Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Are Parents Really Necessary? A Guide to Preschool Education
Read the entire article at http://www.crosswalk.com/homeschool/11575357/page1/.
Socialization: A Great Reason Not to Go to School
Copyright © 2006 Karl M. Bunday, all rights reserved.
Excerpts (with emphasis added):
"...self-esteem is a concept that was born in the school system, and it is best for parents not to overemphasize the self-esteem of their children. Professor Martin E.P. Seligman, in his helpful book The Optimistic Child, discusses how self-esteem has been more and more emphasized in schools during precisely the same years that the youth suicide rate has increased in the United States. Seligman suggests "optimism," a concept he defines in The Optimistic Child, is a better thing for parents to develop than self-esteem. I have read, and am still trying to confirm in other sources, that Seligman is himself a homeschooling parent. Whether or not he is a homeschooler, I know that he is a highly respected psychologist, as I have read many books and articles that cite his research, and have confirmed that Professor Seligman was recently the president of the American Psychological Association. A different perspective on self-esteem is offered by Jay E. Adams, the author of many of my favorite books. Adams, in his refreshingly accurate review of Biblical concepts, The Biblical View of Self-Esteem, Self-Love, Self-Image, points out that persons who honestly follow Biblical teachings don't seek to build self-esteem, but to build love for others that denies self and loves God first.
"And Shyers, from the secular perspective of his research, looked at how homeschooled children treat other children. Shyers found no significant difference between his two groups in scores on the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale. But direct observation by trained observers, using a "blind" procedure, found that home-schooled children had significantly fewer problem behaviors, as measured by the Child Observation Checklist's Direct Observation Form, than traditionally schooled children when playing in mixed groups of children from both kinds of schooling backgrounds. This observational study was reported in some detail in the 1992 Associated Press article. Shyers concluded that the hypothesis that contact with adults, rather than contact with other children, is most important in developing social skills in children is supported by these data.
"The same year that Shyers completed his doctoral degree thesis research on homeschooling socialization, Thomas Smedley completed master's degree research at Radford University in Virginia, with a similar experimental design. Smedley compared twenty home-schooled children to thirteen public school children, matching the children as best he could by relevant demographic characteristics. His study used the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, which evaluate communication skills, socialization, and daily living skills. Smedley found that the home-schooled children were more mature according to the scoring rubrics of the Vineland scales, scoring in the 84th percentile, while the public school children scored in the 27th percentile. Thus the Shyers finding supports a nearly simultaneous finding by a different researcher, who used a different social science evaluation procedure on a different sample population. Such a replicated finding is unusual in social science."
For the entire article, go to http://learninfreedom.org/socialization.html.
Excerpts (with emphasis added):
"...self-esteem is a concept that was born in the school system, and it is best for parents not to overemphasize the self-esteem of their children. Professor Martin E.P. Seligman, in his helpful book The Optimistic Child, discusses how self-esteem has been more and more emphasized in schools during precisely the same years that the youth suicide rate has increased in the United States. Seligman suggests "optimism," a concept he defines in The Optimistic Child, is a better thing for parents to develop than self-esteem. I have read, and am still trying to confirm in other sources, that Seligman is himself a homeschooling parent. Whether or not he is a homeschooler, I know that he is a highly respected psychologist, as I have read many books and articles that cite his research, and have confirmed that Professor Seligman was recently the president of the American Psychological Association. A different perspective on self-esteem is offered by Jay E. Adams, the author of many of my favorite books. Adams, in his refreshingly accurate review of Biblical concepts, The Biblical View of Self-Esteem, Self-Love, Self-Image, points out that persons who honestly follow Biblical teachings don't seek to build self-esteem, but to build love for others that denies self and loves God first.
"And Shyers, from the secular perspective of his research, looked at how homeschooled children treat other children. Shyers found no significant difference between his two groups in scores on the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale. But direct observation by trained observers, using a "blind" procedure, found that home-schooled children had significantly fewer problem behaviors, as measured by the Child Observation Checklist's Direct Observation Form, than traditionally schooled children when playing in mixed groups of children from both kinds of schooling backgrounds. This observational study was reported in some detail in the 1992 Associated Press article. Shyers concluded that the hypothesis that contact with adults, rather than contact with other children, is most important in developing social skills in children is supported by these data.
