Author: fullofgracedj

We are former working moms blogging about faith, family, friends and food! In between writing about our hopes, prayers and adventures, we hope to bridge the gap between working moms and stay at home moms by providing recipes and resources everyone can use to make their family healthier.

God, Love and Rock and Roll

If, when you think “Christian music concert”, you see lots of guitars and banjos—then we need to talk.

Four years ago, I was you.

Then a friend suggested I try the Air1 radio station, at the same time I was struggling to recover from my postpartum anxiety. I turned it on, figuring that melodic, folksy guitar music would be soothing, if nothing else.

Yeah it was soothing. But not folksy or melodic. Hip hop. Rock. Pop.

The same types of music on any top 40 station, except clean, faith-filled, uplifting. That was the end of secular radio in mama’s car.

Our kids really like music. Kate loves to sing along and Gabe is interested in drums. So last summer, when Toby Mac was coming to town, Shea got us tickets.

I didn’t know what to expect. My first concert was Bon Jovi in 1989. I’ve seen Pearl Jam and U2, Pink and Lenny Kravitz.

Can Christian concerts be that big, loud, fun?

Yes they can. Minus the pot, liquor and boobs.

And—they’re cheaper.

Last weekend we took our kids to Toby Mac’s Hits Deep Tour in Eugene. We saw 8 top artists in 4 hours. We got churched up. We danced and sang til we were dripping sweat. I may have cried once or twice.

The place was sold out. Easily 10,000 people. Lots of kids of all ages. Lots of smiles and hugs and manners.

Not one curse word. Not. One.

These artists—they are amazing live. Dancing, standing on tables, jumping into the pit. They could be making so much more money in the secular music world. And instead, they use their gifts for God.

That’s the kind of role model I’m talking about. Not to mention, these are grown men and women testifying. They are walking their talk.

You better believe I want my kids to see that.

The tour has partnered with Food For the Hungry, so at one point, an African pastor came out and talked to us about their mission. His story went like this: If all of the people in the world could be represented by 100 people standing in a line, then we are all at the front. And at the back are children who are starving to death. One child dies from hunger every three seconds. 1-2-3. Another one gone. We may wonder why we are lucky enough to be at the front of the line. It’s because we have the power to make a difference for those at the back of the line. We can’t fix it all, but we can fix one. And God will see us fix that one and He will know we did what we could.

At the end, he counted again: 1-2-3. Then he shouted “Who will help save the ones at the back of the line?!” and Kate shot out of her seat with her hands and voice raised: “ME!!!!!!!”

So we adopted another African child. His name is Kirodunge and he lives in Burundi. It costs $35/month, but there’s no way to put a price on my little girl using her tithing money to help another child.

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Annie getting her worship on for Capital Kings

For more information on the Hits Deep Tour, visit tobymac.com. For other tours and events, visit http://www.air1.com or http://www.klove.com.

 

 

I’m Boycotting the Leprechaun

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I’m all about celebrating holidays. And as most of you know, I really love Christmas. We do trees, hang lights, string garland, bake cookies, take Santa pictures, and I cry. I actually cry about how I love Christmas. And I love Easter. We’ve got eggs galore strewn about the house, along with bunnies, nests with little birds in them, and stuffed baby ducks. We don’t go as large as I’d like for Halloween, but give it some time.

But here’s the thing. I’m boycotting the Leprechaun. And the Ginger Bread Man. Seriously. Here’s something you need to know about Jen and me. We don’t do goodie bags at parties. We don’t do crafts at home.   We don’t fill our children’s every waking moment with some kind of contrived, magical activity. Because we’re tired. And they’re kids. And we’re tired of making every stinking moment magical. (This coming from a woman who’s had a Disneyland pass for 20 years.)

When I was in elementary school, I remember St. Patrick’s Day. You wore green. And if you didn’t, you got pinched. That was about the extent of it. But let me tell you what happened at preschool Monday. The Leprechaun happened. The story was leaked a few weeks ago (yes, weeks) that on St. Patrick’s Day, the Leprechaun was going to come and play tricks on us, and that the kids were going to try to catch him.   So that started spinning my Mazie up something fierce.   (This is a piggy-back on them chasing the Ginger Bread Man around the school, after he escaped from the oven, which ended in the snack lady “catching him” back in the oven and screaming in dramatic fashion, “I got him! I got him!” Which left poor Kingston in tears.) So Monday they made paper shamrocks with scary faces to scare him away, they made little traps with Lucky Charms to catch him, and when they got back into the classroom after recess, that darned leprechaun had upended all the chairs and made a mess of the blocks. And the kids went wild.

