small ones

Four years ago, on a beautiful night in late June, my sister Tabithah was born. (I assume it was a beautiful night. Chances are it was humid and very warm, but I know it was green, and it wasn't raining. In any case, the event made it beautiful.) I was twenty years old.

Taba and I will always have lockstep birthdays. She's four; I'm twenty-four. When she's twenty, I'll be forty. Recently she was playing at getting married. She wedding-walked into the living room, humming a wedding march to herself. Suddenly she stopped, turned, and with a twinkly-eyed little smile waved at me.

"Who are you getting married to?" I asked.

She named some fellow from a video she likes.

"And who are you waving at?"

She laughed at me. Little ones never bother to pretend they're not laughing at you. "You-oo!" she said.

I hope, when she does get married, that she waves at me on the way down the aisle.

Twenty years is a big spread between siblings, even if there are ten others to fill in the gap. Not many girls my age have a baby sister who's still well under four feet tall. It's a privilege--a gladsome joy--to have a small one in my life.

As I was working yesterday she came in and looked up at me with earnest blue eyes.

"Rachel, you know that song you teached me? Can you teach me again?"

So I did. Picked her up, set her on my lap, and sang the old spiritual "Down to the River to Pray" with her. My favourite verse is the one that highlights her lisp: "Oh sisters, let's go down/Down to the river to pray."

Sometimes I overlook the privilege I have--the chance to be a part of small ones' lives, to pick them up, to teach them, to be their "big girl." God give me grace to make the most of these years. Someday I hope we'll go down to the river of God's grace together, that we'll drink of His overflowing Spirit in a sisterhood that's deeper than any we can experience in purely earthly places. When we go, I want our quiver of memories to be already full. I want our attachment to be deep and real. I know I'm weaving the future now.

God honours small ones. God help me do the same.

Family Business: Cons to Beware

Read "Family Business: Pros to Embrace" first.

These days, family business is the new homeschooling. More and more families are realizing that a business of their own can be a tremendous asset. I've been involved in family businesses for most of my life, and I'm all in favour of them.

However, family business has a way of eating people alive if it's not kept under control. A 9-5 job can be left at the office, but a home-based business, like death and taxes, is with us always. Here are some ideas for combating this.

1. Set limits and be realistic. Crunch times happen, in which you must abandon all semblance of sanity and work your hardest and longest to make a thing happen. That's okay, but try to plan in such a way that tasks stay manageable. For example, Mom and my sisters try to space our fudge-making over three days before we hit craft shows on the weekend, rather than doing it all at the last minute.

2. Take a break. Sabbath is important. Most of our business happens on weekend craft shows, so many of us work Sundays. When this happens, we try to take Monday as a day to relax. Burning yourself out may feel responsible, but it will cripple you eventually... don't do it.

3. Give rewards. Another way to avoid burn-out--especially in young people who work with their parents--is to make sure that work is rewarded. When we're on the road, Dad will stretch our budget in order to take the family out for dinner somewhere nice. It's more than worth it. We always enjoy eating out together, and these times are both great motivation and great memories. Morale doesn't have to expensive, but it must be maintained.

4. Fit round pegs into round holes. As much as possible, involve your family members in ways that mesh with their natural gifts. In our family, my artistic sister Deborah has created many of the lovely designs you'll see on our candy; Becky, who has mad skills with the computer and graphic design, built our Web site and designs signs and labels.

Like most things, a family business should be a flexible endeavour. See what works for you; take note of things that are not working. Work hard, have fun, and God bless you!

Carnival of Family Life

Jennifer of Parenting Toddlers has posted this week's Carnival of Family Life. She did a great job, splitting the carnival into four sections that make it easy to find articles of interest: Kids - Glorious Kids, Family Finances, Relationships, and Parenting Tips.

Check it out!

Yes and Amen: The Magnificent Power of "Yes"

This post presents the flipside to a previous one, entitled "Thou Shalt Not: The Staggering Importance of 'No'"

Parents must tell their children "no." To say ourselves nay sets us apart from every rabid coyote in the world. It makes us human.

Equally important, equally stunningly important, is "yes." If no makes us human, yes makes us like God.

