Protecting Your Family in Dangerous Times

All of America is heartsick at the recent killings in Amish Pennsylvania, a small mountain town in Colorado, and Wisconsin. When violence happens in urban America, we are no longer as shocked or uncomprehending as we once were. But these places seemed so remote, so protected, so out of the firing line. Unfortunately, bad things can happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone.

Everyone would like to know, “What can I do to better protect my family?”

I cannot think of a better time to recommend the book Protecting Your Family in Dangerous Times.

Published in 2002, this book asks, “What goes through your mind in those moments when your children leave home for another day’s activities? Just how sure are you that God will bring them home safely?”

Most parents do a good job of protecting our children by teaching them common sense: Don’t cross the street without looking, don’t unbuckle your car seat before I turn off the motor, don’t walk on Nevada Boulevard after dark, don’t go out with the kind of boy who is likely to make you a statistic, don’t use substances, if you purchase a crotch rocket, you better pay for your own funeral because your life expectancy is about 18 months, on and on the list goes. We are conscientious, and our teachings help our children avoid countless errors which could take them out of the game early. And this book does include the importance of parental discipline and teaching children to hear God’s voice and obey it.

But what about the things no one could predict, the odds we can't improve?

Kutz gives an example of the Passover which the Israelites experienced in Egypt. In that situation, clear instruction was given as to how to avoid the bad thing, the violence that would pass through the land that night. Israeli families who followed God’s instructions were spared, those who did not experienced destruction right along with the Egyptians. Bad things happened, but in that situation, people were given a choice to receive protection, or not.

A few weeks ago Balkan Brink wrote:

“I would say God is a liberal. Think about it. From the garden of Eden to today he allows us to follow him or not. Even God, at this point of human history, does not force his will on individuals.”

I would play off this and say that God is pro-choice, in the literal and all-encompassing sense of that word as reflected over and over in the Bible:

Choose life – or choose death

By now I imagine that my reader, deeply grieved over the violence and angry at the senselessness of it all, may be asking somewhat cynically, “So, are you saying that if Emily Keyes’ parents and the Amish girls’ parents had read this book, they would still be alive today?”

As Aslan said to Lucy in The Dawn Treader, “Child, I tell you no one’s story but your own.” I can’t know what might have made a difference for them. But it behooves me to ask what might make a difference for me and my children.

Can You Hear My Love Now?

We snuggled close at bedtime, and she leaned her head against my chest, then looked up at me.

“Mama, I can hear your love!” she told me.


“I can hear because you love me sooooo much!”




How about you, and those you work with, serve, live with or preach to – can they hear your love?

They can . . . if you let them close enough.

Mind the Checks

"I’ll just slip into the house to put this stack of laundry away and I’ll be right back. Watch your sister," I told him. I had two full baskets of clean laundry to fold, sitting at the picnic table while the kids played in the front yard. Mitch was very close, planting rosebushes beside the driveway, but the van hid his view of the kids.

I started to walk away. Something inside said, “Don’t leave right now.”

The radio was playing "God is watching over you, as always." I almost turned to my son to stress the reminder, "Remember, you need to watch over your sister, kind of like God watches over you."

I left the words unsaid. I did not respond to the nudge inside.

Halfway up the stairs inside, I heard my little girl crying.

We were very fortunate. The sharp branch left a red mark just beneath her eye, and more sharp branches scraped her chin, arms and legs. She had tried to follow her brother through a tight place between shrubbery and wall. The sort of thing an adult would have caught quickly and said, “No, Sweetie, don’t try to get through that way.” The sort of thing my son knows, but didn’t stop to process. Don’t go places your sister can’t follow, when you know she’s following you.

He cried pitifully and long when he saw all her bandaids and the scrape so close to her eye. And that’s a good lesson for him to learn responsibility. But I knew that ultimate responsibility always lies with those who do the delegating.

And I ignored mine.

“Mind the checks,” my father has often told me, a bit of wisdom passed to him from some older saint. The little “check” inside, that tiny, almost indiscernible bit of resistance, like when a rusty door doesn’t quite open but you push it anyhow and it breaks.

It’s easy to override. But we shouldn’t.

Little Mama Award

Yesterday leaving work, I had a vague sense I should go somewhere, but shrugged it off, thinking it must have been Safeway, an item I could get another day rather than make a special trip. I found a ladybug on the front sidewalk and picked it up with a blade of grass to take home for my kids. It crawled all around the dashboard, but flew out the window while I was at a red light. Even so, my attempt at a small gift for my kids made me feel relaxed and happy. I walked in the door and received my 3-yr old’s enthusiastic welcome. When the family acts excited for me to be home, it just makes my whole day, so I really soaked in her hug and played up the moment. Finally, I stood up and told her,

“Just let me put my stuff down, Sweetie, and we can go outside and play for a bit before dinner.”