"The same year that Shyers completed his doctoral degree thesis research on homeschooling socialization, Thomas Smedley completed master's degree research at Radford University in Virginia, with a similar experimental design. Smedley compared twenty home-schooled children to thirteen public school children, matching the children as best he could by relevant demographic characteristics. His study used the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, which evaluate communication skills, socialization, and daily living skills. Smedley found that the home-schooled children were more mature according to the scoring rubrics of the Vineland scales, scoring in the 84th percentile, while the public school children scored in the 27th percentile. Thus the Shyers finding supports a nearly simultaneous finding by a different researcher, who used a different social science evaluation procedure on a different sample population. Such a replicated finding is unusual in social science."
For the entire article, go to http://learninfreedom.org/socialization.html.
Home-schoolers threaten our cultural comfort
From the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, June 8, 2008:
You see them at the grocery, or in a discount store.
It's a big family by today’s standards - "just like stair steps," as the old folks say. Freshly scrubbed boys with neatly trimmed hair and girls with braids, in clean but unfashionable clothes follow mom through the store as she fills her no-frills shopping list.
There's no begging for gimcracks, no fretting, and no threats from mom. The older watch the younger, freeing mom to go peacefully about her task. You are looking at some of the estimated 2 million children being home schooled in the U.S., and the number is growing. Their reputation for academic achievement has caused colleges to begin aggressively recruiting them. Savings to the taxpayers in instructional costs are conservatively estimated at $4 billion, and some place the figure as high as $9 billion. When you consider that these families pay taxes to support public schools, but demand nothing from them, it seems quite a deal for the public.
Home schooling parents are usually better educated than the norm, and are more likely to attend worship services. Their motives are many and varied. Some fear contagion from the anti-clericalism, coarse speech, suggestive behavior and hedonistic values that characterize secular schools. Others are concerned for their children’s safety. Some want their children to be challenged beyond the minimal competencies of the public schools. Concern for a theistic world view largely permeates the movement.
Indications are that home schooling is working well for the kids, and the parents are pleased with their choice, but the practice is coming under increasing suspicion, and even official attack, as in California.
Why do we hate (or at least distrust) these people so much?
Methinks American middle-class people are uncomfortable around the home schooled for the same reason the alcoholic is uneasy around the teetotaler.
Their very existence represents a rejection of our values, and an indictment of our lifestyles. Those families are willing to render unto Caesar the things that Caesar’s be, but they draw the line at their children. Those of us who have put our trust in the secular state (and effectively surrendered our children to it) recognize this act of defiance as a rejection of our values, and we reject them in return.
Just as the jealous Chaldeans schemed to bring the wrath of the king upon the Hebrew eunuchs, we are happy to sic the state’s bureaucrats on these “trouble makers.” Their implicit rejection of America’s most venerated idol, Materialism, (a.k.a. “Individualism”) spurs us to heat the furnace and feed the lions.
Young families must make the decision: Will junior go to day care and day school, or will mom stay home and raise him? The rationalizations begin. "A family just can't make it on one income." (Our parents did.) "It just costs so much to raise a child nowadays." (Yeah, if you buy brand-name clothing, pre-prepared food, join every club and activity, and spend half the cost of a house on the daughter’s wedding, it does.) And so, the decision is made. We give up the bulk of our waking hours with our children, as well as the formation of their minds, philosophies, and attitudes, to strangers. We compensate by getting a boat to take them to the river, a van to carry them to Little League, a 2,800-square-foot house, an ATV, a zero-turn Cub Cadet, and a fund to finance a brand-name college education. And most significantly, we claim “our right” to pursue a career for our own "self-fulfillment."
Deep down, however, we know that our generation has eaten its seed corn. We lack the discipline and the vision to deny ourselves in the hope of something enduring and worthy for our posterity. We are tired from working extra jobs, and the looming depression threatens our 401k’s. Credit cards are nearly maxed, and it costs a $100 to fuel the Suburban. Now the kid is raising hell again, demanding the latest Play Station as his price for doing his school work … and there goes that modest young woman in the home-made dress with her four bright-eyed, well-behaved home-schooled children in tow. Wouldn’t you just love to wipe that serene look right off her smug face?
