This was the devotion I gave at my daughter’s bridal shower last year. The theme is from a talk Michelle Duggar gave at a ladies’ tea, and I’m posting it now in honor of her continuing example of showing us how she chooses joy as she honors God by loving her husband and her children.

Daddy has always told his girls that every girl dreams of her wedding, but what she gets is a marriage. You have grown up with a sensible view of weddings, one that sees them as special celebrations of the gift of a covenant marriage, both solemn and joyous. Like so many things in this life, there is a godly tension between the seriousness of the vows you will make with Kyle and with God, and the fun festivities of the wedding feast. That’s where we will share a covenant meal with you both, topped off with wedding cake, a picture of the Feast we will share in Heaven with our Bridgegroom, Jesus.

But it’s still one day, then there is the rest of your life to share with your husband, and, Lord willing, the dozens of children he blesses you with, the ones I am already calling my little Wicklings.

There will be lots of feasts and celebrations in the Wick family. You know very well how to celebrate with gusto. Before we tore our house down, you used to get up every morning bright and early and wake us all up with your singing! Special times, though, will be punctuation marks in the mundane dailiness which you’ve heard me speak of often, and which we have lived together for 21 years. That’s where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. So I am speaking to you today not of romance, though we have talked of that together and I know you and Kyle will do well in your wooing after you are married. (more…)

The countdown has begun.

It’s not much longer that Anna will be with us. She’s goin’ to the Chapel and she’s gonna get married, and then she’s moving to Montana. Anna Montana. And I know firsthand a little about sorrow and joy flowing mingled down.

Tonight we all sat around the dinner table, as we do almost every night, laughing and enjoying a meal that lingers in a good way long after it’s eaten. Tender steak grilled to perfection with a home-made rub. Roasted acorn squash, grown in our own garden, made richer with melting butter. Spinach salad with craisins and toasted walnuts and a homemade creamy garlic dressing. Conversation. We talk a lot, and we share silly inside jokes.

Three of my children have moved away, but this will be our first daughter. Every time there is a leave-taking, there is a hole, a shift in the family dynamic that is a minor bereavement. We learn much about God’s comfort in those times. We learn what it means to depend on His strength in our weakness.

At our dinner confab, Anna told me I should read this new article at Boundless Webzine about “the adventure of staying put.” I knew it, but I love being reminded of it. How I wish everyone understood it. There is such joy in finding contentment in the place you are planted.

For Anna, that will be in Montana. I rejoice that she is marrying a godly man and will become united with a family that desires to honor God in every way. Her calling will be helping her husband in his calling, building a home together with him, following him where he goes and honoring him in what he does. It will be a wonderful adventure, and I am smiling that they will share it together. Together, they will learn the meaning of Home.

Yes, the Great Storyteller has adventure for us. Sometimes it’s adventure like we read about in our favorite books. But most often, and most amazingly, the adventure in stories and films and songs is only a metaphor for the journey we take into the Kingdom, side-by-side with other travelers, weary sojourners on the long road Home.

This article is from Woman’s Day magazine, August 1938. It was written by Rose Wilder Lane (daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder) about her “adopted” sons, and she is very critical of compulsory education and its deleterious effects on a young person’s motivation and industriousness. It is a little too full of that prideful American “virtue” of rugged individualism, so it needs to be read with the reminder “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (I Corinthians 4:7). In spite of the provocative title, it’s not an anti-college treatise. Instead, it’s an interesting lament that the young people of today (1938!) know little of the hardship that forged the steel of character that inspired those who worked to build our nation. It’s also a good reminder to not coddle our children, particularly our sons when they need to learn important lessons from their own trials.

In the 1930s, Lane took in two young boys, brothers who had been left to their own devices during the hardships of the Great Depression. She draws on her experiences as their adoptive mother to lend currency to her opinions here, but her overall point is that people require the experience of working for a goal in order to appreciate the goal itself. This point of view dovetails with her firm opinion that capitalism, and the free marketplace, were the best values for American culture.

We were so poor that I had only one year in High School, and no hope of college. I felt handicapped, and later my life centered in a determination to give my children every advantage I had missed. Last year my older boy graduated from High School and I could have sent him to college. I did not do it.