Witness God's first recorded words: "And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light." From God's "let there be"--His first, incredible yes--we have come. Our earth has come. The heavens have come. "Yes" is creative power: it is all possibility, all adventure, all life.

The power to say yes is an oft-overlooked part of parenting. I am not a parent, and I see how this principle applies to every relationship in life. We all, sometimes, exercise this power in the lives of others. Yes, come in. Yes, talk with me. Yes, I'll hire you. Yes, I'll help you. Yes.

Still, it is parents who speak the first and most important yes's in the lives of their children. If most of us have done anything unusual or wonderful in our lives, chances are it was the yes of our parents that got the ball rolling. I wish I could help everyone see how amazing this is, what creative power we have in shaping lives. I wish we all understood the explosive joy, the growth, the energy latent in this word.

Don't misunderstand. I am not at all saying that you should say yes to everything. That's why parents are so important. They're older than their children; they have a bigger picture. Theirs is a yes of discernment. But when they give it, it opens such doors.

My brother wants to build a house when he's nineteen. (He's almost fifteen right now.) Maybe that goal will change. But we think it a worthy goal. A goal fit for a young man. If he works for it, he'll develop work habits and character and skills. Someday it will help him provide for a family. My parents have heard this goal, and they have said "yes." They'll help him however they can. Perhaps he can apprentice somewhere; perhaps he can get onto a construction crew in a couple of years. Right now he's got a paper route, so Mom and Dad encourage him to work hard at it, to be diligent and responsible no matter the weather or his feelings at the time, and even though on the surface Pennysavers don't have much to do with houses, the character he builds now will be there when he's nineteen. Attaining this yes means a lot of no's in the meantime--no, you can't quit; no, you can't be lazy; no, you can't allow yourself to be distracted. But as long as he knows where he's going, he'll take the no's for the stepping stones they are.

"Yes" can mean so many things. It can mean the formation of relationships that will impact generations. It can mean the difference between daydreaming and pursuit. The difference between excuses and passion. The difference between a life of fear and a life of adventure.

I don't know why we withhold "yes" sometimes. It's not always because we've discerned that yes would be a bad thing. Sometimes we do it because we're skeptical, or lazy, or just plain negative, or irritated over something. But it's such an important thing to say, especially if you have influence in someone's life. A life without "yes" will never be lived. Don't be the one who withholds it.

It's spring. Go outside and feel the sun and think "Let there be light."

Do something incredible today.

Say "yes."

there's magic in the dirt

Why, you may wonder, has Rachel posted a picture of four pots of dirt on her blog?

Ah, but you just think those are four pots of dirt. The truth is something much greater. Those four pots are an herb garden. They are glorious and green. They are healing for headaches and upset stomachs; they are salve to sore throats and aching lungs.

I forget that at times, and then I feel silly for lugging those four pots out into the sun so my herb garden can thrive, and for watering them every night and sometimes praying that my unproven thumb will prove green. But I'm right. There's magic in that dirt.

Have you ever heard a song that melted you or carried you away to some verdant, misty paradise? The song "Perfect Day" does that to me. Every note, every instrument, every word reaches deep into my heart and calls forth a response.

The other day I was typing and I heard my little sisters playing outside my bedroom door. In their story, Keturah was a fairy who sang instead of talking. She sang her whole story: where she had come from, why she had come, what she was searching for. It was rambling and warbly and a little off-key. But there was a seed in it. A storytelling seed, a musical seed, a calling-f0rth-response seed. Someday she's going to reach people with music.


Recently I sat down and faced a blank page. Pushing aside thoughts that I was wasting my time and couldn't possibly pull it off this time, I typed some letters. But they wouldn't stay letters, no, as letters will, they turned themselves into sentences and formed a paragraph. This is what they said:

It was raining in the fields. Cold rain. Taerith stretched out his arms and raised his head, letting the rain hit his face and run down the bridge of his nose. He opened his mouth and gulped convulsively as the liquid trickled into his throat. It was good of the sky, he thought, to give him water. He had been at work with the other men, harvesting late corn, but the rain had put an end to the work for now. The fields were nearly bare anyway. Water puddled around his boots--held together now with string and patches--and turned the trampled furrows to mud.

