shirking scripture

So I haven't been doing my homework.
"Homework?" you ask. "What homework, pray tell?"
The homework for church. See, this summer our church is doing a manuscript study of the book of Philippians, in the New Testament. A manuscript study is a really in-depth study, looking at the book as a whole, then in sections, observing words, sentence structure, repetition, themes, etc.
"But Heather," you say, "This sounds right up your alley! You were an English major and did this stuff all the time! You are a total manuscript nerd! So why aren't you enjoying this?"

Before I go into those reasons, I want to point out that I think the sermon series is, in general a good idea. I think it's great for Christians to actually read the Bible and study it in depth--especially so they understand the context behind certain favorite passages that are oft-quoted. Last year our church read the Bible (yes, the whole Bible. Well, I did the Old Testament) together--I participated happily. And I like the way our church is doing it. I don't feel peer pressure to do homework--they give you space during the service to do catchup if you didn't have time during the week. And our speakers are good.

But when I sat down to actually try to participate, I felt as though I were forcing myself to eat some very unpalatable vegetables. Mixed with some sawdust.
Why?
I've been feeling mildly guilty about it for a few weeks now. It's not just that I'm avoiding the reading/study--I've also kind of not enjoyed the sermons so far. Like the whole experience turns me off for some reason.
Rather than feeling guilty/bad (my usual modus operandi) I decided to come clean! And examine why this sermon series isn't sitting well with me, personally.
Here are a few reasons I've come up with:

• I did a little too much of this kind of study in college. My college church experience was a little extreme in some ways, and bible study was huge. Two examples: I used to do personal devotions each day, examining bible passages with this same method, and filled notebooks with Observations, Interpretations, and Life Applications (OIL for short! Isn't that clever?). I got just slightly burned out. To this day it's hard for me to do daily prayer/study and not feel like I'm forcing myself to do something unpleasant.
• Another bad vestige of college: at one point I took a weekend theology class with my college fellowship. Our teacher told us that with the Bible, there were many "Applications" but only one "Interpretation." Being my then-meek self, I said nothing, but inside, I was aghast. A book in translation from 2000 years ago only has one interpretation? You've got to be kidding me. The Great Gatsby doesn't have frickin' one interpretation.
  
• I think I have some problems with reading the Bible this way. Or, maybe, more accurately, reading it only this way. I felt great relief reading A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren, where he points out that the Bible is not a great big answer book: not every passage lends itself to Life Application. Some of it is poetry, some law, some prophecy, some history. It isn't always "applicable" in the same way that, say McLaren is. Philippians as a book is really more readable this way--it's meant to instruct. But still, something in me rankles.
  
• Something about this way of reading, for me personally (surely not for everyone), takes a lot of the joy out of the Scripture. Maybe it's like dissecting a cadaver instead of sitting down with a person and talking. I found our quick read-through of the Bible refreshing--I got so much context and felt no pressure to "get" everything.
• Sometimes, having been in Bible studies since ninth grade, and doing this OIL thing on and off since then, I feel like I've heard every possible angle on the heaviest-travelled verses. The surprise is gone. The words have become cliched and fail to surprise me. "Take up your cross." (Yawn.) "Love your enemies" (Sigh). "For God so loved the world" (Next). I say this not to be sacrilegious, but I think reading the same words, the same way, for that many years gets reductive. I want to be taken aback by the glorious grace and openness of the Scriptures. Not bored because I'm hearing them the same old way.
• Maybe because I am an English major, this kind of reading is maybe too easy--or too head-based for me. I love to dissect text and squeeze out the OILs. So much so that I almost forget what it is I'm squeezing. I'd love to have a love affair with Scripture--I read authors like Phyllis Tickle or Kathleen Norris and am amazed at how they describe this book that seems so standoffish to me. I'd love to see its words with fresh eyes. But when I do my same old same old Interpretations and Applications I find it more an intellectual exercise than anything relating to my heart.

When I sing Scripture, it goes straight to my heart. When I pray Scripture, it does too, to a lesser extent. What I'd really love in a sermon series is a way to read scripture that is also in depth, also takes seriously the richness that is in the Bible, but is not the old Evangelical bugaboo of OIL. MacLaren says that sometimes the Evangelical church makes Scripture into an idol: we worship it, rather than God. Yet Jesus was also the "Word made flesh". Made flesh though--living and active. Breathing and running and jumping and dancing.

