Category Archives: history

the challenge: working through it together

Posted on by February 13, 2023

Every year we choose new books to read (do you do this, too?), but last year we started something different – we did a reading challenge. Sounds fancy, doesn’t it?

But it’s not, really. Just search the internet and you’ll find a hundred variations. Iree joined us and the three of us teamed up together to read 104 books. Two books per week seems like a lot, but between all of us, it seemed doable.

But we quickly discovered that it wasn’t, quite.

the challenge: working through it together

It wasn’t the number of books, but the categories that threw us. And I understand that the point of a challenge is to, well, challenge you, but there was only one slot for “a book you have no interest in” and I own too many books that I actually want to read to bother digging around with so many categories that were on there that I don’t.

So, taking a languid approach to it, we crossed the boring/inapplicable categories off as we went and replaced them with creative ones that were less boring (cough) more to our taste. Because seriously, I value theology and Christian living, but there were SO MANY of them on there, and absolutely nothing on writing, crafts, psychology, ancient history, criminology, or any of the other weird stuff we also really like.

And by the end of the year our list was a mess, but it was much more fun, and yes – we were still challenged.

This year we did it again, but started off with a clean list. We made sure the categories were both realistic and interesting right off the bat. We crowded around the kitchen island, just throwing ideas out there.

A book written by someone you know. A book with a character you’d want to be friends with. A book about a disaster. A book about personal growth. A book Shannon quoted in one of her books. A book of 800 pages or more. A memoir or autobiography. A book by Dickens.

“A book on Napoleonic history,” Vin suggested.

“Uhh…” Iree and I looked at each other.

“Only if you’re going to read it,” she said. (He said he would.)

Cham came in and we asked her for suggestions. And if you don’t know her, you will after hearing her ideas:

“A book about biology…a book on dissecting. Ohh! A book on cadavers!”

Yeah. Well…we only added one of those ideas; I’ll let you guess which.

There’s so much that we don’t know. We’ll read hundreds, thousands, of pages this year, and aside from the people we hang out with and the time we spend in prayer, very few things will influence our growth like these pages. So it’s important to choose good ones, and to enjoy the time spent with them.

I’m not kidding myself; I know I won’t remember most of what I read. I won’t like or agree with everything that I read. But even without remembering all the facts and storylines and characters and historical figures, we will be changed. The pages will leave an impression that wasn’t there last year.

Last year I started reading Plutarch’s Lives alongside Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Several months in, I realized my mistake. I thought they would reinforce each other, but usually I just get more confused as I try to untangle them from each other every week.

But I am learning.

I don’t remember all the individual lives in Plutarch, and I couldn’t tell you the exact timeline in Gibbon. But what I can tell you is an impression of these cultures and times. I can tell you that there were leaders who had wisdom for the ages, including ours. And there were also leaders who were so abhorrent in their depravity and disregard for the lives of others that the horrors they committed are hard to believe.

But they are in the history books. We generally don’t argue with them.

So, quick question, because I have to go there – why do people disbelieve or disregard the horrors we hear about today? Why are we so quick to mock and accuse people of being conspiracy theorists when they share information about celebrities and politicians doing abhorrent things?

Is it because they’re not in the history books yet? Is it because we have no interest in those categories?

Is it because those topics challenge us too much?

Or is it because we are their contemporaries, and their proximity to our own lives makes us uncomfortable? Because if these things are happening in the world we live in (and they are – it takes very little research to discover it, though you’ll have to use a search engine that doesn’t censor to do it, and you absolutely should not do so without being prayed up), then either a) we might be somewhat responsible that they exist, or b) we might need to do something about it so they no longer exist.

And those aren’t good, easy, fun options. It’s much more comfortable to shoot the messenger, lump it all as conspiracy theory and applaud the censorship that silences them, and move along with our noses heads held high.

I’ve heard some people disavow information simply because it didn’t match their personal experience. And I’m grateful they haven’t personally experienced anything that horrific, but our personal experiences do not define or limit the reality of other people experiences. It is arrogant, narcissistic, and foolishly ignorant to act like it does.

We still have so much to learn.

Hear me, friend: Children chained to beds and starved was not in my personal experience until we got involved in adoption.

