In Transition

        I was talking to a cousin this past Thanksgiving....she is twenty years old and already realizing that life is not what she thought it was going to be....boy is that ever true!!  Life has been pretty much one starting over point after another for me....and I feel kind of robbed.

       I am not sure whether it is just life to feel unprepared or if you actually can be prepared.  I don't feel I was prepared at all for life, and I am not sure why.  I cannot perceive anyone else's thoughts, only my own here.  I don't know what makes one person more prepared than another.  But I do know that I want my children to be more prepared than  I was.  But how do I do that if I am still learning and still in transition? 

      Maybe God brings us through a period of transition naturally every so often and we are forced to rethink everything we believe.  It can be a painful process.  Transition can bring truths out that you have not seen before.  Maybe your family is not who you thought they were, maybe having children is not as fulfilling as you thought it would be, maybe marriage is not the relationship you had hoped for...or marriage in general is not what you thought it was at all.  In fact, in some of these scenarios, it was quite the opposite of what you expected entirely.  Then begins the learning process, right? What you do after you come to realize that life isn't what you thought it was going to be is very, very important.

        Some people get depressed and start drifting away.  They drift away from life, from beliefs, from family and from friends and from everything they once knew and away from what they enjoyed in life.  Life becomes rather pointless and too complicated to solve.  How can the next step be taken when there is nothing in front of or behind you?  That was me.  Life can do that to you.  I look back at all the things i have been through that I did not expect, and I honestly cannot believe I made it this far.

         In college, I did not make the friends I thought I would make and I didn't get accepted into the club I wanted to be in, and it just seemed that every door I tried to open, just shut in my face.  I was filled with disappointment after disappointment.  Then I got into a relationship and fell in love with someone that did not believe the same things that i believed.  I held on to who I was for a little while, but who I was was becoming more and more vague.  I had always followed God and did my best to keep his teachings, but I was not deeply rooted in a relationship with him.  I was unaware of His deep love for me.

       My faith had always relied on my performance.  When I performed well, I felt good about who I was and I felt good about God and me.  When I performed poorly, I felt bad about who I was and I felt distant from God.  And then i committed the 'unforgivable sin' (in my book at that time).  I had premarital sex.

      I always knew in my heart that I would never do that until I was married, but I never considered what it would be like to fall in love with someone and be alone with them a lot.  And I did not consider that the person  I would fall in love with would not have the same views as  I did...nobody told me that if I tried to fight that battle in a relationship unequally yoked that I would fail.  I never knew that I could not fight that battle alone...and that it was NEVER meant to be fought alone.

      Many people have developed their own theories about the above situation.  And you have heard them all and I have heard them all.  'Don't be alone with your boyfriend or girlfriend, don't make out, don't go too far.'  And I have actually seen a complete diagram of each stage of physical touch!  And how far is too far???  I still do not know.  Is the Bible silent on this?  Is that the reason for the confusion?  I always thought it was crazy that I could never be alone with the man I would consider marrying...maybe it is crazy but maybe it isn't.  Let's face it, desire and passion is a part of life and a very beautiful part of life.  But culture has perverted every innocent desire and passion.  But God still created it.  His creation has not changed just because culture has.  The battle for purity was never meant to be fought alone.....THE BATTLE FOR PURITY WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE FOUGHT ALONE.

     I will tell  my children that they are absolutely capable of saving themselves for marriage as long as they are with someone who is striving for the same goal.  If my children fall in love with someone who is not rooted in a relationship with God, they will fail.  I will teach them that if they do commit this sin, that God still loves them but that God desires a learning process to occur.  I just want them to know that they are not meant to fight that battle alone.  There are many battles that must be fought alone, but not that one.  I wish I had known that.  I wish I had known how vulnerable I was and how fragile.

      I realize that not everyone has the same struggles...this is just an example, a very thorough one of going through a transition.  I used this particular example because it took nine years to have some peace about it and by peace, I mean I really feel like I have something to offer in the form of an answer.  I feel like I learned what I was supposed to learn.  And I can pass that on.  But this is certainly not the only transition I have learned from.  But college  is  a good example for me because I believe during that time I became keenly aware that life was  not going the way I thought it would, I was not handling things the way I thought I ought, and I wasn't turning into the person I thought I would be.

     Since I had defined my worth by my performance, what was left?  Looking back, I do not think God has ever  been trying to teach me how to not sin, but He was teaching me that once everyting was stripped away, that He still loved me.  I do not know if you can relate to this.  I hope this hasn't been a lesson on premarital sex for you, but of the importance of finding peace about the point in your life where things shifted and you felt like life was dragging you and you had no say in what happened next. 

