Author Archives: PearlS

Numbers on a Circle: enneagram’s pitfalls

I have hesitated writing about enneagram because I think it’s taken me awhile to walk around the complete circle and examine it thoughtfully. It’s a huge can of worms to crack open–one that, if I’m being honest, I don’t care to plumb the depths because it gets pretty dark.
But it begs for attention, and I’ve been fascinated having studied it for quite some time.

A couple years ago I read The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre.

I pulled it off the library bookshelf because I’d been studying homeschooling methods and one expert had recommended first finding out a child’s personality before attempting to teach them in a one-size-fits-all approach.

The idea was this: if you could understand how a child learns best, you could tailor her education to meet her goals. Therefore, if you knew your child were Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, and Judging (INTJ), a stay-at-home, immersive, Charlotte Mason-approach approach might be a good fit. But if you had an Extraverted, Sensing, Feeling, and Perceiving (ESFP) child, you might choose to reward finished worksheets with community acting classes.

Myers-Briggs took the world by storm. Massive businesses and schools invested in the testing materials, all sold on the tailored, fit-like-a-glove, psychoanalytic theory-turned methodology. It seemed scientific enough, yet fun enough to talk about at a dinner party.

In The Personality Brokers, the story of mother and daughter team Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers is revealed–quirky ladies who were devout disciples of Carl Jung, committed to developing a test that might indicate and reveal deep psychological differences in people, then sold their idea door-to-door. The downright obsessiveness of these ladies is astounding, and according to Emre, the details were hidden for a good reason.

Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst they so admired, came up with individuation–an idea expressed in tapping the unconscious thoughts of patients (including, but not limited to dreams and sexual fantasies) in order to become more themselves and achieve a higher sense of satisfaction. He differed from Freud on only a few notes, but like Freud, Jung wasn’t above seducing his own patients.
Jung was the Briggs’ savior, the promise for two housewives that they might escape the doldrums and make bank by spreading a personality-identifying gospel.

Anecdotally–I am mostly intrigued how Myers-Briggs became a useful tool in the hands of Sally Clarkson, a professing Christian who wrote Educating the WholeHearted Child–the book I read recommending personality testing of children.

If Clarkson unknowingly fell into a Carl Jung trap, who is to say Enneagram won’t be equally as sticky for those of us facing it today as a “helpful” tool?

Here is how I caught the Enneagram bug: I remember sitting at my parents’ house and making my dad do an internet quiz on my phone to find out his personality type. We all sat there and laughed because it asked questions like, when confronted with a mistake, are you most likely to avoid the conversation, defend your innocence, change the topic, or confess your mistake?

He was utterly wounded when we suggested he would totally “defend innocence” while he swore he was more the type who’d confess he’d made a mistake.
I was so intrigued by this self-discovery game that I immediately spent the next few months reading all I could on Enneagram. (Diving into rabbit holes also seems to be a personality trait of my own, if you haven’t figured out by now. ha!)

Typing is fascinating because it gives us a peek into the inner world of the individual, the actual motivation behind one’s behavior. Enter Enneagram, the personality-typing method that claims to reveal inner reasoning for our thoughts, feelings, and actions. There are nine numbers, one for each “type”.
These numbers are placed in a circle, and each personality is fluid, constantly moving toward another number either in health or disintegration, flanked by “wing” numbers that add nuance and insight.
It pegs individuals with striking accuracy.

Do you disappear in conflict, secretly blame others for your malcontent, love snuggling on the couch, and hate when people interrupt you while you’re talking? Enneagram 9, wing 8, moving to the behavior of a low 6. 

You’re a rule-abiding perfectionist who can’t sit down until all the bills are paid because you live with a constant inner critic–but you’re taking the kids to the park because you have a free hour? Enneagram 1, wing 2, moving toward 7.

You are hosting Christmas because you want to be the grandma who makes the best cinnamon rolls and lives on in nostalgia forever–but you hold a secret grudge against your family when they can’t reciprocate? Enneagram 2, wing 3, moving toward 8.

See, the Enneagram is cake for folks in the market of self-help. Like Myers-Briggs, it’s logical enough to insert into practical life but fun enough to be a party game.Unlike Myers-Briggs, it gives you the key motivational factors to unlock personality mysteries and speculate one’s future.
So for a few years, I followed the carousel fun.
But I’ve since tried to exit the carousel. 