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This is written by my daughter. I wish I could write like this…and I wish I could take pictures like hers. I’m grateful for the gifts God has given her, and more than that, I am grateful for her! I needed to hear this after a couple of hard days that I made harder by my petty whining. Perhaps it will help set someone else’s sore feet back on the narrow path. Persevere.

God’s grace is relentless and untiring… it will never stop pursuing His loved ones all the days of their life. We may forget it in the daily moments of life, in the wearying and monotonous moments of living, but He is working His most powerful grace in our lives during these oft disregarded and unnoticed tiles that create the mosaic of our lives. The weight of these moments will break our backs if we try to shoulder them on our own strength — they can’t be shouldered by any but the shoulders that carried the cross for us.

So look back even over this week and see His omnipotent and all-sovereign hand in every step that you took. He was there walking with you with feet that once walked long, dusty miles on this earth. And He was present even in every plan of yours that went awry; and every heated and impatient word that you spoke, and every fatiguing trial that you endured. He endured every conceivable trial, and was patient with even the most infuriating of people. He was there with you even then, working to draw you closer to Him through it all, and conform you more to His likeness… admit your need for His daily grace, even on the sunniest of days, but especially on the days that bruise and batter our hearts and hands and feet, when all the aggravating moments of the day build up to explode with the force of a powerful storm. His love and grace will not let you go until you are sanctified and changed from a child of darkness, who is a self-worshipping lump of clay, to a true child of His kingdom, fit to serve Him forever in glory on the new heavens and earth.

Lovely from the inside out

Indeed when people object about my wife and me homeschooling our children they often accuse us of “sheltering” our children. I often ask in response, “What are you going to accuse us of next, feeding and clothing them?” –R.C. Sproul, Jr.

Soon it will be Baby Braveheart’s eighth birthday. My baby is not a baby any more. His knobby knees and lanky awkwardness are a reminder of this. He can even read a story to me with more expression in his voice than I have when I read to him. So I wait semi-patiently for grandchildren and enjoy the little boyishness that still likes to cuddle with and please his mommy.

We are probably going to see Toy Story 3 for the birthday celebration (in our family we usually do family outings, not parties, and the birthday child gets to pick fun food for the day, including sugary cereal, ick). Pixar is popular here. When Disney was about to purchase Pixar, Steve quickly purchased one share of Pixar stock. It is the only stock we now own, and the framed certificate, with a picture of Woody and the gang, hangs on the wall of the library.

This evening I stumbled across a story about a young man who is a story board artist and animator for Pixar, and he is also a Christian. I was impressed by this man’s desire to help make stories that his small son could see…he wants to protect his little boy. Since this article was written, he has also worked on the the latest Toy Story movie and Up.

Many years ago (and if anyone knows how I can find a copy of it please tell me…it was written sometime in the late 1980s or early 90s) we read a Reader’s Digest article that was very profound. Yes, profundity in Reader’s Digest! It reported on an extensive poll that examined people’s views on various topics, and the curious conclusion was that the tendency to be more conservative or more liberal in one’s worldview correlated not with gender, not with age, not with socio-economic status. The greatest differences in people’s beliefs depended on whether or not they had children. Those with children were much more conservative in their outlook in every area.

I wonder if such a poll were taken today, if the results would be the same. I’m hopeful that most people with children have an innate desire to protect them and will willingly sacrifice for their little ones. But there is a strong Siren call in this culture to jump into the treacherous waves of self-fulfillment, sacrificing duty to fleeting pleasure. I’ve even seen those who began well, jump ship and wallow in that deceptive morass. The God-given desire to protect our children needs to be nurtured if we are going to properly nurture the precious treasures God has given us.

Sheltered children are loved children who grow up to be strong people who can withstand worldly onslaughts. And they will need to be able to stand strong, so they also need to be prepared to face those battles. But the school of thought that throws a baby into the pool to sink or swim is not found in the Bible. Praise God for discerning parents. Families will differ on the details of how this is to be lived out, but we ought to agree to ask God for wisdom and for hearts that love our children sacrificially, something which should come naturally, except that sin comes naturally, too.