Unfailing

I came across this saying in Proverbs as if for the first time:

What a person desires is unfailing love (Proverbs, chpt 19)

As our neighborhood shepherds one of our own through spousal abandonment, this notion of unfailing love has clanged around in my heart and head for the past several weeks.

I think about the life-shattering pain of having a friend and partner of 25+ years walk out, and I think about the contrast with unfailing love. I think about my relationship with my parents and my kids. While my parents have loved me well, I'm coming to terms with the fact that they are in the last leg of their race, nearing their finish line. Death with bring their love to an end (in many ways, but not all perhaps.) When I look at my kids, I wonder if they know that I want to love them despite what they do because Jesus loves me despite what I do? I'm not very good at it, mine is a very much failing love.

Upon reflection, so many things in life remind me of this thirst for unfailing love, an insatiable thirst. Except in Jesus. Now that I've been meditating on unfailing love, I'm finding that the Bible refers to the unfailing love of God all the time. The Jesus Storybook Bible calls it something like God's "never failing, never giving up, always and forever love".

Anyways, I'll keep writing on this periodically, I think. It's been a very fruitful couple weeks thinking about this.

Picture books for young readers, a think out loud

Working for Zoobean and having two kids under 4, I have a lot of time to encounter and think about picture books for children.

Here are a couple points that I've been trying to sort through:

1. The reality on the ground in our home is that we have a 4 year old reading material for kids several years older.
2. Reports from other parents and the New York Times suggest that "real chapter books" are the goal, picture books are for babies and non-readers. 
3. We've heard rumors that publishers are responding to a market for young readers and are supporting books that are age appropriate in content but complex enough for children reading above grade level.

The "early reader" books aimed at children in school learning to read are really hit and miss in content for our daughter. This is true even within the subset of "early reader" books that don't just patently suck in content and illustration, particularly the movie spin offs. So within the subset that are generally good, the animal stories are better than that school oriented stories. Given that most kids learn to read after they go to school, I understand why there are school oriented stories, but in our situation, because she's reading before school there are references she totally doesn't understand, sometimes to the point where most of the story is inaccessible. 

Another young reader who's 6 months older than our daughter has been headed toward Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, that kind of stuff. I think whenever we get there, we'll have a better chance to see if there really are new books that are written for young, advanced readers. Thus far, those rumors are just rumors. At this point, just because our child might be able to read Harry Potter books, I don't think we're going to rush there. Just the other night, we had a tearful discussion about death, heaven, and such. At her age, she's just very literal and concrete. 

With that literalness and concreteness, my current strategy is to send her back into the regular population of picture books. This ends up addressing several issues. First, sometimes, she's just so enthralled with sounding out words, I'm not sure she's working through what's happening in the story. The pictures provide an anchor point for the content. 

Second, she recently announced that she only wants to read "Level 1" readers because they are for Pre-K and she's in Pre-K. The levels vary widely by publisher, but she's comfortably reading most Level 2 books and Level 3 books are simply taxing on her stamina, not her ability to read. So getting out of the "Level #" books will remove this issue. Also within picture books, there is a wide variation in the complexity of content and vocabulary, so there are certainly books that will work for her reading abilities and emotional development.

Third, some of the regular picture books are beautifully illustrated where this is rarely true for early reader books. Our daughter is very sensitive to beauty and I want to foster that particularly for her. But I think that even if she weren't, there's a missed opportunity for keeping our kids engaged in multiple dimensions of beauty if we rush her to picture-less books. She'll be there soon enough and for decades to come. 

Anyways, that's our current approach. With such limited data and experience, I don't want to prescribe this for every family, but I'd love to see more families graduate their new readers of any age from the controlled "early reader" books BACK to regular picture books rather than making a beeline for picture-less chapter books. 

 

In my spare time...

The last six months or so, I've been curating children's books for Zoobean.com which will be open to the public in mid-May. Here's a blog post I wrote for them on some of our favorite illustrators:

Sometime during the seven years I trained as a linguist I went from a world-traipsing museum-goer to a life of words, words, and more words. Oh, and the occasional gesture and eye-gaze.