Do you know how at Sonic there are nearly 170,000 flavor combinations? Well, it turns out Enneagram doesn’t just boil down to nine handy numbers. If a person is constantly moving in a direction of a different number based on health or disintegration, with an emphasis on the stances of thinking, feeling, or doing, compounded by their self-preservation, sexual, or social instinct–are you getting weary of reading yet?

 And so, it isn’t as revealing and intuitive as we humans would like it to be. There are actually more flavors of people than Sonic slushies. (Don’t check my math, but you get the point.)
The Enneagram is one of those awful pinball machines that keeps pinging you to the next subtype, each nuance adding layers that tentatively change under each new circumstance.

Here are a few things I have noticed about the Enneagram that arouse my suspicion concerning it as a valid tool for self-help for the Christian:

The first thing to note is just how prolific Enneagram wisdom has become. This ought to be a red flag, for we are warned “be not conformed to this world” (Rom 12:2). The surest way to spot conformity to this world is to ask, is everyone else doing it? If the answer is yes, you’ve got a problem.
Enneagram teaching has filtered into big businesses and even into many churches. It is used as a method to understand individuals and, like Sally Clarkson tried with Myers-Briggs–to tailor-fit academics and employment and to maximize productivity. This is fine and good, but it begins to veer off path when it marks itself as a path to wholeness, or worse–forsakes solid scripture in favor of personality testing.
Paul pleaded with his Corinthian friends:
I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. (2Cor.11:3)

Here is the real concern today–that young believers will be seduced by the “cake” and miss the true meal.
One thing all personalities have in common is this: the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can understand it? (Jer.17:9)  

Do you understand what this means? It means we are forever moving in the direction of disintegration, left to our own devices. There is no self-growth apart from us becoming, like Paul says, “crucified with Christ–it is no longer I, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

Enneagram “godmother,” Suzanne Stabile encourages students to “do their work” and advises everyone to “have a therapist and a spiritual guide”. Via her ministry, Life in the Trinity, she hosts workshops, sessions, and has a podcast devoted to spreading the “wisdom of the enneagram”. I listened to her show for years because she has such a soft-spoken knack for understanding people and gently peeling back the layers of their self, revealing the deeper motives for their actions. But I began to take note when she mentioned things like, “I’ve found Christians don’t have a good grasp on ‘forgiveness’”–and recommended reading Buddhist literature.
I’ve also noticed that many modern Christian-enneagram philosophers use their perceived wisdom to polish up scripture where they think it has gone errant, especially in the area of homosexuality and gender fluidity. 

These are not gurus who are spreading any kind of wisdom that parallels a life devoted to Jesus. We as believers, sheep among wolves, are to be “shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt.10:16)–so ask yourself thoughtfully, have I let enneagram take the place of God’s word?

One pillar the enneagram experts (and Carl Jung and Freud) love to erect is the idea that we were fundamentally damaged as children. Surely you’ve heard parents joke many times over the past few years, “my kids are gonna need therapy for this someday!” It is one of the most pathetic phrases I think I’ve ever heard uttered, both for the parent who is excusing their poor behavior and the child who is learning their mom and dad won’t take responsibility for their actions. But enneagram loves to dig into the superego.

How was I damaged in childhood? Is the bread and butter of the enneagram. It identifies a core hurt as a kid that is now viewed from a victim’s perspective as an adult and validated by the adult as a gaping wound. The perception we’ve attached, year after year, to a childhood incident or so-called trauma grows exponentially worse as the years go on, and we rely on nothing but memory to serve as witness. It could be nothing more than a nitpicking father or a slobby mother, but the way the grown child has attached it to their self-worth could be the difference between brokenness and wholeness (I am exaggerating, but enneagram does not). This forms an individual’s core number on the enneagram circle, so it is crucial to the self-discovery of the learner. However, how was I damaged in childhood?  is the wrong question. 

We should rather ask, who was I as a child? This question puts the whole person in context, from the perspective of a mature adult of the self as a child, with an open-ended, logical conclusion. For instance, I know my father as an adult now. I no longer see him as the Dad he was when I was a child, because I have grown up and out of that sized version of me. Scripture corroborates this: when I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. (1Cor.13:11)

Without doubt, we are damaged humans, but not more so because of someone else (I am not speaking of incidental abuse, physical or mental). It is because we are fundamentally sinners from birth. Searching for greater meaning through finding fault in how we were raised is humanistic at best and nihilistic at worst. Where is the hope for us as parents if parents are the root cause for our grown children’s despair?
Let’s not poke that lion over and over.

Finally, the enneagram and other personality typing systems fool us into believing we’ve bitten the sacred fruit–knowledge of good and evil–and that we’ve gained superior wisdom. 