Children who weighed 24 pounds at age four were not in my personal experience until we started our adoption paperwork. We converted kilos to pounds in astonishment; it had to be a miscalculation. But it wasn’t.

Children who were so neglected that they were only nine pounds at nine years old were not in our personal experience until we got involved with the people who were adopting them.

Our lack of personal experience did not prevent their existence or the abuse. It only proved our ignorance.

Our personal experience is not the epitome of reality. It is arrogant to assume that our x amount of years in any field (professional, personal, or otherwise) qualifies us to deny the reality of someone else’s differing experience, especially when it comes in the form of testimony with evidence and witnesses.

Just because something is so devastating that it is hard to believe, doesn’t mean it isn’t actually true.

And just because you don’t find information about fraud, horrific child abuse, or other crimes perpetrated by the elite on mainstream media (which no longer even attempts to hide how blatant their censorship is) doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means they want us to think it doesn’t…and that should lead us to some very important questions about what they have to lose.

There are many things that are hard to believe, but are nevertheless reality, regardless of how uncomfortable they make us feel, or how much we hate those categories.

And coming to understand that – and working through it together, with respect and love – may be the real challenge we all go through this year.

keep it: the only way we maintain good times for future generations

Posted on by January 18, 2021

Over the last week with few exceptions, I’ve posted nothing on social media except scripture. I haven’t wanted to add to the noise. He has good things to say about this season, and that’s what I’ve wanted to focus on and draw attention to.

keep it: the only way we maintain good times for future generations

It’s been an interesting experiment and a good move for me, sort of like a fast.

Fret not yourself because of evildoers;
    be not envious of wrongdoers!
For they will soon fade like the grass
    and wither like the green herb.

Trust in the Lord, and do good;
    dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.

– Psalm 37:1-3

It’s been Psalm 37 all week long. But if you’re paying attention (I know many of you are) you know that really, it’s been Psalm 37 for much longer than that. The events over the last few weeks, and even leading up to election week in November, weren’t huge surprises and they’ve been in the making for a long time.

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him;
    fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way,
    over the man who carries out evil devices!

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath!
    Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.
For the evildoers shall be cut off,
    but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land.

– Psalm 37:7-9

On January 6th, we took the day off work and prayed. And then we went to church and prayed. Our pastor talked candidly about the risk of civil war, and I’ve thought many times about how we are facing this blend of civil and revolutionary war – civil because it is among our own countrymen, but revolutionary because of the cause and the nature of it.  But our pastor also talked about the grievous things it could mean for our kids and future grandkids, and I had not fully considered it in that vivid light.

Then one of the elders prayed, and he repented for his generation that allowed so much of this to happen. They were comfortable, he said; things were easy. And they took advantage of it, and the generation that came after took the ease and comfort for granted.

It made me think of this saying that I’ve been hearing a lot over the last year:

Hard times create strong men.

Strong men create good times.

Good times create weak men.

Weak men create hard times.

And it’s so true, I know it is, but surely we must be able to break the cycle. Because if we can’t, everything seems so hopeless – why should we work to create good times if it only results in weak men who ruin it for our great grandchildren?

Or worse, there’s that other argument we hear all too often: Why bother bringing children into the world at all?

But then, the same week, I also read this:

“What sort of world is this to bring them into? That’s another consideration.”

“A very cowardly consideration, dear. A mere shirking of responsibility. It’s a heavy responsibility, of course, a double one, responsibility for the children themselves and responsibility for the world they must live in. But I know of no better incentive for the building of a decent world than the possession of children who must live in the world you’ve built.”

– Elizabeth Goudge, Pilgrim’s Inn

God creates a beautiful, strategic curriculum for our lives: The warnings and repentance, the prayer and the challenge. And I realized again that we are not headed for war; we are already at war.

We always have been. But we lose ground every time we forget it.

What hasn’t changed is that we are occupying the land of a cleanup operation: We are in the middle of a spiritual war in a physical place, and it manifests itself in both ways. We see the spiritual and physical aftermath all around us.

So even when we get back to “good times” – the corruption is revealed, the fraud is overturned, the guilty go to prison (hashtag: we’re gonna need a bigger Gitmo) – we still need to remember that we are at war. We are always at war. Our hearts and culture are the battleground, and never more so when it looks like things are safe and easy.

