Blog

In a way, it is somewhat surprising that it has taken this long before I wrote about my beloved spider plants. Even though I do NOT love the arachnids from whence they derive their names, spider plants are by far my choice of plants to grow.

I have joked in the past that my love of these plants comes from their similarity to myself: they are extremely resilient; they are not high maintenance; and they have lots of babies! The real reason I love these plants though, is that they survive the harshest extremes my area’s climate can dish out. I have always longed to have a “green thumb” like my mother and grandmother had. My grandma could grow anything from just a twig and my mother successfully grew some of the more delicate species of plants. It seemed to take a long time for my “black thumb” to change to green, but it finally did, thanks in large part to the tenacious spider plant.

I cannot remember where I acquired my first spider plant. It was before we moved to our house more than seventeen years ago. We moved in in February, and I inadvertently left this plant outside unattended. My children were ecstatic when we experienced a snowfall shortly afterwards. When the snow melted, I found that my poor plant had frozen to what I thought was an untimely death. As busy as I was, I left the pot to sit outside until I could repurpose it in the spring. Much to my surprise, however, when spring arrived, there were some new, green, spiky leaves poking up in the pot! By summer, the plant had fully regrown and had even multiplied with spider plant “babies” hanging over the sides of the pot. I snipped off the babies, rooted them in water, and planted them in pots of their own. These plants have continued to do well, making it through our hot, hot summers and our cold, sometimes snowy winters.

It actually took me a couple of years to discover the secret of the spider plant’s strength. The time had come to repot one of the plants. When I shook the dirt off the roots, I found not the spindly little roots that I was used to in other plants, but thick, tuber-like roots capable of storing water and nutrients. No wonder my plant had survived the harsh winter that first year! Even though there was nothing showing on the surface, my plant had stored what it needed to make it through and flourish in the next season.

Maybe you have already guessed where I am heading with this story. In the Bible, we are taught several times to be “rooted” in Jesus. Most of the time when I read that, I had pictured a tree standing tall with a root system to match what I could see above ground. I think the real picture of this rooting, at least during the more difficult or harsh times in our lives, is much more like my spider plants. We may have absolutely nothing left to give in an especially hard season, but if we are deeply rooted in Jesus, we have everything we need to flourish again. Like the spider plant, we can have a deep reserve hidden underneath. For us, this reserve comes in the form of God’s word hidden in our hearts and from the comfort of the Holy Spirit within us.

The other way we as followers are like my spider plants is in our multiplication. It is a strange phenomenon, but throughout history and around the world, whenever Christians are persecuted, the Church grows exponentially. Most of my friends, if they are plant people, have received a spider plant baby from me. Just like the Church, it almost seems that the years my plants go through the harshest weather are the years they produce the most offspring. Again, God gives us deep resilience when we rely on Him. The important thing is to soak up His word during our good times just as my plants soak up nutrients for difficult times.

“Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” Colossians 2:6-7

I learned something interesting about guinea pigs recently…when they are happy they jump! This behavior of theirs is called “popcorning.” I can just imagine a group of happy guinea pigs jumping around like little popcorn kernels.

I found this especially funny because two of my children do something similar when they are happy. My twelve-year-old has always been our “sugar monster.” Despite my best efforts at nutrition, the thing that makes her bounce up and down with sheer delight is anything sweet. This can be a dessert like cake or ice cream, but the treat that really gets her on her toes is jelly beans. If you want to see a twelve-year-old “popcorn” like a happy guinea pig just bring my daughter jelly beans!

With my other daughter, music is the source of her bounces and wiggles. For her whole eight years of life, whenever she hears music, she immediately starts moving. If she has the space, she breaks out in full on dancing! It is so joyful and full of life, that most of the time she gets those of us around her to join in.

