On Tuesday, in my home city of Nashville, six pro-life activists were convicted of both violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and felony conspiracy against the right to obtain “reproductive health services.” The group was found guilty of obstructing the employee and patient entrances of Carafem Health Center for almost three hours on March 5, 2021, which they did by peacefully praying and singing hymns. The verdict, which was rendered by a jury and decided in less than 4 hours, is another glaring example of the current administration’s efforts to intimidate pro-life Christians…
Read more over at Lucid Media (originally published 2/2/24)
When I was a girl in the late eighties, I would pour over a book of my mother’s called Color Me Beautiful. Sitting on her bedroom’s carpeted floor, I imagined myself with softly done makeup and glossy, windblown hair like the models in the photos. Tiny squares of various shades of pink, blue, yellow, and green mesmerized my young mind. The book offered its readers a system of color neatly organized by seasons of the year (Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring), and boy, it did something for me: it was a valuable marriage of beauty and logic that made sense.
The system assessed your natural features and found the “season” or color family that best flattered you. For example, if you were a “Winter,” your complexion could handle a high contrast of fair skin and black hair, and jewel tones suited you best. If you were an “Autumn,” you could pull off the elusive shade of marigold, while olive green made your complexion and eyes shine. I fully accepted this system of color analysis as the gold standard. The only question remaining was the obvious one: what was my season?
Fast forward a few years and witness me high-fiving my fortieth birthday.
Business is a metric-driven game, therefore, our emotional sense of success or failure can be directly informed by data. Did you see a return on your investment? Success! Did your new hire close his first deal in Q1? Success! Did the latest campaign generate more traffic? No, engagement is down by X% ( = Failure). These are clear-cut, facts over narrative, outcome-based scenarios to inform how one may emotionally classify an endeavor.
Success and failure in business isn’t as simple as I’m making it out to be, of course.
It’s an emotional roller coaster, especially for those with the most on the line. What if you are a small business start-up? How long do you keep plugging away, investing all of your own capital and some of your family and friends, not seeing an ROI quite yet, until you throw in the towel? (Yes, I am pessimistic by nature, but also weirdly future-oriented, like an entrepreneur during the apocalypse.) I’m not saying it’s a cakewalk, but at least you have data points along the way to inform you of how things are going. You have road signs, fireworks, or flares, something to keep your expectations and emotions in check.
If you didn’t get the memo, I’ve migrated to Substack! Expect a monthly newsletter on cultivating a creative life for God’s glory. Here you’ll find musings on writing, old books, motherhood, the art of learning, the South, culture, and God. Nothing too precious, except life and everything in it.
On learning to learn, the changing of seasons, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘North and South’
In our (long)neck of the woods, the leaves are falling. This morning, while walking the dogs by the creek, the air was cool and wet, and I saw the first orb weaver spider of the season; they like to wait to bring out their giant displays of meticulously woven beauty until the frosty mornings of autumn. It’s a changing of the guard; out with the hazy days of August, thank goodness. I will sometimes walk with a stick to break up the webs of silk in my path, but I pause for a moment before doing so.
Thanks for the sign; Fall has begun.
And with fall comes, of course, the high intentions of sharpened pencils. The “back to school” season in our home is a new and strange one this year –not in a negative sense, but unfamiliar, even awkward at times. We are very much trying to find our feet in new territory, charting our path and all of that. There are small joys to be found: boys picking up instruments for the first time, meals made (and eaten) with time and care, and so many new books. I’m often asked the question, “How is it going?” by well-meaning friends and family, some with knowing love in their eyes, others with a skeptical expression as they ask. The “it” being homeschooling, the new thing we are doing, the thing that has affected other things, is affecting me.
For all the years I have been a Christian, and earnestly trying to follow Christ, the one thing I cannot (honestly) say is that it is boring. I guess it’s similar to raising kids in that way—as soon as you get used to the rhythms and practices of one season, everything completely changes and you are compelled to learn new ways to get along and even thrive. This is an excellent way to live, I suspect because it keeps you open to new experiences and learning all the time. It keeps you humble. Makes you remember earlier times with a bit of sentimentality and a load of gratitude. And just as soon as you get comfortable in a season and think, yeah, I’ve really got this thing figured out, the page turns and you find yourself in a whole new chapter.
This week, the boys and I started homeschooling. It’s a chapter that I didn’t seek out, necessarily, but one that has been lingering in my ‘maybe someday’ file. Maybe someday things will slow down enough to try it…maybe someday our schedules will be more flexible…
And then one day the proverbial straw broke me and I realized that I was the only thing holding us back (I’m the problem, it’s me). Friends, when I say it is a faith endeavor, I mean precisely that.
The internet, and social media especially, likes to talk a lot about mindset -about having “intentionality” with our thoughts. I only mock a little. I get the idea, yes we should be aware of our thought patterns and try to identify and correct any woe-is-me mindset. And scripture certainly instructs us to take every thought captive and submit them to Christ.
But as Christians, we must be the ultimate realists. And we know, like deep down on a cellular level, that we are broken at the baseline. All the affirmations and attempts at “manifestations” (ahem, witchcraft) in the world will not heal what is inherently broken. We will never overcome the sinful bent in our humanness with positive thinking. We need to look outside of ourselves for that.
