why we stayed

(Previously: Do We Stay or Do We Go? and Do We Stay or Do We Stay?)

We made the decision to buy a house last summer (though it took us a year to actually buy).  What that really means, I suppose, is that we decided to stay in Upland at least long enough to justify buying a house - the staying in Upland part was the big decision.

We moved to Upland, IN from Seattle three years ago, and told ourselves, “We’ll probably just stay for three years, and then move on.”  At new faculty orientation, someone told us that ALL the incoming faculty say that...and then they end up staying forever.  I smiled nervously and excused myself to cry in the bathroom.

Here’s how we got to Upland in the first place: Jack was applying for jobs after finishing his MA at the University of Washington.  The TESOL market was saturated in Seattle, and the cost of living there was high, so we knew we’d probably have to leave the city that felt like home in so many ways. He was applying (or, more often, I was the one actually sending inquiries and filling out applications) everywhere, and by the end of April, he had two job offers: first, a fairly prestigious one-year contract with the State Department to teach in Laos; second, a ten-month contract to be the Curriculum Coordinator and Assistant Professor of ESL at Taylor University, the small midwestern Christian college that his parents and younger sister had attended.

We wanted to go to Laos. But we really didn’t want to have to job-hunt again after a year, and we also wanted to have a second child, which would be more complicated in Laos.  The job at Taylor would almost definitely extend beyond a year, maybe even becoming tenure-track. We took it.

Only a few weeks later Jack was offered jobs we would have accepted in a heartbeat - at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville (in the gorgeous Ozark mountains and only a few hours from my family) and at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (halfway between Jack’s family and mine). But it was too late - we had just moved into our rental house in this “map dot/ stop sign on a blacktop” (as Tim McGraw would say). Upland, IN (pop. 3845) had a total area of 3.15 square miles, no stoplights, and (needless to say) no Thai food.  The main thing we noticed when we moved into town was the high number of overweight people on riding lawn mowers wearing bikinis.

For two people with family in the South, the midwest was not ideal.  For two people who had met in Southeast Asia and dated while living just outside LA, a small town white as homogenized milk was not ideal. For two people who loved food, music, and film, a town with no restaurants, little chance of live music, and no movie theater felt not only not ideal but downright ascetic. In Seattle we’d been within walking distance of Vietnamese, Mexican, Brazilian, and Thai restaurants, at least three historic movie theaters, and a number of venues for live performances; in Upland, we were within walking distance of cornfields.

The ESL program Jack began working with was small and fraught with problems.  He put his heart into it, working with diligence and a strong sense of loyalty (as he usually does).  He started going gray.  Three years later, he is the Program Director, and the university has brought in Charlie Brainerd (who spent many, many years in China with ELIC, the organization we went to Vietnam with) to help expand and oversee the program. When Jack began, the program had a handful of Korean students.  Next year, we’ll have Korean, Chinese, Congolese, and Saudi Arabian students enrolled.

We struggled to find a church and to figure out where we fit in this small community.  For six months we visited churches within a 40 minute driving distance, but most of them managed to offend us in one way or another.  We had finally decided to just bite the bullet and attend one small church not too far from our house, and on our third Sunday in a row there, someone preaching from Revelations said something like, “I really have no idea what Revelations is about - let’s leave that to the scholars,” and I died a little bit inside.  We got in the car, looked at each other, and said, “Let’s go to the Episcopal church.”

When we’d first visited the Episcopal church, there had been hardly any kids there, and the congregation didn’t sing any songs we had ever heard before. Now, six months later, there were more families in attendance (though we still didn’t know any of the songs they sang).  Deciding to attend Gethsemane may have been one of the biggest factors in our eventual house-buying decision, and I suppose that’s how it should be: rootedness in a church ought to be that integral to life.  At Gethsemane we found friends and community, and for people like Jack and me, who are introverted and somewhat slow to connect with people -- it would be hard to leave these people and to start over again.

So, three years later, we’ve invested in the university and grown rooted in a church community.  We’ve also started to embrace small town life.  I love that we can walk to library story book hour every Friday, and on the way bump into other friends who are walking there. I love that I can walk my kid to preschool, and that I already know half the kids in attendance.  I love the sense of community at the farm four miles down the road. I love that Labor Day is garage sale day, and that I know which houses to go to for clothes to outfit my daughter for the upcoming year. I love that so many people garden and hang their clothes out on the line to dry.