We ought to be a little scared if, by applying the “sacred wisdom of the enneagram”, we think we can understand and solve the issues in the world around us or in the people we love. But I’ve noticed we do exactly that–and proudly! There are entire social media accounts and youtube channels devoted to meshing godly wisdom and enneagram wisdom. This is truly something we need to evaluate more critically.
Paul distinguishes how we as Jesus-followers are to think versus how the world thinks:
The natural person does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. It sounds foolish to them and they can’t understand it, for spiritual things can only be discerned by the Spirit. (1Cor. 2:14)

I’ll be the one to say it: pray for discernment before opening the next enneagram book or listening to the next podcast. Are you accepting the things that come from the Spirit of God or does it sound like foolishness to you? (God has laid out quite the personality test of His own!)

Personality typing is still personality typing, a means to an end. While it could be argued it is for self-understanding, it is equally a pro-manipulation tool, of which we should be wary. It is flesh-wisdom, not Spirit-wisdom. Personally, I have found this enneagram fruit sweet but entirely unsatisfying. I say it because I know my enneagram number, studied it completely, and it has sort of become a thorn in my side. What was once a party game has paved an unfortunate path in my mind, where I trace all my motivation and energy. I let my “five-ness” excuse my bad habits and poor behavior on occasion. Sometimes enneagram “wisdom” pops into my head and I find I have to chase it away with God’s word. To my shame, I could carry on a very enlightened conversation about any number, stance, and instinct–but I do not know much of God’s word by heart.
I wish I’d never opened the Enneagram can o’ worms, because they’re hard to finagle back into the can.

We were having an interesting discussion, my kids and I, about the UFO that Nasa’s had its eye on for awhile. The object has been emitting flashes of light from a thousand light years away at a steady pace. Scientists have raised the question to the religious crowd: How would you feel about extraterrestrial beings trying to contact earth?

We discussed the science-fiction elements of it, then we came to a higher, bigger thought: What if God himself were trying to get in contact with us?!
And the most interesting answer settled into our lap: He is.

God, The God, He is in contact with us. Not Karl Jung. No door-knocking moms selling us a personality test. No need for numbers on a circle or inner work, or therapists. No self-help books or “godmothers” of theology.
God himself, revealed in His Word and throughout history. We are invited to “ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matt.7:7-8).

Where are you knocking?

 

Impressive resumes.

I’ll tell you, nothing quite starts a day off like a kid puking the night before. Because it is too early the next morning when you bleach the toilet and sink to rid it of the puke germs. And then, only then, do you drink your coffee before returning to the bathroom. Accordingly, the day should resume successful–unless you are me and your fancy electric toothbrush is identical to aforementioned puker’s toothbrush. If you are unlucky and/or absentminded, you will not notice said puker has left his toothbrush next to your own on the bathroom sink, thoughtfully charging it on your identical charger, and you might brush your teeth with the puker’s own toothbrush.

I’m waiting to feel bad but it hasn’t happened yet. In the meanwhile I have enrolled in a program to obtain a teaching certificate. I’m overly confident in the essay testing portion, as only a writer can be. (Is “be” a preposition? No, I don’t think so. See, one ought not be so cocky. I don’t even know what a preposition is or amounts to–there, now I think I’ve done it.)

I’m equally confident in the teaching arena. It is the multiple-choice questions that I over-think. Grownups who make paychecks should be exempt from silly tests in lieu of practicum. Or even if they don’t make paychecks–a mom who is at home shouldn’t have to waiver between a)wipes, b)diaper, c)rash cream, and d)powder, but it might cause her to second-guess herself if she’s offered all four and can only choose one as less than necessary. Some days you need the Desitin. Some babies aren’t roll-y enough to require powder. In a car on a road trip I’ve been caught wipe-less and diaper-less and found a way to MacGyver my way to success (though the details escape me, much like I hope the toothbrush incident does, eventually).

The teaching certificate is to come in handy should our local public school need me to fill a more permanent, qualified position. It hasn’t happened yet, but a few rules are changing in our state regarding teaching, so I’m trying to stay ahead of the game. I also keep at the back of my mind this morbid (or practical) idea that should something bad ever happen to our main breadwinner (not me), I will have a backup plan. I’ve never actually had a backup plan career before, but it seems like the responsible thing to do.

