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Real Christians only
Don’t eat your children and 14 other helpful suggestions for Christian Families
Fifteen guidelines for a Healthy (or Healthier) Christian family
I am going to assume you are already fully engaged in the basics of tiresome family devotions, of “guilting” your children into feeling guilty for not reading, and for not wanting to read, the Bible for several hours a day. I will assume you are checking that everyone (else) tithes to the last dime. I will assume you are already telling your children to be quiet if they think church is boring or if they suggest they’d rather go to the beach than to church.
Anyway, take it or leave it, here are my 15 suggestions for a Healthy (or Healthier) Christian Family:
1. Say yes more than you say no. Lift the brakes on safety (caution). Welcome and release the spirit of adventure. God is not a North American and therefore much more Adventurous and Wild than safe. If you doubt this you have had protected or limited exposure to Scripture and to any vibrant church. Let your individual life and family reflect this God’s Wildness rather than the tameness that is so prevalent in the Church of 2011. This does not mean children should be allowed to play in the traffic. Being adventurous is not synonymous with being ridiculous.
2. Have a valid passport for every member of your family so that at the drop of a hat you may respond individually (and as a family) to needs for service anywhere in the world. How can you “Go into all the world…” if you don’t first have the necessary paperwork?
3. Teach your children old fashioned manners like standing for adults, removing caps when talking to adults (boys), opening doors for women and adults, giving up chairs to elders, eating with a shirt on, walking on the traffic side when walking with your mother. If the rest of the world thinks you and your family are a crazy for being well mannered then consider it a compliment. This is one, only one remember, of many ways to “Be not conformed…”
4. Treasure (respect, encourage) individual boundaries. Everyone (even your precious baby) needs space, distance, separation, unique territory, and un-invaded room to be, to think, and to enjoy. Set these in place day-by-day, week-by-week, and year-by-year, for yourself (you can’t do it for anyone else) and you will see your children will probably (no promises here) do the same.
5. Resist coercion of all forms – even “good” coercion. Every action will get an equal and opposite reaction (yes, even from your angel of a child) so keep this in mind as you try to “force” people to do things. Remember you can only want for yourself. This does not mean children should not be made to brush their teeth.
6. Don’t start anything (behaviors, habits, patterns) you are unlikely you be able to continue. Unless you want to do your child’s homework for him forever don’t do it tonight! I think you get the idea.
7. Don’t obsess about what your children look at, hear, or do with video games, movies, and music. I am not suggesting parents throw all caution to the wind but being constantly on duty hardly models “be anxious for nothing.” You’d think Jesus said, “Be anxious about everything,” if you watch some of the Christian parents. My “rule” (yes, we have rules) is my children can watch, say, eat, smoke, drink – whatever they see me watch, hear me say, watch me eat, smoke or drink. Simple. Remember, that what comes out of you is more important than what goes in you. Your anxiety as a parent is more damaging to your family than anything Lady Gaga, Family Guy, Harry Potter, or World of War-craft can do.
8. Be self-aware. Teach your children to be self-aware. This is not the same as being selfish. Learn to recognize the power and the influence that comes with being human, that comes with living in a family, and that comes with being part of a church family. You are powerful beyond your understanding at the very same time you are not nearly as powerful or as important as you think you are. Get used to this beautiful oxymoron. Your life has influence as an individual, as part of a community, while you are also one person of many.
9. Value obscurity. Enjoy doubt. Celebrate ambiguity. Embrace mystery. Love complexity. Quit searching for certainty, sureness, simplicity and you will live a far less anxious existence. Not only can you not have all the answers you cannot even have most of the questions! Life is beautiful and brutal – and you can’t go too long without both.
10. Put living life and responsibility for living it well into your children’s hands as early as possible. The sooner your sons and daughters get the message that each person is fully responsible for making his or her life meaningful, the better. Blame no one for anything – but take full responsibility for yourself in ever manner possible. Forgive everyone, everything (there are very unusual exceptions). It is impossible to take full responsibility for your life while living a life of blame and finger pointing.
11. Get a life – then you won’t have to take it (your lack of one) out on your children. Giving up your life to rear your children is one of the most ridiculous things the Western church has routinely encouraged. Children can’t take the undivided attention of unfulfilled adults (or even fulfilled adults) and it’s no wonder they so often grow up and reject everything that’s been unloaded on them in the name of Christianity. If you, the parent, are living a full, beautiful life, and are enjoying the God of the Universe to the max, your children will be unable to resist wanting to emulate you. Most Christian parents I meet are so child and church and do-the-right-thing focused that they are no fun at all. Live your faith life for your own sake, not to teach your children something.
