Category Archives: identity

language of freedom: how we end the hostilities

Posted on by November 14, 2024

Like many of you, we’ve felt relief and encouragement over the last week or so of events…on the national scale, at least. At the state level, Alaska’s elections are still a dumpster fire of delay and obvious corruption. And we’re not alone. *friendly wave and fist bump to Arizona*

language of freedom: how we end the hostilities | Shannon Guerra

So it’s a relief, but it’s not over. And the following day, when nationwide results were confirmed, Vin said, “It’s like we’ve made it through Dunkirk, or Brooklyn Heights, or the Battle of Antietam.”

I looked at him and shook my head. He’s a nerd who’s read books on all the major wars and lots of the minor ones, but history isn’t my wheelhouse.

I have, however, read The Lord of the Rings…five times.

“Tell me in a language I understand,” I said. “You mean it’s like after the battle of Helm’s Deep, but Pelennor Fields and the Black Gate are still ahead.”

“Exactly.”

See? It helps to have a common language.

So we’ve won a really important battle, but not the whole war. The work is just beginning. All the cliches.

Because even when you get the results you want in an election, it’s not the end of the fight.

Even if four years brings amazing promises fulfilled, it doesn’t do much good if at the end of them we don’t have a culture that values life and truth, because it will swing back again into another morph of madness, trying to legislate and control lives rather than maintaining minimal government and protecting freedom.

At the root of it, the battle for freedom takes place in hearts – because hearts that don’t value purity, sanity, wisdom, and wholeness will never be free, and they will never really care about the freedom of others, either.

“This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.”

– JFK (January 14, 1963, State of the Union Address)

Great men make good times; good times create weak men; weak men create hard times; hard times create great men. There are exceptions, of course. Patterns are important because they can serve as warnings to watch for, but they are not destiny.

If we want to break the cycle, we have to stop creating weak men, and I don’t think the way to do that is to intentionally shoot ourselves in the foot by creating failure and hard times.

We have to create Kingdom culture, deep and wide.

But their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts. 

But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

– 2 Corinthians 3:14-17

We move wide, laterally and in the present, by healing the generations who don’t really know who they are, who are fear-filled and enraged as a result of their own ignorance, deceived by everything spoon-fed to them in the media.

Many of them have had just enough religion and churchianity to swing far to one side, hating God and anything that smacks of Him, or to the other side, checking off boxes and claiming to be Christian without bearing any fruit that indicates a relationship with Jesus. Some of them film their mental breakdowns on TikTok (what level of broken narcissism thinks people will be interested in that?) and demand acceptance from everyone while refusing to treat others with basic respect. These are the adults who haven’t grown up, many of whom experienced trauma in their childhood and instead of healing through it, stopped maturing at that age. This is why we have middle-aged and older people who still act like six-year-olds.

But also we move deep, vertically and into the future, by intentionally raising great children who become great men and women, regardless of their circumstances. We teach them the language of freedom. And this means we need to nurture our families and marriages and communities, and be better spouses and parents and friends, and humbly work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.

Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

– 2 Corinthians 3:5-6

We need to raise kids who are aware of issues because we took the time to talk to them about them, rather than relegating hard discussions to someone else. That means spending time with them, talking with them, explaining why we do the things we do (and why we don’t do the things we don’t). It means taking responsibility for our kids’ education – and thus their values – rather than abdicating such a vital mission to vague institutions with minimal accountability and transparency. No matter what, we are the primary teacher, caregiver, attention-giver, and disciplinarian of our kids. At the end of the day – and preferably, throughout the day – we are the ones they come to, answer to, and seek refuge in.

I admit this isn’t the easiest thing in the world. As I type this, a kid is doing a chore a few feet behind me. And if she tells me one more time that she’s done when she’s not done, she’s just tired of doing it, I might throw this copy of The Fourth Turning out the window.

(Or down the hallway. Windows are expensive and it’s nine degrees outside. And also, it might scare the chickens.)

Many of our daily conversations with our kids center around food – growing it, raising it, buying it, eating it – and other choices we make about our health; these topics were never discussed in our own childhoods rife with dye-saturated sugar cereals that were thought to be canceled out by Flintstone vitamins. So to be honest, I’m probably more excited about the “MAHA” aspect of this recent victory than anything else, because we’ve prayed about this stuff for years and wondered if anything would ever be done about them. The economy and borders and “health services” have always been on the forefront, but true healthy living, not so much.

Not to lessen the importance of other spheres, but if everything else is addressed while our food supply is still tainted and healthy farming is still under attack and Big Pharma still profits from perpetuating sickness rather than healing people, we haven’t accomplished much. If our food and water are still allowed to be poisoned, are we really free at all?