It seems that children–and evidently guinea pigs–have joy built into them by God. For whatever reason (maybe a lot of reasons in some of our lives) our joy seems to grow less and less as we get older. We lose that spontaneous ability to laugh, jump, spin or “popcorn” our happy moments. It is partly the cares of this world and partly our ideas of how “grown-ups” should act. Even as followers of Jesus, we can have incorrect ideas about how we should experience joy or happiness.

For a long time, I had been taught that happiness was not something followers of Jesus should pursue. Rather, we should rely on an underlying joy to get us through tough circumstances. Oddly, this led to a lot of guilt on my part whenever I would experience happiness. I also tried to keep myself strictly contained, not “looking forward” to things or pursuing things that would give me what I was taught was “frivolous” happiness. I am blessed to have a mentor who has shown me that this type of thinking is not only incorrect, but that the Bible talks about joy over and over. Many of these verses are about the joy we have in God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

God created all of our emotions, happiness and joy included. I now believe that He does want us to experience these feelings, especially when we think about Him. In fact, sometimes I feel so happy about my relationship with Him that I might do a little “popcorning” of my own. If this has been an area where you have held yourself back too, I would encourage you to do a search of all the verses that talk about happiness and joy in the Scripture, and then maybe join my daughter in a happy dance!

“Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, you righteous ones; and shout for joy, all you who are upright in heart.” Psalm 32:11

I found it rather ironic that it took me over a month to write a blog about having no timeouts as a parent! In almost every team sport that I can think of, there are a certain number of timeouts allowed. Coaches use these in various strategic ways such as running down the clock in football. However, from the moment one becomes a parent, there are no timeouts allowed!

This thought originally came to me as I was preparing (or trying to prepare) for an important zoom meeting I had in just a few minutes. This was the moment that my 17 year old son and my 10 year old son both decided to push every boundary they had ever been given! Over this past month, which has been crazy with too many kid-related activities to enumerate, I have again pondered this idea of parental timeouts.

As I have mentioned in the past, I do begin my mornings with Jesus and coffee. After that though, I am running for all I am worth most of the day. As a child, I hated being sent to my room for a timeout, or horror of horrors–a nap! Now, I wish someone would send me to my room!

At this point in my parenting journey, having young adult children, teenagers, and small children, just walking out of the room for a minute can mean chaos breaks out. However, throughout all of this, Jesus is still sustaining me. I am trying to learn to rest in Him in my spirit, even if I can’t physically rest (ideally in a beautiful shady glen in a hammock far away in the woods…) and be patient with everything and everyone around me. As all my family would testify, I am far from perfect at this, but I am getting better. I always find it encouraging to remember that Jesus needed timeouts with God too. He wasn’t afraid to step away for a minute, even though the crowds were all still needy. In this same way, sometimes I need to put my children into God’s hands and take a minute by myself to pray.

I suspect that I am still many, many years from having regular timeouts, but with Jesus sustaining me, I can stay in the game!

“Yet the news about Him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear Him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” Luke 5:15-16

As I was cleaning up the kitchen this evening I realized that my children firmly believe in magic.  This is different from the magic of the leprechauns that I write about every year around March 17th.  

To begin with, the kitchen I was cleaning had supposedly already been cleaned–by multiple people.  Evidently there is an enchantment upon my kitchen that allows only me to see the caked-on crumbs and stickiness on every counter and stove top.  But, magically, when my children get up in the morning, every surface will be sparkling for real.

I also noticed that we were almost out of dish soap, which no one had mentioned, but will also “magically” appear in the cupboard.  There are many things like this that from my children’s perspective simply appear by magic.  

This magic goes on all the time in our home: things appearing, disorder and mess disappearing.  Some day, at least I hope, my children will outgrow this magic just as they grow out of their belief in leprechauns.  They will mature and become thankful, as their older siblings have, of all of the ways my husband and I have cared for their needs over their years without them even having to ask. 

However, children aren’t the only ones who take these kinds of things for granted.  I know I also take my Father’s good gifts and provision for granted.  I can go through a whole day without realizing the miracle of the sun rising yet again, that there is air for me to breathe, and a million other blessings that I can act as though are just there by magic.