In my new life with little ones, I've been reintroduced to visual art and have encountered some wonderful artists disguised as children's book illustrators.

Here are a few artists that have stood out over the past 600-odd books we've looked through.

1) Zachary Pullen
We first encountered Pullen in The Toughest Cowboy: or How the Wild West Was Tamed. This was a fun book, but Pullen's art was better than John Frank's story. So I hunted for other work by Pullen and found Friday My Radio Flyer Flew which he authored and illustrated. Home run! (Speaking of which, he's also illustrated Lipman Pike: America's First Home Run King.)

Pullen paints wonderfully detailed caricatures from frequently odd, close-up angles that invites the reader. young and old, to enter into the world of the book.

2) Jane Dyer
We first noticed Dyer in Talking Like the Rain: A Read-to-Me Book of Poems. Her watercolors paired so well with the thematically arranged poems.

Then, browsing in the non-fiction section of the library we came across Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Cookies: Bite-Size Life Lessons. Rosenthal uses cookies to define abstract terms like modest, fair, and content. Dyer's watercolors of children and animals complement Rosenthal's text in a way that provided a context and opportunity for me to discuss important concepts with our four-year-old. Because she's starting to become aware of ethnic and linguistic differences and her own ethnic heritages, I also appreciated that the children depicted were from a number of different ethnic backgrounds.

3) John Himmelman
Himmelman's extensive experience observing and documenting the natural world is obvious in his renderings of animals. As my father-in-law commented about Chickens to the Rescue, Himmelman has perfectly captured "chicken-ness" on every page. The antics of the thirty-odd chickens are so engaging even my two-year-old frequently dumps the book into my lap for another go at them. We've read several of Himmelman's other children's books, but this is our hands-down favorite. This summer, I plan to take a look at his non-fiction "Nature Upclose" series.

In my late teens and early twenties, I chased down the abstract paintings of Kandinsky and Malevich, and as much as I enjoyed that, it was sort of a personal quirk and definitely a solitary pursuit. In these children's books, I've been able to share the experience of beauty and truth with two little people I love. It's fun to have them point out what they notice, eg. my two-year-old always points out the upside down chicken in Chickens to the Rescue, and for them to remember things we talked about the last time we read the book. One day I'll introduce my kids to Kandinsky and Malevich, but for now we're having a whale of a time with Pullen, Dyer, and Himmelman.

Outliers, part 2: Basic principles

As we watch our daughter develop, we wonder if she too will be an outlier and what does that mean for her and us? Here I mean that she seems to be doing somethings ahead of schedule, and I'm not excluding this possibility for our son, but he's not so startlingly precocious at the moment.

Because of my childhood experiences, I have gone through a period of mourning over this possibility concerned that being different from her agemates would bring her inevitable grief. But as I have processed my own stuff, I have also thought about foundational principles that I would like my child or any child to understand.

I think one such principle is that God created us individually for his pleasure and glory (see Isaiah chapter 43 for one expression of this). This was translated for me in a 6th grade chapel as "God does not make mistakes." What a life-giving message to hear as a preteen, one that I went back to many, many time as a teenager. I wish that every outlier who feels alone and "not right" or "not normal" would be gripped with the reality of a loving God delighting to imbue him or her with just such qualities.

And just as the Creator God gave individual attention to each person, a second principle I want for our children is that the Redeemer Christ died for all. Translated, this means every individual is of the same, glorious worth, bought back with the shed blood of Jesus. So for all the pain of being an outlier,  if you're out there in a socially approved way, smarter, faster, richer, more beautiful, etc. it's easy to believe that you're more special. And that, of course, is bupkis.

If we can communicate these two principles to our kids, I think their hearts will be well-prepared to handle life.

UPDATE: links to Part 1 & Part 3

Effort and faith

I think a lot about what's my part and what's God's part. Like when it comes to becoming a mother who is kind to her kids, what's my part and what's God part? Kindness is very hard to fake, in my mind. So it's probably going to involve an inward reorientation and that always makes me think of something God has to do.