Is it any wonder we hate her so?
Sonny Scott a community columnist, lives on Sparta Road in Chickasaw County and his e-mail address is sonnyscott@yahoo.com.
You see them at the grocery, or in a discount store.
It's a big family by today’s standards - "just like stair steps," as the old folks say. Freshly scrubbed boys with neatly trimmed hair and girls with braids, in clean but unfashionable clothes follow mom through the store as she fills her no-frills shopping list.
There's no begging for gimcracks, no fretting, and no threats from mom. The older watch the younger, freeing mom to go peacefully about her task. You are looking at some of the estimated 2 million children being home schooled in the U.S., and the number is growing. Their reputation for academic achievement has caused colleges to begin aggressively recruiting them. Savings to the taxpayers in instructional costs are conservatively estimated at $4 billion, and some place the figure as high as $9 billion. When you consider that these families pay taxes to support public schools, but demand nothing from them, it seems quite a deal for the public.
Home schooling parents are usually better educated than the norm, and are more likely to attend worship services. Their motives are many and varied. Some fear contagion from the anti-clericalism, coarse speech, suggestive behavior and hedonistic values that characterize secular schools. Others are concerned for their children’s safety. Some want their children to be challenged beyond the minimal competencies of the public schools. Concern for a theistic world view largely permeates the movement.
Indications are that home schooling is working well for the kids, and the parents are pleased with their choice, but the practice is coming under increasing suspicion, and even official attack, as in California.
Why do we hate (or at least distrust) these people so much?
Methinks American middle-class people are uncomfortable around the home schooled for the same reason the alcoholic is uneasy around the teetotaler.
Their very existence represents a rejection of our values, and an indictment of our lifestyles. Those families are willing to render unto Caesar the things that Caesar’s be, but they draw the line at their children. Those of us who have put our trust in the secular state (and effectively surrendered our children to it) recognize this act of defiance as a rejection of our values, and we reject them in return.
Just as the jealous Chaldeans schemed to bring the wrath of the king upon the Hebrew eunuchs, we are happy to sic the state’s bureaucrats on these “trouble makers.” Their implicit rejection of America’s most venerated idol, Materialism, (a.k.a. “Individualism”) spurs us to heat the furnace and feed the lions.
Young families must make the decision: Will junior go to day care and day school, or will mom stay home and raise him? The rationalizations begin. "A family just can't make it on one income." (Our parents did.) "It just costs so much to raise a child nowadays." (Yeah, if you buy brand-name clothing, pre-prepared food, join every club and activity, and spend half the cost of a house on the daughter’s wedding, it does.) And so, the decision is made. We give up the bulk of our waking hours with our children, as well as the formation of their minds, philosophies, and attitudes, to strangers. We compensate by getting a boat to take them to the river, a van to carry them to Little League, a 2,800-square-foot house, an ATV, a zero-turn Cub Cadet, and a fund to finance a brand-name college education. And most significantly, we claim “our right” to pursue a career for our own "self-fulfillment."
Deep down, however, we know that our generation has eaten its seed corn. We lack the discipline and the vision to deny ourselves in the hope of something enduring and worthy for our posterity. We are tired from working extra jobs, and the looming depression threatens our 401k’s. Credit cards are nearly maxed, and it costs a $100 to fuel the Suburban. Now the kid is raising hell again, demanding the latest Play Station as his price for doing his school work … and there goes that modest young woman in the home-made dress with her four bright-eyed, well-behaved home-schooled children in tow. Wouldn’t you just love to wipe that serene look right off her smug face?
Is it any wonder we hate her so?
Sonny Scott a community columnist, lives on Sparta Road in Chickasaw County and his e-mail address is sonnyscott@yahoo.com.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Musings on God
Whether it is a product of our culture or our basic humanness, we are absolutely convinced that pain is bad. Under every circumstance, and at all times, physical and emotional pain is to be avoided. And if it becomes unavoidable, we conclude the only rational thing to do is to try to eliminate the cause, if it can be eliminated, and/or medicate ourselves into a more desirable condition.
This is manifest on every imaginable level of human life. Popular talk show hosts and other "experts" insist that it is "healthy" to end burdensome relationships in favor of maintaining only those friends and relations who give as much as they take. Marriages in which even one partner feels unsatisfied or unfulfilled are encouraged toward divorce, regardless of the impact it will certainly have on the family.