Don’t get me wrong - I haven’t bought into this American mythology about the purity of small towns or farmers.  It’s true that I still probably disagree with my neighbors about all kinds of political issues. You can certainly find narrow-mindedness and divisions among the people here.  

But when it came time to decide if we should stay or go, it didn’t seem right to leave. We have good jobs (thanks to the nearness of the university, the plethora of dependable babysitters, and the support of the university, it’s easy for me to teach one or two classes a semester), the cost of living is low, and we have friends and church.  If another job came calling, we might leave, but it didn’t seem right to go looking for one.  It seemed more right to practise the Benedictine way of stability, learning humility through the discipline of place and community.

We’d like to be closer to family, and we’d like to be adventuring across the wide world, and we’d like to have a Thai restaurant in the neighborhood.  But in the end it seemed right to us, for now, to make it our ambition to lead a little life, to mind our own business and to work with our hands.  In the end, it seemed right to stay, and to live (as Tim McGraw puts it) where the green grass grows. 

Pretty soon I’ll be cutting that green grass on a riding lawn mower, just working on my tan.

a few things at the end of spring

Yesterday, I finished grading all the essays. The chickens are pecking at the remains of dandelions across the yard, and the grass needs to be mowed again every time I turn around.   Lilac branches spill out of a silver pitcher on the dining room table, and we cooked outside this week, sipping cold whiskey-gingers.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that summer is here.  The seniors graduated and we said goodbye to our Korean and Chinese friends - goodbye for the summer, to most of them, and goodbye indefinitely for a few favorites who are going back to finish university in Korea now.

Rosie and Owen dressed up for graduation, too.

 In just seventeen days we'll be moving into our new house. In the meantime, the chickens (whose story you can read at the Renew and Sustain blog) are free-ranging in the backyard, with a portion of the storage shed cordoned off as shelter for them.

We've been very into fairy princess ballerinas around here - but the kind who dig for worms, make mud pies, climb fences, and chase chickens. (I'm a sucker for old-fashioned fairies and bought this book for Rosie and me to share.)

We are journeying into Narnia, too - Rosie and I have read the first three books, and are currently in the middle of Prince Caspian. She can't follow the stories too well, but doesn't care at all, and refuses to let me switch to Betsy-Tacy.

At Christ and Pop Culture I've been reflecting on books and television and music and theology - you can click through if you want to read -

"The Office" Ends, but Love Never Fails  (my take on the "The Office" - which had a really surprisingly great run of episodes at the end!)
Denison Witmer- Songs to Grow Up To (a new album from one of my favorite songwriters - this is on repeat at my house)
A New Wave of Complementarianism (a round-up of other people's posts)
Where'd You Go, Bernadette (a review of a really fun novel - especially for anyone who has ever lived in Seattle)
The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Lesson in Community (a review of conservative columnist Rod Dreher's memoir)

Incidentally, Christ and Pop Culture has launched a new magazine for the iPad and iPhone - you can get a free trial subscription and check it out.  It's a well-designed, curated collection of perspectives on pop culture.


For a few months now, this essay's been bouncing around in my head about buying our first house and reading Alain de Botton's Architecture of Happiness.  Maybe now that it's summer I'll finally get to writing it. Or maybe I'll just go make some popsicles.

Cassie & Caleb (a critical review)

Moody offered me two copies of Cassie and Caleb Discover God’s Wonderful Design to give away on my blog.  You can enter to win one here, where I summarized the book earlier today.  

I have a few reservations about using this book with my family in our context.  Many of its lessons are good - the idea that obedience should be instant and thorough, for example, is a lesson my children and I need to learn again and again. And I love the idea of helping children understand that all of Scripture fits together as a grand story.  I have to admit, though, that some things about this book left me feeling uncomfortable.  While I do believe in gender distinctiveness - that is to say, I believe that God created men and women “equal but different,” as the authors put it - I also believe that there is very little we ought to say about those differences.  

In Karl Barth’s “Man and Woman,” he argued that though God made man and woman different, like the letters A and B, we ought not to subscribe to any particular human definitions of femininity and masculinity.  Rather than trying to systemize gender differences, we are to learn them through relationships with specific men and women.

