and did not remain in their profession were failing women at large. Even without that, it was hard simply because the life transition was so enormous.

So I want to tell you about an experience I had when I was younger which helped me make sense of this sudden change.

My first summer in college, I was in a training program that included  a communal bathroom  for 16 girls. We were put in teams of four. On the morning of my team's turn to clean the bathrooms, I found myself scrubbing toilets while my teammates were still sleeping. I was a very bitter camper.

I huffed my way through the toilets, the shower stalls, and the floor. Then I started on a long row of sinks. Somewhere between the first sink and the last sink, I realized that while everyone else was asleep, God was watching, that these were God's sinks, and that He was pleased. No one else had to know. I didn't need to snark at my teammates.  The bathrooms were cleaner, and this was something I could do for God's glory.

In the years since then, when I've found myself doing stuff I don't like or value (or others don't value), I've been able to turn back to that bathroom experience. It reminds me that seen or unseen, valued or unvalued, my doings can be a "spiritual act of worship" and God sees.

So those years when you were small and needed a lot of "unseen" care, I remembered that God saw and his value of what I was doing with my life meant more than anything, certainly more than faceless article writers. (This also meant I didn't have to welcome your dad home with a boring recounting of all the wonderful mom-things I'd done that day.)

Anyways, as you grow up and face the twists and turns of your own life, remember that God sees and cherishes you, and that you don't need to live for the pleasure of anyone else but Him.

And about you and me: it was hard; you were worth it.

Love to you both,
Mom

Jesus is for Losers

So I am a self-improvement junkie. I'm frustrated by lack of progress, and I really like hitting milestones. Last year I really got into weight lifting, and a big part of it was constantly setting PRs (personal records). It was cool to lift more and more each time I went to the gym. Life, however, rarely indulges my addiction.

Instead, I flirt with depression regularly. For me, depression is like that creepy thing in the haunted house that is eventually going to jump out from behind a corner and scare the daylights out of you. I hate depression.

I'm also a mean mommy. It's really obvious when you lift five pounds more than last time. It's not obvious when you've yelled at your kids one less time this week than last week. I can get totally lost inside my head about really dumb things. The most recent dumb thing was madly searching the internet for the best toilet tab/deoderizer thing. When I get lost in my own head, I am short tempered with my children and husband. It is ugly.

Thankfully, Jesus is for Losers.

Back in my early teens, one of the few times I got dropped off at Planet Music to wander the aisles of CDs, I found a Steve Taylor album with a song called "Jesus is for Losers". This song while musically unmemorable made grace make sense for me.

One of my despairs in my teen years was that I could not understand the book of Romans. This made me feel really stupid. So I'd read stuff like this in Romans 7, and it'd only made the vaguest of impressions:

...but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

In "Jesus is for Losers", Taylor writes:

Just as we are
At a total loss
Jesus is for losers
Broken at the foot of the cross

Just as I am
Pass the compass, please
Jesus is for losers
I'm off about a hundred degrees

And I got it. This was my first glimpse that the Jesus thing wasn't a self-improvement thing. The Jesus thing isn't about shiny, happy, happy all the time. Or in my case, academic all-star, well-behaved all the time.

Of course, there are moments of heart-bursting joy, of beauty that seems unbearable. But I'm a "mature" Christian who is still scared of the depression monster, who still yells at her kids inappropriately, who gets lost in the internet looking for the perfect toilet tab.

Twenty years ago, this song introduced the idea that Jesus is for us while we are lost in our darkness, before we get ourselves cleaned up. And by cleaned up, I mean clean like my two year old after he "cleans up" by evenly smearing his melted ice cream over both hands.

I've been thinking about this idea of "saying yes to Jesus". Initially, I thought of it like saying yes to a marriage proposal. Like YES! Definitely, YES! Woohoo. Let's get this party started.

But lately, I've been thinking that an equally important yes is the small, desperate yes. When I am depressed, yes to Jesus is the tiniest pinprick of light in my darkness, and it takes all my energy to offer it. This is the loser's yes. This is the loser saying with Paul, "What a wretched woman I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Jesus is for losers. Praise be to God.

