Dominion Family

I have a few posts running around my brain but I have been so taken up with the coverage of New Orleans & elsewhere around the South that I feel that anything else is irrelevant. We are still looking into where the best place to send contributions would be; the closer to the individual the better. And aren’t there a lot of social issues swimming around out there? I won’t be getting into those here but it looks like Americans can’t get enough of big government.

Even without a TV we have been able to see myriads of images on our broadband connection. I end up watching a lot of MSNBC coverage which is less than satisfactory. Katie Couric is a true traditional feminist with her self-righteous, change-the-world attitude. She seems to be the great school marm wrapping everyone on the knuckles. If only she were in charge !! The blame game has begun, as if blaming someone for an act of God will help. I guess blaming is better than acknowledging your Creator.

Still it is heartbreaking to watch people suffer and to feel so helpless. I have always been amazed that so many disasters strike 3rd world countries but now it seems like it is just that the poor take the brunt of any disaster.

One thing we are doing as a family is committing not to drive around too much. It is better for our family to stay home more anyway and now we have an impetus. Today we are cleaning up our own yard which is littered with small sticks and debris. We have weathered several big storms since moving to Alabama and this one wasn’t too bad for us. We didn’t lose any bradford pears this time around so I am feeling blessed.

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Do not miss today’s Psalms. All 5 of them are pertinent to the tragedy at hand, no other commentary is needed.
Here is an example from the Blue Letter Bible KJV.

Psalm 33

Rejoice in the LORD, O ye righteous: [for] praise is comely for the upright.

Psa 33:2 Praise the LORD with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery [and] an instrument of ten strings.

Psa 33:3 Sing unto him a new song; play skilfully with a loud noise.

Psa 33:4 For the word of the LORD [is] right; and all his works [are done] in truth.

Psa 33:5 He loveth righteousness and judgment: the earth is full of the goodness of the LORD.

Psa 33:6 By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.

Psa 33:7 He gathereth the waters of the sea together as an heap: he layeth up the depth in storehouses.
Psa 33:8 Let all the earth fear the LORD: let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.

Psa 33:9 For he spake, and it was [done]; he commanded, and it stood fast.

Psa 33:10 The LORD bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought: he maketh the devices of the people of none effect.

Psa 33:11 The counsel of the LORD standeth for ever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations.

Psa 33:12 Blessed [is] the nation whose God [is] the LORD; [and] the people [whom] he hath chosen for his own inheritance.

Psa 33:13 The LORD looketh from heaven; he beholdeth all the sons of men.

Psa 33:14 From the place of his habitation he looketh upon all the inhabitants of the earth.

Psa 33:15 He fashioneth their hearts alike; he considereth all their works.

Psa 33:16 There is no king saved by the multitude of an host: a mighty man is not delivered by much strength.

Psa 33:17 An horse [is] a vain thing for safety: neither shall he deliver [any] by his great strength.

Psa 33:18 Behold, the eye of the LORD [is] upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy;

Psa 33:19 To deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.

Psa 33:20 Our soul waiteth for the LORD: he [is] our help and our shield.

Psa 33:21 For our heart shall rejoice in him, because we have trusted in his holy name.

Psa 33:22 Let thy mercy, O LORD, be upon us, according as we hope in thee.
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I would like to take a brief moment to discuss the T in TULIP: Total Depravity. That is a doctrine that while not to hard to assert is very hard to believe. We innately believe in the goodness of those around us. We know our own hearts are dark but we don’t really think they are THAT dark. When something really terrible happens in the world like the aftermath of Katrina we immediately are faced with total depravity. For comfort’s sake we would like to put a skin color on depravity but total depravity is not about the color of our skin but the state of our heart. You don’t have to look too far to find the heart of depravity with a white layer of skin. The BTK killer comes quickly to mind.

It appears that the Ft Lauderdale Police Department and Academy are not suffering any delusions about the heart of man. On this point at least, they are teaching good theology. Nicholas has been told that if he believes that men are basically good, he will not live very long as a police officer. Then he was shown a few films to drive the point home. What do Tim and I think about our 19 yos seeing very horrible things? We are glad. We do not want Nicholas to become a police officer or a man who mistakenly thinks all is sweetness and light. We want him to be prepared for his vocation. Really prepared.

When Nicholas was a little boy and young man we did shelter him from this. That was our job. But gradually as our boys got /get older we have let them see that there is sin out there. We have let them know that there is sin in their, too. (spelling intentional for my grammarian friends)

Successfully sheltering your children does not mean lying to them about the doctrine of total depravity, lying to them about the state of their own hearts. There is a reason we need a savior. Give your children the bad news as well as the Good News.