“It is not for us to write the text [of man and woman] itself with the help of any such system. It is not for us to write the text at all. For the texts which we write, the definitions and descriptions of male and female being which we might derive from others or attempt ourselves, do not attain what is meant by the command when it requires of [human beings] that here, too, [they]should accept [their] being as[human], as male or female, as it is seen by God.” (“Man and Woman,” 151)

This makes beautiful sense to me.  So many of the things I was taught about “men” and “women” have failed to be true in my personal experience.  Harmful gender stereotypes have at times hindered me from seeing men and women as fully human, unique individuals.

In some ways, Cassie & Caleb Discover God’s Wonderful Design is careful not to be overly prescriptive about gender roles.  On the very first page, we are introduced to Cassie’s group of friends - Kate, who “loves frilly clothes,” Abby, who “never wears pink and loves soccer,” Heather, who is “crazy about books and animals,” etc.  They are “all very different, but...they are all girls.”  In another chapter, Caleb and his father do the dishes while they talk about what it means to be a man, concluding that “being a man or a woman is much bigger than a list of things we do.”

However, there are a few things the book does teach about what it means to be a man or a woman.  Men are to be leaders, protectors, and providers who work outside the home, and women are to be helpers (ezer is given its full, gorgeous meaning) and life-givers.  I don’t fully agree with these teachings (particularly the bit about men working outside the home) or the way Scripture is used to support them.

What worries me more, though, are the descriptive depictions throughout the book of what Cassie and Caleb like, think, and do, and the ways that adults respond.  These seem to follow our culturally instated gender stereotypes quite closely.  Girls make cards and decorate cupcakes, and it is “a very girly afternoon.”  Girls talk a lot, and boys don’t.   Before explaining to Caleb that men and women are equal, his father and grandfather joke that women are “loud” and that men are “better.”  Cassie buys a doll, and Caleb goes to a muscle-car show. When Granny Grace’s laundry room floods, Cassie is in tears because “they don’t have a dad to fix all that stuff.” Boys play baseball, go fishing, and see movies.  Girls shop.  Cassie can hardly wait for her dad to walk her down the aisle because she’ll look like a princess and everyone will be watching her.

Maybe most disturbing is the story where Caleb and his friend, bored, surprise their sisters with buckets of mud.  Wise old Granny Grace laughs it off, explaining to Cassie and Caleb’s mom, “I raised three boys and never did understand what makes them tick, but I know God made males and females to be different so I finally decided the best thing to do is laugh at their adventures -- and make them clean up their mess.”   While I’m all in favor of using humor to disarm, and while I don’t think a mud-attack is a horrible offense, I am concerned by the “boys will be boys” defense of behavior which bothers girls. It’s this very kind of defense that can lead to the kind of rape culture we live in today.

All in all, there is a lot of good theology here and some of the lessons in this book are helpful. For some families, this book will be perfect. But for me, the stereotyped descriptions of boys’ and girls’ behavior is not something I’d prefer to expose my children to in family devotions. If you feel - like the authors - that you live in a culture where gender distinctions have been minimized, then you might appreciate this book.  I, however, feel like the gendered stereotypes offered by Cassie and Caleb are already firmly ingrained in our culture through media representations of masculinity and femininity, so I’ll probably choose other ways of teaching theology to my children.

(Go here to enter the giveaway for this book. Giveaway closes at noon on Friday, May 3.)

Cassie & Caleb (a giveaway)

In Cassie & Caleb Discover God’s Wonderful Design (Moody 2013), Susan and Richie Hunt share twenty short stories for children ages 5-8. Designed for use in family devotionals, each story illustrates a lesson from Scripture, sometimes using the language of the First Catechism. Every story is followed by discussion questions, a Scripture reading, and a suggestion for prayer.

The authors (both leaders in the Presbyterian Church of America) explain in the introduction to the book that they have five principles which guided them as they wrote the book:

1. The creational principle that “God created man in his own image...male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27).  The book seeks to be a corrective in a culture that has minimized gender distinctiveness.

2. To help children discover Jesus in all of Scripture, and to see gender-distinctiveness fit solidly into the context of the gospel story.

3. To teach children that God’s word “is our authority, His glory is our purpose, and the gospel of grace is the power of God to save us and to change us.”

4. To encourage children to love the church as their covenant family.

5. To plant theologically rich language into children’s hearts as a foundation for a biblical framework for thinking and living.

The book cover and pictures were attractive to my four year old, Rosie, and she immediately asked to hear a story.  My mom read the first story to her, and she listened intently to the whole thing. I think the format of the stories is just right for the target age range of 5-8, and most children that age will be truly interested in hearing and discussing the stories. They’ll be happy to learn about how they fit into God’s story, and they’ll probably be happy to have a framework for understanding gender.