After a whole afternoon of my girls running around the house and obsessively searching for the leprechaun, thinking they had seen him, Mazie had a little break down at night. She was really tired because she hadn’t been able to nap, and she was really upset. I asked her how she was feeling. “Tired and nervous.” Nervous? About what? “The leprechaun coming into our house.” And there it is folks.

I know not all the kids are scared about the leprechaun. But let me tell you, when I was 5, I would have been freaked out about a little red-headed elf coming into my house and running amok while I slept. And before you get all up in arms about one kid ruining all the fun for everyone, let me just pose this… Why do we have to make such a big deal about every stinking thing? I mean, we take these fake holidays and blow them up into huge ordeals. We manufacture “Hallmark Holidays” then complain about our society being too materialistic. Can’t we save the big stuff for, you know, the big stuff? Like the birth and resurrection of Christ, perhaps?

Right now, I’m sick of St. Patrick’s Day. And I even love a good party. In fact, I’m cooking up a corned beef on Thursday and baking some soda bread (here’s my recipe, Irish-tested). Most people don’t even know who St. Patrick was. They just drink green beer and wear stupid “Kiss me, I’m Irish” t-shirts, even though they aren’t Irish. And all this leprechaun stuff? This isn’t for the kids… it’s for the moms. Just like the out of control party bags, the catered croissant sandwiches that showed up for the “snack” at the Christmas party for a bunch of 4 year olds, and Elf on a Shelf. Yep, I went there. Elf. On. A. Shelf.

Parents, for the love of humanity, can we just dial it back a notch? Can we not wind our kids up at every opportunity?  Because you know what your kids want tonight? They want to eat dinner with you. You know what they want to do after? They want you to read a book to them, or watch their favorite show with them. They want to take a walk around the block with you. And hold hands. And kick the gosh-darned soccer ball in the front yard. And play Chutes and Ladders, even though you hate that dumb game.

10 Years

It was a Monday. I was scheduled to work for three more weeks. And my department was having a happy hour baby shower for me. So twenty minutes after the bell rang, I left the piles where they lay, grabbed my things and headed out the door.

I tried really hard to get the waitress to serve me a margarita, but the belly gave me away. “How far along are you?” she asked.

Thirty six weeks, on the button.

I had onion rings for dinner. I laughed with my colleagues about how the room wasn’t painted, the baby clothes weren’t washed, the bag wasn’t packed and we had two more childbirth classes to go.

“Cutting it close” one of the guys said.

“Nah, we have time” Shea told him.

“Are you ready?”

“I was born ready” I said.

Before I left the restaurant, I hit the bathroom. My chones were wet, which was weird because I had not been a leaker up til that point. Last month, I thought to myself.

Except on the way home, I felt some more leak.

So I called my sister in law, who’d had my nephew 9 months previously.

“What does it feel like to lose your mucus plug?”

“Like a glop.”

“Let me go check.” I handed the phone to Shea and went to the bathroom. When I sat down on the toilet, there was a whoosh of liquid and I yelled.

I could hear her yell back at Shea “DID HER WATER JUST BREAK?????”

I went upstairs, sat on the bed and started to think of all the things left undone on my desk.

180 essays. A stack of homework. Lesson plans for the next twelve weeks.

I’m not ready.

When Shea came out of the closet with a duffel bag, he said “Are you going to take a shower?”

No.

“Are you going to change your pants?”

I already took my pants off.

“Are you going to put some new pants on?”

No.

“No???”

No. I’m not ready. I’m not having a baby tonight.

He got my mom on the phone. She called me Jennifer Margaret and told me to get in the car. She said she’d be there as soon as possible.

Right, then.

I toyed with the idea of delivering naturally and made it all the way to 7 cm. That’s when we found out that I am one of those people whose blood pressure bottoms out with anesthesia. I revisited my onion rings. I pushed for three hours before calling it quits. I was occasionally awake.

Gabriel was born by c-section at 7:54 am, 7 lbs even, 21 inches and with a giant bruise around his right eye.  He’d been trying to see his way out.

Yesterday, he turned 10. My preemie boy who struggled to eat for the first month of his life, is now 5’1” tall.

That younger me on the night of March 6, 2006, the one who felt not ready—she was ready and Gabriel’s early arrival was only the first lesson in parenting. All of the medical issues we faced in the two weeks after his birth, the jaundice and the weight loss and the blood tests and the weigh-ins. They were our parent bootcamp.

They taught us that life wasn’t going to look the way we imagined.