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Timothy joined the Navy to be challenged. For the first 2 years he felt totally unchallenged. Even bootcamp was a disappointment for him and he has hated living on his ship. Thankfully the Lord provided a family from his church he could live with when not required to be on ship.

Because he is scheduled to go to SEALS in February, he has been given permission to work out with the SEALS in Norfolk everyday instead of reporting to his ship. Finally Timothy is enjoying the Navy.

Now the phone rings every morning around noon. Timothy wants to tell us all the horrible things he had to do that day. There is a new lilt in his voice as he tells us horror stories of being yelled at, stepped on, made to run for hours at a time, throwing up. He is thriving.

” First we ran on the beach in our boots. We ran for about an hour and then they tied a tire to our backs and we had to run for another hour. Then we had to run in the water. Then we had to do 7 million pushups in the sand with the tire on our backs. Then we had a race. ”

He tells us stories like this everyday, and I thought some of you have younger boys who might like to hear about that. But the thing I found the most satisfying was when he started telling me how he keeps going . He said, ” When I think I can’t go on any longer I think of all my little brothers who think I can and I think of Bannockburn and William Wallace and Eric Liddle and all those great men I read about growing up.”

I take great satisfaction in knowing that while the Navy is training the warrior, home trained the poet.

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I am in the midst of teaching my 8th child to read. Andrew is doing very well but he has the annoying habit of reading a word from a list and then saying,” Oh, I know what that means,” and then he uses it in a sentence. I say annoying because today we had a long list of words to go through and he agonized over a sentence for each word. I say annoying , because after teaching 8 children, phonics can get a little boring. The good news is that it can also provide a few laughs.

Andrew has a habit of saying, “I am a bear of little brain.” This is not an admission of ignorance on his part but something he just loves to say. Today when he had the word B-A-R-E, I thought for sure he would say something about being a B-E-A-R of little brain but instead he said, ” I know, Like, I can’t BARE that.” Oh, well.

But the funniest line today came while reading W-O-M-A-N. Andrew read the word and said, “Like, Wo Man you have big muscles.” I started laughing and said, ” No, Silly, it’s like, ‘I am a woman.’”
“Oh,” Andrew replied, ” I am a bear of little brain.”

Speaking of bears-of-little-brains, I was sad to see that Bob Denver had died. He had such a friendly face. I don’t think our children have ever seen Gilligan’s Island but they know about Gilligan because every once in a while, Tim or I will call one of them Gilligan. Usually after we have given a long explanation and they condense it down to the barest neccessity.

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Ok, big boys, here is a page for you.

Navy Seal workout

And little boys, here is a workout for you:

This is a copy of the workout that Timothy sent to Andrew (7):

Navy Seal Workout for Andrew:

Monday, Wednesday and Friday:

10 Push-ups
10 sit-ups
10 4 count flutter kicks (always keep the chin on chest to avoid back injury)
Run around the house 1 time.

That is one set,.
do a set then get a drink of water and rest for 2 minutes.
Do it again 5 times.

On the flutter kicks, lay on your back, sit on your hands, put your chin tight against your chest. To do this wrong will relax your back muscles in the lower back and hurt your back. So put your chin against your chest.

Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday:

Rest and recover.

Andrew,
I took valuable time out of my day to write this because you told me you were motivated enough to stick to a schedule if I gave you one.
Don’t let me down. Do it every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and telll me how you feel when I call.
When you are able to do more I will give you more. Work your body slowly, eat right and get plenty of sleep, and you will be very strong someday.

Love, Timothy

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I have a confession to make. I have been relying almost exlusively on the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room for Katrina News. She is better than Drudge.

I finally had to pull myself away from all the coverage and read a frivolous book. I ended up finishing up the Amelia Peabody mystery Lion in the Valley by Elizabeth Peters. Yes, I started it months ago, last winter, and never made any headway unitl all this heavy news jolted me into lite reading. I really wasn’t sure I liked Amelia Peabody and I am still not, but judging from the Amazon comments my choice may not have done the series justice.

And perhaps scooping the DHM, though I doubt it, here is an encouraging word on Katrina from the folks at
PCA Online Magazine
once again gleaned from the Classed girls.

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Several months ago Rick Saenz ran series on agarianism. The very word sent cold shivers down my spine and some of you may remember that I tried to blog about my painful memories of our failed attempt at gentleman farming in NJ. In the meantime, I obtained a copy of I’ll Take My Stand and have now waded through the introduction and the first essay.