So I am also contemplating putting together a job resume, one that will be woefully short, since stay-at-home mothers don’t get to list their work as professional. No one wants to hear it–people who pay money don’t want to hear about your nightly forays into the bathroom to assist puking children. They don’t think it counts as professional experience. This is why stay-at-homers also feel the ridiculous pressure to somehow keep a foot in the professional world while attempting to feed babies in the middle of the night. This is why it takes Jesus himself to assure us that yielding our “relevance” in the world for the sake of a child is an okay–nay, holy–thing to do.

He chooses the weak things to shame the wise, so my resume is bound to impress Him, if no one else in this world.

I will also say this, having substitute-taught: the professional world has indeed forgotten what children are, because they are often treated as miniature adults. They are adults-in-the-making, future world-shakers. But they are sponges right now, which seems like a logical, child psychology kind of thing to know. They are not supposed to be adults and therefore ought not handle many things, including extended screen-time and limited outside play-time, self-monitoring cell phone usage. Exposure to extrafamilial ideologies is mind-bending–so what makes us think it’s healthy to introduce a thousand alternatives? My instinct is that people used to know this, but now they do not. A child’s mind is not fully developed. Who are the experts here, if not parents who recognize it?

Kids aren’t ready for mature content, and I don’t mean explicit language. They are not ready for adult life. Would you put a hammer in their hand and expect them to build a house, even if they wanted to? Of course not–at the very least you would wait till they’re strong enough to hold a hammer. Then you might send them to trade school for some lessons. What I’m trying to say is we have little patience for children to be children. We want to drop a seed in the ground and see a flower in bloom, but this is not how growth happens. Growth happens when we water and weed and prune back and wait on seasons.

We can’t feed them hours of screen time and shrug it off as nothing when it’s making new neuro-pathways in their brains and replacing healthy, respectful behavior and activities. We can’t circle the topics of suicide and bullying and stranger danger and drugs every year and assume they get it because we’ve had the “hard conversation”. The truth is, suicide and bullying are unthinkable. A child can’t comprehend the kind of despair that lives in the heart of man. Racism and sexual vulgarities–these are not part of one’s vocabulary unless an adult put it there in the first place. And so it goes, intentional misguidance by grown-ups dressed up as responsibility, when actually the grown-ups are just too impatient to water and care for our precious seedlings.

And I guess this is why parents need to excel at their job all the more, even if it sometimes feels like it just amounts to sitting in the dark, waiting to clean the toilet. You are actually a behavior scientist, loving littles and studying everything about them. Your resume won’t sing, but your expertise is solid. This is what makes a good teacher, I think. But we will see if the multiple choice test agrees.

Three Types of Fun

Remember Pa? In all those Laura Ingalls Wilder books Pa would work hard all day long, back-breaking work, the work of a starving pioneer. But at the end of the day he’d pull out his fiddle and sing the girls to sleep. Have you ever wondered why? Why didn’t he draw or play cards or lay on his back and stare up at the ceiling?

Many years ago I read an article by Gretchen Rubin, author of the Happiness Project. I think about it all the time, because it was one of those insightful memos that has come up again and again in my life.

In the article she describes three types of fun. My college degree happens to be in leisure (Leisure Management, why am I not teaching this somewhere as an ad junct? All my professors were ad junct, if that isn’t a red flag. Who was in charge? Were we learning anything at all? But I digress), so I consider myself an expert–and also a person who really, really wanted to finish my college degree as quickly, cheaply, and efficiently as possible. (Those parks and rec advisors are entirely accommodating.)

Rubin is somewhat of an expert in finding meaning in a meaningless life. She’s like a modern leisure counselor for the King Solomons of today  who have everything they could want but are looking for fulfillment void of any spiritual themes. She is a self-help memoirist.

Rubin’s three categories fun are these:

  1. Challenging fun
  2. Accommodating fun
  3. Relaxing fun

The first–challenging fun–Rubin explains, is the kind of fun where you invest energy into learning a skill–participating, practicing, and sometimes perfecting it. She gives golf as an example. My own leisure pursuits have included running, drawing, writing, and playing music. Rubin says this kind of fun is the most fulfilling.

The second, accommodating fun, is when you spend leisure time with other people, but the fun doesn’t require investing a level of skill. This could be watching your kids play soccer on a Saturday morning, taking a trip to the museum, or playing a board game with friends. Some time is committed, but the fun is more about balancing the desires of others and enjoying cooperative leisure pursuits. Lately I’ve loved cheering my kids on as they participate in archery and basketball.