12. Don’t be boring. Don’t be controlling. Being boring and being a Christian are as impossible, as impossible as loving others AND trying to control them.
13. Don’t eat your children. Many acts of parenting that I have seen promoted are more like cannibalism than they are caring. Avoid terms like, “He is so beautiful I could just eat him,” because you might. “I just love her to death,” is another one to avoid. You children are not on this Earth to make your life meaningful. You are here to ensure your own life is. This is not selfish. Taking out your lack of life on your kids or consuming them with your unfulfilled dreams, is. It’s not just selfish – it’s criminal in my book.
14. Practice radical hospitality. This does not mean (only) having Aunt Susie over for lunch knowing she is a frightful, controlling bore. It means opening your home to your enemies, to those who hate you, to those who believe in things you don’t believe in. It means loving those who reject you and who work against you. It’s having Muslims and Gays and street people and former convicts live in your home and be in your small group. It’s knowing, it is actually knowing, men and women who have AIDS.
15. Be generous. Always tip more than expected even if the service sucks – it’s about YOU not the service. A waitress friend tells me the families who pray most urgently in restaurants are the worst tippers. This is a travesty!
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Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
Idiots – always adults, children were surprisingly patient, – would make me repeat sentences as if a repeat performance of the humiliating uncoordinated gesticulations, my arms and legs flying in all directions, would make for an easier delivery the second time. That I’d just spent every ounce of energy trying to cough it up was lost on them. That I was already thoroughly humiliated was something to which they were blind.“Practice, practice,” they’d say as if stutterers simply didn’t speak enough. “Think before you speak. Now – try that again,” they would declare slowly and loudly as if I was stupid and deaf. These thoughtless people were ignorant of just how much stutterers do think. Too much – which is central to the issue!
If I’d known at twelve or thirteen that the day would come when I’d make a career of public speaking I might have strolled off a high-rise building.
Now it is quite easy to hide. I am very comfortable with crowds.
It’s asking driving directions or ordering food at a drive through where it gets tricky. Sitting in a cozy circle waiting for my turn to introduce myself sends my blood-pressure through the roof. The ticket attendant on the London underground can render me dumb after I’ve just spent days addressing a room full of graduate level adults about Family Systems Theory. I know. It sounds ridiculous.
I was almost immobilized the first time I saw Thulani put himself “on duty” in the event he needed to be my mouthpiece. He did it. No one asked him or appointed him. He just did it.
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Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
Our house is the same, but instead of painting from end to end and back again, I am the guy constantly cleaning, – and, it’s hard to tell.
Where I cleaned and swept and dusted and vacuumed and sponged and sterilized yesterday there are scooters and bicycles (boys), mail in piles (me), books (boys and me), newspapers (me), magazines (me), and socks (boys and Max, the Chihuahua).
Turn my back and the boys and Max are at it again – enjoying life as boys (and a dog) while I find being a cleaning lady quite an exhausting challenge.
There is a point of no return, I’ve noticed, or at least a point of the chaos where I feel compelled to let it all go for a while and I throw up my hands and join in the fun of trashing the place.
But when I clean I like to think I’m just like the guy painting the Bridge, which I can only imagine must be a slow and methodical task.
I do it room by room, starting at one end, the front, in the event that I soon lose interest – then, at least, the front room is somewhat in order. I push it (trash, magazines, books, socks, clothes) all back from the living room, through the piano room, then into the TV room until everything lands up in the kitchen.
Once it hits the kitchen I separate out what’s Max’s – he’s has his own set of toys with which he ruins the house – what’s Nate’s, what’s Thulani’s, and what can be recycled, dumped, restacked on bookshelves, placed in drawers, hung on a hanger, or filed in the “important documents” file I keep losing.
We moved into “122” (creatively named for its street number and which has had very few updates since it was built in 1886) when Thulani was about two – and I have been getting it in order ever since. Nate joined us in 2002. Max, in 2009. The house- attachment, at least for the boys and Max, is strong. When I talk of selling Thulani reminds me that Rhino, the husky that was on the run for nine months and returned to die within a few weeks after we reconnected, is buried in an Air France first class cabin blanket just outside of the kitchen door. Nate reminds me of where the fat goldfish is buried and Thulani ends the litany with his inability to think of living in a house without the large tree in the front yard where he has his brother (and Max) have “peed like boys” (and a dog) for the past several years.