We are still occupying and stewarding the land, on mission, until He comes.

There are quiet victories and struggles, great sacrifices of self, and noble acts of heroism, in it…done every day in nooks and corners, and in little households, and in men’s and women’s hearts – any one of which might reconcile the sternest man to such a world, and fill him with belief and hope in it, though two-fourths of its people were at war, and another fourth at law; and that’s a bold word.

– Charles Dickens, The Battle of Life

People’s hearts – ours, and those around us – are always and still the battleground. Hearts and identities and relationships will always need wholeness and fullness, in good times and bad, and that is where God wants to stake His claim. We till the soil regardless of the weather and circumstances because strong men create good times, but strong men can also create strong children. And those strong children will continue to inherit the land.

There were still children in the world, and while there were children, men and women would not abandon the struggle to make safe homes to put them in, and while they so struggled there was hope.

– Elizabeth Goudge, Pilgrim’s Inn

When the Constitutional Convention closed in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was leaving Independence Hall when a woman asked him what kind of government they had just designed. His answer was, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

And that is still our challenge today.

Turn away from evil and do good;
    so shall you dwell forever.
For the Lord loves justice;
    he will not forsake his saints.
They are preserved forever,
    but the children of the wicked shall be cut off.
The righteous shall inherit the land
    and dwell upon it forever.

– Psalm 37:27-29

In good times or hard times, we are still loving our kids and teaching them. We are still learning more and growing. We are still passing on values and standards and true education. We are still in the Word and abiding in prayer. We cannot let up and grow soft when times are easy, and we cannot let go and become calloused when times are hard.

The only way we do that is to remember that the war is never over – it is always raging in the spiritual battleground. We are not only meant to inherit the land, but to keep it.

awake: why we’re thankful in spite of the shaking

Posted on by August 26, 2022

Like many nights, I was already awake in the dark, in the wee hours, nursing Kavanagh. So I probably heard it coming but thought it was just the cats making noise downstairs. But then the noise turned into slight shaking, and then unmistakable rattling.

My first instinct is always to glance at the clock: 3:23. It rumbled in layers, increasing in volume and shaking – long enough that I wondered three separate times if this one would be as bad or worse than the 7.2 we had a couple years ago – before it finally slowed down, stopped, and everything went still.

awake: why we're grateful in spite of the shaking

But this one was only a 5.1. Vin checked on the kids and reported that some were awake, and some slept through it.

And then another one hit. But it was smaller, just 4.0.

Hours went by, and I was awake for most of it. So around six when I heard the dull, distant noise, I wasn’t surprised when another one came, smaller than the first but bigger than the second – we learn to judge these things based on duration, intensity, and whether or not certain wall hangings rattle. The website said it was 4.5 and apparently there had also been another one just half an hour earlier, but it was little and I never noticed. I probably thought it was one of us shifting in the bed, or Knightley stretching at the foot of it.

That evening I heard the noise again and immediately stilled, looking at the clock, wondering if another was going to hit. But no, nothing that time, so it must’ve just been the heavy tread of someone walking downstairs.

And as I realized it was nothing, I had a picture of the Biden-Harris campaign, and their fraudulent claim to victory.

The Lord knows the days of the blameless,
    and their heritage will remain forever;
they are not put to shame in evil times;
    in the days of famine they have abundance.

– Psalm 37:18-19

The mainstream news, social media, and anyone who gets most of their information from those entities and actually believes it, almost immediately proclaimed their victory and have continued to do so.

They did it, and still do it, in spite of enormous and mounting evidence of fraud, changes from recounts, and active and upcoming court cases. The streamers thrown in celebration are actually giving them more rope to hang themselves with.

They did it while suppressing information, censoring articles about criminal behavior, and “fact checking” posts they didn’t like.

They’re doing it about the election and they’re doing it about the virus and the jab and they’ll keep doing it about whatever else they want, if they can get away with it.

Meanwhile, governors continue to lockdown states and mayors keep locking down cities. Churches keep closing their doors. And in a move that looks very much like unethical job security, doctors who know that mask wearing both creates and aggravates terrible health conditions (see also here, and here, and here, and here, for starters) keep requiring them anyway.

