Joyfully At Home: Chapter Eight - Part Two

Winter has come crashing into Michigan this year.  We've got trees with leaves still on at the same time as accumulating snowfall.  Like...four inches of snowfall.   The Chinese Elms in my yard keep their leaves until the absolutely last minute possible so I doubt I'll have a chance to rake the leaves this year.   Similarly, there is...oh....six inches of unmowed grass in the backyard that will hopefully die back before spring.

This time of year, we generally get some snow flurries - but just flakes that are visible in the air with a slight dusting on the ground.  I clearly remembering harvesting parsnips from a raised bed a day or two before Spawn was born in late November 2016. The leafy portion of the parsnip was still alive and the ground was unfrozen.  This year, I harvested my parsnips on November 9th with the tops flaccid from being frozen and thawed.  That was gross enough to start with - but we've had so much rain this fall that the ground was slightly frozen mud.   Even with the gross working conditions, I was glad because I'm not the kind of person who would root around in early spring mud to try and find the parsnips that overwintered before they started growing again.

Reading this section of "Joyfully At Home" by Jasmine Baucham is a bit like rooting around in the mud for half-frozen parsnips.  I know I need to get through this chapter to move on - and eventually finish the book - but man, it's not a pleasant task.   This section includes Jasmine's way of dealing with crushes.  We get into the idea of dealing with crushes by reading a letter from an young woman:

I'm struggling with my thoughts. There's this particular young man I know, that I would REALLY like to marry. No matter how hard I try, I find myself thinking about him every day and ALL day long. How in the world do I get "free" from this? I mean, I don't want to pretend like he doesn't exist ( ie: convince myself that he was never born) , but at the same time, I know I shouldn't think about him ALL the time. Do you or others have any advice? And also, should I maybe not allow myself to want to marry him??? I'd appreciate any thoughts and advice. (pg. 95)

Hmmm. 

My best way of dealing with a crush is to spend time with the guy rather than trying to crush my feelings to death. 

Yup.  That's my advice.  Yuppers.

I mean, spend a bit of time to figure out if he's available, right?  You don't need to go panting after a married dude or someone who is in a relationship.  You deserve to be the main woman in a guy's life, not a piece on the side.

Then figure out if you still like him after spending more time together.   You'd be amazed how many crushes of mine have been killed by spending time talking with the guy. 

If you still like him and he's available, ask him out.  Or make it clear you're totally up for seeing him sometime.

In terms of feelings, just roll with them.  Personally, I often laughed gently at myself when I was daydreaming about a crush when I should have been doing something else like....I dunno....lecturing about evolution or ionic naming conventions. 

Of course, having a wide range of real adult responsibilities like a job, volunteer activities and a social life did impinge on my unstructured daydreaming time because you just can't daydream very well when you are lecturing on the role of genetic drift and gene flow in evolution to a classroom full of high school students.  Likewise, daydreaming while contra dancing never worked well for me; I was too busy focusing on the steps and my enjoyment of the dance in the moment.

If you feel like you want to marry him, you feel like you want to marry him.  Feelings are feelings; they are not an ultimatum or a binding contract.   But be sure to spend time with him; that's a far better way to determine if your feelings are accurate - or based in fantasy.

I remember sitting on a chair in my dad's office sobbing about a similar situation ( which is a familiar setting for my anecdotes), and realizing that maybe the Lord might be using my struggles to teach me something. Maybe when this young man came to my mind, I needed to pray for him. Maybe the Lord was showing me his admirable qualities so that I would file them away for traits for my future spouse. Maybe the Lord was teaching me a lesson about contentment. Perhaps I would end up marrying the man I was, frankly, pining over. In hindsight, the Lord has afforded me the wisdom to see that he knew what was right all along, and I'm glad my daydream did not come true. (pg. 95)

I sincerely hope the first sentence is an awkward construction and Ms. Baucham didn't spend a lot of times sobbing in her dad's office.  I am saddened that I fear that the sentence construction was fine and Ms. Baucham spent more than one time sobbing in her dad's office about a crush.