This is why, on this hard and beautiful Monday morning, I wanted to share my favorite Psalm of Ascent (Psalms 121). This ancient collection of poems, or songs, was sung by the faithful as they traveled to the temple to worship God. They were sung in small groups as folks walked along dusty roads. They were whispered by individuals as they came to the stone steps that ascended upward, where they would meet God.
And they are for us, too. We can sing this simple call-and-response as we are taking our kids to school. We can sing as we start our day, coffee in hand, eyes lifted upward. We keep looking up because that is where the real help comes from. Not our mindful practices, not our goal-setting techniques, not our inner-selves. Our real hope comes from a real God, who is ruling from on high and still -amazingly, gloriously- cares for us.
I lift up my eyes to the mountains— where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot slip— he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord watches over you— the Lord is your shade at your right hand; the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all harm— he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.
Here’s my case for Thanksgiving being the best holiday: it’s centered on two wonderful things – family and delicious food. But most importantly, it is devoid of the pressure to buy someone a gift! I know your family has issues (so does mine) and I know someone will probably burn something (it happens), but overall, time spent telling stories and sharing childhood memories over a piece of homemade pie is about the best way to spend an afternoon.
Just for fun, I thought I’d share six easy, comfortable looks for your Thanksgiving weekend plans. I’ve broken it down to three scenarios – Thanksgiving lunch (day look), Thanksgiving dinner (evening look), and Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving…and whatever you choose to do on that day!)
So let’s get going. Here are two looks that achieve the trifecta of ease, comfort, and style. The key here is to layer (because you never know how high Grandma will have that heater blazing this year) and use different textures and tones. As a bonus, the sneakers will allow for a mid-afternoon stroll around the neighborhood for fresh air.
As many of you know, I’ve embarked on a journey of fiction (not a fictional journey, I hope!) over the last few years.
I like to think that I’m reclaiming my childhood love of readingfor the pure fun of it…and because I need/crave the creative spark that nonfiction was not giving…and various other (mostly valid) reasons.
But I know myself too well (and some of you know me even better) to accept that a fa-la-la reason like fun was enough to take on the ~classics~ of fiction. No, there was something else driving this here train.
Get to the point, Sara: I’m reading fiction again, really good, rich, beautiful (and old) fiction. I’m also watching a lot of old/classic movies (and one timeless contemporary series). Hang with me and I’ll share my recommendations below.
But because I am who I am, I can’t just read and watch and enjoy, nooooo mam…I must go introspective and analyze why (always the question, why) Ikeep going back to the well of the old and the beautiful.
It probably has something to do with my age, and the desire to preserve the worthy art that has gone before me, and also how shallow and fast and ugly our twenty-first-century culture has become in contrast. There is also a deeply personal motivator here: I believe that we are shaped (for good or ill) by the culture/art we consume, and I want to be shaped by virtuous things to honor and reflect the beauty of God (and His good world).
One helpful guide in this pursuit has been Karen Swallow Prior’s, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. She advocates for reading quality literature because it allows us to have a kind of simulated experience of exercising our moral judgment, therefore shaping our character, which eventually predisposes us toward virtue. Or, as she succinctly puts it, “Reading literature, more than informing us, forms us” (Brazos Press, pg 22).
The experience itself then matters; how deeply we are engaged and moved by a story, how well it is written, the cadence and word choice and character development and description of setting, all contribute toward a lasting effect on our hearts and minds. Not just content, but form. Beauty matters.
When my son was about 3 years old, he had a game he liked to play, one he called “worker.” Without warning, he would switch into an imaginary mode and start addressing me as “worker,” cheerfully asking questions like, “Hello worker! What are you working on today?” There was usually some kind of costume involved (always with a hat, of course.)
The Christian Worker
When he first started playing this game, I hesitated for a moment, wondering if his dad and I were warping his impressionable ideas about work-life balance by (seemingly) working all the time. I worried that our work-from-home lifestyle (even before quarantine requirements kicked in) influenced him to think about mom and dad as one-dimensional “workers”…as people who only work.
But as we played the game off and on over a few weeks it became a fun little challenge for me to frame my role as “worker” in different lights for him to ponder. Some days I was the grocery-shopping and menu-planning “worker,” while other days I was the kind of “worker” who wrote words on a screen and held virtual meetings. In the simplicity of the game, it got me thinking about vocation and our call as Christian “workers.”
What is the Doctrine of Vocation?
One thing the Reformers got really right was their doctrine on vocation, based on Paul’s affirmation in 1 Cor. 7:17. But the idea is broader than just what we do for “work” (our careers or job); to pursue faithfulness in our vocations as believers means that, above all else, we trust the providence of God in our lives. In an essay on why and how the Reformers developed these revolutionary ideas, Dr. Veith explains the three main pillars of vocation–the household, the church, and the state.
He says,
“Vocation has to do with God’s providence, how He governs and cares for His creation by working through human beings. Vocation shows Christians how to live out their faith, not just in the workplace but in their families, churches, and cultures. Vocation is where faith bears fruit in acts of love, and so it grows out of the Gospel. And vocation is where Christians struggle with trials and temptations, becoming a means of sanctification.”
Heeding Paul’s guidance, when we are considering our vocation, we must begin in the home. The home, or “household,” is the place of our most intimate relationships as husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, children, roommates/close friends, and (sometimes) extended family, like grandparents. The home, therefore, holds the relationships in our lives with the most responsibility, but also the most potential for growth and good fruit. Similarly, we each have roles within the church, and, to a lesser degree, in the state (through our private employment or daily work, or in the service of the military or government).
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