Moody has offered me two copies of this book to give away.  If you are interested in one, leave a comment here!  I’ll use a random number generator to select two people to receive copies. Be sure to include your email address so that I can contact you.

Later today, I’ll post my full review of the book, including a few reservations I have about using it with my own family.

five things I missed

With two weeks of school left, I'm astounded at how the semester has slipped away. Because I've been writing every week for Christ and Pop Culture, I've been neglecting this little space, but at least five notable things have happened that I haven't recorded.
1. We were confirmed as members of Gethsemane Episcopal Church.

2. I bought six chicks (more on that later).

3. Owen turned two. What I love about this boy is his sense of humor, his side-eye glance, his very cuddly nature, and the way he says seriously, "Oh, gotcha," after I answer his questions, or "cookie, yum, good, fun! Sis? Have cookie too?"

Owen's a little bit obsessed with sports balls.

My parents swung by for the birthday party. And an old friend from our ELIC days came by, too.

4. Taylor celebrated Korean Week.

5. One of my students presented original research (conducted for my class last fall) at an undergraduate research conference at Purdue. I accompanied her and a friend. We were all glad to get out of Upland for a night -- and I was very proud of Gowoon's bravery and hard work.

fairy days

My friend Karen pointed me to Carolee's Herb Farm and their Fairy Days event.

I still haven't adjusted to the Midwestern version of spring. I'm used to the season coming to stay in March, with humidity and dogwood blossoms and snow comes short behind. Here, spring teases and retreats, rains and blows- this week our tulips finally opened, and this week I also wore a down jacket through a wintry mix of precipitation.

But today is lovely, calm and blue and warm.

See the fairy house?

a sort of obituary

Grandma four months before her death

I dreamed that I was in Grandma’s room, helping sort through her stuff after her death. I was standing next to the sewing machine, and had just given the tray filled with brightly colored spools of thread to my mother.  When mom left the room, Grandma came in.  

“What are you doing here?” I asked in surprise. She murmured something noncommittal and lay down on the bed. “Are you comfortable?” I asked, and she adjusted.  She looked the same, but younger; her body seemed to have a fleshy solidity that it had lacked in her last months, as she became frailer, tiny and brittle-boned. I watched her on the bed. Then I woke up. 

The one thing Grandma always said about her eventual obituary was that she didn’t want anything in there about her sewing.  But there it was, in my dream.  What’s a girl to do?

---

Grandma didn’t talk about God, much. Oh, she would show you the poem about prayer that her oldest daughter, my Aunt Kathy, had written as a teenager, just a few years before she died in a car wreck. But she never showed us the letter Kathy wrote to her unborn daughter a few months before that wreck - the letter explaining that she believed in God because he had been her strength when she was at her weakest. Grandma didn’t talk about God.

Grandma talked about people. As an adult,  I grew to love our gossipy lunch dates, where we talked about people: their pretensions (Dad), mistakes (both my parents, chiefly in regard to homeschooling - her opinion, not mine), charms (my youngest brothers), surprising changes (my middle siblings), and hypocrisy (all Southerners - Grandma was a staunch Yankee).

These conversations used to make me uncomfortable.  Grandma had lived in the same town as my family from the time I was nine years old.  Before that, my memories of her are vague, as dreamy as scenes from a Terrence Malick film: feeding seagulls by the ocean when Grandpa came to Texas for cancer treatments, running in their front yard in Kansas City, filling coloring book pages with Grandpa.  When Grandpa died, Grandma moved to be near us.

I never felt that she was quite the right sort of Grandmother.  I think my imagined ideal Grandmother was something out of a television version of the Victorian age, with white hair piled up in a pompadour, long skirts sweeping the floor, a jar full of freshly baked cookies, and lots of hugs and cuddles and compliments and silly gifts.  Grandma wore sensible shoes and had short, salt and pepper hair. When she made cookies, they had healthy things in them, and she kept them in the freezer, not in a cookie jar. She could be a bit stern, and she didn’t talk about feelings.  

----

When I was in highschool, Grandma helped me sew.  She wasn’t pleased with my methods; I wasn’t meticulous, and I skipped steps.  I didn’t always pin and iron. Grandma laughed at the pajama pants I made without a pattern, but she helped me construct a grey wool skirt that I still wear to this day.