I will probably be posting on this subject frequently for a while since it stirs my heart and mind, but today I want to concentrate on the 2 emotions the essay evoked: pain and joy.

My first problem in reading the book is that it is painful. It is painful for me to acknowledge that here in the South we had something precious and for the most part it is lost. Both Tim and I grew up in the South. Tim is a true inbred Southerner and I am from Cincinnati but grew up in cracker country, Florida. That was before cracker was considered a racist word. But having lived in NJ for 13 years, I am well aware that there is still “something” left of the Southern culture that is unique though fading. Here in Limestone County it is amazingly intact but to drive 20 minutes towards Huntsville and Madison, it is a different story. Even in Huntsville there is that “something” that NJ doesn’t have. I would like to expand on this idea in the coming weeks as I continue reading the book but for now let me say, reading I’ll Take My Stand hurts.

As I finished the first essay and began thinking back over our attempts at agarianism in NJ, I suddenly felt joy. What we had attempted and failed in NJ, God had given us as a gift in Alabama. In NJ we bought an old farm. When I say old, I mean as old as possible in America. I mean Gladys Taber/Stillmeadow Farm, old. I mean, George Washington might have slept there when he was a baby, old. We had barns and an orchard and fields and chickens and a horse and cats and a huge garden. Instead of our life being enhanced by all those outward efforts we ended up spending 5 years finding out what we were not made of. Tim and I left the farm broken. We walked away and we didn’t look back. Thankfully, the farm did not break the children. They loved all the hard work and play areas. They loved waking up with snow on their blankets.

Excuse me…I would like to interupt myself:
Waking up with snow on their blankets reminds me that Gary Ezzo could only have a hearing in modern times with modern houses. Trust me when I say that in the olden days mamas kept their babies near and warm.

Now we are in Alabama living on 2 acres in the middle of a little town. Didn’t put a garden in this year, don’t have a chicken (yet), but we are living the ideals that the first essay talks about and we are seeing it lived out around us in our older neighbors. We wave and people wave back. We know the people who own the restaurant and stores in town. We know our policeman. We are only 90 minutes from (the national headquarters) Vanderbilt and the birthplace of Southern agrarianism. We have a porch swing and porch rockers and ferns. We eat BBQ and drink sweet tea. We read and think and talk about classical ideas, just like those 12 guys writing essays in I’ll Take My Stand. Our goals for our children are not carnal but spiritual. And we have hope.

Why? That is what I am asking myself and that is what I am hoping to learn from reading these 12 essays.

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The first essay of I’ll Take My Stand is by John Crowe Ransom and entitled, Reconstructed but Unregenerate

I have already mentioned my emotional state while reading the chapter but now I would like to zero in on one particular passage which I found compelling. It begins on page 9 in my copy and continues on to the top of page 11. Interestingly, it falls nicely into the Titus 2 role of this blog which kinda sounds lame considering the content of the quotes.

It begins with this statement:
Ambitious men are belligerent also in the way they look narrowly and enviously upon each other; and I do not refer to such obvious disasters as wars and the rumors of wars. Ambition of the first form was primary and masculine, but there is a secondary form which is typically feminine, though the distribution between the sexes may not be without the usual exceptions.

Delivering a knock-put punch with this sentence:
If it is Adam’s curse to will perpetually to work his mastery upon nature, it is Eve’s curse to prompt Adam every morning to keep up with the best people in the neighborhood in taking the measure of his success.

Perhaps you aren’t cheering your husband out the door demanding he make more money to keep up with the neighbors in the way described by Ransom. But there are other ways, as SAHMs, that we crack the whip upon our husbands’ backs. When we fail to have simple tastes and simple needs we are hurting our husbands. We may like to think that we are just following some speaker’s advice but in many cases it comes down to feminine ambition. We may kid ourselves into thinking we are enhancing our husbands’ trophy case but, forsooth, we are just making a nuisance of ourselves. Being gracious in the Southern sense does not always mean having the nicest clothes but it does mean carrying yourself with grace no matter what you are wearing, even if it is the same dress you wore the past 3 Sundays.

There are a million other ways that Christian women provoke their husbands to do better wrongly.

Then this paragraph really struck my heart :
“The feminine form is likewise hallowed among us, it seems, under the name of Service. The term has many meanings, but we come eventually to the one which is critical for the moderns: service means the function of Eve, it means the seducing of laggard men into fresh struggle with nature. It has special application to the apparently stagnant sections of mankind, it busies itself with the heathen Chinee, with the Roman Catholic Mexican, with the “lower” classes even of American society. Its motive is missionary, its watchwords are such as Protestantism, Individualism, Democracy, and the point of its appeal is a discontent, generally labelled “divine.”

