The Greatest Call: Come, Follow Me
Forgiving the Sins of My Father: How He Taught Me the Deeper Meaning of Mercy
Can Christian Women Have It All? Debunking the Work-Life Balance Myth
A Note to Young Writers: Honor Your Obscurity
Rest Works: For Matthew Sleeth, Sabbath-Keeping Furthers Both our Happiness and Holiness
Extravagant Subsistence: Restocking the Writer's Shelves (and Soul)
Marauding Bears All Over Town + The Wisdom of Garbage
No Exit
The Greatest Call: Come, Follow Me
Even the most menial job can be christened "sacred" by Jesus.
I’m standing on the beach, surrounded by fishing nets and rotting jellyfish. My hands are cramping from three days of morning-to-night net mending, untangling the wet mess of ropes, and yanking gloppy jellyfish from the web. I’m happy to be working with my husband and sons, but I’m ready for a rescue. I’m ready for Jesus to come strolling along our Alaskan beach like he did on the shores of Galilee, calling out the simple deliverance to those fishermen, “Come, follow me!” (Matthew 4:19).
Jesus called those fishermen away from their nets to a higher pursuit, to “go and be catchers of men.” Of course they said yes! Who wouldn’t trade in dirty fish for soul-saving work?
The Great Divide
While I’m onboard to jump ship and drop the nets, I’m also troubled with Jesus’ call. Christ’s words seem to imply a world divided between the flesh and the spirit—the sacred and the secular. This was amplified in Jesus’ final earthly charge to believers: “Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19).
I remember pondering this idea years ago, immersed in another kind of dirty work: changing diapers, hauling baskets of molding laundry, scraping dried food under the high chair. If Jesus called the fishermen-disciples away from their mundane labor and toward a higher calling, what about the rest of us? Aren’t we all laboring in daily sludge? Surely Jesus is calling us to more! Surely we are doing lesser work than those in “full-time Christian service” who are living extraordinary, make-a-difference lives!
I hear this struggle from many around me. A middle-aged friend who teaches health at a Christian high school confides in me one night that she’s not doing enough for God. She thinks she’s being called to resign, move to Mexico, and start a ministry for abused women. A neighbor making dinner for her large family hears the evening news, sees the refugees, and feels like she is wasting her life on floor polish and toilet bowl cleaner. Another friend who homeschools her four children questions this “calling,” wondering if God is asking her to serve abroad somewhere.
It’s little wonder we wrestle over this. For believers, “calling” is serious business. The word itself comes from the Latin vocatio, from which we get our word vocation, and the Greek kaleo, both meaning simply, “to call.” We believe the caller is God himself and that the one who is “called” is chosen particularly for nothing less than God-appointed work.
We join a long history of angst and confusion over calling, fed in part by these very Gospel passages, and, fed by the church, both Catholic and Protestant. Through the centuries, both created social hierarchies with the clergy on top and the commoners who made bricks, milked cows, and mucked stalls, on the bottom. Evangelicals have played their part as well. Those who join the clergy or become missionaries or in some way enter “full-time Christian service” are clearly doing more for the kingdom than the rest of us—right?
The Priesthood of All Believers
Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther eloquently addressed this in “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility.” He named “a cobbler, a smith, a farmer” as “all alike consecrated priests and bishops,” who all serve one another for the “bodily and spiritual welfare of the community.” Luther went so far as to say that “God is milking the cow through the vocation of the milkmaid.” Today, websites like TheHighCalling.com echo Luther’s wise words, aiming to encourage people in their daily work.
In the Garden of Eden, God’s first appointment for Adam and Eve was work: they were to “tend and watch over” the garden (Genesis 2:15). This labor was not a burden but a blessing. Creation was indeed “very good,” as God declared, but he did not declare it perfect—because it was incomplete. It needed the man and woman to cultivate it into full bloom. That work in the garden is the genesis of agriculture and the genesis of culture-making, all of which was presented to God as worship.
All these words—culture, agriculture, worship—are linguistically connected reminding us that our own work, our own culture-making, done with love for God, is an offering of worship. There is no division then between the work of our hands, the culture we create, and our worship. It’s all the same activity.
But even when we can rejoice in this theology of work, our struggle isn’t over. Is it truly enough to attend to our own culture-making and worshiping when persecution, sex-trafficking, and wars are raging on? In light of these palpable needs, and Jesus’ own command to be salt and light, calling seems to be taking on a new urgency. It’s becoming more and more synonymous with a particular kind of work or ministry that responds to the needs at hand. We are urged, all of us, to become activists in some way, aided by recent books like Dare Mighty Things and Refuse to Do Nothing: Finding Your Power to Abolish Modern-Day Slavery. These notable books (and many more like them) were written to launch us from complacency into action.
All these efforts are laudable and biblical, but there’s a fallout. In the rise of social justice concerns, I believe we’re falling back into a yawning divide that privileges clergy and “Christian ministry” and devalues the rest of our culture-making work. I see women and men doing essential work for the kingdom—raising children, growing food, building houses—who are denigrating their own labors, imagining a higher call elsewhere. At the root of this, I worry that we’re beginning to believe that God values us primarily for our labor and our talents. Most of all, I worry that so much emphasis on our calling can weaken our focus on the one who calls.
The Calling Is Jesus
I think of that morning by the sea when the fishermen dumped their nets to walk behind and beside this rabbi. What was it that lured these multi-generation fishers away from their nets? It wasn’t a new line of work. They had no idea what “fishers of men” meant. They were compelled, not by the call to exciting new work, but by the one who was calling them. The first and most essential call Jesus gives is this: Come, follow me.
We can become so fixated on discerning our “calling” and our “doing” that we forget that Jesus calls us first into a salvific relationship of love and obedience. The proper focus is Jesus himself, who he is and what he has done for us, not what we are doing for him. Mother Teresa, renowned for her good works, noted this confusion: “Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus.”