Lately, the Dallas Willard stuff has been making me think hard about what's my part. Willard's model for change requires "VIM": Vision, Intention, & Means. What vision do I have about my relationship with my children? For starters, I want them to experience grace from me that they can hook up to the grace they've received from God. I can't imagine memories of their mom yelling impatiently at them is really going to help. As I understand it, by intention Willard means the focus of our will. When I come to the point of yelling or not yelling, will I force my will to override my emotions and choose kindness?  Means, in the case, the means are very easy. My vocal cords and lungs can modulate my volume and my tone easily. There's no physical reason why I have to yell.

This notion of forcing the will to override emotions is the most unnatural part of this to me. It feels a little godless, like all I'm going to do is muscle up and sit on my yell button so I can't hit it. But as I think about it, for my example, it's probably the place where I need to be most disciplined about calling God into the process. "God, help me to carry through with not yelling, with having an attitude of kindness."

I think I question the what's my part, what's God's part because God is so obviously more able. So why should I expend my puny effort or how can I believe  that my relatively puny effort will be necessary or productive? Here I think the answer is that I need to ruthlessly apply my effort not because it is big in God's world but because it is big in my world. My efforts represent my desire for "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." Is it more important for me to get my way, or is it more important for God's will to prevail, and surely his will is for me to be kind to my children? Who sits on the throne of my life? If I'm to allow God to sit on the throne and run my life then surely it's not surprising that I have to spend my effort to keep myself off the throne.

Lent: Giving up Contempt

It's that awkward time of the year again where Lent starts and I never know what to say, "Happy Lent?" That just seems weird.

Anyways, in brief, since I have dishes that need to be washed and a bed calling out to me, I've been listening to Dallas Willard's lectures on his book the Divine Conspiracy and one of this themes is a reading of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chapters 5-7) as Christ calling us away from contempt, arguing that what Jesus does in those passages is redeeming the contemptible. I haven't read the book, but the notion has given me pause.

So for Lent, I'm giving up political news which always stirs up my contempt-o-meter. I've done this before with a general sense that my news addiction was unhealthy, but this year I feel I have a bead on the problem: when I read news, I'm not really just encountering information I'm judging and condemning. It's ugly.

Sadly, however, the news is really the least of my problems. What I have realized recently is that the object of my regular contempt is my children. When I get impatient and raise my voice, when I feel I can't take it any more, what has happened in my heart is that I am holding my children in contempt. So while Lent is frequently about foregoing something and I am doing that, this Lent, I want to dig in an embrace kindness and embrace my children.

Harshin' my mellow

One thing I've been pondering lately is why I don't always obey God, aka "Do the right thing."

And when it comes down to it, in that moment, I believe my way is better or my way is the only way I know how to do.

The big thing right now is not yelling at my kids. I think there's a ton of insight in the Bible on why I should not yell at my kids. We'll start with the verse I work with my daughter on "Be kind, one to another, tenderhearted forgiving one another even as Christ has forgiven you." (Ephesians 4:32)

So I know that verse and many others, but I still regularly lose my temper with my kids. What's wrong with me?

In my devotional time this morning I read,

The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.The ordinances of the Lord are sure and altogether righteous.They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold;they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb.By them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward. 

~Psalm 19:9-11

When I first read this, I wanted to jump up and point it out to my daughter:
See! We're not harshin' your mellow. Obeying your parents as God has instructed you to do, that's gold, that's honey, that's reward. 

(Seriously, she bawls like we killed her fictional, pet kitten and served it to her for dinner. It's ridiculous)

But then, I realized this is ME. I think that God is harshin' MY mellow, that giving up my right to anger at my kids or at whomever will hurt me in someway. No, I've got to explode. I deserve to explode. Can't you see how bad he/she was to me?

But that's not true. And it's not a little bit untrue, it's completely untrue. Angry outbursts never solve my problem and any satisfaction I get from them are so fleeting and never worth the cost.