The third type of fun is relaxing fun. Rubin describes this as “practically effortless” and “passive by design”. Some examples are watching TV or lying by a pool. To bring the article into 2022 (it was originally written in 2007), I’d like to add: social media, scrolling on your phone, and youtube. Relaxing fun tends to add up quickly, hour by hour (as our phones discreetly tell us by noting, your average daily screen time has gone up by 35% this week).

The interesting thing is, as Rubin points out–relaxing fun, where folks spend the majority of their leisure time–is the least kind of fun. Isn’t it fascinating that a secular expert came to the conclusion that passive fun has a limit to its “fun”?

Challenging and accommodating fun strengthen skills and focus and relationships, but relaxing fun, at some point, tends to gnaw away at life.

That feeling after you’ve watched two hours of TV and eaten a plate of pizza bites? Four hours, six hours? Somewhere in there the law of diminishing returns will apply and you’ll begin to feel less rested and more like a huge slob. It doesn’t compare to the thrill you get from making your own artwork, or performing your own music, or winning a football game.

At least that’s the wisdom of Gretchen Rubin. Is she right?

Well, sort of.

Leisure is not meaningless. Leisure and joy are brothers, and joy is crucial to a fulfilling life. But real joy can only be found in a life that has a certain level of accountability to God. And when you are accountable to a higher something, you can sort of Dave Ramsey-budget your way into finding more leisure and joy instead of wasting lots of time on unfulfilling “fun”, the kind that gnaws away at life.

What Rubin has erased from her theory is the fundamental purpose in living. It is, to borrow from the Westminster Catechism, to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.

Erasing God from the equation–your fun has no purpose. There’s no fulfillment; there’s no rest. No contentment.
Listen to King Solomon, who had every pleasure at his hand:

I tried cheering myself with wine, and embracing folly…I wanted to see what was good for people to do under the heavens during the few days of their lives. I undertook great projects; I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house. I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me. I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired male and female singers, and a harem as well–the delights of a man’s heart… I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun. Ecc. 2:3-8,10-11

Solomon tried it all out–the challenging, the accommodating, the relaxing. The biggest satisfaction, he says, came from the more laborious pursuits, the work of his hands. Still, devoid of any greater meaning than “having fun”–Solomon was left to wallow in the meaninglessness of it.

There’s great news, then, because conversely, when we lean into that higher purpose–to glorify God–we will find enjoyment and satisfaction that is filled with meaning.

We are told, in the Word, to “be doers and not just hearers” (James 1:22). This sounds like Rubin’s first kind of fun. Do. Train for it and run the race to win an award (1 Cor. 9:24, 27). 

We are told to not just seek our own good, but also the good of others (1 Cor. 10:24). This sounds like the second kind of fun. We accommodate one another, and build each other up (1 Thess. 5:11).

We are warned, again and again (by Solomon himself!) to guard ourselves against passive, lazy behavior.
“Lazy hands make for poverty” (Prov. 10:4),
“A sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he will not even bring it back to his mouth!” (Prov. 19:24)
“The craving of the sluggard will be the death of him, because his hands refuse to work. All day long he craves for more, but the righteous give without sparing” (Prov.21:25-26).

Can we glorify God in our free time and leisure pursuits? If Laura’s Pa can pull out his fiddle after a long day on the prairie, I think there is plenty of time for it.

 

Tossing Babies in Rivers

At my current workplace, no one has yet brought up the subject of my health status. No one has ever asked me if I’m vaccinated or not–and I intend to keep it private, just like my weight, personal hygiene practices and sleep habits.
Would it be beneficial for my employer to know? I’m only a substitute teacher, but they offer me work every day. It’s possible–I might accidentally crush a small child in the classroom if I sat on them. I might spread disease by simply neglecting to wash my hands.
I’m all for being honest–and to the best of my ability I will create a safe, productive place to learn at school. It is maturity that guides my thinking about when, where, why, and how I should divulge my personal choices and values. 

It is an honor system. My employer doesn’t know and doesn’t ask certain things, so we maintain peace and I keep my job. 

I’m still employed because I’m a responsible, stable, qualified adult who knows how to appropriately manage children.
The situation I’m privileged to be in–where privacy is honored and personal responsibility is personal– is becoming less common. 

The Supreme Court is now in session, debating whether employers have the right to mandate vaccines for their workers. Perhaps they will vote in favor of individual rights, and perhaps they will agree with the president that workers should be fined and punished for not following mandates–but history in the long term rarely favors individual rights. Ask folks from China, Germany, Russia, Afghanistan, Cuba, Argentina…the list is a long one. Ask anyone who has fled a country for reasons of persecution. A person’s individual rights don’t typically stand a chance when power is at stake.