Dozens of verses in the New Testament flesh out this perspective of calling. In the largest sense, the church itself, the ekklesia, is “the called out one.” We’re called “out of the darkness” and “into his wonderful light” (1 Peter 2:9). We’re “called to be his own holy people” (Romans 1:7) and he has invited us “into a partnership with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:9). This calling “can never be withdrawn” (Romans 11:29). We are called into liberty “through the loving mercy of Christ” (Galatians 1:6). Our calling is heavenly and “holy” and is given “not because we deserved it, but because that was his plan from before the beginning” (2 Timothy 1:9).
Are we free then, after the call to salvation, to do nothing, or to do whatever we like? We know that faith without works is dead and that we were “created in Christ Jesus to do good works” (Ephesians 2:10, NIV). Salvation begins our life of faith; it does not end it. But no matter where it takes us, it must begin in love for the one who calls.
One of the most poignant passages in Scripture makes this clear. When Jesus commissions Peter in John 21 to establish the church, he does it by asking Peter three times, “Do you love me?” Three times Peter responds, impassioned, “Lord, you know I love you!” (verse 15, emphasis mine). Jesus does know. He then commissions Peter to “feed [his] sheep.” What is it that qualifies Peter for his new calling? It is not his skills or his talents or his labor that matters most; it is his love for Jesus Christ.
What about the rest of us who love Christ? Where will this love take us? What will we do?
Anything.
Anywhere.
Maybe it will keep you home, content, raising children, growing gardens, and designing houses. Maybe it will take you into the boardroom. Maybe it will take you across the world. Maybe it will take you to Israel, to walk in the steps of the disciples.
While thousands of miles from home, hiking around the Sea of Galilee during a research trip for my next book, I realized something further. Jesus didn’t call the fishermen far from the life they knew so well. As they followed him, there were boats and storms and lake crossings to come. He didn’t remove them from the world of fish or fishermen—both were present in abundance. If you want to feed a multitude on a hillside, what is better than a few fish? Nor can you pay taxes without catching a fish who might be harboring a coin in its mouth. You can’t show your friends the physicality of your risen body without roasting and eating some fish with your astounded friends, who thought you dead.
Following Jesus, answering his call, did not remove the fishermen from their neighborhood; it returned them to their neighborhood. Now, with opened eyes and ears, they saw their surroundings anew, in all its beauty, suffering, and sacredness.
Jesus is calling us still, right here in our own beautiful, suffering neighborhoods: “Come, follow me.” When we say yes to this call, we stand in the extraordinary position of being deeply loved. We are made holy and called into intimate fellowship with the Son of God. Our eyes are opened. All our work is worship—even yanking jellyfish.
--------------------------------------------
Forgiving the Sins of My Father
How he taught me the deeper meaning of mercy.
Ten years had passed since I had seen my father. At the time I had no photographs of him, just a vague memory of his face from our last visit. When we pulled up in a rented van to the VA housing complex in Sarasota, Florida, my husband saw him first."There he is." Duncan tipped his head to point.
I turned my eyes slowly. A man was standing under the awning of the complex. I saw his dark skin, his head, nearly bald and square, and a barely visible neck. It was him. He was just as I remembered but bigger, maybe 40 pounds heavier than the last time, when I had left my young children to fly down for three days. I had not forgotten those three days of silence.
Now I stared at him, frozen. How do I play this scene? I thought. Loving daughter greeting long-lost father? Kind daughter bringing her children to meet their grandfather for the first time? Angry daughter wanting just a few words from her father?
Duncan stopped the van. I got out slowly and opened the doors for the kids, holding my breath. They piled out one after another. My father stood there seeming not to see them, as if they were inconsequential to his life—which they were. He knew nothing about them, had never even seen photographs of them. I had never sent any because my father was barely interested in his own children, let alone his children's children.
When the last one jumped out, suddenly I was on. I knew what to do. I hugged the strange man, patting him on the back with the tips of my fingers. I did not want to get too close to him.
"Hi. How ah ya?" he asked in his Massachusetts accent. He smiled a little, showing a few remaining teeth, all broken.
"Good. We had a little trouble finding this place," I said with false brightness.
It had taken us two days to get here. We had flown from Kodiak, Alaska, from the far northwest corner to the far southeast corner of the country. It was spring break 2006. Mostly this was a trip to see him. He was 84, so I knew this might be my children's only chance to meet him.
They didn't know anything about him, and they never asked. But over my then-28 years of marriage and 16 years of parenting, I had learned from my husband and my children what fathers were for. And I wanted them to know who my father was, for themselves. Someday they would care.
Two hours into our visit, I had run out of conversation. I was quiet and grim. He hadn't asked the names of my children or spoken to them. He had barely spoken to me. Scrambling to claim a memory from the visit, I suggested we go for ice cream, his favorite food. We stood in line for our cones and ate them under a tree, watching the traffic. Just before we left the stand, I told Duncan to take a photo. I wanted to remember this moment.
My father sat at the picnic table with a slight smirk on his face, looking utterly content. I stood behind him, my lips taut, mouth clamped shut, containing as much emptiness and anger as I could hold. How can I still want? How can I forgive him for all the years past, for this moment even now? He is utterly content with his ice cream, while his daughter sits beside him starving to death, and thinks the ice cream is pretty good today, isn't it?
I would not come back to see him again, I decided, no matter what.
Five years later, I got a call from my sister.
"Leslie, Dad was at the VA hospital last week. They thought he might have had a heart attack. I found out today."
"How did you find out?"
"I talked to Dad on the phone."
"You're talking to Dad?"
"Yes. I've been calling him almost every week," she said, her voice calm and assured.