Purity in food, purity in the gospel…I know, they don’t really seem related, but haven’t we seen enough corruption in both, and the debilitating effects of compromise? Impurity in any sphere does not produce a free people. It breeds slavery.

And that could be said for many facets of culture – for example, it doesn’t do any good to shift a society toward more constitutional beliefs if those who claim to be conservative are still addicted to porn and misogyny, if our civilization is still a dumpster fire of moral corruption. We need holistic solutions, not pet projects. We need Kingdom culture – because freedom is the common language, though we’ve been confused, distracted, and dissuaded by many counterfeits.

Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.

– Proverbs 14:34

No matter how good our intentions, our message will be poisoned if we compromise to the fear of man and the obsession of ourselves. If we’re centered on ourselves, whether in shame or insecurity or self pity on the one side or in arrogance and pride and presumption on the other, it’s vanity. If we’re consumed with the image in the mirror, what people will think of us…it doesn’t matter if we’re staring at ourselves out of things to complain about or things to be proud of; either way, it’s vanity. And vanity, like fear of man (are they really that different?) is idolatry.

And that’s slavery, too. We create a multitude of problems when we read someone else’s actions and words through the lens of our own insecurities.

But a truly free people, unhindered by the idolatry of vanity and fear of man, speak a language of boldness and authenticity that can’t help but draw people to freedom. Insecurities are disarmed; fearful control loses its grip. We don’t need the phony attractions of red dye or smoke machines or pretend identities when Holy Spirit is given reign to move through us.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

– 2 Corinthians 3:18

As I’m praying about this, I realize there’s good news in the midst of insanity: People who will film their screaming breakdowns for anyone to see are also people who, once redeemed, will not be hindered by fear of man when it comes to worshiping Jesus.

And in that sense, those of us who have been following Jesus have something to consider.

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.

And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.

– Ephesians 2:13-18

Our current culture looks at us and shakes their heads because we’ve known something they don’t, but we haven’t always communicated it in the best way. Freedom is not portrayed in tiny increments as we attempt (and fail) to make truth palatable to the masses by compromise. So it’s not that we need to water things down to become more relevant; it’s that we need to purify our message so it reveals freedom.

And freedom is its own draw. If we can give people a taste of it, we’ll win the next battle, too – and we’ll win it together.

pages & shelves: what we learn from all those books

Posted on by October 31, 2024

An epiphany this week: I just realized that I’ve been homeschooling for twenty years.

pages and shelves: what we learn from all those books

Twenty yeeeears. It’s a milestone made all the more significant by the fact that I have never owned a denim jumper and just recently had to be reminded what a “scope and sequence” is.

(“Wait wait wait, you mean the stuffy instructor’s material that I always throw in the bin so I can get to the good stuff? Oh…yeah, I knew that…” *nervous laughter*)

So hey, twenty years, eight kids, three down, five to go. Craziness. But it explains why my mind is often in fourteen literary directions and experiencing bookish spasms of attention deficit disorder. It’s just an occupational hazard of being a homeschool mom; we’re always reading great books.

I don’t ask the kids to analyze or dissect them. We don’t dig around for meanings and implications that were never intended by authors and only planted by dry language arts classes. Books are fun and fascinating and stand on their own without any picking apart, so we enjoy them and the stories they tell.

Rather than leaving us cold, education should produce the warmth of interest and pleasure in the knowledge we meet.

– Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony

But still, reading takes time. How do we justify all the hours put into reading pages and volumes and shelves full of great books – especially classic literature?

Here’s how.

We learn about bravery, and cowardice, and consequences, and human nature, and relationships, and responsibility, and maturity. We get to know heroes we want to emulate, and we are repulsed by villains who sometimes remind us a little too much of ourselves. In complex characters we see bits of our own tendencies, and we don’t usually even realize it’s happening, but as we read, we’re confronted with questions about if we want to keep those tendencies.

We learn about the world around us, and the world far away from us that we’ll never experience otherwise.

We think we’re reading the story of an epic disaster but we learn about Indian culture and the British Empire. We grab a fun mystery and end up learning about the tradition of bell ringing in churches. We open a novel from the 1800s and think we’re in for, maybe, an old-fashioned romance and dusty glimpse of village life – but no, by the time you’re halfway through you’ve learned to translate a bit of Scottish and you know that “I dinna ken whaur I cam frae” means “I don’t know where I came from” and you don’t even have to think about it.

