The Tyranny of Worrying about Children

Pastor, blogger, and author Kevin DeYoung just released a new book called Crazy Busy.  In chapter six, he discusses the tyranny of business that our current cultural attitudes toward parenting produce.  Here is an excerpt:

“As nanny parents living in a nanny state, we think of our children as amazingly fragile and entirely moldable. Both assumptions are mistaken. It’s harder to ruin our kids than we think and harder to stamp them for success than we’d like. Christian parents in particular often operate with an implicit determinism. We fear that a few wrong moves will ruin our children forever, and at the same time assume that the right combination of protection and instruction will invariably produce godly children. Leslie Leyland Fields is right: “One of the most resilient and cherished myths of parenting is that parenting creates the child(68).”

I know that in my own parenting I often feel guilty that I’m not doing enough of “this” or doing too much of “that,” but the reality is that what I am really doing is trying to play God with my child.  What I really need is to trust that God is sovereign and that he is using my brokenness to produce the person that he would have my daughter be.  I don’t need better parenting skills, I need to rest in God’s sovereign!

You can pick up a copy of DeYoung’s book on sale here: Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem

Friendship: It’s Depth, not Breadth that Counts

There is a great video at Vimeo.com called “The Innovation of Loneliness.”  The video does a great job of explaining how (in keeping with recent studies about social media) the more we connect the more lonely we feel.  What matters most in our friendships is not how many we have, but how deep the friendships go.  Deep connections take time, effort and vulnerability, all things that we are unwilling to give in our fast-paced, consumer driven culture.  It’s much easier to control what other’s see and have the illusion of friendship, connecting with acquaintances quickly and lightly through a shared picture or comment, than having a deep conversation that helps us to truly know them.  How are you using social media to insulate yourself from people?

Boredom, Entertainment and Learning

Here is a great blog post about boredom and learning.  Note: boredom comes from entertainment, not in its absence. Boredom is for Chumps-Housewife Theologian.

Satisfied with an “Ordinary” Christian Life

Michael Horton has a great article today about the dangers of emphasizing energy and activity in our faith, to the detriment of living an ordinary life in Christ. Here’s an excerpt:

“My target isn’t activism itself, but the marginalization of the ordinary as the richest site of both God’s activity and ours. Our problem isn’t that we are too active. Rather, it is that we have been prone to successive sprints instead of the long-distance run. There’s nothing wrong with energy. The danger is that we’re burning out ourselves—and each other—on restless anxieties and unrealistic expectations. It’s an impatience with the familiar, sometimes slow, and mostly imperceptible aspects of life.”

It’s very easy to fall into the trap that Horton describes. Has “ordinary” become a dirty word in your vocabulary or are you able to delight in the way God works through the ordinary things in your life? Here’s a related thought from G.K. Chesterton where he sees the ability of children and God to rejoice in things that are the same, time and time again:

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy