Twelve Reasons to Stay Put

I like my house.
By any standard it's a nice house, spacious and full of light. The kitchen is well equipped and pretty, the bedrooms look out on green spaces, and there's room for family, books, and conversation.
I know someday we might need to move. Someday we might want to move. But not yet.
“Wouldn't you like to downsize?” asked one of my daughters, noting that only her dad and I live here now. “A cozy bungalow -- doesn't that sound appealing?”
Well, no. It doesn't. And there are several reasons why:
* This house is full of memories. It's the last house where my dad visited us, and the last house where John's parents came to see us. I remember them all here for family dinners, or walking up the driveway or in the yard, or just stopping by for a visit.
*Seven of our eight kids spent a lot of time growing up here. Two of them had their weddings here, one in the back yard, one in the living room.
*All ten of our grandchildren think of this as our house, and have fun when they're here.
*We've remodeled the kitchen and the basement, re-roofed, planted shrubs, trees and flower beds, survived a flooded basement, and painted, patched and papered almost every room in this house. My dad and my uncle, all our kids, their friends -- everyone pitched in to help us fix up this place.
*When our dog Meg died, we buried her in the back yard; two of our boys came a long way to help.
*The rose bushes in the side yard were a gift from my confirmation class students one year. The lilac bush was a gift from another confirmation class.
* We have the best neighbors.
* We like the location -- we can walk uptown easily.
* This house has a peaceful quiet that I love. John and I enjoy breakfast at the picnic table or coffee on the swing or chilly Sunday afternoons in front of a fire.
* Did I mention all the family celebrations -- the Christmas morning when we got up to a picture-perfect snow, or the Easter egg hunts, or the Fourth of July backyard baseball games? Thanksgiving dinners when we have to set up tables in the living room and the basement? These walls have absorbed the joy and fun of those family times; on a quiet day they echo back that joy and fun.
* I like having space. I want room to spread out, room to invite people into. I would rather create cozy, not have it imposed on me by the down-size of a house.
* This house is a home, a shelter. When I turn onto our street, I feel as if I'm returning to a place where I belong, where I can relax or where I can get to work -- whichever I need to do. This house is the place where I can locate my family, my heart.
How will I ever fit all that into a bungalow?

One Fun Thing

Here's a fun thing I found on one of my favorite blogs, PENSIEVE: Wordles.
You have to go take a look! and then you can make a Wordle of your own.
It's a captivating form of wordplay, designed to tempt and coax the artist in you.
Just be sure you have a little time to play!

Beauty Is Its Own Reward

The Midwest is hardly ever listed on “most breathtaking” lists. The nation's breadbasket doesn't win tourism awards. We're hardly ever photographed the way Big Sur is, or the Great Smoky Mountains, or Cape Cod.
But the Midwest has subtle beauty for those who have eyes to see, and this week-end is a good example. As trees color the hills and roadsides from green to gold and red, fields undergo their own transformation from green to bronze. Sumac blazes, pumpkins wait for harvest, orange and round and plump. Light filters through spider webs and shimmers on creeks, all tucking themselves in for the coming winter.
Like a crazy quilt, the Midwest in autumn is stitched together with color and texture, piecing beauty and utility into something warm and surprisingly beautiful.

Something Old, Something New . . .

It's always exciting to start something new.
For me something new is a new weekly column on the Blissfully Domestic website, on the Inspired Bliss channel. You can find my first Grandma on Board column here, and a new column again each Thursday. You can also use the Inspired Bliss button on the side column of Notes from Home to find the Inspired Bliss website and explore all the other excellent posts on that channel.
Oh -- the something old?
That would be me!

Boredom, Ennui, Restlessness, and then some . . .

I've been reading Kathleen Norris's new book, A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life: Acedia & Me, and as always, I'm both touched and challenged by her insight.
In this book she shares a great deal about her marriage, her husband's death, and the acedia she experiences in the midst of her everyday life, in the challenges of making a life in the midst of daily responsibilities and death.
Norris writes, “It's easier and far more efficient to go about our daily tasks as though we were the sun around which the earth is spinning, and devote our attention not to divine mysteries but to whatever comes along: deadlines, e-mail, rush-hour traffic. And all of this is oddly comforting.”
She continues, “While we complain about the stress, it reassures us to know we're busy -- it means we're essential. We convince ourselves that we are far too important to die, and this is how we live from one day to the next.”
So -- what, exactly is acedia?
Boredom? Ennui? Restlessness? A sense of futility?
All of the above, and then some.
And what is the remedy?
One of the nice things about Norris is that she doesn't preach; she shares her life with her readers. She doesn't provide prescriptions, she offers pieces of her experience.
And in that life and those experiences, we can see glimpses of God dealing with one of His beloved children. No one-size-fits-all remedy. Just God, being God.

Little Things Like Silverware

Sometimes it's really all about the little things -- the small pleasures and irritations of daily life that bring us joy and build our character.
I blogged about little things on the Hearts at Home website this month. Find out how loading the dishwasher turned out to be a lesson in both character building and marriage.
And let me know how you load the silverware!