We learn how to communicate and articulate, and how to attend and listen. We learn the nuance of different phrases and vocabulary so we can express how we really feel and what we really think without resorting to vague generalizations. We use language that demands a response from those who might otherwise blow us off, and we get our point across to a society who needs better content to think on. We lengthen our attention span and expand our understanding, and we’re not tuned out by complex language. And we are saved a multitude of misunderstandings, conflicts, inconveniences, and embarrassments by doing so.

We preserve culture and strengthen our communities by acquainting ourselves with great classics. Why have scholars and writers been persecuted in “cultural cleansings” by tyrants throughout history? Because they know and figure out things.

Those who read classics have a common language filled with short phrases that have complex, full meanings that are shared in just a few words. We say, “There is a tide,” just four words, and those who have ears to hear know the time has come to act before the opportunity is gone. We quote, “War is peace” and the sarcasm is understood by everyone who’s read 1984. We quote, “It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done” and to anyone who’s read A Tale of Two Cities, we’ve distilled the 374 pages of repentance, sacrifice, restoration, and victory in just fourteen words, because readers have their own code.

On the writing side, though, I have been the writer-mama who tutors other people’s kids and coaches adults but still, at wit’s end, signed one of my own kids up for an online program with an outside company just to have someone else drill the same concepts into him. And that course was…meh…but still worth it to remove the extra conflict out from between us. So there’s no shame in needing help because of time, expertise, or just needing reinforcements.

So I did a thing to hopefully help lift a little burden from homeschooling parents of high schoolers.

(And yes, “to hopefully help” is a split infinitive, but we don’t really care about those anymore. I’m actually more aggrieved by the tacky alliteration in it.)

I put in some overtime – in our house, this means I stayed up too late after putting the kids to bed, and often let my littlest stay up too late by letting him do atrocious things to my hair – and I made an 18-week long British Lit course for homeschooling parents who don’t have several hours a week to keep up with all of their high schooler’s literature readings and evaluate their papers.

A second Brit lit course is in progress and it will be followed by American Lit, as long as we don’t run out of bobby pins.

The 30-page course booklet is $10 for those who want to do it on their own; it includes the schedule, suggested writing topics and questions, graphics, and memes. Alternatively, for those who need one less conflict between themselves and their high schooler and a few dozen less things to do, for $200 they can send me all of their weekly assignments and papers for constructive feedback and coaching over the duration of the course to save you from having to be on your kid’s case about those things. You’re on your own if you have to nag them about chores though.

You can check out the course here.

Not all of the books are your standard high school choices. Some are…and some are better. And some are considered by many to be children’s books, even though the language in them is far more advanced than the [redacted] [redacted] stuff that passes for modern YA lit sometimes.

Great children’s books are enriching for all ages, and many of us missed them when we were younger anyway. And even if we already read them (or they were read to us), we get new experiences and insights out of them years later – and many of those insights lead to maturity and perspective that we want our kids to have.

Life is too short to learn from only our own mistakes, so we need to learn from Frodo and Scarlett and Jane Eyre and Tom Sawyer and Mr. Darcy and Robinson Crusoe and thousands of others. We see multiple facets of human nature and learn how people respond to their circumstances, and how those responses do and don’t work. As we read about struggles and triumphs and flaws and heroism, we learn compassion and wisdom and bravery and self control.

Or at least, the seeds are planted. What we do with them afterward, when we are tested, is up to us.

P.S. Want to join us for our next book in Gaining Ground? It’s a biggie and will last us a while…we’re starting Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell on October 28 and we’ll be reading about 50 pages a week through the end of March. Join us on Telegram anytime as we wrap up Emma.

making it: we rise above fear by changing our minds

Posted on by September 25, 2024

It seems like when you live with boys, your immune system has the choice to either toughen up and be stronger than average, or to keel over and just let you die. So far, five boys later, I think we’re making it.

making it: we rise above fear by changing our minds | Shannon Guerra

But here’s why it’s such a miracle: Boys do things – all kinds of things – except for washing their hands. Did you scrub the toilet? Check. Clean the catbox? Yes, ma’am. Scoop out the chicken coop? Uh huh.

And we, silly parents, ask these questions as we are watching them in the kitchen, spreading peanut butter on a tortilla. And then – and only then – do we remember to ask the obvious question, which should have been the first question, even though it’s too late anyway, the damage is done:

Did you wash your hands?

“Ummmmm….” Stalling is always a bad sign. Especially when it’s followed by an almost silently whispered, “nope.”

Serenity now, Lord Jesus.