There's magic in those little ink blots. They're not just letters now, they're a story--a story of a man who is sent away from his family and forms a new one by laying down his freedom to serve a slave girl and a persecuted queen, to befriend an imprisoned priest and fight next to a half-blood warrior. (You can read what there is of that story here.)

Beginnings. Rarely do they resemble what we know, by faith and a sort of passionate instinct, they will become. Off-key ditties don't sound like symphonies. Jumbles of a's and b's and h's don't look like literature. Children don't look like mothers and fathers, prophets and servants, yet there's magic in them. God put something in them that will grow if it's tended, into something green and tall and beautiful.

Keep hauling your pots into the sun, watering the dirt, writing those words, playing that piano. Keep investing in the lives of your children and grandchildren and brothers and sisters and friends. What you sow, you shall reap.

Thou Shalt Not: The Staggering Importance of "No"

Last night two friends and I came up with the designs for three t-shirts. We want to wear them around the university campus where one of us lives, as protest to the degradation that universities are more and more famous for. The first shirt would say "Ack!", the second "Why?!" and the third "Thou Shalt Not!"

Religious people are much maligned because we believe there are things we shouldn't do. Likewise, parents are made to feel guilty for "stifling" their children with the dread word "no." Give us free rein, we say. Let us be ourselves. Let us follow our hearts, capitulate to our whims, be in all things accountable to nothing but desire.

The importance of "no" cannot be overstated. A society of people who cannot say "no" to themselves are destined to destroy themselves. Not every human urge is good. Some impulses should be bludgeoned, not acted upon. Do you doubt this? Try being on the receiving end of someone who says "yes" to everything. Yes, lose your temper. Yes, let those venomous words out of your mouth. Yes, take that physical relationship far beyond the limits of commitment. Yes, have another drink. Yes, start that fight. Yes, yes, yes.

God is often seen as a monster because He dared tell us "Thou shalt not." The parent who does the same is overprotective, overbearing, and overstepping the bounds of individuality. The grown-up child who tells himself "no" is a stick-in-the-mud. So says the world. But the world will crumble while God and His people stand, all because of the virtue of saying "no."

When I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to ask why when my parents said "no." It meant what it meant; my job was to obey. As I grew, the rule relaxed. My parents wanted me to understand. Blind obedience is good to a point, but whole-hearted obedience born of understanding and acquiescence is better. I read the Bible and got a whole host of "Thou shalt nots," and with them, an understanding of what sin does to people. I thank God for His laws. I thank Him for His wisdom. I thank Him, because the "Ack!" and "Why?!"-worthy things we do were not in His plan.

The ability to say "no" is what makes us human. We can and must judge between good and evil in our society, our standards, our actions. Self-control enables us to rise above animal urges and live worthy lives of creativity, duty, productivity, real love. What good does it do a man if he follows his every urge, and loses his own soul?

It begins at home. Self-control, the inner "Thou shalt not" that guides us, is best learned at home under the loving tutelage of parents who want us to understand, as God wants us to understand. The father or mother who can firmly and lovingly say "no" opens the door to true humanity.

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Coming next week: "Yes and Amen: The Magnificent Power of 'Yes'"

Passing Days and Paper Routes

I have a date tonight. YES, it's with a boy. Stop snorting. You can put your eyebrow back down, too. And, er, yes, my mother's coming along. Not to chaperone--he asked her, too.

The boy in question is in fact my eleven-year-old brother Jonathan. He's taking us to Canada's watering hole (coffeeing hole?), Tim Horton's, for a treat because we help him with his paper route.

We actually help a lot of people with their paper routes. At the moment I believe we have six Pennysaver routes to our family name, which makes for a whole lot of stacking and rolling and stuffing and carrying. Our living room turns into a paper processing factory every Thursday as the route owners prepare to ready, set, deliver. A few of us, including Mom and I, help out with delivery on Friday because it's good exercise and it's nice to pull together.

In the past, my family of fourteen did everything together. Now that we older ones are getting older, that doesn't happen quite so much. We have a lot of different interests and goals we're pursuing, besides relationships and commitments and what not else. So it's a peculiar joy, every Friday, to look at the people walking down both sides of the street and know that they're mine. All of them, from the tall ones striding along like they own the world to the little one struggling to keep up; from my mother, who looks amazing at fifty, to my brother Jim who astounds me at almost-fifteen.