"Every week? And he talks to you?" I couldn't hide my confusion. I couldn't believe that out of the six siblings, she was the one calling him. It was her room he had visited at night when he was home, when the rest of us were in bed. We didn't know until decades later.
That was not his only offense. He either couldn't or wouldn't keep a job, leaving us to a childhood of shameful poverty. When I was 13 years old and my mother was going to school so she could seek work, my father took the bit of money we had left and drove away in his car, intending never to come back. Unfortunately, weeks later, he returned. Years later, when he finally scraped together some money, he moved 2,000 miles to Florida to live on a dilapidated sailboat.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked my sister.
"I've forgiven him, Leslie."
I hung up. The room was spinning.
As the way such things happen, suddenly the entire world felt abuzz with the matter of forgiveness. The Lord's Prayer became unsettling: Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. How many times had I said those words and not heard them? How could I let go of his sins and crimes against us? And what of the commandment "Honor your father and your mother"? Surely if a father or mother acts dishonorably, we need not honor them. I had built most of my life around that premise.
I did not have to look far or long to find others struggling to forgive a father, a mother, a stepfather, a foster mother, a grandparent—all the people who were supposed to love and nurture us and for many reasons did not. It's an ancient story, as old as Cain and Abel and their fallen parents: sinners raising sinners. The iniquity of the fathers and mothers visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations (Ex. 34:7; Num. 14:18). But however universal, and however inevitable it feels, the issue is particularly compelling in our own time and place.
Families are unraveling at what seems like an unprecedented rate. Nearly half of first births in the United States are now to unmarried mothers. About 1 in 5 U.S. children are raised below the poverty line. Forty percent of first-time marriages will fail, leaving children in relational crisis and loss. More than 7 million children live with a parent who has alcohol or drug problems, and one in four families are affected by mental illness. Among families with two parents, about half (44 percent) are headed by two parents who work; another one in four families (26 percent) are headed by a single working parent, leaving these adults absent far more from their children than they would like.
Jill Hubbard, a clinical psychologist with New Life Ministries in Laguna Beach, California, sees the fallout of family brokenness up close and personal. "At least half of the people I see each week are battling some degree of unforgiveness, especially of parents," she told me. "They may not always realize the condition of their hearts, but you can see in their lives the replay of the hurts they haven't dealt with."
Even relatively healthy and stable homes suffer from wounds and deficiencies. No matter how dedicated to her children, no matter how churchgoing and God-loving she is, every parent is plagued by failures. I know I am. That's part of the reason I wrote my book—to give it to my own children.
After walking the stony path of forgiving my father, I am convinced we must all walk that same path. If we are to thrive as image bearers; if the church is to be a salve to a wounded culture; if our country and our communities are to prosper; if our own families and children are to break free from generational sins, we will need to learn and practice forgiveness toward those who often have hurt us most: our mothers and fathers.
As I urge others in this call, I'm not a lone prophet bleating a strange message in the wilderness. Forgiveness is trendy. In the past 15 years, the topic has been ushered out of the church and into mainstream and primetime, so much so that Jeanne Safer wrote for Psychology Today, "From the political to the personal, Americans are caught in an orgy of forgiveness." A number of academic institutions have formed forgiveness projects and institutes, including the International Forgiveness Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Stanford Forgiveness Projects. Fueled by foundation grants and hope, hundreds of studies in the fields of medicine, mental health, and the social sciences affirm the extraordinary power of forgiveness to lower blood pressure, reduce stress and depression, boost the immune system, and increase feelings of compassion and optimism even for the most traumatized individuals.
Beyond the West, forgiveness projects have brought healing and reparation to countries devastated by state-led and ethnically driven brutality, including Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Africa. These projects have at least interrupted generational cycles of vengeance, hatred, and genocide.
Back in the States, the message of forgiveness has taken a decidedly American tone, becoming increasingly secularized and individualized, particularly in the past five years. The names of authors and articles are too many to list here, but a theme emerges: Forgiveness is a choice, and it's primarily for our good. Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects, delineates a nine-step process to "forgiving for good," stating outright, "Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else." Some forgiveness outlets counsel empathy toward the offender, but for many the impetus is personal health: releasing bitterness toward the offender, detaching from the offender, and regaining well-being and control.
The "therapeutic forgiveness" model has entered the public parlance as a kind of self-administered miracle cure. A New Age blog running the headline, "I Forgive for Myself," typifies the reigning therapeutic understanding of forgiveness. The author states, "I am not forgiving for the good of the other person. I am forgiving for the good of myself so I can be free and move forward." So goes the mantra: "Forgive and set yourself free." Dr. Phil joins the chorus, urging his readers toward forgiveness to gain "emotional closure." To get there, we do no more than is absolutely necessary. He says we are to find our "Minimal Effective Response"—"the easiest thing you can do to resolve your pain."
Christian theologians have played a significant part in crafting the therapeutic forgiveness message. Lewis B. Smedes, the late ethicist, was one of the first to pitch forgiveness as a gift to ourselves (in the classic Forgive and Forget): "To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you." The quote is so widely used it has taken on the force of gospel truth. Such messages have only increased since then. Joyce Meyer's 2012 book on forgiveness is titled Do Yourself a Favor . . . Forgive. And in January, speaking on CBS This Morning about his new book on the topic, megachurch pastor T. D. Jakes assured the panel that "forgiveness is a gift you give yourself." The book is pitched as "the most important step you can take right now toward personal healing and professional advancement."
To be sure, a fuller Christian witness has remained in the public square—the forgiveness of the shooter of five Amish schoolgirls, for example, and the forgiveness offered by the mother of slain black teenager Jordan Davis. But multiple articles appear online in Christian outlets every month extolling the same message: Forgiveness is a choice, and forgiveness is for my own happiness and peace.