She stepped back, looked up at me, and said loudly,

“But, Mom – WHAT ABOUT PICKING UP MY BIG BROTHER???!!!”

Oh, yeah. That must have been it. My son spent the afternoon at a friend’s house north of town, and I was supposed to head there straight from work to save on doubling back.

When I called our friends to apologize, she laughed, “I wonder how long it would have taken you and Mitch to notice, if your little girl hadn’t mentioned it?”

How long indeed.

My son, of course, was thrilled to get an extra hour with his friend on Lego Star Wars PS2, and in fact pleaded for extra time, “We’ve almost killed General Grievous!” I even heard him speculating to himself that perhaps he shouldn’t have told his little sister that mom would be picking him up . . .

I remember in elementary school (and high school), my mother used to ask me every morning as I walked out the door, “Bethie, do you have your bus pass?” (season ticket for public bus)

It irritated me, but a couple of times I forgot, so it came in handy . . .

Now, sometimes, my little Mama asks me, as I’m heading out the door, “Mom, don’t forget your coffee!”

I’m sure my Mom will be thrilled to know her genes have indeed made a successful leap – even if they did skip a generation!

Passing the Towel Along

I keep a towel on my desk. Just an ordinary white hand towel, like you might find in a nice hotel. Its place of honor, draped across a picture frame on my desk, comes from the words, embroidered in black and red, along with the Alliance logo:

Living the Call Together
Matthew 28:18-20
. . . by serving one another.

Soon after Dr. Gary Benedict was elected as President, Gary held a special chapel where he inducted the staff into the Order of the Towel, reminder of the call to serve. Gary chose one employee, an IT help desk guy, and knelt down and washed his feet in front of us all. Not your typical executive moment.

My job is all about service, answering questions, solving problems, reassuring panic, sometimes causing panic by reluctantly giving the bad news that seems to come too often in this line of work: “No, I’m sorry but our plan does not cover that.” To the best of my ability, never once allowing the caller to feel that it could be anything but an unmitigated delight to help him or her. And it really is my privilege. I wouldn’t work here if I didn’t feel that way.

Since I have the sort of brain which compulsively sorts paper clips - (once, at another job, I won’t tell you how many minutes I spent sorting a co-worker’s paperclips into jumbo and regular-sized heaps, just as a little gesture of niceness, only to have her reappear and sweep them all into her desk together, oblivious to my small effort) - honestly, I really don’t mind answering the same questions over and over and over. However, since my job is communications coordinator, eventually it does dawn on me that repetitive questions may signal a lack in the way I have explained things. So I write, re-write, and re-write the benefits summaries once more, attempting to steadily reduce those ambiguities which make the benefits realm so very bewildering to my precious people who already have plenty of challenges on their plates.

Mine is a desk job, physically undemanding. Usually I arrive home ready to stand and wash dishes, or run up and down stairs doing laundry, fixing dinner, playing with kids. I don’t sit much at home, except while the family eats dinner, and then only until someone wants seconds.

But one day, not long ago, my service had been literal and manual, dragging chairs and tables into a pleasing arrangement, arranging linens and place settings, filling water pitchers, cutting flower stems, and ending the evening by washing endless china and attempting not to break any (I only broke one this time, and then only because I leaned down in the elevator to adjust the stack on the cart, attempting to make it safer, and inadvertently knocked the top one off the stack in the process). Early the next morning, back again to set up breakfast, brew fresh coffee, make sure the lunch arrives and get everyone who needs to out the door to the airport on time. This happens twice a year, an enjoyable break in my sedentary routine. I love mingling with the guests and thanking them for their service to our participants. Their gift of time is valuable, their gift of expertise invaluable. I want them to feel special while they serve with farsighted wisdom and intense discussion. Hence the china.

After the second day, I went home to my family, inexplicably far more exhausted than I should have been, more than I normally am at such times. Instead of jumping up and down refilling my families’ plates and cups, I stretched on the sofa, dozing, but unwilling to leave my children again to go to bed. They played around me.

My three-year-old solicitously took my hands in hers, standing so close I could feel her sweet warm breath on my face. “I will wash your hands, Mama,” she offered. Without water, she went through the motions of washing my hands, using a Tupperware container, and a dishtowel to “dry me off.” Then she started on my feet. Taking my socks off, she carefully and thoroughly ministered to every toe, tenderly caressing my whole foot with her hands, and again without water, drying off my feet.

She has never done this before, or since. I don’t recall telling her the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. That one evening, nothing could have soothed my soul more thoroughly.

So now I have to ask: Gary, have you been sneaking into my house while I am at the office and teaching the lessons of the towel to my children?!

As Gary so visually emphasized that day in chapel, the ministry of the towel is an essential part of our call. For you to whom serving others is as natural as breathing, please remember that receiving the towel graciously and humbly is also an important discipline. If someone tries to wash your feet today, please let them!

