Mama Bears for Jesus in the Digital Age

It’s very in vogue just now to take a discomfiting exchange and recount it online with the indignant gravity that causes your friends to rally to your side in supportive outrage. You know what I’m talking about, Christian mommies. Grocery-Store-Stranger Angst.

Here are the examples I see most frequently:

“My big family attracted this sarcastic criticism…”

“My mixed/adoptive family attracted this intrusive curiosity…”

“My homeschool family attracted this leering condescension…”

And all these complaints end with the italicized kicker: “…and they said it right in front of my kids!”

Beloved sisters, here’s my exhortation to you.

If you’re a Christian and you’re in any of these categories (or all of them!) then you have probably become the sort of family that draws public contempt in direct response to the call of God on you to glorify him by leading an off-trend life.

What that looks like in 2016 is not what it has looked like in other eras, but rest assured this is just another iteration of the promise that we will never look like the world and that we will draw its [frequently negative] attention.  So first of all, congratulations on reflecting Christ in quietly bold ways!

But…there’s always a but... when we take our frustration at the world’s lack of understanding and trumpet it as indignation, we’re reflecting our culture, not our faith. The expectation that society should be sensitive to our preferences and hide signs of natural curiosity is our culture’s current reigning ethic.

It is not a Biblical one.

The Psalmist cries, “Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy on us, for we have endured no end of contempt. We have endured no end of ridicule from the arrogant, of contempt from the proud.” But he cries out to heaven, not to his facebook fanbase. And like James, he knows that trials, and even the temptation to vent, produce endurance and joy. Like an HIIT workout for the spirit.

Families making counter-cultural stances must expect some hostility and view curiosity as a welcome opportunity. Especially, especially right in front of our kids.

Here’s the thing. If you’ve got eight kids, or if your kids are eight different skin tones, or if they trail after you at Target during regular school hours (in matching jumpers or not) it’s a little unfair to expect people to not wonder. We all try to make sense of what we see. Whether those curious strangers should say anything or not may be a matter of opinion, but I’ll say this: can we simultaneously bemoan the loss of community and village-mentality in our culture and act scandalized when a stranger engages us? Even if the question betrays ignorance, as Christians we should extend grace where the intent seems innocent. It’s how we’d all want to be treated.

But of course, sometimes it isn’t innocent. Sometimes the hostility is blatant. Well, if you can write an eloquent and witty blogpost, you’re probably smart enough to know when to walk away (pearls before swine and all) but I tend to view even many hostile openings as openings.

Think of this. Your family, just by existing, is prompting conversations with strangers.

Every. Single. Day.

You have daily invitations to explain the reason for the hope that is in you. Speaking of your children, do they see you jump through that opening and offer up something to send that stranger off pondering, or do they see you grit your teeth and go home and rant online? Your children will hear things that hurt (which in many cases still doesn’t really compare with the suffering of myriad children worldwide if we’re honest) but what they will internalize is what you did in that moment.

Remember this. Our culture is hostile to big/colorful/homeschooling families because they fly in the face of the imperative to seek self-gratification. Here’s what we offer the world, and those who are grasping at fleeting pleasure: whatever thing they fear to lose, that your ten children threaten, is its own reward. There is no derivative benefit. Jet setting, night life, power career, whatever it is, its pleasures never outlast the moment.

Are our family choices inconvenient? Yup. They really are. We really do sometimes wish we could leisurely try on bathing suits and then read at a café, or prioritize bikini waxes and manicures and travel. We really do. But they know all that. What they don’t know, if we respond defensively instead of joyfully, is that by investing in people (and there are many ways to do this without having kids! Teach! Volunteer! Counsel!) we reap benefits that increase exponentially with time and generations. That’s something you get to share with someone who’s curious enough to ask.

So if someone assumes that the kid behind you in line isn’t with you because you don’t look related (whether because you’ve adopted or in our case, because of hilarious genetic happenstance), put your arm around her and say, “Oh, she’s all mine!” and tell them how she completes your family. Right in front of her. Make her blush. Everyone wins.

If someone questions your qualifications to teach your kids and wonders if you’re raising unsocialized weirdos, gush a little about how you get to see the “ah-ha” moments and how much time you can spend reading good books over pancakes and how vibrant their relationships with all age groups are. I’ve seen so many cynics soften when I share my excitement instead of getting (as the Marines say) butt hurt about it.

If someone wonders if you’ve heard of birth control, let it slide and bubble over with the unique joys a big family experiences while you share the sweet anecdotes that make the sacrifices worthwhile. They don’t know. How can they if you don’t tell them?

All that to say… culture will give you a pass if you turn from these encounters and seek comfort from those who are already like-minded. Sensitivity is A-OK in the public arena. But not in the Christian life. We were called to stand out, take some abuse, and turn it all to his glory. So rejoice if someone notices how weird you are. You have a unique platform. I know you can use it faithfully and well.

 

 

 

 

Once Upon a September

I’m a sucker for the warm feeling of camaraderie. Sports offer that sense of shared, vital purpose.

