Are you a shag or berber?

I think that there are two basic kinds of people. There are the people that walk on the carpets in their homes, and those that don’t. The other day, I walked into my friend’s house to see her new baby, and almost forgot to take off my shoes. She has lived in her house for a few years, and her carpet is immaculate! That wouldn’t necessarily be remarkable, except that she has four children. One reason her carpet is so nice, is because she doesn’t walk on it with shoes. They always take their shoes off before coming inside.

I think relationships are like carpet. They start out all nice and squeaky clean smelling of new chemicals, and you’re pretty careful for a while not to soil anything. Then, one day you can become careless and spill something, or drag in the garbage from the garden, and bam! There’s a stain. Oh, sure, you can use spot remover, but that doesn’t always get the stain out. Sometimes people have to live with that stain for a long time.

Or have it steam cleaned. God is the steam cleaner, and his prices can’t be beat!!

So, I have to ask myself. Have I walked on the carpets of people’s hearts? Have I forgotten to take off my shoes? Have I dragged my past baggage into new relationships and left a messy environment behind me? Too many times the answer is, ”yes”, especially those that I love the most, like my husband.

What about my children’s hearts? Sometimes in haste it can be easy to forget that their hearts are still like clean carpets that have been unblemished by age, spills or wear and tear. I need the Lord to remind me to take off my shoes and tread lightly around those that I love. I need to leave the mud and the slime outside.

So, how do we “take our shoes off”?, you ask. Well, I think it’s by being intentional about it. So many hurtful actions and words can slip out when we are distracted by ourselves. I like to use this self test at the end of the day to remind myself what went wrong, and what went right.

Are my words loving, encouraging and uplifting? (Eph. 4:29) trustworthy and self controlled (Proverbs 11:13), pure (Eph. 5:4), peaceful (Proverbs 17:1), the words God wants me to speak (1Peter 4:11) and a reflection of God’s righteousness (Psalms 17:3b).

Not that I have arrived by any sense of the word, but again, this is not about being perfect, it’s about being intentional with our words and actions. It’s about taking the time to think about someone else, other than ourselves. I have said many times that the root of all sin is selfishness. So, tomorrow, try to be intentional with your husband, children, or whomever you come into contact, and keep their carpet clean.

Taking off my shoes,
Brandie

Homeshool Heaven

Tomorrow I get to go to the local homeschool expo, and I’m as giddy as a….well, as a schoolgirl! This time of year always thrills me. I get to look down the long aisles of people wanting to sell me things. Things I need, things I don’t, and things I thought I didn’t but now that I see them I know I must have them and how on earth did I ever get along without them??????

Breathe in , and out….

I love homeschooling. Yes, it’s harder than anything else I have ever done in my life, yes, it can be like pulling teeth at times when my nine year old wants to do ANYTHING other than her school work. No, it isn’t easy trying to balance a 4th grader, kindergartner, a preschooler and a baby toddling around. Yes, sometimes we eat McDonald’s just to get out of the house, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

I remember the moment Ponygirl learned how to read. We were going through a phonics book, because she wanted to learn. Mind you, she wasn’t even four yet…but SHE wanted to learn.

So she put together the sounds “r” “a” “n”.

I saw it click

“RAN!!!!!” she screamed at the top of her lungs while running around in circles as fast as her little legs would carry her.

I wouldn’t trade that for the world.

Yes, we have to sacrifice and go without, many times. Yes, I would like to have new couches (ones without springs coming out the back), or vacations, or going out to eat more. But this is what I am called to do. This is what I was meant for.

So I stay at home to raise and educate my children in a world that can be hostile, even violent. I want to make not only productive citizens, but movers and shakers, those willing to sacrifice for the good of other people.

As I type, I am hearing the Battle Hymn of the Republic playing in the background…

Back to reality.

It’s hard. Very hard. But I love it. I get to see the “firsts” and I get to see the light bulbs go off. I get to see the gleam in Superhero’s eyes when he understands that when a knight has three apples and a dragon rips off his head then eats one apple, there are two apples left.

So tomorrow I get to look at eye candy, all the gleaming new books, smell the unused paper, listen to people tell me how to organize my home (hah! More on that later), and have lunch with my friends drooling over the cool curriculum they just got.

Ahhh….I love expo time.

For Such a Time as This

Fear is a funny thing.

Have you ever read the story of Esther in the Bible? It’s a cool story about a beautiful Jewish girl named Hadassah who lived in Persia during the reign of King Xerxes. She was basically kidnapped and taken into the king’s harem. She was chosen by the king to be his queen. He had just sent his previous queen packing for defying him. Hadassah’s uncle, Mordecai, had warned her not to tell anyone she was Jewish, since the political climate at the time was a bit anti-Semitic, and her life could be in danger if the wrong people knew. Therefore, he told her to go by Esther, a name common in the Persian empire.

Well, time goes by and behold! Haman, the king’s right-hand man, comes to hate Mordecai, and now wants to annihilate the Jews. So he convinces the king that it’s a good idea to wipe them out. Now, there was a rule in the kingdom that you NEVER went into the king’s presence without being summoned. If you did, and the King didn’t make an exception, you were dead. Literally.

So Mordachai goes to tell Esther what has happened and that she has the power to stop this genocide by going to talk to the king. But she doesn’t want to go because the king hadn’t summoned her for a month. Who would want to go?! I wouldn’t!! Even if the king did make an exception for her (a politically dangerous thing for him to do for a woman), why would he believe her over Haman, who had the king’s favor? So she would not only have to go without being summoned, but also tell him (and Haman) that she was a Jew. So she told Mordachai, “No, find someone else!”