All these proclamations, from both inside and outside the church, demonstrate that we have not lost the concept of forgiveness as a moral good. But we have narrowed the good to ourselves alone. (Unsurprisingly, the near unanimous chorus to forgive for our own sake has spawned a minority but notable backlash—like the author of the Psychology Today article above, who rightly argues that if forgiveness is truly for our happiness, we might feel happier withholding forgiveness.)
I do not wish to diminish the aspirations and achievement of anyone who pursues forgiveness. But I worry that abandoning its deeper biblical foundation has gutted it of its full power and aim. We have to return to the New Testament commands to "forgive as we've been forgiven." This raison d'etre rescues the whole project of forgiveness from its worst forms of superiority and self-absorption. Jesus uses the parable of the unmerciful servant to illustrate our true condition and need—and the full scope of the remedy.
We know the parable: That man with massive debts who is called before the king is us. We're hopeless before the holy King. We stand there shoulder to shoulder with every other debtor, even those who owe us money and honor and parental love, all of us complicit in what L. Gregory Jones calls "the universal disaster of sinful brokenness." Our only hope is the King himself, and he does it. He clears our debts entirely. We know what it cost to clear those debts: the death of Jesus, the only one who could pay them.
In the parable, the debt-free man sings and skips out of the presence of the king. But then he collars the poor man who owes him a piddling amount, and we know he missed it all. He failed to recognize himself in that pitiful man, a fellow debtor. He sees himself instead in the role of the master. And he fails that role as well.
He misses this essential fact: Forgiveness is not for his personal freedom and happiness alone. It's to bring freedom and restoration to all, especially to those who owe him. It's to bring the mercy of God among us frail humans, waiting for redemption in a broken world. This right response to God's forgiveness is so serious and essential to the Christian life that Jesus warns the disciples after teaching them the Lord's Prayer, "For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins" (Matt. 6:14–15). God is not hinging his forgiveness on our release of others' debts—his salvation doesn't depend on any action on our part. Still, it's clear God requires forgiven people to be forgiving people.
Believing all of this did not make my own forgiveness of my father simple or immediate, of course. After that phone call with my sister, I made several trips to Florida over the next year and a half. I went at first with the words of Micah in my ears, "And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God" (6:8). I went wanting to love mercy, but my father and I clashed. He proclaimed his atheism. I was defensive. I remembered all the reasons I never liked him. And in every kindness I extended to him, I mourned that he had never done the same for me.
But I began to see him more fully. I saw his eagerness when I showed up each morning to visit. He called on my birthday. After his stroke, when he awoke to see me standing beside him, he began to weep. I placed my hand on his shoulder, the first time I had ever touched him with compassion, and we wept together silently, both of us for his long, sad life, and for all that had divided us. I finally recognized his mental illness, the root of his inability to love others. I realized I was not the only one jumped, robbed, and bleeding beside the road: he lay there too. With every recognition, my heart both broke and healed. Between visits, I called and sent letters, presents, and books. I was loving my father. I was loving mercy. I was laying down his selfishness and crimes, leaving them in the hands of God.
But things did not end as I hoped. My father never voiced interest in or love for me. He did not acknowledge his wrongs. My extension of mercy did not lead him to plead for God's mercy. When his heart so weakened that he fell into a coma, my sister held the phone up to his ear and I spoke words of love and forgiveness, but he was unable to respond. When he died two years after my return to his life, I cried for days.
Some might interpret these events as proof that Christian forgiveness—the kind predicated on God's forgiveness of us—doesn't work in the real world. I released my father from his debts against me, but it didn't seem to change him. Then I made a crucial mistake: I reentered relationship. I loved him and served him. In the end, I was hurt far more than if I had simply found my "minimal effective response" and then moved on with my life.
But that final event is not the real end of the story. I end at an earlier time, when four of my siblings and I gathered in my father's tiny room. We perched wherever we could, all of us turned toward him. He was wearing a beige shirt with green stripes and the khaki shorts my sister and I had bought him.
I looked around the room that day and blinked with wonder. It had been 16 years since we'd all been together. Now, our family was reconstituted around the very one who had split us apart so many years before. I thought of the Old Testament story of Joseph, of the scene in the dining hall with all his brothers, the reconstitution of his own family. How unlikely, impossible even, it was. The 10 older brothers sitting below him had ended the life Joseph had known some 16 years before. But their intent to harm had not utterly destroyed Joseph's life, and neither would he let it destroy their lives.
So it was with us. Our father had wounded each of us in significant ways, but we had decided the same thing: We would not pay back what was given to us. We were there to bless. We were there to honor. We were there not to silence the past but to reclaim it together. We were there to become forgiving people, people who could forgive one another as well.
My father was confused by our presence, but I saw him tear up with emotion one afternoon. Another time he acknowledged with stuttering words that he was not worthy of our attention. But we were not there to measure worth: we were there to love. When he died months later, he did not die alone. Two of his children were by his side.
The ministers of therapeutic forgiveness have a role to play, but their message is deficient in significant ways. They have made forgiveness too emotional, too private, and too small. But they are right about its power and freedom. Biblical forgiveness does release us, and not simply from our own anger and hurt. Biblical forgiveness releases us to bring the mercy we received from God out into the world to others. Forgiveness does simplify: the more forgiving we become, the less offense we take from others. Forgiveness does liberate: it opens our hearts rather than closes them to the suffering of others. Forgiveness does empower: it enables us to heal families and break generational sins.
We may begin the journey of forgiveness to ease our own burdens. But along the way we discover a chance to live out the fullness of the gospel: loving the unlovely, forgiving seventy times seven. In so doing, we reflect the kingdom of God among us.
I could so easily have missed it. I could so easily have listened to those voices rather than to the man who hung on the cross praying over his betrayers, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." In the moment of his executioners' greatest wrongdoing (and therefore their greatest need), Jesus offered forgiveness. We are called to do the same. We will not mend the entire human family, nor will we ever forgive as perfectly and completely as Jesus. But we are called to try, out of obedience and love for the Father who forgave us.
