I know I’m late with this bit. I’ve said it before, but my energy level is not the highest…it’s peaks and valleys with me and I’ve been in the valley since returning to my mountain home from the big trip, and though I do love to talk to y’all (like my Virginia lingo?), the ones here at home get first dibs on whatever I’ve got to give. If it sometimes seems like the things I write here are the leftovers, well…

Gracie and I did bring back colds in addition to the many happy memories. Then that Ben character had to go and drain the well a bit more dry by making his mother worry about him (”You know the pictures in the news of the most dangerous parts of the fire…that’s where I’ve been.”) Plus a birthday, plus more excuses, excuses.

But I still have a couple things to tell about our trip.

Fort Pocahontas, where the last two days of the Jamestown birthday celebration was held, is part of the estate owned by Harrison Tyler, whom I think I mentioned is truly the grandson of the tenth president, John Tyler (1841-1845), and who owns the ancestral property. Mr. Tyler is in his 70s, he was born when his father was in his 70s (Lyon Gardiner Tyler, official historian of the Jamestown tercentennial in 1907), who was born to the tenth president when he was in his 70s (John Tyler also had the distinction of being the father of 15 children). Think about that, and try to grasp how quickly that time has gone by, think of how the heritage of that family illustrates the short space of our national heritage. That man’s grandfather was president before the American War Between the States, before the California Gold Rush began. We blink our eyes and the moments are gone. That is why it’s so important to talk about the milestones, to mark them and remember them with special times of celebration.

Becky Morecraft, the “poet laureate” for the event

My friend Becky Morecraft demonstrated that beautifully on the second day at Fort Pocahontas, under the huge tent where we gathered for special talks and other highlights during the two days there. She wrote a lengthy poem to commemorate the entire celebration and to lead up to the dedication of the Children’s Memorial, the only monument made for the birthday of Jamestown. Becky’s poem was inspired by her own joy in telling stories to her grandchildren, who beg their grandma to do so whenever they visit with her. I’m not surprised, as Becky has a compelling way of telling a story with her lovely, lilting southern voice. Her poem was itself a story, about a grandfather sharing his personal memories of the beginnings of Virginia with his grandson who sat on his knee. I wish I could play a recording of it for you or link to the actual poem somewhere. I like to think I’m pretty good at reading aloud after so many years of practice with my children, but Becky, who has a very powerful singing voice (which you can hear on her sister, Judy Rogers’s, CDs) was superb with the cadence and emotion of her poem, whose refrain echoed perfectly the purpose of the entire event: “Remember God’s providence my son—remember, and persevere.”

The Jamestown Children’s Memorial, overlooking the James River at Fort Pocahontas

Gracie commented after we returned home that we couldn’t walk more than a few steps without stopping to talk to someone. Even waiting in line at the porta-potties we had some great conversations . Several ladies I visited with noted how special it was to be in that place with so many sweet Christian families…sometimes we feel alone and get discouraged by negative reactions, even in the church, to our countercultural decisions. Homeschooling, having more children than is considered “normal,” and some of the other personal convictions lived out by the Christian families we met are met with anger and suspicion by some. Sometimes it’s people who see such convictions as “weird,” and sometimes there are those who feel judged knowing that such convictions are held because the ones who seem different choose to differ for a reason.

And sometimes the ones with the convictions are not so gracious to those who differ with them.

As we walked around Fort Pocahontas, we met people who wore head coverings, but we don’t. Some folks we met wear dresses only, and though I almost never wear pants anymore, my girls do. We homeschool, but there were those who came to Jamestown who are involved with Christian schools. Though longer hair was the norm for most of the women I saw, there were a variety of hairstyles and lengths. I even noticed one young man in the book tent whose hair was down to his shoulders, and I would have even talked with him if the opportunity arose . Of course, there were lots of Baptists there, but we are of a more Presbyterian persuasion. And no, not even half the folks there were dressed in historical garb, though such clothing did lend a festive atmosphere to the occasion which was, after all, to remember an important time in the beginning of our nation’s history.

The lovely Miss Altman and her sister had some good talks with me about books, even though we California girls had skirts which went only a little past the knee that day

Which brings me to tell you about one of the best talks of the two days at Fort Pocahontas, by Paul Jehle. Dr. Jehle is the director of the Plymouth Rock Foundation, thus he gave a talk comparing the Plymouth settlement and the Jamestown settlement. Perhaps you have heard Jamestown unfavorably compared to Plymouth. Yet Dr. Jehle said that both form a cornerstone together and are a “balanced expression of kingdom principles.”