The question today is not if, but when we must begin tossing our metaphorical babies into rivers. Our American life is rapidly becoming less about individual freedoms and more about greasing squeaky wheels. Matters of conscience have become open to interpretation, and therefore personal decisions now fall prey to what is deemed “public safety”. It’s the whole idea of “for the greater good” while ignoring the consequences of tossing babies out with the bathwater. Can the babies cry for help? Should we listen to them anyway if it’s not a matter of their personal freedom but for a greater good?

“What’s the worst that can happen?” is one reaction to this dilemma, a question of procrastination at best. Inch by inch we are beginning to see exactly what it entails. We could list all the possible scenarios, anticipating the worst–but that’s an exercise in misery.
 

It’s a relief to read about a situation where the worst actually happened–and hope was there, waiting.

Have you heard of Jochebed? The mother of Moses was put in a hard spot when the king of the land declared the Israelite race to be inferior and too many. Is it too much to ask if we eliminate this problematic population boom?— he asked himself. A mandate went out: throw your Hebrew boy babies in the river Nile. Here it was, the worst thing that could happen.

Let’s take a look at what Jochebed did.

When she saw that (Moses) was a fine child, she hid him for three months. (Ex.2:2)
Jochebed did not immediately line up at the river to dispose of their baby. She kept him hidden from the executive order as long as possible–to keep him alive, yes, but also to make a plan.

…when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. (Ex.2:3-4)
Did the mother of Moses give in to the harsh order of the king? Rather, she declared fearlessness in the face of the impossible, made a DIY waterproof basket, and had her daughter keep an eye on where it was headed.

Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the river bank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her slave girl to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. “This is one of the Hebrew babies,” she said. (Ex.2:5-6)
Was it any accident Moses’ basket ended up in the same spot of the river where Pharaoh’s daughter bathed? I think not. Jochebed pushed that basket toward a very specific destination at a very specific time. She likely timed it so Moses would be hungry enough to cry out just as the basket entered the bathing area. She appealed to the humanity of a person with authority–a woman who had the power and instinct to do something with a crying baby in a basket.

Then his sister asked Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?”
“Yes, go,” she answered. And the girl went and got the baby’s mother. Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.” (Ex.2:7-9)

Miriam, Moses’ sister was tasked with anticipating any need baby Moses had, and she spoke up in a situation that was likely intimidating. What a brave big sister! And look how it turned out–Moses’ mother, formerly a slave, now had a paying job to nurse her own baby!

Here are three things we can do when enforced federal mandates feel a bit like asking us to toss babies in the river:

1–Make a plan. Did Jochebed follow the mandate? In a way she did. She put the baby in the river as required. But could she have lived with herself if she’d let her baby drown in the water? I think not. Jochebed took time to review her options and form a plan she could live with–she looked for the best possible outcome under the worst of circumstances.
Where does your conscience allow you to make concessions? Where does it draw a line? 

2–Stand fearless in the impossible. In putting Moses in the basket, Jochebed was humbly accepting the fate of not being able to raise him the way she wanted to, but trusting God to fully handle Moses’ future. Do you know He can handle your future for your good? Do you know He is interested in the impossible?

3–Look for the humanity in a hopeless situation. Jochebed was not sending good vibes out into the world and praying for good karma. She and Miriam made intentional, human contact, appealing to the daughter of the king. Miriam very practically offered the service of a nursemaid for the infant which turned into a paying job for Moses’ mother (so cool!).
Are you continuing to seek the humanity in people around you? Are you making genuine connections with others? Can you be an unlikely ally?

Let’s not forget who Moses grew up to be!
If there is hope for giants to be born from certain-death circumstances, we have plenty of hope indeed.

church pains + how to recover

I have found in life there are many times you cannot put your finger on the pulse of what is happening in the present. It takes months and years to grow into the person who has enough wisdom to look back and understand why something happened the way it did. To gain a perspective that isn’t laced with bitterness, but mature enough to ascertain some goodness came from the bad. 

Still, isn’t it common to experience discomfort, stress, aching–signs of pain–in the present? You feel pain and it signals to your brain something is wrong.
It’s useful, but pain doesn’t bring relief, just the awareness of the disease.

Last year I was feeling pain. And now I know why.
 It was an emotional time (and I hate emotions, though I certainly feel a lot of them). I was at home with the kids full-time. Through no fault of theirs we were homeschooling and keeping our heads down, noses to the grindstone. It wasn’t ideal, but it felt like the only thing to do. 