It’s like hearing the distant rumble, wondering if it’s going to be the big one.

Is this the end?

In the upper rooms there were little rows of hard beds, and on every wall there was a notice and a list of Rules. Pippin tore them down. There was no beer and very little food…and Pippin broke Rule 4 by putting most of the next day’s allowance of wood on the fire.

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

But no, I don’t believe it’s the end. I think it’s the tread of heavy feet, or at most, the relief of pressure in a small, harmless way that feels threatening at first but turns out to be nothing but the exhalation of pent-up gas.

The Lord laughs at the wicked, for he sees that his day is coming.

– Psalm 37:13

It’s causing us to stop for the moment and examine our surroundings, endure the brief threat, but overall it will bring alignment to that same environment, and prevent the big one from occurring.

The shaking exposes fault lines, weak places that require reinforcement.

“You’re arrested form Gate-breaking, and Tearing up of Rules, and Assaulting Gate-keepers, and Trespassing, and Sleeping in Shire-buildings without Leave, and Bribing Guards with Food.”

“And what else?” said Frodo.

“That’ll do to go on with,” said the Shirriff-leader.

“I can add some more, if you’d like it,” said Sam. “Calling your Chief Names, Wishing to punch his Pimply Face, and Thinking you Shirriffs look a lot of Tom-Fools.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

The excess shaking is teaching people to be alert at the slightest rumble. We’re awake, alert, alarmed at the threat, prayerful for safety, and the shaking results in justice as corruption is exposed and people decide which authority they’ll obey.

[The Chief] doesn’t hold with folk moving about; so if they will or they must, then they has to go to the Shirriff-house and explain their business.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself having anything to do with such nonsense….You can give it up, stop Shirriffing, if it has stopped being a respectable job,” said Sam.

“We’re not allowed to,” said Robin.

“If I hear not allowed much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

And there’s no doubt, the threat is real and dire. Many Christians shrug and say, Well, our hope was never in a president, persecution grows the church anyway, c’est la vie, what can you do – but if socialism came to any of our doors and completely removed our freedom of speech, our ability to purchase things we need, or force unwanted medical “care” upon our children, there would be no shrugging. These are not “oh, whatever” offenses. We’ve already begun to see them in social media censorship, threats from certain employers, and in the difficulty to get proper healthcare if you cannot wear a mask…ask me how I know.

“There’s hundreds of Shirriffs all told, and they want more, with all these new rules. Most of them are in it against their will, but not all. Even in the Shire there are some as like minding other folk’s business and talking big.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

And some people are happy to mind your business for you, shaming and blaming and accusing, wagging their fingers in all their self-righteous virtue signaling. Bless their hearts, they believe everything the mainstream media tells them.

But there are more people who don’t. They tend to have better manners and aren’t as loud about it. But make no mistake, they will get loud if pushed to do so.

“Raise the Shire!” said Merry. “Now! Wake all our people! They hate all this, you can see: all of them except perhaps one or two rascals, and a few fools who want to be important, but don’t at all understand what is really going on.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

This week, we are gathering.

Our neighbors are elderly missionaries, and they invited us to pray with them a few nights ago. They want to make it a regular thing. They’re not unwise, but they’re not afraid, either. Over tea and candlelight, we held hands and called on God to move in our country.

Last night we gathered with friends at church, studying forgiveness and honor and submission and authority. We honor the position, not the behavior. We obey unless we’re told to do something against God’s word. We shared homemade food and phone numbers, and talked about how, contrary to pop culture, silence should not be mistaken for betrayal, consent, or inactivity.

Tomorrow we gather with our oldest son and my dad and other family. There will be hugging. There will be political talk. There will probably be discussion of court hearings, more evidence of fraud, and likely – this is Alaska – a comparison of ammo inventory.

And I’m grateful for all those things, and more.

People are praying for us. Andrey is catching up in school and Reagan is reading five-letter words. Our neighbors are the cutest. People all over are dropping the bomb on election fraud. God is giving us wisdom and new ideas; our book sales are up and I’m excited about the next project already. And my African violet, which hasn’t bloomed since I bought it who knows how long ago, has flowers again.

I showed it to Vin this morning, and he said, “It’s the return of the King.”

And I think it is, or something like it. Thanksgiving is already here.