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.

The good news of faithfulness

We spent the weekend with our local church family hashing out God's call to magnify his glory by introducing people to life in his kingdom. We are 100% on board with the church vision that people in our city have repeated opportunities to experience the life-changing reality of Jesus Christ. We really struggle with understanding how our family is to participate in this.

In our year of "do less", we're hearing from the pulpit "do more". As we grow older and are more comfortable with how God made us, the "success" stories presented to us don't look like our lives. Whether it's true or not, what we seem to be hearing is that who we are isn't valuable. We need to be X. X meaning more extroverted, more exhausted, more what we weren't made to be.

As I step back and look at who N and I are, we're the un-glamour family. Professionally, we're actually reasonably accomplished; N has worked on some high profile video game titles, I've published a couple books. But when I think about our lives in among our neighbors and friends, there's not a lot of flash and bang. We're not going to win community service awards for hours at the soup kitchen. But our neighbors will drop by to borrow an egg or ask for computer advice. People from 5, 10, 15 years ago will call when they need a friend. In a dozen months, we've had about that many out of town visitors.

Doing less goes hand in hand with marginal living and allows us to steward what we have. Because we're not out running around every weekend, N has time to learn how to keep up our yard. This is important first, because it is simply part of being a good neighbor and second, because it helps us connect with our neighbors who happen to care about their yards and are way more knowledgeable than we are. Because there are "margins" in my life, white spaces, when crises arise as they seem to with some regularity, instead of being bowled over I can pray and contribute.

Our pastor reminded us this weekend that becoming a child of God cost us nothing (because Jesus paid it all), but that becoming a disciple costs us everything. I don't disagree. Following Jesus is about recognizing that we are dead, dying to ourselves, so that Christ lives in us. But these words coming from a go-go-go church planter easily sound like we have to burn ourselves out to become disciples. I know the Apostle Paul uses a lot of race and training imagery, but he also exhorts the believers in Thessolonica to make it their ambition to lead a quiet life...so that their daily lives would win the respect of outsiders.

Maybe if I could summarize our struggle it's that we are Appalachian trail through hikers who feel exhorted to sprint marathons. What we have to offer is the faithfulness of putting one foot ahead of the other, mile after mile. No flash, no oos and ahhs. I think this is a deep grace in our lives, and I think there is an element of gospel-living in this that I'm unwilling to give up in order to squeeze ourselves into a check box that makes sense to who knows who? I live with the deep trust that as we are drawn deeper into God's grace, our lives will be more and more aligned with God's view of and work in this world. How could it not be?

89 cent chicken and stewarding what we have

In the last post, I wrote about ways that I've been preparing whole chickens I get for 89 cents a pound. And then I thought to myself, "Why's it so important to me that the chicken is 89 cents a pound?" As it turns out, this is actually related to the year of "doing less". Doing less doesn't mean we're doing nothing. What I'm finding is that we're being drawn back over and over again to "stewarding what we have".

It's tax time here at our place and this ends up being our annual tally up how much we gave away assessment. We try to give away 15% of our gross income every year, but stuff comes up and we may give away more.

89 cent chicken instead of $3.99 chicken helps us to support:
Our local church that invests in us and our community
Friends who invested in us and are now missionaries in Thailand
A child in South America through Compassion Intl.
Friends who have been working to get kids off the streets in Tanzania
Friends who invested in me when I was a college student. One couple is now investing in post-college people and new teachers across the US and another is investing in college kids in Hungary.
Friends who work with the urban poor off my college campus.

I like doing this annual tally because I'm reminded why we didn't buy a fancier house, cooler, new gadgets, and hip furniture and why we do drive older cars and look for ways to spend less. Would it be nice to have our lives "tricked out"? Probably, for a while. But what means more to us is having relationships that are meaningful. We're not the most relationally savvy folk around, so we're grateful to the folk that have poured into us. And I think that's a good thing and something the Apostle Paul encouraged. We want to help them out as we can and right now that's financially. We have money and when we steward our money well, we get to participate in extending the kingdom of God far beyond what we could do with our own two hands and two feet.

Those are the thoughts for the day, more on doing less and stewarding what we have later.