We were attending a church that had initially seemed like such a nice oasis in Denver from the craziness of the world. It was a convenient stone’s throw away from our house. The neighborhood surrounding it was mostly Hmong and Spanish speaking households–kids who all attended school with our own.
Our church was perfectly positioned in a community and it seemed advantageous to me as a public school mom–the church could support the school and parents; the parents might in turn come to know Jesus better. My goal is always for Jesus to be better known, because in knowing Him, my life hasn’t fallen apart like it should have long ago.

The thing was, we didn’t know a lick about the denomination of the church. We detected it was a secretive little thing. The men who led it claimed they were from the “brethren” ideology, nothing more. There was no statement of faith printed on the bulletins, no hard, obvious rules to follow. The church was made of aging parishioners mixed with a couple young families. We were informed it was an upstart–the older folks had phoned a friend, so to speak, and the neighboring community of “brethren” believers sent a preacher and some families to add new life to the congregation. They decided on a new name.
It was fine–we were new. We were encouraged by the non-descript, plainness of the building, the lack of signage, and the absence of all those things fancy churches have that are showy and expensive. It seemed to elevate Jesus.
There were still many older ladies who only wore long skirts and placed doilies on their heads to cover when praying, but it meshed with younger moms in capris and sandals, and I didn’t sense it too divisive.
Of course, we had only been attending Baptist and reformed churches up until then, and so most everything seemed a little odd, but not off-putting. Sure, only men were allowed to pray aloud in the first service, but they served communion every week and let kids stay in the auditorium instead of rushing them off to “children’s church”.

We, as they say, got plugged in.

For two years we taught Sunday school to a handful of kids. We led a weekly kid’s night and fed the whole crew who came and sang and learned with us. We prepared communion and I helped lead worship. I became certified to teach English and set up a conversational class on Thursdays in the church building (it was remarkably unsuccessful, but some things are). I arranged coat drives and school supply drives and tried to do some community networking between the school and church. Joe led the security team. The church was positioned on a street with high crime incidence and many homeless people, so he got his permit to carry a concealed weapon. (You’ll remember this was around the time a terrible shooting incident took place in Texas at a church. Sadly, this is necessary in some cases.)

In the pandemic we were grateful our church only shut down for six weeks or so before the leadership decided it wasn’t a viable way to keep a church alive. If no one is attending, there certainly isn’t anyone putting money in the coffers.
Meanwhile, I was reading thru the stack of books on the church bookshelf (as recommended to me by our church’s resident expert, a man who has written and sold thousands of copies of books regarding church eldership)–all biographies written on heroes of the faith. All men who served in some missionary capacity to bring the Word to the lost world.
The books struck me as kind of paternalistic, because the heroes were all men doing maybe incredible things while also maybe abandoning their own families “for the sake of the gospel”.
Don’t get me wrong–there were many brave missionaries who brought light to dark places, but these books seemed a little pointed and weird. The protagonists were heartily applauded; the women and children too weak to endure the hardships were derided as crazy or unsupportive, or lacking faith.

We returned to in-person church–a weird thing at the the time, as you’ll recall in June of 2020 people were beginning to wear masks and it felt odd to all of us– but we were so grateful to have a bit of normalcy and willing to give it a hearty go. Our church blossomed that summer with people who were missing church (theirs having been shuttered for the foreseeable future). The leadership prided themselves on their tact and skill on handling people and church and that tricky balance of being relational, relevant, and religious.

For the first time, I noticed at church there were a lot of John MacArthur quotes being tossed around in the sermon. I knew only a tiny bit of MacArthur and had no hard feelings, but I noticed there were Bibles and hymn books in the pews with his name on them. Odd. Then there were emails to correct our musical worship–no drum kit, but a more acoustic set-up. No guitar between the singer and the microphone, because it’s too performance-based. Only these songs from this hymnal, must be piano-driven. There was no Biblical reasoning for any of this, it was simply something the elders had decided.
The men in the pulpit (always one of three elders) seemed to qualify their sermon points. It was as if they thought the free world might come to an end and so it fell on us, the local church, to align our values with theirs–should we have hope of not losing a foothold. A lot of bashing Catholics. Teasing out the differences on small issues. It’s us versus them.
This seemed a tad obscure to me and Joe (Baptists aren’t all bad, neither are church of Christers), and we felt ourselves distancing our thinking from what was said at church. 