The controversy, of course, is that Jamestown was allegedly founded exclusively for commercial purposes while Plymouth was an exclusively religious colony which did not care about material profit. Dr. Jehle spoke of how both had religious as well as business-related ends, but that each had differing perspectives. Jamestown had a more “national” mission, founded as it was by leaders in England’s government (such as Edwin Sandys) and men who were involved with the state church. Thirteen years later, the founding of Plymouth was more local and small in scope and vision, by a group of Separatists from the church. For quite some time, the southern vision encompassed this more national and larger view, while the northern colonies had a more federal (as in de-centralized) idea of governing their affairs. This ironically switched later, as we see in the northern and southern views during the Civil War. But there was some conflict between the two groups initially, though both models came to temper one another eventually.

Then Dr. Jehle used this historic example to give us a present-day application. He talked of the way the Virginians considered the Separatists as arrogant and not honoring the king with their refusal to submit to the Church of England. The Separatists of Massachusetts thought the Jamestown settlers were compromisers who did not honor God, and they went too far sometimes with the idea of separation to the point of breaking fellowship with other believers who didn’t agree with them on non-essentials. Yet both colonies were founded on a religious mission and came with the Geneva Bible. Later on, we see the national mission of Jamestown and the federal mission of Plymouth balanced in the Constitution, which was not either/or, but both/and.

Our convictions are important, but we must learn how to live them out while also being a leaven in society. Dr. Jehle reminded us that we are not to be a trophy on God’s mantelpiece…we need to model humility. He told a story of a starving time in Plymouth in 1622, that happened not long after the starving time in Jamestown. A ship with supplies came to save the Massacusetts settlers just in time…from Jamestown, the place with which they wanted no associations as they considered their Church of England associations to be reprehensible. Yet they had to humble themselves and accept help from those they wanted to avoid. Governor Bradford called it a double blessing as they received the food and they learned to receive from the hand of God in ways they didn’t expect. Sometimes God needs to bring us out of pride and ignorance into humility to say, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

I appreciated Dr. Jehle mentioning something with which I wholeheartedly agree, as do most of those whom I know: the goal of restoring the family is not to worship it. We need to let our influence grow and leaven society. There is a godly tension of being both insular and outward in our convictions, just as we see the tension between the federal and national nature of our founding and our government (the way it was intended to be).

When I talked with those ladies about the blessings of being with the other families that week, I also noted that while it was a blessing to be there together, it was also a blessing to go home and live as lights for the Lord in all the places He puts us. Though in our churches and families we are benefitted as we have unity and work together for common goals, we also benefit from the trials of standing alone about some things and the challenge of loving others and bearing one another’s burdens even though we don’t perfectly agree on every little thing. Sometimes the rough edges that get rubbed off are our own.

Bonnie is a lady who could teach me lots…I wish we didn’t have an entire country between us, but it was a privilege to meet her and her family, too

Let’s stop insisting that “ninny” is part and parcel of femininity. In her essay “The Essence of Femininity,” Elisabeth Elliot says:

The feminist theology of Christians (I cannot call it “Christian feminist theology”) is a Procrustean bed on which doctrine and the plain facts of human nature and history, not to mention the Bible itself, are arbitrarily stretched or chopped off to fit. Why, I ask, does feminist theology start with the answers? One who spoke on “A Biblical Approach to Feminism” defined her task (a formidable one, I should say!) as the attempt to interpret the Bible in a fashion favorable to the cause of equality (Virginia Ramey Mollenkott at the Evangelical Women’s Caucus, Washington, D.C., November 1975). The “interpretation” called for amounts to a thorough revision of the doctrines of creation, man, Trinity, and the inspiration of Scripture, and a reconstruction of religious history, with the intent of purging each of these of what is called a patriarchal conspiracy against women. Why must feminists substitute for the glorious hierarchical vision of blessedness a ramshackle and incoherent ideal that flattens all human beings to a single level—a faceless, colorless, sexless wasteland where rule and submission are regarded as a curse, where the roles of men and women are treated like machine parts that are interchangeable, replaceable, and adjustable, and where fulfillment is a matter of pure politics, things like equality and rights?