So. I’ll go on painting and, before you send me letters about giving the boys chores and responsibilities and assigning daily tasks and getting on top of it before it gets on top of me let me advise that you are barking up the wrong tree (sorry, Max for the dog metaphor) because we do have all that in place and it does work here and there and off and on.
I know, I know. Consistency is the name of the game for parenting and let me tell you, the ONLY thing that is consistent here is the need to keep going room by room with or without the boys (and Max) to get this little bridge painted one stretch at a time so the world can see just how organized and decent our lives are here at our beloved “122.”
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Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
I am regularly aware that:- I was discouraged from playing soccer in the “front” yard (in view of the neighbors) with the servant’s children. While this may seem insignificant in the light of other much more severe problems rising from racism, it was huge for me as a child on several fronts. I loved the children and I loved soccer even more. They were excellent soccer players.
- I did attend a segregated school as did almost all white South Africans while there did exist some church schools that were integrated even under Apartheid. I vividly recall my school principal scolding the entire student body (over a thousand white boys) because a domestic worker (a black adult man) was seen walking in the neighborhood wearing a school blazer.
- Although, by no means wealthy, I was waited on hand and foot by a full-time servant.
- In the late 80s I was warned not to pray publicly for Prisoner “Nelson” Mandela from my church pulpit.
- A member of my family did balk at my request that I bring black children to his home-swimming pool to swim.
- Even as late as 1987 I was embarrassed that a young black boy whom I’d “helped” in his squatter camp had shown up at my door unannounced. I recall wondering what the neighbors would think seeing a child arriving at the home for a social visit and not to work in the yard.While I am aware that these are piddly problems in the light of what millions faced under the Apartheid regime, I am also aware that these factors in my immediate environment “shaped” me into believing perverse things (like in my own superiority and in “their” inferiority) about persons of other race groups. More significantly, I am frequently reminded that my children and I could not have shared life as we now do if we were still living in the era of Apartheid.
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Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
That’s the upside.
We are a 10-hour-drive to the nearest coast – and, most of the east coast beaches are not worth the drive. The west coast, which has many wonderful beaches comparable to where I was reared, takes three full days of driving to reach.
Being landlocked is one thing but another is the weather. Indiana weather is erratic, neurotic, and downright psychotic.
Days ago I could’ve (but I didn’t) ice-skated across the street. Now, as I write, there’s a small lake in the street next to the sidewalk from last night’s rain. The weather is so brutal and extreme (it is as hot as blazes in the summers) that when we do drive anywhere (there are no grocery stores in walking distance) the streets are often full of potholes making some of America’s finest suburban streets resemble stretches of road you’d find in a rural stretch of South Africa’s Wild Coast. So, I am exaggerating but really not too much. Washington Boulevard is a challenge to drive right now, you have got to dodge potholes and loose pavement or, unless you drive a tank, you stand to severely damage your suspension.
But I do love living here. My neighbors are some of my best friends. My children are free and safe in the neighborhood and everyone knows everyone’s children. Even as I write Joseph (born a week or so before Thulani) from down the street has wondered into the house and it is quite likely he will eat with us, stay the night, and then wander down back down the street to his home sometime in the morning. His mom and I will talk sometime between now and nightfall unless he of course chooses to wonder off home and be gone just as quickly as he showed up.
Potholes and crazy weather won’t send us running, although we will drive to church in the morning – even though it is really close. I’m not sure I want to brave the elements which could be a snow-storm, an ice storm, the threat of a tornado – or a little or a lot of each. What else could you expect during March in Indiana?
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Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper. Of course you can go baby-stuff-shopping, get a room painted, stencil yellow ducks on the wall – if you know long enough in advance your child is coming. But painting a bedroom with ducks and rainbows and a pot of gold, and getting a truck load of stuff from your local one-stop baby emporium will only fill your home with a lot of weird and wonderful, and mostly unnecessary, equipment.
Children interrupt everything. It is the child who is really ready to teach you, whether you are or not. Once he arrives he will become the hub of all your scheduling. You will be fine with this because the child is not an interruption to your life but rather, from this point on, central to it.
The baby will make you ready and you can’t really prepare for the baby until he is breathing in the crib right next to your bed.
Life inside the Smith household
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