If anyone has suggestions for me about how to find new eyes for the Bible, I'm all ears. (or eyes?) I've looked into stuff like Lectio Divina (not terribly substantially) in hopes I'd come up with ideas, but beginning and actual practice of something new has seemed too hard. I'd love to have company.
So there you go. Now that I've read all my reasons, I feel better about shirking. I pray these reasons aren't excuses, but help me figure out how I can find joy in the Bible for myself.

one step back

A week or so ago I started writing a triumphant post about how our allergy problems seemed to be getting better. I have tentatively eaten wheat and soy fairly regularly in the last month, with only minimal problems. I didn't think we were out of the woods yet, but I was happy to report that I could see the light shimmering through the branches.
I haven't finished the post. Which is good because I'd have to put a huge asterisk after basically every sentence.

Last Sunday, Lucy was playing happily in the kitchen when Dyami noticed she had a red patch on her face.
"Did she scratch herself?" he asked.
I stooped down. It did look remarkably like scratches--sort of like she'd rubbed up against sandpaper.
She didn't seem to be unhappy or in pain at all, so I went back to what I was doing.
A minute later, I looked down. The red patch no longer looked like scratches--the white spaces had filled in with pink.
"She's got something in her mouth," said Dyami, his tone slightly more worried.
I did an exploratory swipe and extracted two miniscule white pieces of something. With mama aplomb, I popped them into my mouth and tasted.
Nuts. Probably almonds.
"Oh, crap," I said.
Now the red patch had extended to the side of her nose.
"Are we going to be taking her to the emergency room?" Dyami asked.
I picked Lucy up and took off her shirt to check for other hives. All clear.
"We should just wait," I said. "It doesn't look that swift, though. If she starts wheezing, we'll worry."
"Maybe now is a good time to go over our emergency plan," he said.
For the next hour or so we watched Lucy, on tenterhooks.
Thank God the patch just faded to nothing. Today I noticed some very faint dark scab-ish lines where the patch was.

So now we know she has some sort of sensitivity or allergy to nuts, probably almonds. An allergy that involves red skin reactions, and occurs only with touch. Perhaps she rubbed the nuts on her face, or scratched her skin after picking up the nuts. Or maybe she swallowed a tiny bit. Who knows?
Oh, Joy! I had been kind of glad not to be dealing with truly scary allergies that potentially involved hospital visits. Argh.

But the final kicker was when I was talking to Hack Mommy about it. Her kids have a wide assortment of allergies and associated reactions ranging from vomiting to hives. It makes life at her house fun and interesting!
"You probably shouldn't eat nuts while you're nursing," she said.
I stopped, looked at her, and cursed.
Because the last thing I wanted was to eliminate more ingredients, especially when almonds form a large part of my diet. Plus, I'm slightly hypoglycemic, so any kind of protein is very important to me. I can't have milk or soy, so we use almond milk. I use almond butter instead of peanut butter, and mix it into smoothies. I use ground almonds, and love pesto made with walnuts. My favorite granola is the "super nutty" variety. Almond butter on bananas was one of my favorite quick snacks.
Today I bought rice milk. I hate rice milk. I even hesitate to get the "multigrain" kind because of the wheat.

So, I've decided:
I never really liked Hack Mommy very much.
I like allergies even less.
If anyone has some second opinions that would prove Melissa horribly wrong and misguided, it would be super-appreciated right now. Because Lord knows, I don't respect her knowledge in other areas.
Argh.

nervousness

So I read The Price of Motherhood. Besides making me even more of a crazed, liberal, tree-hugging activist, the book also made me a touch nervous.
I'm really glad that I have confidence that my marriage is going to last past whatever troubles we run into, because I am a sitting duck if anything were to happen.
I've been skulking around the house lately, making sure Dyami doesn't start oppressing me. (He managed to diffuse my tension by cleaning the oven and kitchen counters on Monday, unprompted. I love this man!)
Things didn't go so well when he offered his usual incisive/devil's advocate critiques of the book when I read him quotes. Sometimes I don't think guys realize that for them it's a fun parlor game, offering critique, while for us (well, me) we're inserting our own last name for Mr. and Mrs. X, so it's a tad more personal. For example: when I mentioned some ideas regarding equitable divorce, which involved taking much of the guy's salary and giving it to his wife and kids, so that they all would be at the same crappy standard of living, here was his (joking) comment: "If that's the case, it would have been cheaper for the guy to make his wife go back to work, and pay someone else to watch the kids."
For the record, I know he was just playing devil's advocate, and he told me straight out that he agreed that the kids shouldn't be in poverty because Daddy decided he wanted a new girlfriend, but still! I resolved the argument by getting surly and weepy for a while, and then we made up.