This is a world that the poets have never aspired to, the literature of the ages has somehow missed, a world that takes no account of mystery. The church claims to be the bearer of revelation. If her claim is true, as C. S. Lewis points out, we should expect to find in the church “an element that unbelievers will call irrational and believers will call supra-rational. There ought to be something in it opaque to our reason though not contrary to it. . . . If we abandon that, if we retain only what can be justified by standards of prudence and convenience at the bar of enlightened common sense, then we exchange revelation for that old wraith Natural Religion.”{1}

Christian vision springs from mystery. Every major tenet of our creed is a mystery—revealed, not explained—affirmed and apprehended only by the faculty we call faith. Sexuality is a mystery representing the deepest mystery we know anything about: the relationship of Christ and His church. When we deal with masculinity and femininity we are dealing with the “live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge,” as Lewis puts it.{2} We cannot at the same time swallow the feminist doctrine that femininity is a mere matter of cultural conditioning, of stereotypes perpetuated by tradition, or even the product of some nefarious plot hatched by males in some prehistoric committee meeting.

Please do not misunderstand me. We must and we do deplore the stereotypes that caricature the divine distinctions. We deplore the abuses perpetrated by men against women—and, let us not forget, by women against men, for all have sinned—but have we forgotten the archetypes?

Stereotype is a word generally used disparagingly to denote a fixed or conventional notion or pattern. An archetype is the original pattern or model, embodying the essence of things and reflecting in some way the internal structure of the world. I am not here to defend stereotypes of femininity, but to try to focus on the Original Pattern.

The first woman was made specifically for the first man, a helper, to meet, respond to, surrender to, and complement him. God made her from the man, out of his very bone, and then He brought her to the man. When Adam named Eve, he accepted responsibility to “husband” her—to provide for her, to cherish her, to protect her. These two people together represent the image of God—one of them in a special way the initiator, the other the responder. Neither the one nor the other was adequate alone to bear the divine image.

I hope you will read the entire essay as it beautifully states the paradox of the joy we find in surrender.

On this last Lord’s Day, our little church had some special visitors, the Harris family (minus Dad, who had to go home to preach). They had just finished the Sacramento Rebelution Tour the day before, with a little lot of help from our friends, the Steward family. On Sunday, Joel Harris played the piano beautifully and helped lead the singing during the service, and my husband preached a wonderful sermon on John 12. He even coined a new word (at least, I hadn’t heard it before), when he said that a greater threat to the church than the aggressive atheism we see so much is the “playtheism” of those who claim to be Christians but don’t take the claims and requirements of Christ seriously.

Brett and Alex have a lot of inspiring things to say to young people, but they also said something (which my daughter pointed out to me this evening) to inspire this older lady: there’s a book sale! And not just any book sale, but one to inspire anyone who desires to know God better, a sale on John Piper’s books and other books at the Desiring God Store, all for just $5 each, for two days. The books I especially recommend are:

• The ESV Bible in hardcover softcover (update: looks like maybe they changed this one and didn’t intend for the more expensive one to be included, sorry)
• Don’t Waste Your Life
• Contending for Our All (Defending Truth and Treasuring Christ in the Lives of Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen)
• The Hidden Smile of God (The Fruit of Affliction in the Lives of John Bunyan, William Cowper, and David Brainerd)
• The Roots of Endurance (Invincible Perseverance in the Lives of John Newton, Charles Simeon, and William Wilberforce)
• The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (God’s Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin)

I hadn’t checked in on my friend Herrick for quite some time (you do know about his wonderful, book, right?) I am always impressed with his simple way of telling a story. He doesn’t use fancy words or try to impress the reader…he just tells what happened with a little commentary, and he always manages to paint an eloquent picture of whatever he describes. This feat is similar to an accomplished artist who can make a picture come to life with a few simple pencil lines, while the rest of us are surrounded by crumpled paper after hours of frustrated and failed attempts to capture our subject. I cannot draw at all, I can write a little. Herrick has a gift for telling stories that I admire greatly.

Herrick recently wrote about how the visits of a neighbor’s little girl tamed some of the wildness in his sons. Last year I ran across an online book printed in the 1800s (for which I lost the link!), with first-hand stories of the pioneer days of California, and the author told some fascinating things about the civilizing changes that took place when women began coming here to settle after the Gold Rush began. The civilizing influence of women is the premise of George Gilder’s book Men and Marriage.

