« my day in pictures (sort of) | Main | this woman's work »

Thursday, June 09, 2005

deliberateness (or whatever)

Amy posted yesterday about deliberateness (is that a word? If not, it's my invention, not Amy's) in our decisions, which touched off a train of thought for me, about which I'll post here, rather than using her comments section for it.

When T and I married, and actually largely before we even married, we made several conscious decisions about the way our new family (that's us plus whatever children God blessed us with) would be. A few of the boundaries we set early on were:

• We would homeschool our children if God made it at all possible.
• I would not have an outside-the-house job that required us to put our children in day care. (we were not sure if we would be able to manage without my income long-term, so we decided that if I HAD to work, we would put our children in a private Christian school. Praise God that he has enabled us to go with Plan A. ;)
• Divorce was never going to be an option on the table. We could disagree, we could fight, but it was never our marriage on the line.
• We would not belittle each other in any way -- not in anger, not to make a joke, not to show affection.
• We would not engage in "coarse jesting", with each other or with our children. (in other words: no potty humor).
• We wouldn't teach our children to believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, or any of the other imaginary beings whose existence they would later discover to be a sham, because we didn't want them to end up lumping our faith in God in with all those other invisible, imaginary people Mom and Dad had told them about.

Now, every family has a set of values, whether they mean to or not. Ours may mark us out as "weird" to other people, and frequently do, and we've had to deal with several different instances of confrontation about one or more of the above items (and there are others as well). But every family either consciously or otherwise lands in a pattern -- a set of priorities. Some people decisively set out to reach a certain financial goal -- to own a home, to be independent, to be able to clothe their children in brand names (this, by the way, was one of my hard and fast goals before I was a Christian and before homeschooling became mainstream. If my children were going to go to school then they were going to have to have whatever was trendy, from their shoes on up, because I figured that was their best shot at avoiding the kind of school experience I had). Some families just kind of fall into a lifestyle that suits them, without ever really thinking about it or setting hard and fast boundaries -- "beyond this point we will not go." I think, honestly, that this is the average American family -- shaped by TV, trends, peers, youth culture. We tend to stand out in rather a startling way from this average family. No, I haven't seen the commercial for X or the episode of that show where Y does blah blah. No, I can't just go get a job so that we can buy a house, because we believe firmly that my place is here with my kids, even if that means we rent for the rest of our natural lives. No, my kids don't climb on a yellow bus and wave goodbye and leave me with six hours of structurable alone time every day. My kids talk differently from their peers, and they dress differently (as do their parents), and they don't notice or care that they're different. This "differentness" was not the goal of the priorities we set, at least not in most ways, but it is definitely a byproduct of it.

Occasionally we'll come to a crisis (financial or otherwise) regarding some of those priorities; we (I) may tear our (my) hair out looking for a way to slip by and somehow manage to uphold what we know is right while simultaneously denying it, but in the end it's of course impossible. And each of those times I do remember why we decided to do things the way we do. In fact I think God lets me have those moments of trying to wiggle under the fences we set up so early on, just so that I can remind myself why we built them in the first place. A few weeks ago I was pressing my husband hard; I wanted to take a night job so that we could afford to buy a house. He said no, and reminded me that really we don't want to be a family where one person's always coming in as the other goes out; we know that's not what we want to be locked into. But we prayed, and then gee, one day out of the blue (who'd a thunk it!) we both at once came up with the idea of sub-leasing the apartment over our garage, which our landlord had told us in the past we can do, until we reach a defined point in one year where our financial status will be better for some very boring reasons. At first the landlord backpedaled when we brought it up; we got off the phone and prayed, and he called the next day to tell us he'd reverted to his original position. So we'll proceed prayerfully and see what happens; our hope is that this will enable us to pay off the little bit of debt we have and build up some savings before we make the decision to plunge ourselves into a California-sized mortgage (the very thought of which gives me a freaked-out tingly kind of feeling. Remember when a quarter of a million dollars seemed like just a huge amount of money? It's apparently chump change in the California real estate market. Ouch.)

All this is just one example, chosen to show why I believe God will bless us if we deliberately choose to honor Him and His plan in our priorities, and come to Him with the difficulties caused by that choice rather than deciding not to honor him after all. It's a hard lesson sometimes, but I think if He hits me over the head with it often enough I'll eventually get it.

Comments

Posted by: debi at June 9, 2005 03:53 PM

Posted by: Sal at June 9, 2005 05:12 PM

Posted by: jenn at June 9, 2005 08:35 PM

Posted by: dichroic at June 10, 2005 09:52 AM

Posted by: mary at June 12, 2005 02:45 PM

Posted by: jenn at June 12, 2005 10:31 PM

Post a comment