Keeping the laws of God: gold, honey, reward. Value, sweetness, true recompense.

God, help me to see how flimsy my "mellow" is, like dust in the mouth. Let me see your guidance as gold, honey, & reward.

Hope deferred

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. ~Proverbs 13:12

We appear to be turning a significant household corner. Our son appears to be ready to sleep through the night and our daughter appears to be ready to wear regular underwear and use the toilet on her own. It's only been 3 days so far, but man are we ready for both of those breakthroughs.

We're a couple months shy of our 6th wedding anniversary and if I had to sum up year 6, at this point, I'd say grueling. We are so tired. We never thought either of these milestones could take so long for our kids.

At the same time, I think I have finally made peace with becoming a mom and have been able to enjoy the deep sweetness in it. The pleasure and satisfaction of parenthood is very difficult for me to express. I have never identified with and never liked what I considered to be saccharine, pastel renditions of mother-child relationships.

The best metaphor for a mom-moment is a memory I have of a summer in college when I worked in maintenance at a conference center. I had spent the whole day outside in the dust and dirt. I was tired and sticky. And somehow I got back to the showers first and had the whole place to myself. As the drops of hot water hit my arms, I was fascinated to watch little rivulets cut through the layer of grime.

That refreshment after a long day of physical labor is the best I can do to explain what it feels like today to see our children growing up and hitting milestones we have been hoping and praying for these past months.

Super Mom breaks a leg

At 4:45PM last Monday, I had homemade granola about to burn in the oven, a roast on the grill, a house that needed tidying for guests, a sticky almost-3 year old, and a fussy baby.

In a fit of SheerGenius(tm) while I had my son on the changing table I thought, "He's half undressed anyways, I should bathe the kids." And then in a moment of UtterStupidity(tm), I left him on the table to turn on the hot water.

In the interim, my daughter wet her underwear, and my son fell on the changing table and started screaming his head off.

Two days, many miles on the road, many interviews with nurses, doctors, social workers, a blood draw, urine sample and several dozen xrays later, my son's broken leg was in a cast and we were done with the "suspected non-accidental tauma" protocol.

I had a lot of time to review how we got to the fall. At the end of the day, I'd say it was 2 parts pride and 1 part selfishness.

I like having guests and I really like playing with meats on a grill. And then there's MyAgenda which includes baths for the kids on Mondays, making more granola when I run out like I had that morning--even though I certainly could have had something else for breakfast and could have made more another day, and having a basically presentable house by 6:30 on Mondays when friends come over for dinner or church small group.

I knew when I decided to do bath time right then, that I was trying to be Super Mom. For that matter, I knew when I started doing the granola that I was being a little crazier than I needed to be. But I wanted to be super. To have a list that I could show my husband, "See I do cool stuff with my day too!"

It's pretty devastating to realize that pride can literally come before a fall. Especially when the faller is your cute little boy who has no business bearing the brunt of your inner ugliness.

What is amazing, however, is that I don't have to live in mom guilt. My pastor likes to use the phrase "standing under the waterfall of grace". It's a pretty phrase, but it should be offensive too. The apostle Paul wrote, "there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

That means that even though I screwed up, and I really did screw up, Jesus is not holding a stick over me and I'm not either. I am receiving a forgiveness I don't deserve; it's both-and. I don't deserve it and I am receiving it. I hope that kind of ticks you off.

We're about half way through Lent, charging our way to Easter where Jesus dies for the wretchedly ungodly and buys freedom for prisoners who deserve their sentences.

Hallelujah!

Thankful for the screams

I hate baby screams. My husband says I take them personally, so it's been a rough couple months with our infant son, although the past week has been a dramatically wonderful turn around. He hasn't been colicky; he just hasn't slept the way we expected him to be sleeping and our lack of sleep made, well, lots of things difficult. Among those things were being pleasant, grateful, and compassionate.