Let us begin with our own families, bringing to our ruined homes the balm of Christ's boundless mercy. From there, who knows where forgiveness will lead?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Can Christian Women Have It All? Debunking the Work-Life Balance Myth
Why Christian women are needed at home and in the highest echelons of society
By now everyone who cares, and some who don't, have heard about Ann-Marie Slaughter's exhaustive Atlantic cover story, "Why Women Still Can't Have it All." The sub-blurb heightens the controversy:
It's time to stop fooling ourselves …. The women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here's what has to change.I've always found cheerleading inexplicable, but while reading Slaughter's 12,000+-word treatise, I felt a powerful urge to don a flippy skirt, grab a pom-pom, and lead a stadium of women in a cheer: "Sis Boom Bah! No More La-Dee-Dah!" Slaughter, who broke several glass ceilings as the first woman dean at Woodrow Wilson School of Law and as first woman director of policy planning under Hillary Clinton, dared to do the unthinkable: She stepped down from her high-level position to spend more time with her struggling teenage sons.
Slaughter boldly takes on the myths of feminism perpetuated most recently by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Both women are addressing the persistently low numbers of women in high levels of government and corporate leadership, despite decades of feminist ideology and greater gains among women in education and influence. Sandberg blames it on an "ambition gap." Women are giving up positions of power to prioritize their families, but they can do better. If they're committed enough, if they marry the right person, if they sequence their childbearing correctly, they can have it all. Or so goes the mantra.
But Slaughter effectively guts these myths. The real obstacles to successfully managing both a career and family life, she argues, lie in outdated, one-dimensional thinking in our workplaces. For too long we have thought in exclusive categories: If you're committed to your work, you'll spend as much time as possible at the office. If you talk about your family at work, you're less professional. The greater your devotion to work and the more time you spend, the more productive you'll be, and so on.
She gives us homework we can all do right now: to begin breaking down the artificial borders between these essential parts of our lives. Slaughter leads the way. "When I was dean, I was very conscious of openly saying, 'I have to go to a parent-teacher meeting. I have to go home for dinner.' What kind of society doesn't let us say these things?"
Slaughter's unrelenting affirmation of the importance of family, and the need to rethink our workplace obsession, will endear her to some evangelicals. But I fear some readers will drop the magazine when she writes this:
"The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a 'new gender gap'—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders."
Despite this statement, Slaughter's cause célèbre is not feminism. She is intensely interested in the well-being of families, of mothers and fathers, of workers and employers. Her cause is humanism, the well-being of all. To advance this cause, we need to bring the best minds to the hardest problems in the highest realms of leadership. As long as our work culture virtually excludes women with families from rising to leadership positions, we're losing needed brainpower and perspective. The means of achieving better representation, creating a more fluid environment that places a higher value on family, will benefit all.
Where are Christian women in all this? Can Christian women have it all, too? Several Christian friends who read this article thought Slaughter's life and perspective were "sad" and "joyless," comments that reveal a suspicion of ambitious women. We—the church and even other Christian women—don't know what to do with highly educated and accomplished women. We often wrongly assume that those who aspire to powerful positions do so out of pride and self-seeking, and we offer the biblical model of the servant-leader as a corrective.
Yet it's clear to me that Slaughter and other highly placed women spend their days and nights serving—that is to say, leading, that is to say, serving for the benefit of many. I detect little ego in their extraordinary schedules and efforts. Nor do I require explicit joy from them. I do find much hope in Slaughter's words, and I sense an implicit understanding that "to whom much is given, much is required" (Luke 12:48).
We Christians also tend, at times, to view women who are confident and successful in the workplace as less feminine, less submissive, perhaps even less godly than women in more traditional roles. As both sides run to Proverbs 31 to proof-text their choice, we must all admit that the virtuous woman is almost obsessively industrious, leading and serving inside and outside her household walls—as did Deborah the judge, Miriam, and Queen Esther, among other pillars of the faith.
Because of these biblical models, and after my own decades of experience in churches, colleges, and businesses run almost exclusively by men, my advice to young Christian women is changing. I still encourage women in their homemaking lives, a life I am immersed in as well. But I also encourage Christian women to aspire to graduate degrees and positions of influence. It is clear to me that the church, the government, and the culture in general will not become healthier without the involvement of more women. We will not earn those positions without a renewed commitment to faith, to education, and to the wider world.
But, as Slaughter so clearly outlines, we need more than that. With tens of thousands of Christian women graduating from U.S. state and Christian universities every year, the potential for godly influence is growing rapidly. But without changes in our work and home lives, without husbands and wives working together and sharing tasks, this potential won't be fully realized.
Christian women need to be empowered to follow their calling and their gifts. As Christian women, we can have it all and we should: which means, we must be full participants in the creation of a healthy, vital culture where work is honored, God is served, and families are loved and secure.
----------------------------------------------------
A Note to Young Writers: Honor Your Obscurity
In the last month, I spent time with two younger women, both of whom had just released their first book. Sarah and Andrea are both fine writers whom I expect will continue to write and publish books. In the short time I had with each of them, I found myself dumping all my writing and marketing advice, talking about websites, blogging, Facebook, twitter. But I forgot to say the most important thing of all: honor your obscurity.
Very few young writers, musicians, artists value their obscurity. For good reason. We know if we’re to be published in any form, we need an audience, a sizeable audience. We know that most of the time we have to find that audience before that first book contract even lands on our desk. And once it does, and the book is out, we’re tasked to keep racking up bigger numbers. But how do we catch the eye and ear of a world that so often chooses the flippant, the crude, the gaudy spectacle over the good, the authentic, and the true? If we’re the praying sort, we may resort to prayer, remembering the words another writer made famous a few years ago,
“O, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.”