     Has there been a point where life just crumbled?  I figure if it happened to me, it probably has happened to someone else.  And I truly hope what I have learned can be of some use to someone else.  After the transition of college, I started struggling with depression.  And I still struggle with it.  Turning points that involve pain in our lives such as the turning point in my life are what God uses to shatter some misconception we have of him and his love and the way he works  in our lives.  Turning points are unavoidable and necessary, but to make it through one and it not leave completely debilitated, you must be deeply rooted in God's love.

I know what Matthew 18:3 means

     Then he said, "I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven."
     I guess growing up I had some idea of what this meant.  I always assumed it was purity.  But children are not pure.  We all know that children lie, sneak, throw fits, scream, refuse to listen, make the same mistakes over and over.  Adults struggle with the same things.  Some of us have more self control than children, but there is one very marked difference between kids and adults and it is huge.  As adults we are terrible at this.  And children are almost masters of it and Jesus was too.  Forgiveness.
     The other day I was pretty much a monster.  My children were acting like children as usual.  Some days I handle the strife better than others.  But my husband has been gone for two weeks, and all the things they do that require me to intervene started sounding like a bomb going off in my ears every five seconds.  Patience was blown to bits.  My nerves were like metal on metal.  These days never make me feel good.  I understand why it happens, and I have more grace for myself than I used to, but I knew I needed to apologize. 
     So I went in their room and I said, "I am so sorry for how I have behaved today.  I know I have asked ya'll over and over again to forgive me for yelling.  I have prayed about this over and over and if God asked me for whatever I wanted I would tell him Patience without a blink!  And I know I will have to ask forgiveness again but I want you to know that I hate that I do it, and I love you so much."  And without hesitation, my child that gives me the most grief said "And we love you too" with the biggest smile on his face and his arms outstretched.  I am tearing up writing this just thinking about it.  Ahhhhhhh.....forgiveness.  This has got to be what that verse means.  I do not know if as adults we are so terrible at forgiving or if we are so terrible at apologizing.  Apologizing means we name what we have done, we make no excuse, we talk about how we have tried to remedy it, we talk about how we have failed after trying to remedy it and we say we are so sorry.  And we realize we can do nothing to get the response we want and we are at the mercy of the offended. 
     How many husbands do this when they have hurt their wives?  How many wives do this?
How many of us actually forgive or just try to forget instead?  Maybe God is trying to teach us something when we continue to struggle with things even though we long with all our heart to stop the thing and we have prayed about it over and over.  I get why it is hard not to yell.  I have four kids and there is always something to do, someone always wants something, they always need more time from me.  Even if I never yelled, I would feel guilty about how I do not have a special moment with each of them each day.  I run out of energy physically and emotionally.  But what about those things in our marriage that hurt us, that never get an apology, and that never stop?  Do you forgive something that is not asked for?  And if so, how?  How do you forgive something that someone does over and over that hurts you and they never acknowledge it and when you bring it up, they make you feel worse about it because they deny it and just refuse to see your pain.  I know what Christ says about forgiveness, but how does forgiveness have any meaning if it is handed out arbitrarily?  It doesn't.  Not to the perpetrator.  Jesus did not say to forgive people who hurt you and do not care about you because they deserve it but because you deserve it.  You deserve to be set free from other people hurting you that do not care.  Apply this to marriage.  The number one reason for divorce is money.  It is not money, it is the perpetual issue with money.  My husband does this one thing that hurts me and he does it over and over and when I confront him about it, he lies and says he does not do it.  It is not the thing he does that threatens our marriage, it his refusal to see and to stop it.  People grow weary of the burden of continual hurt.  Most of us, probably all of us can deal with the same issue a few times, but the issue that never stops and never gets resolved, now that is what destroys, and that is why God gave us forgiveness.  He made it and gave it to us.  I have no hope without it for my marriage.  I can actually experience some peace if i forgive.  If forgiving is a burden then it is not forgiveness.  Forgiveness is there to help me cope.  It is also there because people mess up all the time and we sin against God so we are expected to forgive because we ask God to forgive us.  But many of us ask for the forgiveness and we feel remorse.  This is different.  There is a difference in forgiveness when someone asks and feels remorse and tries to stop the thing they are doing and the forgiveness given when there is no remorse and no attempt to change.  The first kind is for the offender, the other is for the offended.  I do not profess to understand this or to have learned to do this or what all this means, but I imagine the day I learn how to forgive that perpetual offense will be the day I stop perpetually yelling at my kids....but more importantly, will understand what it means to get into the kingdom of God.