So do wars.

Today, eating wings in a sports bar, there was a moment where some of the early games were finishing as several more games were kicking off. The Iggles had won, so we were primarily concentrating on our sticky-fingered lunching, but around us were a surprising number of Oakland fans, on their feet, watching a nail-biting finish to their game. The Raiders had just gone for 2 and were trying to hold their thin lead as the clock ticked down the last forty seconds.

Across the room though, on another screen, in another city, a giant flag was rippling over a field and a lone trumpet was singing out the anthem.

 

Suddenly, the Oakland fans fell silent and listened to the music as the last moments of their victory slipped by unheeded. When they began to cheer, GaleForce asked, “Did their team score again?”

“No,” I told her, “They’re cheering for America.”

It reminded me of a moment in the fall of 2001 when my best friend and I had scored free tickets to sit in the Flyers’ company box for a game. They were fantastic seats and the game was tight.

Then, between periods, the president’s post-9/11 speech was aired. Instead of refreshing their beers, people sat watching it on the big screens above the ice. Suddenly, though, his voice was cut off mid-sentence so that play could resume.

The players stood, awkward, not moving to the center, but looking around. And from somewhere, maybe from the ice, a chant began and swelled.

“Leave. It. On!”

“LEAVE! IT! ON!”

Both teams pumped their fists in chorus with the crowd. They refused to take the ice.

The voices built to a cheer as the president’s face filled the screens again and the players and fans alike sat to watch in a palpable atmosphere of solidarity.

This time, over wings, wasn’t like that time. But Oakland fans, like Philly fans, are known more for their brazen passion than for their grace and sportsmanship. And, for a moment, all the many-jerseyed passions united in patriotism again.

Reason in a Rhimes World

An easy thing to do these days is to publicize your opinions in about 600 pithy words (she wrote, in the first of about 600 pithy words.) Then, social networks allow for small alliances to be built, for a day, on the foundation of these editorials. Who shared this vaccines post, who was notably silent on that parenting diatribe and so on. 

For these low-stakes opinion skirmishes, it’s often enough that the blogger has restated what we already believe or that someone’s words resonated with us. We require little in terms of evidence or research. In other words, we choose sides based largely on our feelings.

I often come back to this idea of philosophy as the basis for action. Your beliefs, whether you’d characterize them as religious or irreligious or somewhere more nuanced, are never neutral. They are defining principles that, like the roots of a tree, flow directly into action: the fruit of your existence.

 Except when they don’t. People who don’t know exactly where they stand, or what they believe about fundamentals (like what it is to be human, why we’re here, where we fit into our environment, and why we even conceive of right and wrong) are like an apple seed that grows the trunk of a beech and produces holly berries and pansies. In nature, we would suspect this specimen of being, gasp, a sordid kind of GMO.

Feelings are so elevated in our culture that it’s not odd to hear an educated person cut off reasoned discussion by saying, “Well, this is just how I FEEL.” To which there is no response, not because feelings are always legitimate, but because there is usually no reasoning with them. It takes cojones to stand up to feelings in a culture where they are so dangerously precious.

Conversely, a philosophy will help a person to examine his own emotions. He might find that his emotions are justified, but if he finds that they aren’t, he can master them like a hero. Noble actions are the result not of bulldozing the world with your feelings like a character in a Shonda Rhimes teledrama, but of overcoming your feelings to do what your mind, thoughtfully, has decided is more important, or more true.

The prophet Isaiah (like this leap I’m taking?) gives a dramatic warning to women, saying in chapter 32, “Tremble, you complacent women; shudder, you daughters who feel secure! Strip off your fine clothes and wrap yourselves in rags.” It’s not sound exegesis, but it’s also not a huge stretch to imagine that in our physical First World comfort, we feel a parallel false security in the personal, inconsequential nature of our opinions. But complacency about the weight of ideas and the state of our own thinking leads to scary places. 

Zombie movie places.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Isaiah wasn’t actually sent to turn Israel’s hearts and minds. He was sent to harden them. Which reminds me of this frustrating fact: emotional people have a predictable response to rational argument: the greater the evidence that their position is wrong, the more staunchly they dig in their heels. This is why college campus debates are vitriolic: the kids come for the fight, not the counterpoint.

 

But we aren’t Israel and this isn’t 740 B.C. We get a chance to do more than Rhimes-culture demands of us: think through the ideas behind things before we decide how we feel about them. What does the band Imagine Dragons mean when they sing, “It all comes back to you?” and is it true? Do you have to choose between Heidegger and metaphysical traditions, or is that a false dichotomy? Can there be multiple opinions on a question decided in a lab?

When I read opinion pieces on anything from free-range parenting to racial profiling to intervention and national sovereignty, I notice a common thread: most arguments are surface and personal. Rare is the writer who starts by stating overtly his philosophy on, say, human depravity or goodness or some such foundation from which to form his conclusion logically. So we can only hope that readers seek out the roots of ideas before they click “share.”