When we got home today, three of the little girls were holding hands and dancing around the purple amaryllis that's blooming in the front yard. Just before we reached them, they let go and fell around each other in the grass. Then Tabithah, who's almost four and not-a-baby, jumped up and came running for me, heavy winter boots clomping beneath her short-sleeved purple dress, arms open wide. She grabbed me around the knees and hugged tight.

Life keeps changing as the days go by. Babies turn into four-year-old in winter boots, "middle kids" become strapping young men, eleven-year-old brothers take mothers and sisters out for donuts and coffee. As much as my busy schedule and sprouting writing career dictate that I spend a lot of time apart, I'm trying to keep my heart at home. To pay attention. To "catch the moments as they run."

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P.S.

In case you didn't know, the book my cousin and I wrote on big family life is due for release next year.

The Blessing of Family

It's finished! Yes, Letters to a Samuel Generation: The Collection is finally available in hardcover. I'm excited. It can already be ordered from Amazon, and will be available from Little Dozen as soon as my sister gets home so we can set up the PayPal links ;).

In the meantime, I wanted to share the lone SamGen essay that didn't make the book. It was written in the early years, and looking back, it doesn't quite fit the discipleship theme that SamGen grew into. However, it was special to me when I wrote it and still is now. Without further ado:

Blessing

by Rachel Starr Thomson
originally written November 2001

Have you been to the movies lately?

Have you spent any time with teenagers?

Have you listened to the tone of the media?

If so, you may have noticed an alarming trend. Society believes, knowingly or not, that family is "uncool."

Youth leaders tell teens that their parents are out of touch, so they should come to their pastor if they have problems.

Older siblings spend oodles of energy trying to ditch their younger sisters and brothers in order to spend time at the mall, the movies, the bowling alley... anywhere where there are friends and no family.

Reunions, birthday celebrations, and Christmas get-togethers are seen as annoying obligations. And no amount of heartwarming, shallow movies about love and family seem to be able to offset the damage of this general slide away from family ties.

In church we hear about how curses are passed through the generations; at the therapist's we hear about how parents have permanently scarred their children and doomed them to life in and out of prisons, marriages, and happiness. This is probably true. But it is one side of the picture.

And as a product of the other side, I would like to protest.

Oh, my family has problems. We're human. But let me tell you about the blessings that have come through the generations.

When I was a little child, I had aunts and uncles around me constantly. I grew up feeling protected and loved. I didn't have to have anyone's constant attention. Just knowing they were there was security. About six years ago, my family moved away from our home in Canada and went to California, and I lost that shelter. Three months ago, I moved back home. A week ago I went to a cousin's thirteenth birthday party, and most of the aunts and uncles were there. And once again, I felt that shelter.

Every day, my paternal grandparents take a walk and pray for each of their grandchildren by name. Every day at evening devotions, my maternal grandparents ask the Lord to draw their children and grandchildren to Him. My walk with the Lord has been blessed in many unusual ways. And I don't have to wonder why. My mother, grandmothers, and aunts have taught me about being a woman, and more especially a lady. My uncles open doors for me. Uncle Stephen took me on my first date when I turned sixteen. Dad would take me out for coffee and ask about my needs and my interests every so often, just checking up on me. My cousins have taught me to lighten up and have fun, and to love people no matter what. My sisters and brothers have taught me to look for the good in people even when the bad is glaringly obvious. And when I've found the good, it's been beautifully, brilliantly, wonderful.

In my mother's Mennonite family tree, there are martyrs for Christ. In my father's Scottish history, there are preachers, pastors, and Sunday School teachers. For generations, there is prayer.

I have ten siblings to teach me about teamwork and growing up, eight aunts to giggle and trade stories with, four grandparents to show me what true priorities should be, six uncles to treat me like a princess, over forty cousins to laugh with, love with, and live with, and two parents to train me up in the way I should go. I am a product of generational blessings and generational grace. Have there been problems passed down? Yes. But I believe the good things outweigh the problems. To every one out there who thinks family isn't cool: Please, please, start building new relationships with those God has given you. Serve your sisters and brothers. Love your nieces and nephews. Pray for your children and grandchildren. It isn't ever too late to start.