The girls and I just finished working out with an exercise video. I am very amused that they are so enthusiastic about doing this—when I ordered the DVDs (based on recommendations by my friend Samantha) they snickered and made a few comments about the funny pictures on the covers, but they are the ones now dragging me out of my chair to exercise. I hate exercising. But I do feel better after I do it, and so I am thankful for my nagging children who don’t let me get away with settling into the sedentary pose that I would prefer to assume every evening after a long day.

One of the things Samantha noted about her newfound interest in exercise is that she is not so inclined to the intellectual pursuits that once engrossed her. I think we all go through different seasons of life where some interests are more compelling than others, and though I am reading a lot, I’ve also been less inclined lately to opine about my still-strong political views in a public way. Perhaps it’s involved with that mysterious concept of “calling,” though I do believe that our deceitful hearts can trick us into thinking that a selfish interest is the voice of God directing us down a particular path when all we really need to do is the “next thing,” which probably involves dirty clothes or cooking a meal. ‘Tis nobler in the mind to elevate our interests to a calling than to suffer the slings and arrows of vacuuming the living room.

Exercise is good, so is pursuing our intellectual interests, but serving God in humble ways is eternally rewarding. Being rather anti-gnostic, I know that strong bodies do benefit us in our service to God (when Paul said “I buffet my body,” he was not using a French accent and speaking of filling up his plate with epicurean delights). It takes strong arms and lots of energy to be a Proverbs 31 woman. But we work our abs and pecs so we can better exercise our calling as wives and mothers, not so we can look hot in the latest slutty style that fashionistas parade in the newsstand rags and shopping malls.

Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit which is often overlooked in the church, and it’s a trait that involves how we deal with chocolate chip cookies as well as bad stuff on the internet. Taking care of ourselves is one way to demonstrate that we are grateful for God’s good gift of health and that we are prepared to be used for His service in whatever way He calls us. In His providence, sometimes we do not have the health or energy we would desire, even though we have done our best with the clay He has given us. But whether we eat, or drink, or exercise, we ought to do it all to the glory of God. True beauty truly radiates from the inside out, so both body and spirit will be lovely when you focus your energy on that which does not decay (see Matthew 6:20). Get up out of your chair and work out, but don’t neglect to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, because sin-burning is much more effective than fat-burning :-).

I got to spend a couple of days with my good friend, Lisa, this week, and she knows what I like. Not only did she put my favorite chocolates in the room in which I stayed, but she took me to…

THE USED BOOKSTORE!

This used bookstore was the kind where the shelves hadn’t been dusted in a while, and alluring corners beckoned with lovely surprises. The storefront was industrial chic. The prices were reasonable. The proprietor had the nearsighted inattentiveness of the castle landlord in Enchanted April, though he was quite helpful when asked where to find the theology books and Wendell Berry. It was a perfect place to hunt for treasure. Lisa and I had an enjoyable interlude there on the hot Tuesday afternoon.

Here is what I found, in no particular order…

City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World by Witold Rybczynski
A Short History of Scotland by Andrew Lang
Leonardo da Vinci by Emily Hahn (a Landmark book)
Playing God: Dissecting Biomedical Ethics and Manipulating the Body, edited by R.C. Sproul Jr.
A Cloud of Witnesses by Stephen Abbot Northrop
Less than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell
Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward (inscribed “Beloved Parents—Parent: Here’s a ‘pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.’” ~Earl Tim, Christmas 1943)
Sunflower Houses by Sharon Lovejoy
With War Eagles: Global Air War in Original Color by Jeffrey L. Ethell (Jennie Chancey’s dad) and Warren M. Bodie
Window Poems by Wendell Berry (with beautiful wood engravings by Wesley Bates, and a foreword by James Baker Hall which recounts the Berrys’ early married days, when Wendell built his bride a new outhouse for a wedding gift, to accompany their rustic cabin home.)
Matthew Poole’s Commentary on the Bible, Matthew through Revelation
If There’s a God, Why Are There Atheists? by R.C. Sproul
The Scots Worthies by John Howie
Two Barclay’s commentaries, Galatians and Ephesians, and the Gospel of Luke
When You Rise Up by R.C. Sproul Jr.
Looking at History by R.J. Unstead
As They Were by M.F.K. Fisher
Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future by Neil Postman
Fair Sunshine by Jock Purves
Life of David Crockett, an autobiography whose previous owners were Thelma Crockett and C.A. Crockett of Kennewick, Washington, with a date inscribed of Christmas 1920, of interest to me as Davy Crockett is reputed to be one of my ancestors
Eating in America: A History by Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont
America’s Heritage Gary DeMar

We have a compost pile, under a black tarp, in the corner of the garden. We do not do all the scientific layering and turning: we just throw stuff under the tarp that we collect from the kitchen and the chicken coop. It’s cooking nicely but won’t be ready till next spring. We will wait patiently for the compost to crumble and enrich our garden, meanwhile educating ourselves about how to eradicate the gophers, cutworms, and bindweed that infest our garden.

Gardening is a lesson in patience and longsuffering. God meant it when he made dominion-taking a thorny prospect, but he didn’t revoke the job. And He gave the grace and tools for accomplishing it.

