Hello!
We had a fun Easter egg hunt for my son and my nephew yesterday. I was struggling to figure out how to make the event fun for both boys. My nephew is high-energy and likes to run around a lot. My son is fairly low energy and needs support to walk. I wanted to make sure that my son had a chance to find eggs but didn't want my nephew to be stuck moving at the speed of my son.
I ended up putting two eggs (or two toy cars) in each hiding spot. Now, the boys are four so I dropped the eggs in easy to spot locations and we still needed to lead them about to help find all of the eggs. I hid a few sets of eggs right next to the starting area and demonstrated that each boy got one egg. I assumed that my nephew was going to run off pretty quickly - but he and Spawn actually stuck pretty close together and worked well as a team. My nephew was great at picking up the eggs and putting them in a basket. He'd also bring eggs he found back and put them in Spawn's basket. Spawn, on the other hand, is built to search out an entire area carefully before moving on - so he'd find egg stashes that my nephew had missed. Both boys had a blast and their shared grandmother got plenty of photos for her albums.
I'll let you know when the egg hunt ends. I hid five sets of cars - but we only found four. I have no idea where I put the last set - but I'm sure we'll find them soon. :-)
We are working our way through Jasmine Baucham's chapter on how being a stay-at-home daughter (SAHD) fulfills the Great Commission in Matthew 28. Her answer - in a whole lot more words - is that being a Christian Patriarchy/Quiverful (CP/QF) middle class family is fulfilling the Great Commission. The reason she needs a lot more words is her dogged attempts to drag "normal daily life" into "major ministry contributions" like this relatively short quote:
The first group - visiting missionaries who need a place to stay - is unintentionally ironic since adult Jasmine gets to see her parents twice a year when they return home from Zambia for furlough/fundraising.
For a wider audience, how many visiting missionaries are there per year to room and board compared to the number of families in a church community? Jasmine's family probably got more than their fare share since their family was small for a long time and her dad was the minister - but I'd be really impressed if their congregation had more than four visits a year.
As for showing hospitality to unchurched neighbors and those in need - I agree that's bona fide Christian ministry work - but how do families pull that off while sheltering their kids from the malign influences of the unsaved? Unchurched neighbors probably watch TV! The women likely work outside the home! OMG, they might have advanced degrees and no family business! That's why I'm highly skeptical that much official ministry work gets done out of most CP/QF homes; the main thrust of the homes is to shelter children so effectively that they never have a chance to rebel against their parents' chosen lifestyle. Interacting with people who need ministry makes sheltering kids much, much harder and a whole lot of this system is set up to make life easier for the parents.
I love that one example is kicking the can down the road. Yeah, we're not doing ministry right now, but the kids who are being raised will do real ministry at some date in the future! Spoiler alert: that's not terribly likely. Most of the former SAHDs who are my age are raising a family like their parents did while the women who remain SAHDs in their 30's and 40's are settling into the role of the spinster aunt of Victorian times.
Maybe Jasmine realized that kicking the can down the road was a cop-out - but she's very slim on details of what the ministry that is so demanding that people need to recharge at home entails.
This next quote reminds me that Jasmine's surrounded by teenage and very young adult believers. May God save us from being surrounded by the very young and very immature:
Good Lord. So young and so cocksure about their moral superiority over their own parents.
Being saved is not like seniority in a workplace. A teenager who was saved 6 months before their parents does not automatically qualify to be the spiritual director of the entire family. (Although I can see how teenage me might have been confused by that. Life is linear, right? Effort in gives direct result out, yeah? I'm so glad I'm not 15.)
If you are saved - or whatever the correct term is for a given denomination - and you are making fun of a new worship leader who is learning the ropes of leading prayer time, you really have a long way to go in term of maturity.
But most importantly of all: don't tell your parents that you are praying for them to become more convicted or for their spiritual growth. There is no way to say that sentence as a dependent member of a family structure and not sound weirdly passive-aggressive.
"Ok, Mom. I understand you are not as convicted as I am about the importance of wearing skirts. I'll pray for God to further your spiritual growth."
Yikes.
The first group - visiting missionaries who need a place to stay - is unintentionally ironic since adult Jasmine gets to see her parents twice a year when they return home from Zambia for furlough/fundraising.
For a wider audience, how many visiting missionaries are there per year to room and board compared to the number of families in a church community? Jasmine's family probably got more than their fare share since their family was small for a long time and her dad was the minister - but I'd be really impressed if their congregation had more than four visits a year.
As for showing hospitality to unchurched neighbors and those in need - I agree that's bona fide Christian ministry work - but how do families pull that off while sheltering their kids from the malign influences of the unsaved? Unchurched neighbors probably watch TV! The women likely work outside the home! OMG, they might have advanced degrees and no family business! That's why I'm highly skeptical that much official ministry work gets done out of most CP/QF homes; the main thrust of the homes is to shelter children so effectively that they never have a chance to rebel against their parents' chosen lifestyle. Interacting with people who need ministry makes sheltering kids much, much harder and a whole lot of this system is set up to make life easier for the parents.
I love that one example is kicking the can down the road. Yeah, we're not doing ministry right now, but the kids who are being raised will do real ministry at some date in the future! Spoiler alert: that's not terribly likely. Most of the former SAHDs who are my age are raising a family like their parents did while the women who remain SAHDs in their 30's and 40's are settling into the role of the spinster aunt of Victorian times.
Maybe Jasmine realized that kicking the can down the road was a cop-out - but she's very slim on details of what the ministry that is so demanding that people need to recharge at home entails.
This next quote reminds me that Jasmine's surrounded by teenage and very young adult believers. May God save us from being surrounded by the very young and very immature:
Good Lord. So young and so cocksure about their moral superiority over their own parents.
Being saved is not like seniority in a workplace. A teenager who was saved 6 months before their parents does not automatically qualify to be the spiritual director of the entire family. (Although I can see how teenage me might have been confused by that. Life is linear, right? Effort in gives direct result out, yeah? I'm so glad I'm not 15.)
If you are saved - or whatever the correct term is for a given denomination - and you are making fun of a new worship leader who is learning the ropes of leading prayer time, you really have a long way to go in term of maturity.
But most importantly of all: don't tell your parents that you are praying for them to become more convicted or for their spiritual growth. There is no way to say that sentence as a dependent member of a family structure and not sound weirdly passive-aggressive.
"Ok, Mom. I understand you are not as convicted as I am about the importance of wearing skirts. I'll pray for God to further your spiritual growth."
Yikes.
"I'll pray for God to further your spiritual growth." sounds like a catty thing an evangelical version of Regina George would say. Which is a great image.
ReplyDeleteThat is an amazing mental image!
DeleteI think the part that was killing me was the fact that many adults tend to be better at working out which actions are really important vs. optional than teenagers. Yup, your parents are probably much less sold on you being a SAHD until you marry and raise a brood of kids - but that's not because they aren't good Christians. It's because they care far more about making sure you have the skills you need to support yourself if you are single at age 45 - or worse - divorced from a deadbeat husband who isn't providing support for your 4 kids.
To paraphrase Miss Marple from Agatha Christie "Young people think that old people are being pessimistic and catty when they expect the worst from certain couples. What young people don't know is that old people have seen people with the same behaviors make the same mistakes over and over and over."