Telling The Story, One Day At a Time

I love stories.
I love to hear them, I love to read them, I love to tell them. I just love stories.
My favorite story is the gospel story -- the good news of Jesus Christ. And I love the “story songs” that tell that story, or talk about telling that story.

Here are some of my favorites:

“I Love To Tell the Story”

“Tell Me The Old, Old Story”

“Tell Me the Stories of Jesus”

“We've A Story to Tell to the Nations”

These old hymns always remind me of the privilege of sharing the story of Jesus, the responsibility to tell it, not just with words, but with my life. They remind me to be intentional and deliberate about telling this wonderful story, and they remind me of the pleasure God takes in our sharing this story.

Sometimes I think heaven will just be one big sing-along!

So -- what's your favorite old hymn?

Rain, Rain, Go Away

This past week-end's rain left our yard soggy, but the sun has come out to dry everything off.
We scurried around in our basement as the rain continued to fall, putting things up from the floor, wondering why we haven't made more progress in sending our grown-up kids' possessions home with them, watching the creek as it rose and rose.
By noon, though, the rain had stopped and the creek started to fall, slowly at first. The basement was still dry!
For us this was a morning's anxiety; for our friends and neighbors in Texas and Louisiana and Chicago -- not to mention Haiti and Cuba -- this was devastating. Our prayers are with them.

BUGGED

Went out to sweep the porch a few days ago and found this visitor.
I backed up fast -- I'm not a big bug person -- but then I couldn't resist snapping a few shots. He -- she? -- kept turning his head to watch me, which was a little freaky. I felt as if I'd stepped onto the set of some sci-fi movie.
Later the 5-year old identified my visitor as a praying mantis. A boy in her pre-school class had brought one in for show-and-share and she recognized his face and form. We examined the photographs carefully, noting the fine details of this particular praying mantis. The detail and planning that must have gone into creating this small creature are amazing!
Next time, I'll try to remember to introduce myself.

Five Ways to Work Toward a Culture of Life

Working to create a culture of life doesn't require winning an election.
It does require courage, commitment, and creativity.
It also requires discernment and the ability -- and willingness -- to think about different possibilities with clarity.
It might even involve some compromise -- supporting a candidate we don't agree with 100%, or accepting some policy we don't support wholeheartedly in exchange for making progress on something more truly important.
It means we have to be able to define clearly, both for ourselves and for others, what we believe to be negotiable and what is not.
It means becoming invested in that conversation with God we call prayer.

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I like Sarah Palin. She's feisty and brave and funny, and she's a mom, which means that, no matter what else she does, she's a working woman.
There's still a lot I'd like to know, though.
I think she has a serious lack of a certain kind of experience, particularly in foreign policy. I'd like to know how Senator McCain is working to help her learn what she would need to know as his Vice President; how he'll prepare her to carry on if the worst should happen to him. I'd like to know how he intends to utilize her gifts and abilities in that role. I'd like to know what he expects of her, and how she intends to meet those expectations.

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If it came to a choice between a candidate with integrity of character but little experience, and a candidate with experience but little integrity of character, I think I'd choose the candidate with character.

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Kristen commented on a previous post, noting that “We'll know women have really advanced when we don't have to behave like bad male caricatures...the posturing is like the bad menswear shoulder pad suits of the 80s... “ I think she's right. We women need to quit imitating men when we run for office (or run companies or do any of the things women are doing now) because when we do that, we neglect the distinctive gifts we as women bring to a situation.
Andy Crouch addresses the postures we adapt in his book Culture Making. He writes, “I've found that a helpful word for (these various responses) is postures. Our posture is our learned but unconscious default position, our natural stance. It is the position our body assumes when we aren't paying attention, the basic attitude we carry through life.”
Too often both women and men adopt what Crouch calls the “gestures” of everyday life that we think we should adopt -- the gestures that will help us fit in, that fit the way we think the world is or should be -- and not the gestures that reflect who we really are. Those gestures, repeated over and over often enough, become part of our posture.
So, politicians adopt gestures they think will win votes, and over time those gestures become part of their posture, whether they are authentic or not, at least initially.
The question is, how do we discover what is real in a person and what is not? And how do we live so politicians will trust us when we see them as they really are?
We need to be discerning.

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I don't agree with a lot of things Senator Joe Biden says or does, but I like this about him: he took care of his family when his wife and daughter died. He made his boys his priority, and that shaped the man he has become.
And I liked Senator Dick Durbin's sharp rebuke of those who would make much of Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy. His defense of the Palin family's privacy in this matter was both pointed and elegant.

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Creating a culture of life is work enough for all of us, and it requires God's grace.
Andy Crouch, writing in Culture Making, describes that grace this way: “Do we see a divine multiplication at work after we have done our best? Does a riotous abundance of grain spring up from a tiny, compact seed? This is grace: unearned, unexpected abundance that can leave us dizzy with joy. It is a return on investment that exceeds anything we could explain by our own effectiveness or efforts.”
Dizzy with joy. Unearned, unexpected abundance. Grace.
Where is the candidate for office who understands this?