But, nervousness. The book is supportive of the choices women make--but is very clear about the long-term consequences if you guess wrong about your marriage. Motherhood is a big factor in poverty, as is divorce; alimony is increasingly less common, and all the stay-home care you provide (or want to provide) your kids doesn't count in its calculation. People tell you you're doing "the most important job" but they don't want to pay you for it, and if you're poor, to get public assistance, you can't stay home with your kids, but must put them in daycare and take a job that pays less than the daycare costs. Social Security ignores your (very real) provision of productive, tax-paying members of society, jobs don't allow flexible time, and the women who have power (and seem to prove that feminism has changed our system) generally don't have kids. Not only that, but traditional family advocates (read: conservatives), feminists, and even regular moms often ignore or criticize or worse, fight against policies that might actually help the grand majority of us. And all these lousy policies are unlikely to change until moms get in power. Which is a bit hard to do when we're locked out by lousy policies.

All of this makes me need a large dose of wheat-free, gluten-free beer. Or a Moms Rising party. (It's happening! Whoop!)
I'm praying that my nervousness would not translate to anxiety, but to action. That Christ would help me not worry about what I can't control (the future, for example) and instead speak up for those that don't have the time or freedom to read hair-raising books.

vindication

So I got out a scale at my inlaws and weighed Lucy.
It's not an officially calibrated doctor scale, but my weight seemed normal on it.
Lucy weighs seventeen pounds.
That is four more pounds than she did at 6 months (a little less than three months ago), when the doctor got all concerned about how small she was.
And according to the WHO breastfeeding charts, she's now firmly average.
Whoo hoo! My child is mediocre!

So it's official: I didn't need to worry about Lucy wasting away from not being fed enough. I also didn't need to feed her three times a day or wake up in the middle of the night to pump. I didn't need to worry about the fact that her growth had slowed and was falling off of the curve on my ped's laptop screen.
Imagine! My child might not match the curve on a laptop screen! She might grow in spurts!
Wait. Don't they call them "growth spurts" for a reason?

And just a note: I would still be okay if Lucy weighed less; I was pretty firmly convinced she was fine all this time. But I will admit it's nice to have the little number that sort of backs me up. Just in case other people don't trust my motherly intuition.

miracles upon miracles

It is eight pm. I am in Ojai, in the chicken coop. I am typing. I have just finished a leisurely brownie, and some seltzer water. I am relaxed.
My baby is sleeping in the other room, and she might even stay asleep.

Let's pause for a moment to just savor those two paragraphs.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

This is such a different experience than last time, I can hardly believe it. Last time we arrived (trip was fine) and Lucy had about three major meltdowns between arrival and bedtime (which was another meltdown). This is a baby that doesn't melt down very often. Then we didn't sleep the whole night.
The rest of the trip was less eventful, but not super-relaxing.

In contrast, today we drove (drove! imagine!) three hours with only maybe a half-hour of fussiness, total. The rest of the time she was either happy or asleep! (We stopped several times along the way, but all things considered, the trip didn't take us that long)
She had no meltdowns. She had minor fussiness and shyness at Nana and Poppa's house (my in-laws). She got mildly fussy a bit after bedtime and then fell asleep pretty easily.
Best news: she is now in her hammock bed (which we brought along, a major reason we drove) and so she is in a familiar place! So she might even stay asleep tonight!
I know, I know, it's such a crazy concept, I can hardly believe it myself.

A major weight has been taken off of my shoulders.
In other good news, my fabulous husband got me an hour massage today with a great person here in Ojai. Which helped with the relaxing.
And my fabulous mom-in-law made us brownies. Gluten-free. Does she love me, or what?
Speaking of which, I'm going to go have another one. And then I'm going to relax some more.

active

I've had an idea for a while of hosting a party.
I was inspired by this website, momsrising.org, an advocacy group for family-friendly policies. They produced a documentary about the issues, and I got a DVD. They recommend that people hold house parties and show the movie, then have conversations about the issues/ideas it raises, to try to raise awareness about the current state of affairs, and some ideas for how to change things.
All good, right? Fun party, being active and helping other moms, helping other people to find a better life, and making our society more livable for everyone. And with a movie, we could even make popcorn!