High in the Sky Apple Pie Hopes

Next time you're found with your chin on the ground,
Just remember that ant
Oops, there goes another rubber tree plant

My weekends tend to roller coaster between anticipated relaxation, industrious housecleaning, and the dramatic tension of competing expectations.

My after-hours clients clamor for my services: “What’s for dinner?” “Look, Mama, I washed Chidawgo.” “Mom, can you guess which droid I am?” “Sweetheart, can you search Fruitless Mulberry? We need a good climbing tree.” And even Zydeco chimes in clearly, “Pleeeeeeeease play with meeeeeeeeee.”

Every time my kids ask me to play with them, I feel put upon. I want my time. And the reality of the undone mountains of laundry and dishes presses upon me. I’m sure other parents feel the same clouds of gloom upon surveying boxes full of Lego parts mixed with doll bibs, microscopic GI Joe hand grenades, Mom-I-Love-You scribbled on napkins, and tin-foil-glued-to-a-paper-plate creations too precious for trash, too crumpled for anything else. Am I supposed to ignore all this and just play with my kids? They think so!

And not just any kind of quality time will do. Expectations are very specific. I must strategize military attacks, practice light saber strokes, manipulate PS2 controls in such a way that R2D2 levitates across the abyss rather than hurtle screaming into the hot lava. Often as I sit attentively watching a child build spaceships or tuck a doll to nap beneath a dishrag, just trying to meld with his or her world after my work week, I face the recurring accusation, “Don’t you want to play with me? You’re supposed to be playing with me.” Although I’m right there on the floor, it’s not enough to spectate; I must animate small figures in each hand, making them fly or fight or sing in enough voices and facial contortions to exhaust Martin Short. If I pause to draw breath, the little prosecuting attorneys are at me again. Amplified by the one in my head.

I believe with all my heart that playing with my kids is of eternal significance – perhaps more than anything I do all week, and that’s saying a lot. So why can’t I muster up more enthusiasm for it?

To compound my angst, sometimes when I offer to play a game or read a book, my overtures are rebuffed. Today, as I attempted to insinuate myself into a game of matching picture cards with my 3-year old, she tactfully tried to get me out of her way. “You can play with me as long as you share,” she admonished, “but don’t you need to make dinner?”

I guess she told me.

You do realize, when I say in my blog profile, “Being a world class wife and Mom is my most important job,” I’m not actually claiming to be that. Not today anyhow, crushed beneath the awareness of my own imperfections.

Rather, that statement is a faith verbalization, calling the things that be not as though they are. Calling myself to a greatness I have yet to manifest.

Sarah must have felt pretty foolish hollering hubby in for dinner, “Dad of a thousand sons!” – that new name Abraham insisted she call him. The servants nudged each other and whispered, “They’re in denial about their fertility problem.”

Some struggle to conceive, others of us struggle to parent those precious, incorrigible “products of conception” for the next twenty to forty years.

I wrote my blog profile one Saturday morning, full of the fresh hope a dawning weekend brings. By Sunday night, my kid-tolerance sunk to a low level, again, I felt convicted and incriminated by that phrase, “World Class Mom,” taunting me with its unreality. I told Mitch I would delete it from my profile. “You just need to delete your attitude,” he retorted.

Of course, he’s right. (If Mitch is ever not right, I will blog the occasion in detail and go dancing in the streets.)

I grumped a bit, worked myself out of the attitude and left the profile as is. Meanwhile, I scraped the unburnt top layer of lasagna onto Mitch’s plate for dinner. Did I mention world class wife, also?

I might as well hitch my wagon to a star, even if I fall off backwards when it turns out to be a meteor.

Really, It’s Up to You

Expectantly she stood at my elbow while I ate breakfast, Etch-A-Sketch in hand. “What would you like me to draw for you, Mama?”

Well, let’s see, a doggie would be nice, or you could draw a horsie for me.

She gave me a blank stare. Clearly, this was not what I wanted her to draw for me. I tried again, feeling like Anna in the King & I, guessing what advice the king wished to hear. “How about a doll?”

Her face grew sunny, “Yes! I will draw a baby doll for you, Mama.” And she sat down and drew a lovely . . . cow.

A few minutes later, I checked in with my Daddy during drivetime.
“So, God, what would you like me to do for you today?” I asked, expectantly.

I could feel His chuckle right down to my toes.

Playing Hide & Seek

“Find me, Mama,” demands the petite heap of blankets every morning. Cooperatively I search the room . . . “Is my little girl in the closet? behind the chair? under the crib?” I rattle drawers and rustle curtains, culminating in a “find” full of kisses and giggles. Often I must repeat the process, and more than once I’ve mortally offended my son (our eldest Hide & Seek aficionado) by locating him too quickly. “You cheated!” he accuses, and we must prolong the game until my children’s passion to be found is satiated.