Vince and I sit on the couch dumbfounded as the boy drops the lunch implements on the counter and runs to the bathroom. I consider donating the entire container of peanut butter to the chickens, and Vin quietly but dramatically pleads the blood of Jesus over our entire home, asking for a special consecration over the fridge and silverware drawer.

(Side note: This post might prevent any dinner guests from accepting invitations for the next three months.)

There are so many things that could go wrong, and it’s best not to think of them. It’s best just to be grateful for grace, for strong immune systems, for a life that allows for such activity, and for healthy boys who are (please God) learning good habits.

And this is good to remember at night, or more accurately, at 3 or 4 am, when panicked thoughts about chickens and homeschool and kids’ behavior and inflation and taxes and paperwork and vehicle woes and world events and a million other valid concerns start crowding in as you lay there, wide awake, wondering if you’re going to make it. There are so many things that could go wrong, and it’s best not to think of them.

But we do think of them. Many of them require action on our part – like making an appointment, or paying a bill, or filling out forms, or disciplining children, or disciplining ourselves, or being more frugal…and all these actions require thinking.

But what is not required is worrying, or partnering with fear, or expecting the worst. None of those have to be in our thinking, though they tend to be our default.

So we need to be rewired. We need to forge new pathways for better thoughts.

For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.

– 2 Corinthians 10:3-5

Have you ever considered that agreeing with fear – which is what worry is – is making a “lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God?” It is.

God is not worried or fearful. And we have the mind of Christ, and we can trust God…so we need to agree with Him. (Listen, self.)

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

– Ephesians 4:17-19

This isn’t usually how we apply this scripture, but roll with me here: If we have a belief that truly sets us apart from our old ways, our thinking should demonstrate that. But worry is futile, a darkened understanding. Worries are ignorant of God’s love and trust; when we worry we are hardened in our old paths and ways of thinking.

And we wouldn’t normally associate it with making us callous or greedy, but consider…when we indulge in fretting and fears, are we not giving ourselves up to a sort of sensuality? Isn’t the distrust of God’s goodness and love an act of impurity?

Huh. Still thinking on this. It goes on:

But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires,

and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds,

and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

– Ephesians 4:20-24

We have lain there awake in seasons of waiting and waiting, crying out for breakthrough, telling God, “I know You’re good and faithful, but this is still so hard, so it must be that I’m not good and faithful.”

And He reminds us that victory is not a pass/fail test or a zero sum game because things are much more complicated than what we are seeing. We are seeing “if not this, then this” but reality is “not this or this or this, but all these other things in varying degrees and intensities.”

Many, many things are actively in the process of working out. Together. All at the same time, and all at different times. And in the meantime, it looks like a mess.

Will we make it, though? we ask in desperation.

Did you make it in 2004? He asks, turning the question around. Did you make it in 2007, and 2008, and 2011, and 2012, 2013, and every year since then? Did you make it when you didn’t know where you’d go in 2017? Did you make it when the rug was pulled out from under you in 2018? Did you make it through the chaos and stupidity of 2020, and the upheaval in 2022?

Did you make it last year, Love?

Yes. Over and over, in every crisis, real or perceived – we made it.

So we have something still to do:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 

Wait, this is me interrupting again. Is our mind – our brain – part of our bodies? Yes? So our thoughts also should be presented as a living sacrifice. This is where we make the sacrifice of praise even when it still doesn’t feel praiseworthy yet. We lay there in the midst of the flying fears and whisper Thank You because we know He’s in control and He loves us and He has this all covered, even when we don’t know what to do. (He knows how dumb we are, remember. And that is a huge comfort.)

Okay, carry on:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

– Romans 12:1-2

If agreeing with fear is an example of being conformed to this world (and it is, I’ll fight you over it) then rising above the fear and thanking God that we can trust Him while we let go of our regrets and insecurities and assumptions and negative imaginings…is one way we are transformed by the renewal of our mind.

We choose the thoughts that get to play. Fear wants us to just keel over and die, but God has made us to be stronger than average.

Has everything always turned out the way we wanted? No. It’s still a fallen world, a clean-up operation.

But so much has turned out better than we could’ve imagined. We’re all making it. And as we’re grateful to God and trusting Him, renewing our minds and offering the sacrifice of praise, we’ll continue to do so.

After car accidents and miscarriage and illness and grief and bank failures and huge expenses and big risks and unexpected pregnancies and medical corruption and corporate gaslighting and global deception and financial loss and leaving the familiar and starting over when it seemed like the most foolish thing to do… we made it. And you did, too.

We all made it. And here we are, by the mercies of God.