One of my greatest joys as a parent is daily reading aloud to my children – a practice I’ve maintained for more than 25 years. As eager, wide-eyed parents, my husband, Dana, and I began reading Winnie-the- Pooh to our oldest son, Judah, when he was just two months old, not because we thought he’d enjoy it, but because we did.
“The outer world is only an expression of an inner, spiritual world,” the theologian Eugene Peterson wrote in A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. In other words, the violence and strife erupting around us are a produced by the violence and strife raging within us. If our spiritual world is broken, then our physical world will be as well.
It happened again this week. I glimpsed my reflection in the mirror – silvering hair braided down my back, creased eyes rimmed by glasses – and thought, I look like my mother. I sound like my mother too. One night, chatting with my daughter, who was visiting from college, I mentioned an article I’d read about the eruption of an Indonesian volcano in the early 1800s.
I am clearly trying to juggle too many things: Lord of the Flies, driving the squirrels from my attic (which are chirping as I write), completing my M.Ed. in Literacy, getting dressed, walking the dog, overseeing the endless cycle of laundry-meals-and-household mayhem and writing this blog, which I turned in late to my local newspaper.
The book of Job is likely the oldest recorded text in the Bible. It takes the form of a traditional three-act play. Whether it was written as a piece of performance art meant to reveal deeper truths about God, or whether it records an actual event, theologians disagree.
‘Return to Sender,’ read the yellow sticker plastered over my friend’s name on the envelope I’d addressed and mailed a couple of weeks before Christmas, ‘Insufficient Address, Unable to Forward.’
Wife, mom, writer, friend, sharing God in my everyday life through “Faith Notes.”