There are therapies and pills for every kind and degree of depression, no matter how clear or vague its cause. From every direction in unison voice, the culture presumes that the normative human emotional state is and should be a happy one, and that anything less is somehow symptomatic of the dysfunctional and mentally ill.
Does heartburn threaten to limit your dietary choices and quality of sleep? There's a pill to fix that. Are you worried that delivering a baby will be too painful? Let's schedule an epidural. Are Junior's feelings hurt when his soccer team loses? Sign him up for the league that doesn't keep score. If being a poor speller makes you feel lacking, there is actually a camp of people pushing to throw out conventional English spelling rules for a purely phonetic, spell-it-the-way-you-think-it-sounds method, on your behalf to spare your self-image. (I swear I am not making this up.)
Everything is engineered to promote the notion that people should not have to endure any kind of pain, and that doing so is unhealthy. And for the more academic among us, the existence of pain at all gives proof that God must not exist at all. Their philosophy rationalizes that if God were both omnipotent and loving, He would use His power to protect His creatures from suffering.
I do not mean to say that every effort at pain relief is of no value. Medication served me well as I recovered from childbirth and the early pains of nursing my babies. And I will be forever grateful for the one who made sure I felt no pain during a tooth extraction. But, when my heart has been broken by someone I love or by my own dismal failures, I didn't wonder at the acute pain I felt as though it were an anomaly. Wouldn't it be the mark of the mentally ill to smile painlessly through what any other normal human would call heartache? Who decided that feeling sad isn't normal anyway, especially when experiencing what any sane person would find regrettable?
So, by my estimation, not only is the feeling of pain is a normal part of being human (since it is safe to assume we have all experienced it), it has purpose in God's economy. After all, one must reconcile God's love and His power toward that final conclusion that if God allows it, He must in His love purpose it for the good of His creatures.
Just like toothaches indicate a problem and move us to action, God allows suffering on every other level to bring about His good purposes, whether it is to pain our consciences to our own faults or to incite the soul-ache longing for the way things ought to be when they are not. Sometimes it teaches us to simply pull our hand from the flame out of self-preservation, backing away from the more obviously self-destructive behaviors. Sometimes it is to melt away the self-sufficiency and pride that ignores one's need for God in favor of the brokenness that reveals how desperately dependent upon God we really are. Sometimes it is to demonstrate to the world just exactly what faith in God's provision looks like and to mold us more fully into the better creatures He intended for us to be... but always, in every way and in every time, with purpose and for His glory.
And what of love? If by God's love we hope to be the beneficiaries of a lifelong supernatural supply of painless contentment, then we must also hope to already be just as He intended, warts and all, in no need of His loving reconstruction toward holiness. For God to love us perfectly, in the only way a perfect God can love, He must want for us to be more like Himself, which puts us necessarily in the way of divine scrutiny and remodeling. Artists who take pride in their work take great pain and effort at perfecting their pieces. Truly loving parents are not satisfied in allowing their babies to continue acting like babies as they grow. As my mom says (quoting her grandmother, I think) -- God loves us, but He loves us too much to let us stay the way we are.
To better and further explain this reconciliation between God's love and human suffering, I defer to one whose mind and pen were far more adept at expressing these thoughts than mine. Consider the following from The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis:
"By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness -- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.' Not many people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds... I conclude that my conception of love needs correction."
"...We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the 'intolerable compliment.' Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life -- the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child -- he will take endless trouble -- and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less."
"Another type is the love of a man for a beast -- a relation constantly used in Scripture to symbolise the relation between God and men; 'we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.' This is in some ways a better analogy than the preceding, because the inferior party is sentient and yet unmistakably inferior: but it is less good in so far as man has not made the beast and does not fully understand it. Its great merit lies in the fact that the association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man's sake: he takes the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it may love him, and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it. Yet at the same time, the dog's interests are not sacrificed to the man's. The one end (that he may love it) cannot be fully attained unless it also, in its fashion, loves him, nor can it serve him unless he, in a different fashion, serves it. Now just because the dog is by human standards one of the 'best' of irrational creatures, and a proper object for a man to love... man interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man's love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on teh 'goodness' of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog, and admitted, as it were by Grace, to a whole world of affections, loyalties, interests, and comforts entirely beyond its animal destiny, would have no such doubts. It will be noted that the man (I am speaking throughout of the good man) takes all these pains to the dog, only because it is an animal high in the scale -- because it is so nearly lovable that it is worth his while to make it fully lovable. He does not house-train the earwig or give baths to centipedes. We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses -- that He would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for mroe Love, but for less."