While Gilder’s book is not from a Christian perspective, speaking about family roles from a psychological and sociological viewpoint, it is a scholarly look at the ramifications of disrupting what Christians have viewed as biblical roles for men and women, with men as primary breadwinners and protectors of the home, and women as the mothers and caretakers in the home.

The ideology of the sexual liberationists sees society as a male-dominated construct that exploits women for the convenience of men. In evidence, they cite men’s greater earning power, as if economic productivity were a measure of social control rather than of social service. But is is female power, organic and constitutional, that is real—holding sway over the deepest levels of consciousness, sources of happiness, and processes of social survival. Male dominance in the marketplace, on the other hand, is a social artifice maintained not for the dubious benefits it confers on men but for the indispensable benefits it offers the society: inducing men to support rather than disrupt it. Conventional male power, in fact, might be considered more the ideological myth. It is designed to induce the majority of men to accept a bondage to the machine and the marketplace, to a large extent in the service of women and in the interest of civilization.

Any consideration of equality focusing on employment and income, therefore, will miss the real sources of equilibrium between the sexes. These deeper female strengths and male weaknesses are more important than any superficial male dominance because they control the ultimate motives and rewards of our existence. In childbearing, every woman is capable of a feat of creativity and durable accomplishment—permanently and uniquely changing the face of the earth—that only the most extraordinary man can even pretend to duplicate in external activity.

Women control not the economy of the marketplace but the economy of eros: the life force in our society and our lives. What happens in the inner realm of women finally shapes what happens on our social surfaces, determining the level of happiness, energy, creativity, morality, and solidarity in the nation.

These values are primary in any society. When they deteriorate, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put them back together again.

Praise God for men like Herrick, like my husband, and like so many other faithful husbands who are godly men who not only understand this important truth, but who literally lay down their lives to care for their wives and children. And praise God for bold women who go against the prevailing ideology to serve God in their homes and families, understanding the importance of that service to the King whose laws may be trampled upon, but whose will will prevail no matter how the nations rage and imagine a vain thing.

Next month a big event is taking place near the Pacific Ocean, and the reverberations from the clash of cultures will be so great, you may be reading of the aftershocks in the news. Everyone knows that when matter and anti-matter meet, there’s supposed to be a big bang. Hang onto your hats. When the West-Coast Christian Worldview Conference begins in über-liberal Santa Cruz, California, the San Andreas Fault may finally let go its tenuous hold on that part of the Left Coast. But I doubt it. Many righteous young men and women will be attending the great event, so God will likely hold His hand so they can gain wisdom from the godly speakers and go into all the world to shine their lights to His glory with a message of victory in Christ. And all kidding aside, Santa Cruz is a lovely place.

The conference is intended for high school (at least 10th grade) through college-age students. It is very well-chaperoned. This is what they can look forward to during the week they attend:

There are at least five hours of instruction each day in subjects that range from entertainment to science and from history to cultural affairs. The material is challenging, both intellectually and personally. Small groups meet often to discuss these and other topics.

The conference’s goal is that each student will leave feeling affirmed in the faith and encouraged to spread the kingdom of Christ.

Though the schedule is busy, there is ample time for fellowship and recreation. Past social activities have included Civil-War and Colonial dancing, various team sports, musical ensembles, and talent shows.

The list of this year’s speakers is here, which includes our beloved Pastor Morecraft, whom our family considers the greatest living preacher today. The topics for the conference include:

• Harmony and Its Relationship to Virtue
• The Elements of Music
• A Connection between the Loss of Faith and the Loss of Musical Tonality
• A Specific Look at Musical Masterpieces
• Prayer
• Time and Eternity
• Canonization
• The Infallibility of the Scriptures
• The American Mind in 1776
• Great Expectations: What We Want from God and Why We’ll Never Get It
• Sinners, Sin and Saints: Holy Living in an Unholy World
• Truth and Love: Find and Balance, Find the Joy
• Let Me See Jesus: What Does God REALLY Promise in Our Personal Relationship
• The World, the Flesh and the Devil: The Ultimate Nature of our Real Enemies
• Overcoming the World: God’s Strategy for Dominion, and Why We have Failed
• Sex, Marriage, and Divorce

When you visit the WCWC site to register, take a look at the masthead pic of some of the previous students, and see if you can pick out the Friedrich kid. If you are interested in attending and you can find and name the member of our family in the picture, I will send in $50 toward your registration for the conference deposit (for the first person who gives me the correct answer).