(Oh, dear Jabez, I want to say. How did you get away with that prayer?)
But we do it too, I suspect. The artists’ version would go something like, “O, that you would bless me and enlarge my platform, increase my followers, expand my twitter peeps and keep me from publishing harm so I will be famous, free from the pain of falling out-of-print.”I can write this prayer because I know these desires. An hour ago I was on a nationally syndicated radio show, and I find myself, now, against my better will, glued to numbers, trying to measure “impact.” While guiltily number-stalking, a stranger writes me on Facebook immediately after the broadcast and asks how he can become a writer and speaker, like me. (He’s in his twenties and he hasn‘t written anything yet . . .) Someone else writes to ask me how to build a fan base for her blog.
I do have advice: if you want others to read you and listen to you, you must listen to others. Do for others what you want them to do for you. That will not make you famous; that will make you better informed and more humble.
And second, fame is not what you think. Admittedly, I am not the best source here. My moments of “fame” are modest and sporadic. But I still know this: it isn’t what you think. It’s often over in a moment. It brings more responsibility than freedom. And if you’re not careful, it can pollute or paralyze your writing. I have a friend whose first book shot to the New York Times bestseller list. His agent, his readers, his global fan base now hold their collective breath for his next book. “How do I write under this weight?” he asks me. He has so many others he must now heed and please.
“Honor your obscurity” is another way of echoing Bill Roorhbach’s charge to “honor your apprenticeship.” Value these months, years of laboring toward your best work with fewer listening in than you would like. This quiet is your wilderness, your blessing. Here you will sharpen your art. You will lean closer to the sounds around you, for the fragile people who haunt the forests you watch, for the small voice that whispers names you didn’t know.
Enjoy the purity of your efforts, making art and worlds and essays out of the sheer love of words, of theatre, of longing and of hope. Enjoy it now before a woman or a publisher sits down beside you filling your notebook with a thousand necessary tasks, few of which have much to do with why you began writing in the first place.
Finally, what do you imagine fame will bring you? For me (and for many writers I know) I hope mostly to be able to keep on writing, to keep using “that talent which is death in me to hide,” as John Milton writes. If you’re doing this now, pouring life into the truest sentences you can make, you’re already famous.----------------------------------------------------
Rest Works
For Matthew Sleeth, Sabbath-keeping furthers both our happiness and holiness.
We're overworked, stressed, constantly on the move. More than 90 percent of Americans stay connected to their mobile phones—which is to say, to their office—24/7.Old news. In 24/6: A Prescription for a Healthier, Happier Life (Tyndale), Matthew Sleeth, M.D., dashes off a prescription that is 3,500 years older: a return to the fourth commandment ("Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy").
As someone who has taken the dose, I have unexpected news to report. Halfway through, I felt so convinced of Sleeth's arguments for rest (and so exhausted from my previous Sabbath), I took a nap. Without guilt. My testimonial, then: 24/6 works!
Sleeth makes a winsome case for a return to Sabbath "rest, renewal and reverence." As the director of Blessed Earth and the author of Serve God, Save the Planet, he brings his dual expertise in eco-theology and medicine to the subject. A Sabbath, after all, is given to the land itself, and who would know more about workaholism than a former ER physician?
His diagnostic skills are on full display. We take comfort from our work obsession, he notes, because "[i]f work is the meaning of our lives, then more work equals more meaning." To balance hard work, we engage in hard play. But there's a biblical solution to our collective freneticism: work hard—then stop, a rhythm where "the work takes on more meaning and the stopping takes on holiness."
God's holiness is the very ground of the fourth commandment, the longest and most detailed commandment of the ten, Sleeth reminds us: "He rests because he is holy and everything that God does is holy …. Rest shows who God is."
He does address the usual issues around Sabbath-keeping: Which day? What constitutes work and rest? Does Jesus' grace nullify the commandment? He sketches these issues helpfully without getting stuck in the usual ruts of legalism or, on the other side, a casual libertinism that reduces the Sabbath to any personal moment of diversion.
For all this good, I confess to a few queasy moments along the way. The subtitle itself threatens a Joel Osteen-like "live your best life now." The vibe continues in the preface, which highlights a business owner who closes his store on Sunday and ends up, yes, a multimillionaire. Thankfully, Sleeth makes few prosperity promises beyond that lapse, but he clearly knows it will take some pragmatism and marketing to sell the Sabbath to a horde of workaholic pragmatists. Overall, though, the theologian in me is slightly disappointed. More should have been done to address the sacred/secular divide that the fourth commandment appears to establish and sanctify. The seventh day is named holy; does this imply the other six days of work and commerce are not? It's not until the last third of the book that the author enlarges the Sabbath from a single day to a "sabbatical way of life," but even to the last, I sense a dualism that isn't fully reconciled.
Admittedly, it's easy to find gaps in a small book that tackles a weighty topic. In the end, Sleeth made the right call. In resting on the seventh day, he notes, God showed restraint, which is "not doing everything that one has the power to do." The doctor has shown a similar restraint. Would an exhaustive theological treatise on the Sabbath urge fatigued readers toward a fuller life of reverence, balance, and faith? Not likely.