But yesterday I was talking to a mom whose 2 y.o. got a stomach bug so virulent that after a couple days she stopped walking. My similarly aged daughter darts around. It's hard to imagine her awake and not moving around (unless there's a TV on). But I remember when she was in the hospital in April and how lethargic she was as well. And this reminds me that as cranky as sleep deprivation made us, our son's crying was well within the healthy baby range.

Not only that, for a period, they were appropriate indicators that he wasn't getting enough milk. Now it took us a number of weeks to seek help and figure that out, but at least we had some kind of warning. How heart breaking would it be to have a weak, listless baby?

As we head into Thanksgiving week, I want to take a look at some of the things I've been bitter about and re-examine them. So first off, I want to be thankful for the cries of our son; instead of really mad that I'm not doing what I want to be doing which is usually sleeping or resting.

Book Review: Shepherding a Child's Heart

Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp, Shepherd Press, 1995. 215 pp. including scripture index.

Who should read this book
--Christian parents who like being told what to do and the 90s era culture wars.
--Thinking Christian parents willing to sift for nuggets of wisdom while dumping the junk

About the Book
This book comes in two parts. The first part is Foundations for Biblical Childbearing which is covered in 12 chapters with a summary chapter. The foundational principles cover topics like a child's spiritual development, the role of parents, the goals parents may have, and biblical methods including communication, "the rod", and an appeal to the conscience. The second part is Shepherding Through the Stages of Childhood which is six chapters covering three developmental stages: infancy, childhood, and teenagers. For each stage there is a chapter on training objectives and then one on training procedures.

There is an introduction that precedes all of this that seems very important to Tripp's ideas. As someone who frequently skims or skips introductions, it would have made sense to me for that material to be put in an actual chapter.

Chapters are typically not very long and have a half to full page of application questions at the end. The writing style of the book drove me bonkers having a tone of certainty and moral imperative that I find overbearing and misplaced. Words and phrases like "must", "hand-to-hand combat [for]...the child's heart," "The result is obvious," act like fingernails down blackboards for me.

Thoughts: The good
There are some principles in the book that I agreed with. The first is the premise on which the title is built, that is that the issue is the heart over behavior. The annoying, dangerous, correction-inviting behavior I witness in my children is an outflow of what is in their hearts.

Second, loving parents will discipline their children. We see that in Hebrews 12 and I agree with Tripp on this.

Third, listening to our children is equally important to speaking to them.

Thoughts: The ugly
I don't think there are overtly bad ideas in this book, but I do feel a lot of ideas are really awkwardly or weirdly presented. For example, on the one hand, Tripp writes that parents shouldn't think deterministically that anything we do produces automatic guaranteed results. However, a lot of his rhetoric implies that our children's lives are at stake vis-a-vis precisely what we as parents are doing. There's an underlying theme of fear in the book that I object to, an implication that if we do not raise our children the way Tripp recommends that the very souls of our children are at stake. And that's just not true. As parents, I believe we do have responsibilities that God holds us accountable for, but children have their own responsibilities and choices to make. And I think Tripp would agree, but he is unclear and inconsistent about this in the book.

Perhaps as a conversation analyst I am overly sensitive to this, but the dialogues in the book are really awkward to my ear. They are weird structurally but also in content. Here's the central example that bugs me:

-You didn't obey Daddy, did you?
-No.
-Do you remember what God says Daddy must do if you disobey?
-Spank me?
-That's right. I must spank you. If I don't, then I would be disobeying God. You and I would both be wrong. That would not be good for you or for me, would it?
-No.

To my ear, this sounds coercive, like God is coercing Daddy to spank and Daddy has no choice in the matter. As a kid, I would either hate God or my dad.

Putting aside the dialogue, spanking gets a lot of air time in this book. I am not an opponent to spanking although I did think that my parents' version of time out was extremely memorable and formative. (We had to stand in the corner holding our ears and squatting as if sitting on an invisible chair.) But Tripp sees spanking as rescuing our children from danger. So parenting isn't deterministic, but spanking rescues our children? Sigh.