"A nobler analogy, sanctioned by the constant tenor of Our Lord's teaching, is that between God's love for man and a father's love for a son... A father half apologetic for having brought his son into the world, afraid to restrain him lest he should create inhibitions or even to instruct him lest he should interfere with his independence of mind, is a most misleading symbol of the Divine Fatherhood... Love between father and son, in this symbol, means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be. Even in our own days, though a man might say, he could mean nothing by saying, 'I love my son but don't care how great a blackguard he is provided that he has a good time.' "
"Finally we come to an analogy full of danger, and of much more limited application, which happens, nevertheless, to be the most useful for our special purpose at the moment -- I mean, the analogy between God's love for man and a man's love for a woman... The Church is the Lord's bride whom He so loves that in her no spot or wrinkle is endurable. For the truth which this analogy serves to emphasise is that Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere 'kindness' which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does any woman regard it as a sign of love in a man that he neither knows nor cares how she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal... he is pleased with little, but demands all."
"...You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect,' is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes."
"The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word 'love,' and look on things as if man were the cenre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. 'Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.' We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased.' To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable. We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that He could reconcile Himself to our present impurities -- no more than the beggar maid could wish that King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt, or a dog, once having learned to love man, could wish that man were such as to tolerate in his house the snapping, vernimous, polluting creature of the wild pack. What we would here and now call our 'happiness' is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy."
This is manifest on every imaginable level of human life. Popular talk show hosts and other "experts" insist that it is "healthy" to end burdensome relationships in favor of maintaining only those friends and relations who give as much as they take. Marriages in which even one partner feels unsatisfied or unfulfilled are encouraged toward divorce, regardless of the impact it will certainly have on the family.
There are therapies and pills for every kind and degree of depression, no matter how clear or vague its cause. From every direction in unison voice, the culture presumes that the normative human emotional state is and should be a happy one, and that anything less is somehow symptomatic of the dysfunctional and mentally ill.
Does heartburn threaten to limit your dietary choices and quality of sleep? There's a pill to fix that. Are you worried that delivering a baby will be too painful? Let's schedule an epidural. Are Junior's feelings hurt when his soccer team loses? Sign him up for the league that doesn't keep score. If being a poor speller makes you feel lacking, there is actually a camp of people pushing to throw out conventional English spelling rules for a purely phonetic, spell-it-the-way-you-think-it-sounds method, on your behalf to spare your self-image. (I swear I am not making this up.)
Everything is engineered to promote the notion that people should not have to endure any kind of pain, and that doing so is unhealthy. And for the more academic among us, the existence of pain at all gives proof that God must not exist at all. Their philosophy rationalizes that if God were both omnipotent and loving, He would use His power to protect His creatures from suffering.
I do not mean to say that every effort at pain relief is of no value. Medication served me well as I recovered from childbirth and the early pains of nursing my babies. And I will be forever grateful for the one who made sure I felt no pain during a tooth extraction. But, when my heart has been broken by someone I love or by my own dismal failures, I didn't wonder at the acute pain I felt as though it were an anomaly. Wouldn't it be the mark of the mentally ill to smile painlessly through what any other normal human would call heartache? Who decided that feeling sad isn't normal anyway, especially when experiencing what any sane person would find regrettable?
So, by my estimation, not only is the feeling of pain is a normal part of being human (since it is safe to assume we have all experienced it), it has purpose in God's economy. After all, one must reconcile God's love and His power toward that final conclusion that if God allows it, He must in His love purpose it for the good of His creatures.