I expect and hope the doctor's prescription will lead to ditched cell phones and outbreaks of walks, family dinners, naps, and a furious shuffling of to-do lists, which may feel a lot like work at first. But not for long.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Extravagant Subsistence: Restocking the Writer’s Shelves (and Soul)
Our freezer is nearly empty. We’ve eaten all of last year’s fish and meat, which constitutes a near emergency. Tomorrow I’ll close my computer, ignore my writing deadlines and head back out by bush plane and boat to an island in the Gulf of Alaska where I’ve worked in commercial fishing with my family for 35 years. We were so busy with the commercial season this summer we didn’t have time to put up our own fish for the winter, the wild salmon that will feed us luscious Omega-3 saturated flesh weekly through a long season of dark. We also harvest berries, venison, halibut and sometimes caribou. Putting up our own food stores, which goes by the shorthand term “subsistence,” is a normal and necessary part of most people’s lives in rural Alaska.“Subsistence” is defined as “The action or fact of maintaining or supporting oneself at a minimum level.” In Alaska, however, where a subsistence lifestyle is as common as wool socks, it’s evolved into almost the opposite concept. We don’t hunt and fish and grow and harvest simply to live—we engage in subsistence to live well. We have access to cellophane-wrapped factory-farmed meat like everyone else—but it is expensive, saturated with antibiotics and hormones, and has been shipped a very long way to get here. We prefer to harvest wild-grown meat from our own piece of the land and sea. It’s one of the reasons we live here.
This last week I began another kind of subsistence: I started re-reading Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s wise and extraordinary novel. Her profound musings on the worth of life, as spoken through John Ames, an elderly pastor, remind me how empty my writer’s pantry has become. The authors who have sustained me through the decades—Frederick Beuchner, Annie Dillard, Richard Wilbur, Eugene Peterson, Walter Brueggeman, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Emily Dickinson—have become strangers of late supplanted by blogs, social media, and research for other writing projects. These are all quick, short reads full of good information, but I’ve been achingly hungry without knowing it.
I realize that my writing life is little different than my food life. I’m often so busy on the commercial end of the work—the marketing, creating the next book proposal, the social media—that I forget to do the real subsistence work. While I’m as tempted as anyone else to spend my time feeding on strategies to garner audiences and master social media, ultimately, I’ll starve on such a diet. Fifty-seven Ways to Grow Your Platform, while helpful, will do little to awaken mystery, stir my imagination, provoke paradox, unearth wisdom, deepen my humanness, all of which is why I began to write in the first place. I realize if I maintain a steady diet of techniques, I’ll soon be setting an impoverished table for not only myself, but also for my readers, who come themselves needing sustenance.
Subsistence work is not easy. Rather than grabbing cellophane packages of meat and fish from the meat counter, I have to go out into boats, I have to use knives and muscles, I have to cut off heads, pull out guts, spill real blood.
It’s a physical engagement with the material world. Reading the best writers is not unlike this. It takes more effort to read longer works. Blood will be spilled there as well as we wrestle with the deepest, hardest and most profound stories of dying and living. But this is how we will subsist and be sustained as writers for a very long time.
When I sit down to my first meal of grilled salmon this winter, I will remember where it came from, how it felt in my hands. I will be so well-fed, I will want to write about it, and will set the table for others to join me in the feast. I hope my work will feed others as well as I have been fed myself. With some labor, and yes, some blood, it can happen.
What kind of reading are you returning to for “extravagant subsistence”? How can we make more time for this kind of reading (and for sustaining physical labor)?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marauding Bears All Over Town+The Wisdom of Garbage
“But when nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted.” ---Wendell Berry
More than a dozen bears are ambling and gobbling their way out of the hearts of Kodiak residents. There’s a couple in my neighborhood too. One was shot and killed while raiding a chicken coop not far from my house.
Removal of the bear shot while raiding a chicken coop.
We live on an island of more than 4000 Kodiak bears, the highest density of bears in the world. Most of the island is a federal bear refuge (everything in green on the map).
But we’ve not had so many frontyard bears before. The reason? A new garbage system. Central dumpsters have been replaced, inexplicably, with garbage cans (“rollcarts”) placed out on the streets, creating an irresistible temptation to the bruin population.
Blame is being slung as fast and harsh as hash and hard tack. No one is blaming the bears. Everyone is blaming the garbage; more specifically the ones who voted the new garbage system in.
Into this mess of blame and hash, I feel no need to defend the bear. The bear is himself an overwhelming fact of nature who can defend himself better than most (though not against guns). Nor can I defend the planners who passed this plan despite vociferous and prophetic objections. I offer instead a few words in the defense of garbage, which cannot defend itself.
We hate it, of course. We despise even our own garbage. We lily-wrap it in scented bags (I predict floral garbage bags will be next) that lock, snap and tie like a noose to choke out any possible leakage. We whip it out our doors, out of sight and smell, as if it carried the bubonic plague.
But garbage tells the truth about us. It has wisdom to impart. It reminds us that are not independent, self-sustaining creatures. We must eat, drink, wear clothes, and clean up to stay alive and well. Our lives, our breath and our body costs other beings, requires other lives and resources. We cannot not create waste. Even without wrappers or fast food, the cleanest foods, even water will turn to waste in our bodies. There is always something left over. Only the dead produce nothing.
But we are wasteful in our waste. We tire of our clothes sooner than they wear out. We chuck our clunky-heeled shoes, no longer in style. We stuff the can with the turquoise coat too gauche for our taste this year. We serve ourselves too much food and throw away the rest. We throw too much away because we buy too much. We buy too much because we don’t know the difference between want and need.
I am not much different than most people. I’d like to consume less---less of everything, especially plastic (but maybe not shoes and clothes—which I buy a lot of, but mostly used--Phew!)
Two thousand years ago, when Jesus turned a boy’s sack lunch into a feast for 5,000, despite his ability to produce infinite resources, he threw nothing away. When all had eaten and marveled, he told the disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments. Let nothing be wasted.”
Those words, both their spiritual and their literal application, are enough for me. “Let nothing be wasted.” Don’t waste pain, or fear or time or strength or resources or any of the gifts you’ve been given. Don’t even waste your waste.
Reduce it if you can. Don’t refuse so much of your refuse. At the least, let it remind you of the cost of life, what costly creatures we are.