Read Herrick’s take on how eschatology and compost are related.

Go ahead, plan your garden, start your compost heap, and look forward to the future. It’s in good hands. While you are waiting, read Herrick’s book, which I have for sale here.

I’ve been an agrarian sympathizer for some time. As I see box stores and bland houses proliferate, covering farmland and foolishly ensconced on flood plains, I yearn for the time when neighbors knew and helped each other, and craftsmanship was not an expensive eccentricity. Though I desire this simpler life, and believe it would be healthier in many ways for both our souls and our bodies, I am also grateful for a great deal of the technology of modern life, including that which helps heal our bodies and nurtures our souls through easier access to spiritual and intellectual resources.

Calvinists are caricatured for their unbending and hard-nosed attitudes, but a True Calvinist (TC) is one who understands that the depravity of man begins in her own heart and permeates each person, and she knows that God’s common grace is a blessing that makes life in this sinful world not only bearable, but surprisingly full of joy and goodness in unexpected places. That is why I was able to enjoy Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver, and her husband Steven Hopp and daughter Camille Kingsolver. The Hopp-Kingsolver family has some of the same ideas I do about home and community, even if not for the same reasons.

Though she is a famous novelist, I have never read any of Barbara Kingsolver’s books, nor am I sure I would like them as I’ve heard they are not kind to Christianity. Ms. Kingsolver is definitely a feminist, a political liberal, and an evolutionist. But this book is filled with warm stories of domestic life and friendship which center around food, and the picture she portrays of garden- and kitchen-centered life is one that many Christian families would benefit from emulating. This is a very home-centered book.

Because of their family’s concern about the loss of the family farm and the fuel-dependent chain of distribution for groceries, irrespective of local seasonal produce availability, Ms. Kingsolver and her husband and two daughters, who had experience with gardening on their Virginia farm, decided to try a year-long experiment. They made a pact to only eat food that was produced within 100 miles of their home, with a couple of exceptions (coffee, for example; each person chose something that they couldn’t live without but couldn’t find locally). Folks who strive to live with this resolve sometimes call themselves “locavores.” The book details how this resolution became a reality through each month of the year.

Interspersed with statistics (some from liberal sources), information about free trade and CSAs and other alternative food and farming ideas, and family vignettes about food preservation and how the girls dealt with their new food life, there are also dozens of recipes in the book (available at their website), making the idea of eating in season very attractive and even possible. They relied substantially on a huge home garden, but they also bought produce and meat from farmers’ markets and found a local source of grain for making their own bread. Husband Steven was the baker, mostly relying on a bread machine, but also building an outdoor clay oven. Their youngest daughter became quite a chicken and egg farmer, even starting a home business and learning about all the expenses and overhead that must be accounted for before realizing a profit. The family’s experiment in breeding heritage turkeys, something that is apparently not done because the poor birds have been bred not to breed the “normal” way, is a racy but hilarious episode in their adventures.

The year-long effort to eat fresh, local, and homegrown food that is recorded in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, makes it apparent that such a life is not for the fainthearted and it is a career in itself. I have contended and still contend that in order to make a home, someone has to be in it, or it’s just a pit stop for the people who sleep there and use it for a weekend getaway. Not everyone has to forsake the division of labor and produce all their family’s goods and sustenance, but it is nourishing to the folks in the family when they are productive and contributing to the well-being of the household. This was one of the obvious benefits to Ms. Kingsolver’s family. In spite of her feminist leanings, listen to this observation from her book:

I understand that most U.S. citizens don’t have room in their lives to grow food or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the packaged meal and takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question, and an uneasy one, because I find myself politically and socioeconomically entangled in the answer. I belong to the generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won’t have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration. We fought for entry as equal partners into every quarter of the labor force. We went to school, sweated those exams, earned our professional stripes, and we beg therefore to be excused from manual labor. Or else our full-time job is manual labor, we are carpenters or steelworkers, or we stand at a cash register all day. At the end of a shift we deserve to go home and put our feet up. Somehow, though, history came around and bit us in the backside: now most women have jobs and still find themselves largely in charge of the housework. Cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we could live without…

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. (or worse, convenience-mart hot dogs and latchkey kids.) I consider it the great hoodwink of my generation. (pp. 126-127)

See why I liked this book? What have we given up, even those of us who are home but too busy with superficiality to enjoy what’s real? It’s something I think about often and struggle with in my own life as I make choices about what to do with those 24 hours that fly past each day. God’s good gifts are to be enjoyed, even if they come from the freezer section of the supermarket, but it is a miracle to see a tomato grow from a little green stem from which pretty yellow flowers emerge, that sprout into little green balls that suddenly round into large, red, juicy fruits that taste like nothing you will find in the bland pile of reddish blobs piled up in the produce section. There are hundreds of varieties of tomatoes, but you probably won’t be able to taste most of them unless you grow them yourself (or visit the farmer’s market). It’s not that hard. And you don’t have to believe in global warming to do it.

Tomatoes are getting ripe!

