I was chatting on the phone with my oldest this week about purity culture–which deserves a post on its own. (I have feelings. Big feelings.)
I expressed to him how tough it is as parents, when some of the less-healthy methods of purity culture are subtracted from parenting –I’m looking at you, shame-parenting–to find something as powerful to direct our kids toward good and keep them from what’s truly bad.
So there’s this chance raising teenagers could kill me.
I’m (again) in one of these parenting seasons where hope feels like a mind game. There is indeed a battlefield in my brain, in my soul.
Months ago, I stumbled upon what I thought was an epiphany: silicone scar strips…which promised, with 4.5 stars on Amazon, to fade stretch marks, people.
My heart lifted. My first child ballooned my belly like a watermelon, complete with stripes. When another mother asked to glimpse my stretch marks after I mentioned their severity, she gasped aloud with some equivalent of Good golly.
It was in a passing conversation, see. Finally all the dots were connected, and I knew. I realized what her pet sin was. It was probably one she didn’t even see as I saw, considering just how conniving and blinding these tend to be.
But what’s telling is this: For at least 24 hours, I did not feel compassion for her. I didn’t pray for her. I didn’t use it to understand her more. I didn’t use it to examine my life for my own corrosive habits.
Hey.
I was there just this past Saturday, too. Felt like it had been a year of keeping my head down, doing the right thing with a hopeful smile. Or maybe some tears. I’ve mentioned this last year my struggles with feeling powerless; with the tension of not living some dreams.
I may have even scrawled the phrase tired of a “Yes, sir” life in my journal this past weekend.
One of the unexpected delights of our final couple of months in Africa was the arrival of a college friend who’s known my husband and I since the beginning. She watched us meet, cautiously date, giddily become engaged. She played the piano when the two of us spring chickens said “I do” forever. Later, I stood with her as she spoke her own vows beneath a spreading tree. And when she visited us in Africa and we stayed up entirely too late, she gave us this gift: I told my husband, “I love that she reminds us how good we are together. That you and I together are a really good thing.”
I wrote before that this time of leaving Africa, of setting a foot on two highly divergent continents, has delivered unavoidable stress to our relationship. Both of us are strained, so it makes sense that our most intimate relationships would bear that weight. So it was kind of God to remind us that despite the ways we occasionally feel like the losers in a three-legged-race right now—“us” is still a really good thing.
Part I of this post outlined some essential reasons we need to identify when we’re stressed. If you’re convinced, let’s get down to it. What are the signs your marriage is under stress?
Read an interesting quote yesterday. So tell me: Do you agree or disagree?
The place where God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. (Frederick Buechner)
So at first glance, I’m like, Yes. Yes! Yes with a smiley-face-with-heart-eyes emoji! Especially when it comes to my kids (which you saw in Tuesday’s post on ideas for teaching kids the spiritual discipline of service). I want them to not just drag themselves through service, like our stick-shift doing 45 MPH in second gear. I long for them to find that burbling well inside of them: their part of the Body of Christ.
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
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