So I haven't actually planned anything yet. Part of it is that it's hard to have projects when your day is divided up into 10 minute chunks.
But that's not the only reason.

I have never really been an activist. I've always thought I should be spending time doing dogooderness of some kind. But I've never really done anything. Sure, I serve in my church, and give money, and be kind to people, but it's not the same thing. I've never really had a cause (except for my faith, which calls me to do dogooderness as part of showing God's work in my life).
I've always been a bit uncomfortable with causes. I think to be active in stuff, you really have to be sold on something, and willing to put yourself on the line to make something happen. You have to be full-bore about something and identify yourself with it.
I'm always so wishy-washy I am never sure about really committing to causes.
Actually, I think a lot of it is fear of looking stupid.
I kind of have a pathological fear of looking stupid. So much so that if I play games with Dyami and lose frequently, I get bent out of shape, because I am so afraid of being "bad" at, say, Duck Duck Goose.

So to invite a bunch of people to my house and show a video, I have to say, This is my cause! Join me! Aren't you excited about this too? Isn't this important?
What if everyone yawned? Or said, hmmm, I don't find this very compelling? Or, why are you sending me an invite for a cause? I need to go do something better with my time.

Okay, this is all sounding like a really bad case of "everyone like me" syndrome.
Sigh. Will I never get out of junior high?

The thing is, I am tired of being so wishy washy. I am tired of being cynical about causes. I am tired of not being willing to put myself on the line. I don't think being cowardly about letting people know I care about things is a good way to spend my thirties. (I'm almost thirty, by the way. At the end of the month. !)

Today Dyami and I were talking about feminism, and some of the issues the movie raises (he hasn't seen it), and in typical Dyami fashion, he raised some good points of critique with the way I described things. And then I got all bent out of shape because he was critiquing me.
I realized, after I calmed down, that it's that same fear of looking stupid. Because I am a baby, learning about all of these issues, and I don't really understand them all that well. And I don't know that much about them yet. So who am I to "raise awareness"? Who am I to invite people to a party about them? Doesn't that just smack of the novice, getting super excited about something she doesn't even understand all that well?

Anne Lamott descirbes the voices in her head as a radio station, called KFKD. (FKD stands for a bad word, okay?). The station plays all negative commentary, all the time. Shooting down any idea she has as stupid, irrelevant, hopelessly naive, etc.
I have no idea what the woman is talking about. Really, I don't.

I'm turning off the radio! I am taking a stand!
I am making an evite! I am inviting people! Whether or not they will judge me! I am joining a cause!
Just as soon as I get back from vacation.

Note: If you would be interested in coming to said party (or parties--I might hold more than one, since our house is small), you should comment, saying so. It will motivate me to get off my keister and actually follow through. And no, I have no idea what I will be doing about childcare (have kids there? Take kids to park? Who knows?). But I know we can figure something out.

travelling

So we're going to Ojai to visit my in-laws tomorrow.
I am, in many ways, quite delighted to be going. My inlaws are great (parents, bros and sisters) and it's been forever since we've been able to see them. Ojai is great, and we're taking a car, so we'll be able to get out a bit. The weather should be nice. And Dyami has six days off of work.

So why am I not exactly looking forward to the trip?

I think it's the vestiges of the last trip, where we had a fabulous time with Dyami's family, I slept very little, got a cold, Dyami got sick, Lucy got sick, and then we didn't sleep for the next month. I was just the tiniest bit unhappy for a long while.
Right now Lucy isn't sleeping that great (I think it's because we're transitioning her to a mattress instead of her hammock bed) and so the palpitations have started.

Breathe, Heather, breathe.

Most of me knows that Lucy is a completely different animal than she was at three months, that I know much better how to deal with her ups and downs, and am more resilient. Plus it's not winter, so the chances of everyone being sick are much lower.

But who ever said anxiety was defeated by head knowledge?
I have been asking people to pray for me. I don't want to have a nervous breakdown the first night (like I did last time) and subject my husband to my anxieties. I would just like to enjoy being there, like I used to. I would like to be more relaxed, in general.
I would also like to be a bestselling novellist. Or short-story writer.
One can pray, right?