Knowing this, don’t spend more: value everything you hold for all it’s worth.
And sometimes, don’t let go.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No Exit: Guest post by Leslie Leyland Fields
I push through the doors of the Ted Stevens airport, the last door on the strip. I am late, of course, but I am not worried. This is ERA I am flying, after all. I’m just going home to Kodiak. No airport security, just fly through the check-in 20 minutes before the flight, show a boarding pass and ID and walk the tarmac out to the prop-winged bird. But it is Frontier Air now, I remember, yet another airline re-shuffle in these unstable times. I check in and find out that the Frontier departure gate for Kodiak has been moved and is now at the other end of the terminal. I buy some crackers for dinner and roll my carry-on down the new hallway.
The tunnel is distant, twisting and empty; it is Kafka-esque, I decide, and I wonder, as I’m eating my crackers and rolling my suitcase, if some grotesque metamorphosis is even now rearranging my cells. But when I reach the end, I change my mind. A sudden city of people has appeared, crammed and clustered in a narrow cell of a waiting room. They all look strangely settled, as though they’ve been here for an age. I decide Kafka is out---and Sartre is in, in this chillingly accurate replica of “No Exit.”
I find out the weather in Kodiak is bad. That the last two planes, the Frontier dash-8 and the Alaska jet both flew gallantly all the way to Kodiak, looped successive ellipticals, in hopes of a fissure in the impenetrable fog and clouds, then defeated, circled back. This city in the cell, then, is populated with returnees, Loopers, fatigued but dogged people, trying again.
I know that feeling. I’ve done the Kodiak Loop too many times myself in my 32 years here. (My husband may hold the record, though---five loops, five tries to Kodiak before he finally touched ground.) Tonight, I just want to get home, rest my swollen cheek and throbbing jaw, from root canal surgery done the day before, on my own feather pillow.
I sit next to two women I know. We compare weather reports from our families back home. All reports agree---the weather’s getting worse. Heavy rain, heavy clouds, heavy fog, and winds coming up. A voice from the ceiling speaks, “We’re waiting on the weather to board, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll see what the weather wants to do. We’ll let you know as soon as we know if we’re going.”
Debbie and Christy and I decide they should just cancel. We should all go back to our hotels, go out to a really nice dinner (Orso’s, say Debbie and I ) and return to Kodiak tomorrow---well-fed, rested, swooping home in a single declarative flight, no questions (will we board? Will we land?) hanging. Fifteen minutes later the voice announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, the weather has improved enough to launch. If it doesn’t get better while we’re flying, we’ll land in Homer to refuel, and then take another look at it from there. We’ll be boarding in just a few moments.”
We roll our eyes at each other. It’s good enough to launch, but not likely good enough to land. Neither place, Anchorage or Homer is home, but getting stuck in Homer is worse than getting stuck in Anchorage. We slowly reconstitute ourselves, get up and dumbly, reluctantly stand in line. We all know we’re players in Sartre’s theatre after all, but we have to follow the script. We have to try, at least.
On board, the seats are full. No one bothers to look out the cloud-blinded windows. My seatmate mutters to herself, “This is why I don’t live in Kodiak anymore.” I entertain Debbie across the aisle with another flight story, this one of a three hour flight delayed in Seattle, then an unexpected midnight landing and refueling in Yakutat, in case we had to circle extra long before landing. We don’t talk about the planes that have crashed.
Fifty minutes pass. We’re past Homer now, surely. We’re going all the way, then. We feel the plane descend, hear the engine straining at another pitch. The landing gear drops mechanically; my seatmate and I exchange hopeful, nervous smiles. All eyes strain at the windows, trying to pierce the curtains of fog. We lean forward in our seats, pressing toward home, but still no sign of earth below. Someone behind me, across the aisle says “Look! I see some cliffs!” Hope stirs , the plane buzzes louder, our stomachs drop, a runway appears and we fall onto it gracelessly but beautifully.
A few months earlier, while traveling home to Kodiak from somewhere far away, I limped up to the ERA counter at the Anchorage airport. Almost home. One leg remaining. I was tired. I handed my commuter coupon to the woman behind the counter. There was a problem. She studied my coupon, reads my itinerary aloud to herself, “Okay, let’s see, Anchorage to Yuck, Yuck to Anchorage”.
I looked at her through night-flight eyes, blinked slowly, incredulously, then asked. “What did you say? Did you just call Kodiak, yuck??”
She laughed unselfconsciously. “Oh yeah. We all call it that. It’s the worse place we fly. That and Dutch Harbor. It’s always causing problems—wind, rain, fog, so hard to get in and out of. What a pain.”
She did not consider the fact that I might live there. She wanted me to feel sorry for her.
I have ten trips to make Outside these next few months, for speaking and teaching. I try to show up on stage at conferences and colleges and perform as though whisked in by my own Lear jet. As though I did not miss my other connections because I couldn’t get out of Kodiak, as though I had not flown all night and the next day to get there. As though the passage from this island to the rest of the world were not exhausting and harrowing every time. I try not to talk about it, this endless subject. And I try not to feel like a martyr for living in a place nicknamed “yuck.”
I’m not always successful. I don’t want to play the martyr---or the fool. Kodiak Island is not a stage, but I’m acting out what is most of all, true in this world--- we only imagine that we direct our lives. Our comings and goings, our entrances and exits are fragile, our intentions and desires controlled by winds and clouds and waters whose own travels are measured and announced, but largely unknown. I yield to this, in my own stubborn way, relieved to know the out-there world is so beyond my one self. I am glad to be here at all, to have any part to play in this stunning, wind-and fog wrought theatre.
I say that in my best moments. In my deepest heart, I want my planes to take off and land by my own perfect script. When they don’t, I know nothing else to do but this: to sit by the window, rehearsing my lines---again.