Conclusion
Obviously, I really struggled with this book. I read it because a number of people recommended it and there are definite take away principles worth remembering. However, it was written in the early 90s and it has that vibe of fear and war with the surrounding culture. I would personally recommend reading something else unless you like wading through that stuff.

When you feel you don't fit in

Dear Children,

While it is on my mind, I thought I would address something I hope you will not have to encounter for another decade. I think most people at some point in their life feel they do not fit in. By virtue of your family history, you will actually not fit in. While there are more and more families with parents of different ethnicities, most of your classmates will not be in this situation. Certainly, we as your parents were not. But we both did grow up in a home culture that was different from the surrounding culture. And it is from that experience that I want to offer two truths that can be lifelines as you navigate these tricky waters for yourself.

1) God did not make a mistake when he made you.
2) You have an invitation to belong to God's household.

God did not make a mistake when he made you
As a young person, I often felt like a cosmic oops, that God had been distracted when he made me and that's how I ended up being a girl born to Chinese parents in the American South. Like wouldn't it have been easier if I had been born Chinese in China or White in America? Growing up, in the US I was never American enough, and in Chinese countries, I was never Chinese enough. You may feel similarly.

But something that helped me a lot was a chapel when I was in 6th grade where the speaker said, "God does not make mistakes." I don't remember the verse she was speaking on, but here is one to offer you food for thought:

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
~Psalm 139

The image here is one of God taking great care in crafting a life. God picked out your eye color, hair, nose, and mouth. And he built them on the genetic differences between Asians and Caucasians. Likewise, he knew you would have a particular cultural environment and has plans for that. Your ethnic background is not a cosmic mistake.

You have an invitation to belong to God's household
In your everyday life, you may feel like you don't fit in, you may be told you don't fit in, and you may actually not fit in. That's an awful feeling, I know. But this verse was huge for me when I was processing all of this. Listen to this:

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household,
~Paul's letter to the Ephesians

When you accept that Jesus's death and resurrection was for your sin too, you get a new citizenship and a new family. The spiritual reality is that God sweeps you into his family and loves you perfectly just as he made you. You have a place to belong. And this is true even if there are people actively telling you that you don't belong. And this is true even if the people telling you you don't belong are people who say they are Christ followers.

Now, I hope that you have a few friends who are also hapa. That y'all laugh about the weird, awkward things that come with it. And I hope you have Uncle Jonny and Uncle Kevin around to show you the ropes. But iffn you don't, I think these truths can carry you a long way.

I love you,
Mom

Stewarding what we have: Children

I have occasionally written about stewarding what we have and have always considered financial resources. But recently our daughter had another asthma attack that got so bad so quickly, I really feared for her life. It was a complete wide-eyed-mom moment at the medical check-in counter with a "Dear Jesus help them help my baby." She's fine now, but the incident brought me face to face with the mortality of our children.

As I've documented on this blog, I was slow to warm up to being a mom, but two years in, I'm all in. I am in the guts of mother-child relationships. Bowels might be more appropriate since this week we're back to potty training. This stage of parenting is so physical. There's a lot of hands on wrangling which inhibits abstraction. The diaper is wet or it's not. The spit up stinks or it doesn't. The plate of food is going in the stomach or on the floor or in the hair. Tickles result in full throttle laughter. Items are banged, slammed, and torn. I think this close physicality made me forget how thin the line between life and death is.

Being awakened to that reminds me that whether I spend a few more days and weeks with my kids or decades, their whole existence from before time into eternity is wrapped in the hands of God. In our overlapping time, however long that may be, I've been entrusted to take care of them as beloved children of God. On the one hand, this means that we've a much higher calling than to make sure they stay alive and learn not to be embarrassments to the family. And on the other hand, this means that God is particularly interested in each of them and active in their care and nurture so we don't have to bear the burden in our own strength and wisdom.

So the first step in parenting toward the cross is to remember that God is the ultimate creator and designer of these little lives. It's not about us creating our own little kingdom and our own family name. It's about realizing that like money, our children have been entrusted to our care for a short while.