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.

When he proposed to me 30 years ago, Steve and I discussed children. He wanted to know how many I wanted to have. “I think four would be nice,” I told him.

“Four! Wow, that’s a lot…” he blurted.

Now that we have ten, Steve’s pat encouragement to younger parents with a growing family is that once you have three, you might as well keep going, because you’re already outnumbered.

We are sometimes asked at what point we began to feel a bit overwhelmed (yes, it happens to the best of us). My standard response to that query is, that point came for me after we had six children, because it was then I realized I was not in control any more. I should have realized it much sooner.

Today is the 17th birthday of that sixth child, our third and youngest daughter (three boys, three girls, four boys). Before she was born, I was a pretty confident mommy, disciplining diligently, homeschooling with gusto, and confident that my efforts would result in a crop of well-scrubbed and well-behaved youngsters who would march in line behind me like a scene in one of our favorite picture books, Make Way for Ducklings.

Those were the days before we graduated from a mini-van to a green 15-passenger van (aka, “Moby Pickle”). Those days are a faint memory.

I ought to say right away that it is not because of my birthday girl that I had a reality check. She is a dear daughter, a delight to her parents, and we are very grateful to God for her. She has always been, though, a lively girl from a young age, and when I once expressed to my father in a moment of weariness that I wished she had a little less energy, he wisely told me that one day she would be the family party planner and that I would be grateful for it. He was very prescient and wise. But that is not why I say that six was the magic number that transferred us from a state of being self-appointed parenting experts to the position of daily dependence on the manna of God as it sometimes seemed we were wandering in the wilderness.

It is not uncommon for people blessed with children to make this transition, but it is uncommon, I’m afraid, for parents to realize that the latter state is preferable to the former. It is where the blessings are found.

When dark trials come and my heart is filled with the weight of doubt, I will praise Him still.

We are used to tidy TV dramas with conflict resolution within an hour, minus commercials. When we have the ongoing difficulties of daily life, multiplied by the number of people in our household, we might wonder if it’s time to change the channel. We might even want to cancel the program. But we are not in charge of the script; it has been written before the world began, and we are merely players, as Shakespeare, the playwright, so famously noted. The point of the cliffhanger is not to jump off the cliff. If you hang on just a while longer, then the denouement explains all that was mysterious, and the resolution (in a well-written story, and we know that this story we are in is the best that was ever crafted, don’t we?) is worth waiting for. Wait on the Lord.

As I spent the day with my daughter and my other children, I remembered all the times I have had to wait and I thought about the times I will continue to wait. But looking back, I know that time is a tricky thing. In the thick of the moments that vex us, it does seem to drag, but I know that it’s soon gone like a vapor, and I wish for even some of those long days as a young mother with a house full of little ones. That spurs me to make more memories now, and cherish the children God has given us. I am so glad I am not in control.

My three girls at our birthday picnic today

We are so jaded. Perhaps we need to put ourselves in a tiny, unborn baby’s footprints and gaze upon this magical world with new eyes. Are you in awe of God’s fingerprints? Are you in awe of your own? You are fearfully and wonderfully made, in His image. That is why we can weep and smile at the same time.

By the Babe Unborn
by G.K. Chesterton

If trees were tall and grasses short,
As in some crazy tale,
If here and there a sea were blue
Beyond the breaking pale,

If a fixed fire hung in the air
To warm me one day through,
If deep green hair grew on great hills,
I know what I should do.

In dark I lie; dreaming that there
Are great eyes cold or kind,
And twisted streets and silent doors,
And living men behind.

Let storm clouds come: better an hour,
And leave to weep and fight,
Than all the ages I have ruled
The empires of the night.

I think that if they gave me leave
Within the world to stand,
I would be good through all the day
I spent in fairyland.

They should not hear a word from me
Of selfishness or scorn,
If only I could find the door,
If only I were born.

Do you see the abcb rhyme scheme?

How many stanzas does this poem have? How does the simple form convey the perspective of the speaker more effectively? Do you think simplicity in form can sometimes be more powerful than complexity in conveying complex ideas?