Life was going to look the way it was, every single joyful, messy, scary, exciting, daunting, exhausting minute.

And now I know I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Cheers to ten years of parenting.

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Come Outside The Walls

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Did you know that when St Francis of Assisi got serious about his ministry, he left the Church?

True story.

Francis was a young man born to wealth and privilege in Assisi. At the urging of his father, he pursued glory for himself and his family. Then one day he found himself in a crumbling church outside the walls of Assisi, called San Damiano. The Christ on the Cross spoke to Francis, calling him to “rebuild his church”. Francis of course thought it was a call to rebuild San Damiano, which he did before realizing that the call was about something much bigger.

During Francis’ life, the Catholic Church was overrun by greed and power. Francis, once consumed with greed and power himself, founded an order of friars who believed that poverty was sacred and necessary.

He never stood actively against his beloved church.

But his order stood in stark contrast to the opulent church culture in a way that was unmistakable. He founded his community outside the walls of Assisi—outside the traditional ways and protections. And he held to it, even after criticism from the people of Assisi, even after questions from the Vatican, who worried his order was too simple, too spare, too poor. And eventually, the people came to him.

It was a revolution. It was one man’s attempt to make his church great again.

But it wasn’t like revolutions before and since, too many of which operated within the existing structures and served only, as Richard Rohr says, to “rearrange the furniture on the deck of the Titanic”.

Instead, Francis worked after Jesus’ example and “built a new boat”.

And that’s the key to any revolution—it has to look and sound like Jesus building a new boat.

If it doesn’t, then it isn’t.

So I want to share with you how our family is set to handle this election.

Like Francis, we’re going outside the walls.

We’re going to vote, because our church tells us to vote. But we’re not going to become our vote. It will not define us.  It certainly doesn’t need to be defended. It’s ours. It’s ok.

We already know for whom we’re voting, so we’re going to cut down on our exposure to the talking heads. God bless them, but they make money off our emotions. If we aren’t scared or outraged or spiteful they aren’t making money. We get it. We just aren’t going to play.

We’re not going to let the data tells us anything about our friends, neighbors and countrymen and women. We’re going to remember that we don’t know what we don’t know, and at the top of that list is what is in someone else’s heart.

We’re going to keep doing what we do, which is loving and living and praying and meeting God in all the places we see Him.

We aren’t going to lose faith. Outside the walls is a more peaceful place. It’s grass roots. It’s people helping people. It’s simple. It’s less. It’s easier to see what really matters here.

It’s not ignorance, or blindness. We’re participating. We’re just not being loud about it. Plus, we can see the walls from here. We can hear the noise.

We just don’t need the noise. We don’t need the spectacle.

Can you imagine what would happen if everyone walked away? If everyone said “We’ve had enough. We’re good. We’ll just be over here getting back to real life”? What would happen then, if people left their seats at the circus and came outside the walls?

That would be a revolution.

 

No Drama, Mama

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I was on the receiving end of a shaming attempt last week.

The mama took me unawares because I know I have a big “I don’t care what you think because I’m minding my own business” sign over my head. Well, maybe it says something a little bit different…but either way, other mamas do not usually come at me like this.

My mom could have saved her the time, too. Shame hasn’t worked on me since I’m four.

But she didn’t know. So first there was a long and angry text, thinly veiled as “friendly”.

This mom was upset that we–myself and three other moms–had pulled our kids from a school where we do not support the decision-making anymore. She said that our kids were talking smack about the school–smack they must have heard at home from their parents. In whom she was now “disappointed” and from whom she “expected more”.

I didn’t tell her about my sobbing daughter or how she didn’t sleep much the night before or how we don’t lie to our kids and so yes, my daughter knew the truth of why she was leaving and probably was saying it out loud to process it through and who could blame her.

I don’t know why my decision was causing so much trauma for this woman, but I do know it would have been fruitless to explain or argue.

So I firmly but politely told her it was none of her business and didn’t require her input. And I kept saying that every time she poked.

I didn’t give her what she wanted: a fight. Neither did the other moms, which upset her most of all.

And that’s the part that got me thinking: What’s really going on here?

I wish we would stop taking one of the most sacred jobs on earth and using it to beat others about the head. Or to make ourselves feel seen or heard or important. When we lash out at others in an attempt to look or feel better, we show the world our unhappiness in a way that makes it very hard for anyone to care.

That’s not cool in the sisterhood, where we’re all just trying to hold it together with duct tape and prayer. For reals, mamas. Every single one of us is a dropped shoe away from needing all the help.

So no more shaming. No more drama.

Let’s mind our business and pray for our sisters.