This is the clincher for me. Mordecai told her, “Do not think that you alone will escape the fate of everyone else, just because you’re the queen. If you keep silent, deliverance will come from somewhere else. But who knows, perhaps you have come to this position for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:13-15 paraphrase, mine)

If you don’t know the rest of the story, go look it up. It’s a thriller, and I don’t want to ruin the plot. Actually, Hollywood made a pretty decent movie about it called, “One night with the King.”

Anyway, the point of the whole story is that fear seems so much bigger when we focus on it. When we focus on ourselves, we will always be paralyzed with fear. When we focus on God’s ability, His power lives through us victoriously.

Sounds good as an adult, but I am trying to get that across to a nine-year-old girl afraid of anything in the insect world. I can’t say that I blame her. Georgia has some BIG insects, much bigger than the West coast, and the wasps here can get a bit grumpy. But that fear paralyzes her to the point where she won’t go outside to water the plants if she sees a wasp.

Sigh…

So, I keep on praying that God’s power to overcome fear will live through her. His plans for us are so much bigger than our own plans, even mine. I want her to live without fear. He wants so much more...

In the thick of it right along with you.

God Bless,
Brandie

P.S. Thank you to Cory Hallett of Riverstone Church and to Big Idea Productions for inspiration for this blog.

Little Kids are so cute!

Ladybug is in what I call a "chewy" phase.

Generally speaking, when one of my children turns 6 months old, they become so cute, I want to chew on them. I don't care what I eat: feet, fingers, knees, even the occasional tushy. As a parent, I have an overwhelming desire to consume my children.

This "chewiness" lasts for about a year or until the word "no" escapes their mouth for the first time. Then the cuteness factor goes down a bit, and I find that I actually have to work at this parenting thing.

So, Ladybug is only 15 months old; I have a few more good months before the dreaded vocabulary starts. Actually, probably longer than that, since she doesn't have a lot to say. In reality, being child number four, there is not a lot of speaking that she needs to do. Everybody does it for her, at her, around her and above her. There is rarely a quiet moment in our house!

So she points, gestures, and every once in a while she humors me and signs "milk" or "more" or something else adorably cute.

Actually, I think God did that on purpose. I was discussing this with a friend tonight. Everything is cute as a baby. Well, maybe not warthogs, but most everything. I think God made them so chewy so that as parents we would remember how cute they were when the going gets tough.

Just a thought to ponder...

Chocolate, weight loss and testosterone

I just want to be on record as stating the obvious. Chocolate and weight loss, should go hand in hand. I mean, chocolate is made from the cocoa bean, right? Isn't that a vegetable? Or a legume? Or something other than "fat"? When I was first married, I was working for a national weight loss program in their customer service phone department. We were convinced that if you ate chocolate on weekends and holidays, it didn't count. Is this wrong? But alas, the injustice of it all.....sigh.


On a completely different topic, I've been pondering the testosterone in my house. I have one son (Superhero) who is about to turn 5. He is surrounded by 3 sisters, one older and two younger. We like to think of ourselves as kinder, gentler people by nature. We tend not to be very "macho", but consider ourselves more intellectuals. How on earth, then, did this child come to our house? Everything this boy does exudes testosterone. His favorite current pastime is dressing up in costumes, and since we have so many girls, there are a lot of "girly" costumes around the house. So, being a man of invention, he makes do. Having said that, he makes even a fairy look burly. Notice the lumberjack shirt, flannel pants and hiking shoes.

I have enjoyed seeing the manhood emerge in this child without even trying. He adores his father, and from an early age has tried to copy everything his daddy does. Even when Daddy is away at work, he manages to be "utterly boy". He makes sticks into guns, and when I take them away for shooting his sisters, he simply makes his fingers into AK-47s and goes into secret operations mode.

He has never seen shooting, killing or overt violence in any movie or the few TV shows we allow him to watch, yet the desire to conquer, overtake and annihilate anything in his path is overpowering for him. And for me at times!

We have tried to impress the idea of chivalry upon him, and have encouraged dressing up as a knight, etc. thinking that this would appease his need to be "dangerous". But, most of the time the knight "accidentally" slays the fair maidens, instead of the dragon. I know this is normal. I know this is good. I just can't help thinking of a video I saw on you tube talking about the difference between male and female brains. Ponder that.

Until later, I, a fair maiden (and Queen Mum), am going to pursue my little knight (or G.I. Joe, Superman, Spiderman, Batman, whatever the superhero of the moment is) and try to let him be a rough tough and "dangerous" boy.

Hello world!!

O.K. So, I'm supposed to type in what I want to blog about. I am drawing a blank, then suddenly I look over to a picture on my desk of my four pumpkin doodles. I think, life is too funny not to share. I am a stay at home mom to four ever increasingly active monkeys that I homeschool in my spare time (or is that the other way around?). We are busy, exciting, and NEVER dull.

For instance, tonight I get back from a meeting and go to "tuck" 3 year old Princess into bed, when she shared with me her "painting" on the wall. Yes, you guessed it, a brand new, huge portrait of.....something.....in crayon all over her beautifully hand painted mural wall that my mom laboriously fashioned herself. Oops! But she was so proud of this "work of art"!

I was so stunned at first, I just stared. Then I caught her face out of the corner of my eye, the lip starting to quiver...you know the rest, how could I be upset with such a sensitive artist? If I said anything, she might never draw again! As Todd Wilson says in his column this week, respect can come another day, maybe tomorrow, maybe not. Tonight I'll go to bed knowing that I "loved" Princess more than the beautiful wall...sigh...that's real.