The fact that I had freaked out for around 30 seconds when Jasmine brought up the idea that she had a crush because that dude needed prayers was not her fault.   I was having a flashback to Debi Pearl's bat-shit crazy theological train-wreck idea involving angels giving girls crushes so they'd pray for Mike Pearl, psychopath extraordinaire.  To rehash my theological objections, the entire argument implies that God needs prayers to work in the world in the same way that a jukebox requires coins to play songs. 

Jasmine's take brings the addition weird complication that believers are supposed to take sexual attraction and assume the attraction is a sign that the other person needs prayers or that Jasmine needs to pray.  There's no Biblical support for that.

We agree that deciding which good traits Mr. Crush has is a good idea.  I would also add thinking about which bad traits (or even neutral traits) are deal-breakers is a great idea.  The problem is that Jasmine's not allowed to interact enough with Mr. Crush to figure out his negative traits.

At the time, though, I definitely considered that the last scenario would be the best-case scenario. My mother later reminded me, however, that, whatever the outcome of my current struggle, I have been called to be faithful in this situation: to use my single years to glorify the Lord, to wait patiently until he revealed them to me, not through wild imaginings, but through of sound sign of commitment, that the young man I was thinking about was the man he intended me to marry. I think one thing that kept me holding onto my struggle was the slim possibility that I'd get married to the man I was thinking about, and my struggle would be worthwhile. In reality, though, even if I married him 6 months from then, I'd been called to turn every distraction over to the Lord right now; I was to be whole devoted to him right now ( Isaiah 58: 1-8), because his love is utterly, beautifully sufficient. (pg. 95)

I respectfully disagree with Jasmine about why she had such a hard time with that crush.

Obviously, I'm in favor of dealing with crushes by spending more time around the person you are crushing on so their obnoxious or irritating habits will kill the crush faster.  (I'm deeply romantic, you see. 😃)

The other problem, though, is that Jasmine is literally allowed no other path in adult life than "wife and mother".   A young woman would have to be preternaturally calm to NOT obsess over any single man she might be attracted to.  After all, a man must approve of her enough to want to spend his life with her before she's viewed as an adult in that culture.

But what about that unicorn prancing in the mist - the much vaulted "family-based ministry" that is supposed to fill a young woman's hours?

There's some lip-service paid to doing family-based ministry, but precious few SAHDs seem to have access to a home-based ministry.    As I'm thinking about it, I can only think of two sets of sisters who have a standing ministry of any length.  Sarah Mally and her newly married sister Grace Moffiat have kept their family ministries (Tomorrow's Forefathers, Bright Lights, Just Men, Stand Strong, etc) hopping for over 15 years now.  The other SAHDs who deserve mention are Sarah Maxwell who runs the entirety of Titus 2 / Managers of Their Homes/Schools and has for close on 20 years now along with her sisters Anna and Mary who have been allowed to run a children's Bible club at an apartment complex.  Considering how sheltered the Maxwells are, that's pretty renegade of them...

But even those ministries are constrained in many ways. 

Grace and Sarah Mally set up various clubs, book studies, conferences and events that gathered obedient CP/QF teens and sent them out on missions to convert strangers.   What I doubt the Mallys are even aware of is the fact that "soul-saving" outings like that are much less about saving souls and far more about indoctrinating CP/QF young adults about how much they will be rejected by the wider world if they stray from the fold.   Because - seriously - I've yet to see a soul-saving technique that isn't guaranteed to annoy or anger most people. Why do people continue to do such daft techniques if they don't work?  Because the purpose is to solidify the unity between members of the CP/QF culture - not save the rest of us.

Similarly, Anna and Mary Maxwell have finally been allowed to run a Bible study for mostly children of color at a local apartment building.  That's more interaction that the Maxwell girls have had with non-CP/QF folks in their lives, but being immersed with elementary school aged kids is very safe for  women who are 27 and 23.  It's pretty unlikely that those kiddos would ask any really challenging questions like "So what are you planning on doing with your life?" or "If marriage is so important, why aren't you married?" Additionally, any time the kids allude to being raised by a single mother or dealing with poverty, Anna and Mary can pat themselves on the back at being such virtuous young women who have avoided reproducing before told to do so by a legal husband.

Since every activity that marks adulthood for women in CP/QF land requires a man to declare that a young woman is worthy of being his wife, of course Jasmine Baucham went a bit overboard on her crushes.  I would have, too, since boredom is a powerful motivator.