It was around this time we began really hearing the word “eldership” pop up a lot. And the term “church-sanctioned”. A new elder had joined the group mid-pandemic, and since we had an eldership expert on the team, it wasn’t a question of qualification. Joe was urged to serve as a deacon, and when he asked what that would entail he was told it would be his usual duties of security and general service.
“So,” he said, “it would just be a title then? You want me to have a title?” He had no desire to be called a deacon, and he said so, to their disapproval (even after they offered to fly him to a John MacArthur leadership conference).

I think this is where things began rubbing the wrong way.

Nevertheless, we agreed to host a weekly home group at our house, because the elders decided–should the church face persecution in the face of Covid–we would already have sub-churches in houses. It was the practical thing to do–we were the youngest family living nearest the church, and our sprawling house could accommodate a crowd. My kids were withering from lack of social interaction (going on six months at the time), and I could use a few good friends, too.

This was our biggest mistake.


We must have looked suspicious, wearing our hearts on our sleeve. We wanted a Bible study, but our hearts were sincerely feeling turmoil over the denominational “non-denominational” vibes at church. Weren’t we invested enough in the church? Could we not allow for folks who didn’t subscribe completely to a John MacArthur theology? Shall we sit and nod dumbly while a man tells us why we ought not think Mark chapter 16 deserves to be included in canon?
Believe this, or… Agree with this, or…
In Bible study we were supposed to follow the text that was being preached on Sundays. It gave us very little wiggle room to explore what we were reading, and what were we to do with the parts where we disagreed with what the preacher had said?

No need to fear–two months in, the elders emailed out a Bible Study Life Group Mandate. Rules for how the “church-sanctioned” evening should proceed, from serving dinner to praying to what additional reading resources were or were not “elder approved”.

Angry mass emails were received that bashed “certain people” for trying to lead others astray. Warnings for church discipline.

It was many months of homeschooling kids and cleaning the house and preparing dinner on Thursdays, dreading life group. I waited and fretted and wondered why it was so miserable anticipating a Bible study. If Living Water brings Life, what was wrong with this picture? Why did it feel like a mole was planted to spy on us and report back to the elders? Why was it “for our own protection”? Where was the autonomy in having our own family culture? What would define us if we left the church? Who are Christians without a home?

You might be able to guess at the rest of the story, since I am writing this from another state entirely. It did eventually blow up in our faces in a literal way. On a spring Sunday morning one of the elders confronted Joe and said some hurtful things about me to my husband. (It didn’t help that he read my online writings regularly and thought he knew more about us than he really did.) How manipulative I am, how controlling in our marriage (this is a John MacArthur, complementarian recipe for disaster). It blew up because we did not pursue the path the local church had for us. It did not matter how many hours we served or how much we loved our community. The church was in the business of training us to follow their rules, not training up disciples of Jesus.

And it caused us great pain in the process.

This morning I was listening to a lesson by J. Vernon McGee about the time Jesus met for dinner at a Pharisee’s house. (I do still study my Bible with unconventional, non-church-sanctioned references. McGee’s been dead 35 years.) 
As the culture of the day was, neighbors gathered to watch and observe the meeting, and one woman showed up and began doing an odd thing. She was crying and letting her tears drip on the feet of Jesus. He let her continue the bizarre behavior even to the point of her kissing his feet and wiping them with her hair and the perfume she’d brought.

You have to admit, it is odd.

Simon, the Pharisee, couldn’t ignore it anymore, and Jesus, knowing his thoughts, pointed out to him that it isn’t the righteous, church-ruling leaders who are full of love for God. It’s the common folk who can’t ever get over what Jesus has done for them in forgiving their sins.

In fact, the woman with the tears and perfume performed the common courtesy of the day– washing a visitor’s feet and greeting him warmly–where Simon only had Jesus into his home as a curiosity.

And don’t I know it, the girl who can’t join a church to save her soul. Women that were cured of demons and unclean spirits and diseases followed Jesus everywhere–they invested their money and lives into making disciples; they didn’t sign up at the local church to have their wrists slapped for minor infractions.

So I will keep trailing after the lot of them, following Jesus. He lets us do that, do you know it? Even me, who was less than a stellar wife to my husband for the first decade of our marriage. Me, a pharisee in my own right. Me, a mom sending her kids to public school while culture unravels around us. It doesn’t seem so odd to me to throw myself at Jesus. He allows us to anoint his feet and drip our salty tears on Him. He invites us to get personal.

Pain that is borne is pain that can be overcome–we know this because Jesus bore it all. And He has overcome.

So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him,
rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught,
and overflowing with thankfulness.
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.

Colossians 2:6-8