I have a few vivid memories of the trip we took to Scotland when I was a teenager.  I remember being awake in an Edinburgh hotel room at midnight, while Grandma snored loudly.  I looked out the window and wished I could leave and explore the streets on my own.  I remember being annoyed by the fact that every time we passed flowers, Grandma would say, “Do you see those flowers, Amy?  Aren’t they beautiful?” Yes, of course I see them, they’re right in front of me.  I don’t have to comment every time.  I can enjoy them quietly, my angsty little teenage mind would retort. I remember slipping outside when the haggis was served, and napping on the tour bus with all the retired folk from the church (did I mention we were on a tour with older people from her church?). I remember loving the castles, and walking along the rocky beach of Iona by myself in bliss.

I suppose we didn’t connect well. I was too quiet, too bookish and dreamy; Grandma was too practical, too concrete and  -- well, she thought books were a bit of a waste of time. But Grandma kept takingme on trips.  Kept inviting me to lunch. Kept quietly depositing money into my college savings account. Kept supporting me when I made decisions she couldn’t comprehend (like moving to Vietnam). She may not have been the type to say “I love you,” very often, but her love was there, in her actions, steady and reliable, just like she was.

---

I know most people don’t get to have an adult relationship with a grandparent, but it’s one of the greatest things in the world.  As an adult, I decided to reject my anxiety about our gossipy lunches and learned to enjoy them.  Finally I understood her smart, sarcastic humor.  Finally, I allowed myself to be amazed by the heartache she’d experienced in her life, and her resilience, loyalty, and love.

Finally I started asking for the stories -and I could never get enough of them - the stories that gave me insight into who she was, what had formed her, and what part of her was in me. I asked her to write them down, and she wrote by hand, even when her hands were barely working.  This is how it begins, remarkably:

My Great Grandma lived in Missouri and was orphaned during the Civil War.  She was rescued by a soldier from Colorado who took her home with him and raised her.  She married John Paul Jones who had been a settler in this area.  They had 7 children - Dan, a cattle rustler, Ralph and Ray, ranchers, Paul, a sheriff, Alice, Emma, + Etta (my grandmother). Etta had 2 children, Nellie (my mother) + her brother, Bill.  She was married to Carl Stoddard. Carl had a race horse who was the cause of their divorce. (Do you call a horse who?) Anyhow, after the divorce Carl moved to Salt Lake City.  At age 18, my mother went to visit him, and they travelled for a year from Alaska to Glendora, California.

My father, a son of immigrant German parents, grew up in Michigan. He was the youngest of 7 children. Henry, Herman, Bill, Mary, Minnie, Anna, + Albert. Mary took care of him as his mother did not want him. She fed him unpasterized milk from their cow.

Nellie (my great grandmother) met Albert (my great grandfather) when he worked as a ranch hand for her father.  Albert called her on the phone when she had moved to California and proposed marriage.  She didn’t have anything better to do... (which is how Grandma describes both her parent’s decision to get married, and her own). Al’s siblings cheated him out of his share of the inheritance, and he and Nellie were so poor that they lived for a while in a neighbor’s ice house. Then, he worked for 60 years at a Chevrolet factory.

When Grandma was in college, she used to go dancing every weekend.  A different boy every time. A big band would play, and they’d dance till midnight. She married Grandpa in September 1942, and he headed to army training. She and her army wife friends made a cross-country road trip to California to be near their husbands, an epic journey of flat tires and gas rations and desert heat.

-----

Grandma stayed with Grandpa until he died of cancer in 1988.  They stayed together through the war, the post-war prosperity, the free-loving sixties, the loss of their oldest child, Grandpa’s alcoholism and manic depression, and his celebration of five years of sobriety.  She stayed with a bipolar alcoholic, and not because she was a doormat.  

Grandma found a lot of joy in life: in dancing, in flowers, in sewing, in finding a good sale, in traveling and in staying put, in watching her grandchildren sing and dance and grow up. She never talked about the hard parts, and she rarely talked about God.  She didn’t speak much about love.  But I'm starting to think that in her quiet generosity, her steadfast endurance, and her reliable presence, maybe she was actually preaching about God and love all the time.

Eileen S. (Cross) Lepine, October 22, 1920 - March 22, 2013

Five Easters

Trying to avoid cliches here.... But really, can you believe how fast this is happening?