Just like toothaches indicate a problem and move us to action, God allows suffering on every other level to bring about His good purposes, whether it is to pain our consciences to our own faults or to incite the soul-ache longing for the way things ought to be when they are not. Sometimes it teaches us to simply pull our hand from the flame out of self-preservation, backing away from the more obviously self-destructive behaviors. Sometimes it is to melt away the self-sufficiency and pride that ignores one's need for God in favor of the brokenness that reveals how desperately dependent upon God we really are. Sometimes it is to demonstrate to the world just exactly what faith in God's provision looks like and to mold us more fully into the better creatures He intended for us to be... but always, in every way and in every time, with purpose and for His glory.
And what of love? If by God's love we hope to be the beneficiaries of a lifelong supernatural supply of painless contentment, then we must also hope to already be just as He intended, warts and all, in no need of His loving reconstruction toward holiness. For God to love us perfectly, in the only way a perfect God can love, He must want for us to be more like Himself, which puts us necessarily in the way of divine scrutiny and remodeling. Artists who take pride in their work take great pain and effort at perfecting their pieces. Truly loving parents are not satisfied in allowing their babies to continue acting like babies as they grow. As my mom says (quoting her grandmother, I think) -- God loves us, but He loves us too much to let us stay the way we are.
To better and further explain this reconciliation between God's love and human suffering, I defer to one whose mind and pen were far more adept at expressing these thoughts than mine. Consider the following from The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis:
"By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness -- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.' Not many people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds... I conclude that my conception of love needs correction."
"...We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the 'intolerable compliment.' Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life -- the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child -- he will take endless trouble -- and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less."
"Another type is the love of a man for a beast -- a relation constantly used in Scripture to symbolise the relation between God and men; 'we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.' This is in some ways a better analogy than the preceding, because the inferior party is sentient and yet unmistakably inferior: but it is less good in so far as man has not made the beast and does not fully understand it. Its great merit lies in the fact that the association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man's sake: he takes the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it may love him, and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it. Yet at the same time, the dog's interests are not sacrificed to the man's. The one end (that he may love it) cannot be fully attained unless it also, in its fashion, loves him, nor can it serve him unless he, in a different fashion, serves it. Now just because the dog is by human standards one of the 'best' of irrational creatures, and a proper object for a man to love... man interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man's love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on teh 'goodness' of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog, and admitted, as it were by Grace, to a whole world of affections, loyalties, interests, and comforts entirely beyond its animal destiny, would have no such doubts. It will be noted that the man (I am speaking throughout of the good man) takes all these pains to the dog, only because it is an animal high in the scale -- because it is so nearly lovable that it is worth his while to make it fully lovable. He does not house-train the earwig or give baths to centipedes. We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses -- that He would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for mroe Love, but for less."
"A nobler analogy, sanctioned by the constant tenor of Our Lord's teaching, is that between God's love for man and a father's love for a son... A father half apologetic for having brought his son into the world, afraid to restrain him lest he should create inhibitions or even to instruct him lest he should interfere with his independence of mind, is a most misleading symbol of the Divine Fatherhood... Love between father and son, in this symbol, means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be. Even in our own days, though a man might say, he could mean nothing by saying, 'I love my son but don't care how great a blackguard he is provided that he has a good time.' "
"Finally we come to an analogy full of danger, and of much more limited application, which happens, nevertheless, to be the most useful for our special purpose at the moment -- I mean, the analogy between God's love for man and a man's love for a woman... The Church is the Lord's bride whom He so loves that in her no spot or wrinkle is endurable. For the truth which this analogy serves to emphasise is that Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere 'kindness' which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does any woman regard it as a sign of love in a man that he neither knows nor cares how she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal... he is pleased with little, but demands all."
"...You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect,' is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes."
"The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word 'love,' and look on things as if man were the cenre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. 'Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.' We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased.' To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable. We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that He could reconcile Himself to our present impurities -- no more than the beggar maid could wish that King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt, or a dog, once having learned to love man, could wish that man were such as to tolerate in his house the snapping, vernimous, polluting creature of the wild pack. What we would here and now call our 'happiness' is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy."
Monday, June 23, 2008
And They Grew...
The youngest two jungle bugs are officially walking... er, and running. Nothing can stop them now!
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Lost in the Translation
Kids say the darndest things. Here are just a few things that got lost in the translation:
ear loaf -- ear lobe
glossias -- gracias
super girl to arrest you -- super girl to the rescue
ear loaf -- ear lobe
glossias -- gracias
super girl to arrest you -- super girl to the rescue
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