Blip.

I asked some pointed questions at the end of my last blog.  I am not prepared to answer those questions yet.  Biblical themes of sexuality are wrapped up with so many other elements of life that separating  sexuality out and saying, "This is how we use our innate sexuality for good," is kind of the work of a lifetime.

However, it is the work in front of me because I have a preteen daughter.  And while at present, she is content to dress in jeans and Gryffindor t-shirts and watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle clips on YouTube <sigh> , I can already seen signs that she is beginning to develop her tastes and think of herself as a woman.  We are going to have to answer questions together, and if she is anything like me, we are going to have to come at it intellectually as well as all the other -ally's.  Sometimes, one just really needs to know why.

So yes, using one's womanhood, and correspondingly one's manhood, one's sexual nature is something that I'm going to be reflecting on a lot in the next couple of years.  I would love input -- verse suggestions, anonymous experiences, personal reflections.  You can send them to me via Facebook Messenger or to jnnfrtsm@gmail.com.  

The next chapter in our little saga

Last week, I quoted an anonymous Beattle (I think that's an oxymoron, but still, that's what I did).  This week, I'd like to quote another famous 20th Century Brit. "What Shasta didn't realize is that when you have done one good thing, the result is generally that you are given better and harder one to do."  Well, perhaps I exaggarate, but not much.  We had an opportunity to grow this week, a chance to test our faith that God is going to provide and to test our resolve to keep going in the direction that we're going.

It was Tuesday afternoon.  I had not gotten a sub call, so Seth and I had spent the day doing domestic sort of things -- cleaning gutters, getting coffee, juicing grapes, melting mixing bowls (long story).  My morning was spent in Boogaloo's classroom and getting groceries.  His was spent bent over his books.  But in the afternoon, as I was bent over something on the stove, he got a phone call.  It was from a tech company that he had worked in conjunction with at Intel through his old company, and they liked his resume.  Would he like to come in for an interview?

We were kinda blown away.  The call had just come out of nowhere. He had not applied for any positions with this company.   Was this a Moriah moment or was it a ram in the thicket?  We weren't sure; excited, but not sure.  Being uncertain felt a little like looking a gift horse in the mouth, but at the same time, Seth had just left a tech industry job.  He knew that the industry never sleeps, and when it puts demands on customer service, it expects to have those demands met.  When the speed of calculation is moving down to the nanosecond, everybody moves at the nanosecond.  Hollywood could stylize it and make the next great sci-fi thriller.

He went to the interview.  Once there, he hardly had to say anything because the manager loved his resume, knew his old boss (the topmost boss, not the one who fired him), and appreciated Seth's honesty when Seth mentioned that he was in graduate school and would be making his studies a priority with his time.  Apparently most people wait until after they have a contract to mention that.  Actually, Seth fully expected graduate school to be a deal breaker, but the interviewer didn't bite.  So we were left with a huge conundrum on our hands.

It fully looked as if Seth was going to be offered a job much like the one he had left and had been eager to leave, a job offer that had come out of the blue and looked like the hand of God.  We hadn't had any work yet, and our expected income was going to be unpredictable.  Was this God's way of offering us some stability until something better came along for me?  How should we approach this?

The question was simple, but it was beyond us.  Could Seth do both full time school and full time work over an extended period of time and fulfill those commitments and his commitments to church, family, friends, and sanity to the glory of God?  It's really a yes or no question, but we hadn't a clue which side we should land on.  Seth took it to our pastor (who was a little surprised to see him drop in in a suit), and I took to Facebook because I have a striking number of friends and family in the ministry.  As I typed the question, I prayed, "Lord, let them be in unison." And He said, "Don't worry, I'll make it obvious." 

Now I should make plain that when I say these little prayers, I don't usually expect them to be answered literally, and God usually does just that.  Every response, every single response said no.  From our pastor's gentle, "What about your other responsibilities?" to an old classmate's concise "I wouldn't recommend it,"  every single response, and there are 24 on that post, said don't try it.  

I should also confess that I had been excited at the prospect of Seth working again.  With him out of work, I have to work, and right now I have no full time work.  As a teacher who has spent the last seven years at home, I am not people's first candidate for a job.  Seth, with his constant work and military experience, is much more profitably employable then I am.  When I was done posting on Facebook, I sat down and began planning out ways that I could take any and every other responsibility off of Seth's shoulders so that he could take this job.  But as I read the responses (migraines came up once, forgetting faces of wife and children was mentioned a couple of times), and as we discussed what the job would likely require of Seth (possibly 50 hours a week if all didn't go well in the initial 40), my feelings changed dramatically.  We both came to the conclusion that accepting this job, should it be offered, was just impossible..

Friday morning, while I was teaching my first subbing job of the year, Seth sent an email to the interviewer, saying in effect, "Thank you for your consideration, but this job is just too much to fit in to my life where it is headed."  Friday afternoon, he received an email from the interviewer (seriously, the emails must have passed in the interspace) saying in effect, "We've reviewed our budget, and this position is no longer feasible anyway.  Still, we will pass your resume around as broadly as we can because we like what we see." 

Okay then.  So much for that.  In the space of four lines of digital space, the question was revealed to be out of our hands anyway.  God had said he would make it obvious, and He did.  He made our advice unanimous.  He made the thought of the work onerous.  And then, when we had made the right decision, He took away the opportunity so we would feel no regret.  

We went out for dinner that night, just he and I, and as he sat across the table from me, he said, "You know, I'm already removing myself from that world.  It's not where I'm going, you know?"   And it was good to have resolution. The end result is that we were confirmed in our resolution to "Seek first the kingdom of God" and to believe that "All these things will be added to [us] as well."  I'm still a little nervous, but

 But why did this happen?  We invested a lot of mental and emotional energy in making the right decision here (because apparently there was a right decision, even though it didn't really depend on us), and well, it didn't really depend on us at all. Is this Abraham in the thicket, cutting the ram free?  Yeah, probably. 

A meditation

Are parents teacher or students? My biggest concern when I learned I was going to become a parent was how to teach my coming child about God. I mean, how does the finite (and fallable and tired) communicate the nature of God to the mind of a child. Now that Niki is here, I find her teaching me about God in tiny finite moments.

Often in the Bible God presents Himself to us as our Father. We take this to mean that He is in authority over us, that He is our origin, that He provides for us, but think about everything else that a parent is, all the things that are difficult to put in words.

For instance, this morning, as I was changing Niki's diaper, I budged her head on the changing table in a way that was uncomfortable, and she looked at me with tears in her eyes and her mouth all smunched up, but when she saw my face and noticed that I was smiling and comforting, she decided to smile instead. She looked at me and decided that what she had thought was a bad thing was not so bad because I was smiling.

Think of the effect that a parent has on a child. More than teaching right and wrong, we teach them how to respond to the smallest things: scraped knees, bugs in the backyard, dirt, lace and ribbons, their own desires, habits, and traits. They take their mindsets from us. They look to us to learn how to respond to all the little stimuli in the world around them. So too we should look to God, letting His perspective or the look on His face determine how we respond to the stimuli in our world, especially the hard ones. If we look up and see God smiling, then we can be confident that whatever discomfort we are experiencing is part of a healthy process or done with a good purpose.