Why does the unborn baby imagine he has “rule the empires of the night” for “all the ages” but will only stand for a day in “fairyland”?

Read this poem aloud, remembering to pause at the end of the lines that have punctuation, but don’t pause if there is no punctuation.

This year is a very special anniversary, the 500th birthday of one of the greatest, most humble, most courageous, most influential Christian theologians since the early days of the church: John Calvin. A Frenchman who ended up in exile in Geneva, Switzerland because of the intense persecution of Christians in his native land, Calvin encouraged the faithful reading and application of God’s holy, inerrant Word for his generation — of which many were martyred for their fidelity to God and the five solas of the Reformation — and for generations to come.

Sadly, many in the church have maligned the memory of this great man, portraying him as a stern, proud, authoritarian religious zealot whose heavy-handed ways led to the persecution of his opponents, particularly “poor” Servetus, at whose feet Calvin is practically accused of igniting the wood that burned him for heresy. This most well-known bit of slander is handily dealt with by apologist James White here:

I’m currently reading a book of essays in honor of Calvin’s birthday, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, & Doxology. The authors are a “Who’s Who” of outstanding Christian teachers of our day, including Jay Adams, Joel Beeke, Jerry Bridges, Sinclair Ferguson, Steven Lawson, John MacArthur, and Derek Thomas. John Piper, Joni Eareckson Tada, D.A. Carson, David Wells, and G.I. Williamson are among those who endorse this book. Such consensus of some of the most solid and godly thinkers of our day ought to give pause to those who would readily condemn the memory of a man whose contributions to the Reformation were pivotal in the battle for the truth, who gave us an inheritance of not only freedom of religion, but political freedom in our own nation, as well.

Our friends at Vision Forum have planned a big birthday bash in Boston, July 1-4, to honor the legacy of John Calvin, and with inimitable style, they will be giving irrefutable and compelling evidence from outstanding speakers that we owe a great debt to that great man. One of the best parts of the celebration is the teaching of our friend Pastor Joe Morecraft, whose knowledge of reformation history is unparalleled, as is his passion to convey a love for God’s Word and for our Christian heritage. Anna has been reading Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion because of this upcoming shindig, and I have been enjoying her enthusiasm as she delves deeply into those theological roots, blossoming with inspiration for applying the Word of God to her life. She is finding that the practical piety of Calvin is a spur toward greater intimacy with her Savior which leads to wanting to live out her faith in Him in every area of life.

In his essay about John Calvin, Sinclair Ferguson says this about the change that took place in the misunderstood reformer when God called him out of darkness into His glorious light:

In Calvin’s conversion, two things stand out: First, his pre-conversion condition was marked by a “hardened” and resistant (”unteachable”) mind, and, by implication, a distaste for true godliness (later reversed into an “inflamed…desire”). This, of course, was the informed biblical analysis of one who believed that the fallen human mind is “a perpetual factory of idols” and therefore deeply resistant to the iconoclasm of grace.

Second, for Calvin, conversion to Christ meant not only a transition from condemnation to justification but from ignorance to knowledge and from arrogant rebellion to a humbled heart. His mind was thus softened and brought “to a teachable frame.” From this flowed powerful new affections. He now was “inflamed” with “intense…desire” to make progress in “true godliness.” Thus, to have a heart for God meant to have a desire to grow in the “knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness” (Titus 1:1).

That humility, that teachableness, is evident in his life, seen both in his own writings and in the voluminous correspondence and writings of those who knew him. If you don’t know anything about this giant of the faith, other than some snide gossip from historical revisionists, I encourage you to emulate both his humility and teachableness and at least read some of the articles posted by Doug Phillips at his blog and this article by Bill Potter on the Puritans and how their Calvinist heritage led to blessing for us all. If you aren’t able to make it to the Reformation 500 celebration, you can still learn from Pastor Morecraft and Dan Ford through an online study course on the Reformation and its impact on the family, the church, and the state.