Tough Love

     As a parent, I fail in too many areas to count, but there is one thing I do understand and execute quite well and that is tough love.  I will henceforth explain.  My kids are not sheltered from reality and by that I mean the subjects that really matter.  For example, my 12 year old and nine year old have known what sex is since they were seven and that was probably too late.  Gasp!  I just thought I would start with the most terrifying subject to start with and navigate from there.  If you are like me and believe that our Lord created it and also that it has been exploited to the nth degree in our society, you would be hard pressed to convince me the conversation was unnecessary.  If they have not heard about it by second grade at school, they have seen some form of it on a phone or lovely x rated commercial or x rated picture that pops up when you are browsing netflix.  I just wanted to let them know what our perfect Lord had to say about it before they heard what the world has to say.  Also, when we talk to our kids about difficult subjects, we are saying, "I have faith that you can handle life."  This is a good thing to remember as a parent when any difficult subject that we feel wholly ill equipped to discuss is launched into our lives and subsequently directly into our laps. 
    On a different subject yet a completely connected one, my husband thinks it is cruel to tell my kids 'when you are 18 you are up and out!'  He is of the vast majority of opinion that kids should be able to live at home pretty much indefinitely.  What he doesn't realize, like majority of society is that saying 'you are entering the world on your own at 18' means 'I believe in you'.  Having our children fall back on us time and time again sends the message that they cannot handle life.  That is like every time your child messes up on their homework, you correcting it all for them before they hand it in and every time they fail, you forcing the teacher to let them do it again and again.  Not handing them their lives and expecting them to live them, is saying that failure teaches us absolutely nothing.  How many quotes have we heard about learning from our failures.  How many of the most successful people in the world have experienced failure and have discussed at length how failure influenced their success  more than their success?  We inhibit our children's failures constantly and we do it when they become adults as well.  We tell them to fail is ok then do everything humanly possible to prevent it.  We try to make everyone the same.  Everyone is a winner.  Everyone deserves a trophy.  Everyone deserves a second chance and a third chance.  Everyone deserves to be on the team no matter how they act or what their grades are.  Everyone deserves to go to college no matter their GPA.  What if preventing our children's failures is robbing them of their life?  What if preventing their failure is robbing them of all their potential?  If people learn more from their failures than their successes and they ultimately attribute their character and their accomplishments to what they learned from failure, then what are we doing?  What kind of damage are we causing?  What kind of success are we stifling?  Next time your kid forgets his homework, do not jump in your car and chase him down to give it to him before the bell rings, let him fail.  Have enough faith in him to let him fail..

And by the way, my children both talk about how excited they are to have their own apartment some day.  My oldest already has ideas on how to decorate and what job he will have to pay for it.  hmmmmm

Robot Marriage

       I was listening to a christian podcast yesterday, and they were discussing artificial intelligence.  I have been hearing a lot about this topic lately.  I am not super interested in this topic so I am just going to jump into the part that has been invading my thoughts pretty regularly.  These three guys on this Christian podcast were discussing how it will not be odd one day that someone marries their robot.  I do not think Christians like to think of these possibilities, but let us consider without reservation for a moment that this will happen.  Is this so hard to comprehend?  Is this not happening already?  There are video games that feature sex in first person simulation.  People have online relationships.  People access airbrushed pornography every single day by the millions.  This is not what disturbed me the most.
     I am sad to say that I believe that most marriages already assume the position of calloused robotics.  How many marriages are thriving on friendship and purpose and depth and compassion?  How many marriages are ripe with invigorating conversation of future growth and success as a couple and as parents?  How many married couples go to work every day and discuss and brainstorm about how to be more effective and prosperous for their company and for themselves?  Why is it that in every other endeavor in life, hard work and perseverance is expected and pursued except for marriage?  How can this be so foreign?  How many married couples read the Bible together or pray together?  How many couples have read one marriage book together-even one that isn't that good?  How many couples have gone to marriage conferences or marriage counseling?  Now ask yourself, how many married couples have attended conferences and read material for work?  How many books were read in college and in high school?  Now, if you think all this is unnecessary and silly when it comes to marriage, could someone remind me of the divorce/failure rate of marriage?  And let us apply this parenting too.  About the same amount of effort is put into marriage as is parenting.  Can someone look up the stats on drug use and pornography use with teens?  What if the stakes based on our self education were as high when it came to our jobs?  Do not answer that.  I know the answer.
     Not too long ago, I decided to sub at my children's school from time to time.  There is a new process for this venture and it is quite intense and complicated, but I did it because that is what I had to do.  It was completely silly and unnecessary yet I did it because I Wanted to sub a couple days week when my husband was off work.  I also went to nursing school for a year to learn how to hand people a pill and give them a shot, all of which someone can do at home for an ailing spouse.  Do not get me wrong, I do not despise my education, but Marriage effects our lives and our spirits.  It effects the people we vowed to love the most, our spouse and future children.  Is it not a bit convicting considering that one day people will be more interested in a robot spouse than a real one?  Is it not that way already?