Why do they do this? And it doesn’t stop when we get older.

Here’s a favorite line from a favorite movie, Parent Trap (1994), when Natasha Richardson and Dennis Quaid’s characters try to make sense of their break-up a decade ago:

He: “Why did you leave?”
She: “Why didn’t you come after me?”
He: “I didn’t know you wanted me to.”

Every time we watch this, I snuggle closer to Mitch, get teary-eyed, and say “ALWAYS come after me.”

Mitch mastered this game early. In the four long years I gathered courage for the greatest leap of my life, trepidations began to crumble and a final fear surfaced: “What if you ever left me?”

“Then I would try to talk you into staying,” he replied simply, with complete logic. That’s how I knew he had found me and wouldn’t let go.

Hide and Seek.

Sometimes we seek by hiding.

Like the old saying goes, “he chased her until she caught him.”

In “Kate & Leopold,” Kate’s brother strategizes his pursuit:
“If I call and leave a message on her answering machine when I know she’s out, then the ball will be in her court.”
And Leopold responds,
“Ah, but you want the ball to be in your court.”

After all, if both players hide, you’ve got no game.

Did you ever hide and no one came to look for you? The big kids ran off to fry bigger fish, leaving you cramped in a small dark place smelling dirty socks and the dawning realization that you had been left seekerless.

Dr. Dobson addresses this devastation in the arena of adult relationships in “Love Must Be Tough” and “Tough Love for Singles” - if your game is off, it’s time for a little coaching.

Do you believe we should be “seeker-friendly”? What if no seekers come and we hide unsought? Did we leave voicemail for the people who stay home on Sunday mornings, and wonder why they don’t call back? Perhaps we should have kept the ball in our court.

Pastor Mark Beeson of Granger Community Church did not spend big bucks to rent a billboard shouting “For the next five weeks, our church will host a solid Scriptural sermon series exhorting you to stop indulging in adultery, lust and pornography.” He would have been lonely in his pulpit that Sunday for sure.

Instead, the billboard, with its four bare feet and four bare words, whispered,

“We’re hiding . . . and the Spirit and the Bride say Come! Find us!
Whoever is thirsty, come on, ‘cuz we’ve got water here!”

And they hosted the feeding of the seven thousand.

Another great game of Hide ‘n Seek.

A-Lions, Felines and Bears, Oh My

Bedtime at our house is a zoo. I’m sure this is true of your home too, if you have children anywhere from birth until whatever age it is they begin to disappear into their caves unaided.

Since I work full-time, bedtime is my big chance to speak into the lives of our young son and daughter. Last night’s circus kicked off with my little one, who produces and directs her own shows, starring herself and whatever family member she can con into playing the other part.

“Mama, you be Goliath and I’ll be David.” So I act gruff and growl “Who will fight me?” Little David squeaks bold defiance, and I continue, “Am I a dog?” Soon I am thumping my way down to ceremonious defeat. Then it’s her turn. She screws her sweet elfin face into the crustiest curmudgeon she can manage and deepens her tiny voice into a snarl as she throws down the gauntlet. I accept the challenge, and she accosts me with “Are you a cat?”

At this point “David” breaks character and laughs. My little comedienne, ever ready to milk a receptive audience, presses in, “Are you a frog?”

Act II: We go through our nightly cribside liturgy: “Mama, what are we going to do tomorrow?” “Well, you and Daddy will stay home and play, Big Brother will go to school, and Mama will go to work.” Only this time I added, “ . . . at the ALLIANCE.”

“Mama, are there LIONS at your work?”

Act III: This is where the “bears” come in, that is, tough and colorful questions from #1 Son:
“Mom, what’s booze?” and then “hootch” and then “butts in an ashtray”? From the quizzical and slightly shocked look on his face he was picturing a most disgraceful display (he’s visual just like me!). And all this in one paragraph . . . Even my laidback husband raised his eyebrows – what is he reading? “Left Behind: the teen series” – the book was describing an irresponsible alcoholic relative in a most unappetizing light, and the message my son, along with the boy in the book, got was “This is NOT cool, this is NOT what you want to grow up to be like.” That was the “colorful” part – now the "tough" questions – several dozen times this week “When will the rapture happen?” “Will it be in my lifetime?” and “When will the AntiChrist come?” Never mind that I’ve told him a hundred times I have no idea . . . he needs to hear a great message I heard on “living with ambiguity.”

And don’t we all? Life is a circus and we don’t know what’s going on in the next ring, much less the next act! Blogging is good, it helps us connect the dots, connect those rings as we catch a glimpse of who’s walking what tightropes and who’s facing down tigers while we peddle popcorn . . .