The gift of belonging

You will never really enjoy other people, you will never have stable emotions, you will never lead a life of godly contentment, you will never conquer jealousy and love others as you should until you thank God for making you the way He did.
~Hufstetler in Calm My Anxious Heart by Dillow

The Hufstetler quote paints a very stark picture. It boils down to this: You can't live with others until you can live with yourself.

This quote comes from the 3rd chapter of Calm My Anxious Heart  which focuses on Psalm 139. A psalm prompts us to embrace the intentions of our Creator. In Genesis 1, the creation story, God looks at what he has made and he says, "That's good." In response this writer cries out in agreement, "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." He highlights the loving attention God lavishes on you and I from our bodies, to our thoughts, to our feelings, even to our habits. Despite having memorized this whole chapter in 7th grade, I later still struggled to thank God for making me the way He did. In fact, I wondered if he had been asleep the day I was born.

I was born to Chinese parents in the American South. I stood out; in school, in the stores, on our street. Nevertheless, all my closest friends in childhood were also Chinese. My friends' moms and dads were my "aunties" and "uncles". I merrily lived in this happy bubble of Chinese-American life until my teen years.

In the midst of my teen angst about seemingly everything, I remember thinking, "I wish I were Chinese born in China or American (White) born in America." The constant feeling of not fitting in because I didn't understand homecoming and Friday nights out and the Breakfast Club and sleepovers crescendo-ed into an inability to accept that I was not some cosmic mistake. God must have been asleep that day and gotten confused. A Wong Yuen-Ling should be born in China. And an Andrea White should be born in America. But Andrea Wong? What is that other than a mistake?

At 18 or 19, I finally noticed Ephesians 2:19, and it reorganized my inner sense of geography. I'd remembered the beginning of the chapter where Paul lays out the state of humanity: In sin, we were dead. But God, in his loving mercy rescues us in our utter helplessness through Jesus. This rescue is so complete that not only does life overcome death, but that old division between Jews and not-Jews is obliterated. Now here comes verse 19: "Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household..."

Paul was speaking to his friends in the city of Ephesus about their identity, but I needed to hear this about my own identity. All I could see what my own strangeness and alienation, the many ways I didn't fit in. I needed to know that whatever I felt about my status as a person in my community, as a person who belonged or not, in Christ I had new citizenship, new household membership. In Christ, I belonged.

Calm My Anxious Heart makes the point that if we knew how purposefully and lovingly God created us, we could give up some of the hang ups (or dare I say it, self-hate) we have about ourselves. That strikes me as right, but in my own life, the reality of belonging to God's kingdom through Jesus regardless of my own true and perceived traits has been the key to following the second half of the second greatest commandment: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Random things that have worked

Watch timer

I got a sports watch for Christmas that has an easy to use count down timer. This is both useful for working out when I want to rest between weightlifting sets for a certain amount of minutes and for managing kid fights over toys. When my kids used to fight over toys, sometimes I put the toy in timeout because I couldn't figure out who had what when. Now, I usually try to see if one is willing to let the other play for a few minutes while I set the timer. When the timer beeps, the toy is handed off. Frequently, by the time the timer beeps that "must have" toy has already been abandoned. But for some hot ticket items we have switched back and forth three or four times. Way less tears lately, and I love it. 

Broiled chicken "nuggets"

I did this a long time ago, but recently tried it again. It's quick and the whole family enjoys it. Here's how I've been doing it lately:

Preheat oven on broil setting

2 chicken breasts, sliced in 1 cm thick pieces, tossed in 2 tbsp milk

Breading:

1 c. corn meal

1/2 c rice flour (we have two gluten free eaters)

salt & pepper

paprika

cumin

garlic powder 

Mix breading ingredients together, dump in ziploc bag or tupperware container, add chicken, shake until coated.

Line a cookie sheet with foil and spray with oil. 

Lay out chicken and throw in oven for 4 minutes, 

turn pieces over

put back in oven for 3 min

check and add for another 90 sec - 2 min depending on how they look

Done.

Clorox wipes/equivalent

I was a cloth rag person for a while, but then I realized that some time after I had the kids, I also stopped cleaning my bathroom. The perfect being the enemy of the good, and having clean bathroom surfaces during potty training being a good idea, I broke down and got these wipes. You know, the stuff they advertise on TV. I have a stash in each bathroom, and it take seconds to wipe the surfaces down.