I want to grateful every day for the blessings God gives me, from the simple to the profound. It is good to be well taken care of and it is good to be grateful!

“I will give thanks to you, Lord, with all my heart; I will tell of all your wonderful deeds.” Psalm 9:1

For the Israelites, the land signified God’s promise.  So much so that they regularly referred to it as the “Promised Land.”  The land, more than anything else, symbolized God with them and also his blessings.  

When God first made humans he placed them in a location, the garden of Eden.  When sin entered, they were sent out of the land and symbolically out of God’s presence.  When the people were released from slavery, it had not been God’s idea for them to wander in the desert for all those years.  His plan had been to deliver them from slavery to the land he had promised Abraham years before.  For people in the Ancient Near East, deities were connected with a location and the Israelites would have viewed Yahweh in the same way.  Much like the garden, when the Israelites were obeying, they remained in the land, but after continued disobedience, God allowed them to be exiled.

God used the concept of land to illustrate and teach many things to the Israelites.  He wanted them to fully trust in him.  He wanted them to know that he would fully provide for them. The people fully expected a land of abundance, flowing with date honey and milk.  God even allowed the people to struggle to claim the land so that their faith in him would be strengthened.

Even when Jesus came, the Jewish people still viewed God through a lens of place.  They were looking for a time when God would establish his reign on earth, centered at the temple in Jerusalem.  God has other plans, but these still involve his promises to us today and the ultimate renewal of all the earth, not just Israel.

Believers today still “dwell” with God.  The same promises that he gave his people are ours today.  He is still a God of abundance and blessing.  Even if we cannot understand the significance of physical land, we can take comfort that our dwelling place is with God and as Joshua 1:9 ends with, “the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”

A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful…so begins the Scout law.  This is a list of twelve qualities that Scouts strive to live up to, whether at a Scouting event or in everyday life.  Our family has been involved in Scouting for over fourteen years now.  During that time we have logged many, many hours at all kinds of activities ranging from weekly meetings, to camping trips, to fundraising events and much more in between!

Our kids have learned a lot from Scouting, much good, some difficult.  One aspect that we embraced as a family from the beginning was the practice of leaving things better than we found them.  Whenever we would finish up an event, all Scouts and leaders would systematically scour the area for trash or anything we might have left behind.  The kids would grumble a little of course, but they always did a good job.

As a parent or a leader of young people, you never know what is going to stick.  Much of the time it can feel like our words are bouncing off brick walls right back at us.  It may take years to find out what did get through, maybe until the kids we were talking to have kids of their own.  However, in this area I have seen the impact it made on my own kids.

Wherever they go, my kids are always cleaning things up and leaving it better than they found it.  Whether it is at the lake or eating at a restaurant, my family is picking up any trash left around.  My husband leads the charge in this, especially at restaurants.  When we are done eating, the table is cleaner than when we sat down!

This habit of ours is based on something that may not be readily apparent: respect.  By leaving something cleaner than when we arrived, we are showing respect for the next people that visit.  By gathering our dishes and cleaning the table at a restaurant, we are showing respect for the servers and bussers that are working.  When we pick up stray fish hooks, bottle caps, or broken glass that others have left at the lake, we are showing respect for little feet that may come after us. 

In our world of overwhelming problems, this little quirk of ours may not seem to count for much.  However, if more of us would take this idea of respect for others–even others that we are never going to meet and who will never know anything about us–into other areas of life, maybe together we will begin to change those problems.  

The Scriptures do not record Jesus and His disciples cleaning in this way, although they didn’t leave the scraps from their meal all over the mountain!  However, Jesus had a tendency to leave people better than He found them, if they were willing.  He still does this today.  He can come into our messy lives and clean them up if we will allow Him.  Just like the Scouts are supposed to be, He too is trustworthy.