Traveling with our crowd…seven children, Mom and Dad, and the furry kid on our recent trip to the Oregon coast…is like moving an army, with all the baggage, food, and other accoutrements required for a pleasant journey. As the quartermaster (mistress?), I must plan carefully to make it work, and to make it all fit in the vehicle! Reflecting on our latest trip, I thought of a few ideas for a new Top Ten list.

1. Don’t wait till the day before to pack. When you start dreaming of a trip, then start keeping lists as ideas pop into your head. If you are leaving on a Saturday, find a spot to put your things and begin gathering supplies in one place early in the week, checking items off the list as they make their way into the pile. Remember that you will probably not use half of what you pack. I only read a couple of the dozen books I took with me :-).

Homer didn’t even finish one book. Every time he tried to read he fell asleep.

2. Think of some easy snacks to take in the car that you can pass around when everyone gets bored. I brought sandwich-sized ziploc bags to put goodies in to send to the back seats of the van when the natives got restless. We took trail mix, beef jerky, grapes, granola bars, and bottles of water. Gum is a nice treat for those old enough not to swallow it or stick in in their hair or their brother’s ear.

3. Provide some suitable entertainment while driving. I have a philosophical objection to playing DVDs in the car. I would rather my children look out the window at the new scenery, read a book, or have a conversation. I will not hold it against you if disagree. I do, however, bring audiobooks, sermons and talks, and music on my iPod which connects to the car’s stereo system.

4. Plan activities, but leave some down-time, too. Most of us are so busy in our everyday lives that it seems unnatural and even a waste of precious travel time to not jam as much as possible into a trip. It takes effort to relax. I admit that I did not achieve my goal of enjoying myself with abandon as much as I hoped, but some of the best moments of our trip were spent just staring at the ocean and listening to the pounding of the waves.

5. Keep meals simple and use the grocery store. It helped that we had a kitchen and an entire home away from home on our fabulous vacation. We only ate out a couple of times, and those were not our favorite meals while we were gone. The best meal was a picnic in the car. We had visited Fort Clatsop, where Lewis and Clark’s westward journey ended, and we intended to have a picnic at the park there, but found that a nameless someone had forgotten to pack the bagels we were going to eat with the salami and cream cheese. An executive decision was made to continue on to Astoria and look for a store to buy bread, but we had trouble finding a store until I spied a bakery in the distance. We made a beeline and bought some sourdough bread from the very hip (as in “hippie”) establishment, then drove to a nearby wharf to watch a lazy sea lion while we munched on our repast. The bread was amazing, and the car picnic was memorable with the entertaining wildlife watching. Another yummy meal was rotisserie chicken and bagged salad from the store. Eating on the road can be expensive, but it’s not necessary to have restaurant meals every day.

6. Alternate physical activities with more cerebral pursuits. We went to the beach almost every day and chased waves, flew kites, and hunted for sea shells. One day we took a 2 1/2 mile hike which was very strenuous. But we also visited a cheese factory, a maritime museum, an airplane museum, and an historic fort. Even grown-ups can handle only so much information before it all blurs together. Make sure there are plenty of opportunities to stretch the legs as well as the mind.

7. Have some familiar, homely objects or rituals so that homesickness does not put a damper on your time away from home. A stuffed animal, pillow, book, or favorite movie (we do bring movies to watch once we get there) can help ease the unfamiliar transition to a new spot. I took my blankie and my pillow with me. Try to keep regular bedtimes as traveling can be wearing, and it’s not much fun when everyone is grumpy and on each other’s nerves because of not enough sleep.

8. Don’t put too much emphasis on making it “picture perfect.” If you do, you will put too many unrealistic expectations on your family and be disappointed. It’s easy to get grumpy with one another when thrown into close quarters for an extended period of time—keep things lighthearted and be ready flexible enough to change plans if necessary. When we got home, I laughed at most of the group pictures: I can remember cajoling and threatening to get everyone to look at the camera at the same time, let alone smile. I don’t think I have a single perfect picture. But we do have lots of happy memories of our vacation, and that’s better than having memories of Mommy fuming because she didn’t get her way.

After a long walk, nobody wanted their picture taken, and Homer wouldn’t even look at the camera.

9. Make new friends, try new experiences. Be spontaneous. Those enticing roads to explore, or interesting eateries that you chance upon, might be the brightest spots of your time away from home. We drank the best mochas at a hole-in-the-wall coffee house in Astoria. We were disappointed in the seafood dinner at a well-known tourist spot, but we prepared a delicious meal from the seafood counter in a nearby town. The kids took a couple of funny pictures of Mommy and Daddy trying to pick out some dried jerky to buy at the Road Kill Kafe. And since we had Homer with us, we stopped and talked to every corgi owner we met and took Homer’s picture with his new friends.

Homer met many new dogs and he is glad to find that he is not the only tri-color corgi in the world, though they are not a common sight. Being part of the Friedrich clan, he is used to being a little different and is glad to know there are kindred spirits in many places, though not always easy to find.

10. Don’t forget to use the opportunity of going away to remind your children that there is “no place like home.” The best part of every trip is coming back to the place you love best.