Ladies, do you see what he is saying? Service can be another word for ambition. History tells us that many of the former feminist advances came on the heels of do-good women’s issues. Abolition was essentially a feminist movement allowing women to leave their own sphere of sovereignty to stick their noses in other peoples’ business. Prohibition comes to mind; Carrie Nation self-righteously destroying bars. When women leave their own dominion and self-righteously begin to serve outside their sphere, bad things happen in society. From current events Mary Landrieu comes to mind. It is just sickening to watch that woman.

And fictional literature has not failed to give us the do-good woman as a caricature of true womanhood. Charles Dickens, himself a reformer, has no end of “missionary” minded silly woman in his tales.

That is why, I think, the patriarchy movement has been so dead set against progams in churches. It isn’t just that our children are getting negatively socialized….because sometimes they are not. It is that so many church programs deteriorate into woman-run do-goodism. A woman should be busy at home not busy at church. This is not to say that works of service are not a part southern womanhood. They are just performed within the proper sphere.

Now a quick reminder that I am a global thinker. I am much better with big ideas than small details.

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In the comments section on the previous post, Joanna asked a question about women bloggers discussing politics and theology.
Tim and I responded to Joanna with our own comments but there was one more thought I had that I wanted to turn into a post instead of a comment.

In the olden days, I was a serious news junkie. I loved to watch news shows and hear commentary. When we got rid of our TV, I ended up listening to the radio a lot more. But in recent days the internet has become an explosive tool for news and everything else. It has changed all of our lives for better or for worse. One reason I find it hard to step totally away from the computer is that it has simplified many aspects of my life including comparitive shopping, bill paying and banking.

I believe blogging has been a powerful force for good on the internet. I will give you one example of why. It used to be that a politician could get on TV and few people would see it and comment but most of America was easily manipulated and given only the info the media desired to dish out. If a politician made a poltical mistake Rush Limbaugh could discuss it but most of us didn’t actually see the mistake.

This week Mary Landrieu got on TV with Chris Wallace and really showed us what was underneath the pretty hairdo. I personally would have had zero chance of seeing something like that. I also have limited time. Now though because of the internet I can go agleaning. Instead of wading through the vast material on the internet I have found a few key places that can give me a scoop that I trust. So I go over to The Common Room and find out which stories the DHM is linking to. She is linking to the Political Teen and he is keeping video downloads of some of these interviews. I know that the DHM and I probably have many of the same perspectives on politics, after all she linked to Davy Crockett’s Not Yours To Give, possibly the best titled speech ever given. I don’t say, “How does DHM have time to do all this?” I am thankful that she does have time. I know from past experience on the internet for at least 5 years that her children are well brought up and impressive. I am thankful that each day she goes agleaning and that I can follow her footsteps saving me myriads of time. When Tim came home from work yesterday I was able to tell him about how funny the interview was. He said he had heard a little about it on Rush Limbaugh. I then pulled up the link for him very quickly and he watched the interview, laughing his head off. I don’t mean to imply that he is insensitive but when Mary commented that the buses weren’t used because they were under water all you could do was laugh or cry. I was happy that I could enhance his day and distill some of the news stories from the hurricane for him.

I am not a libertarian so I do not read Lew Rockwell regularly still occasionally someone over there will say something profound. I can count on Carmon to let me know therefore saving time everyday. I also think it is extremely important for homeschooling families to understand the implications of Charter Schools and Carmon is doing a great job in that area.

When someone like Judge Roberts comes along. I need to hear the real deal and I have benefitted from the many wise words other women have said on the subject. My blog is not the place to come for astute political analysis. Mostly I just make occasional comments.

As far as theology goes, I head over to Wittenberg Gate where I know I can trust Dory and usually will come away convicted by the Holy Spirit. Lately Dory has been too busy to blog but in a few weeks she will have more time and be back. I consider Dory a mentor and I greatly appreciate her maturity.

Carmon, DHM and Dory are all older women. They each display a maturity that dwarves my own. I am stretched and convicted when I read their words. Sometimes I disagree and many times I talk to Tim about what goes on in blogdom. I consider what I do and what they do “gleaning.”

The Proberbs 31 woman brought her food from afar. Ruth gleaned in the fields of Boaz. I approach blogging the way I approach everything, as a Christian woman. I believe blogging is a valid and healthy form of communication in this age of disgusting media. But I do not believe we should approach the reading of blogs without a great deal of discernment. Sure there are plenty of woman out there that probably shouldn’t be blogging but I am not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

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