April began with a beautiful week in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. We had a few days of vacation, then enjoyed the Inter-church Holiness Convention. It
was a special time of meeting with God’s family and spiritual renewal. The next week was busy with a women’s meeting, a date night, and Easter preparations. Celebrating our Lord’s Resurrection is always a highlight of our year. This was our last “first holiday” in our new town, so we feel a bit more acclimated now that we know what a whole year brings.
The third week was a celebration of our oldest as she leaves her teens. We celebrated quietly at home with pizza and cake since she and her dad were recovering from a cold. My oldest son also got his temporary driver’s license. Oh, the joys of teaching a kid to drive! I love the times when a kid just sits down to eat lunch with me or when we get to go out to dinner and shopping, as I did with my daughter this month. The last week of April was a special treat. I got to host my parents at my house all week while they ministered at a revival meeting in our area.
As you know, my word for the year is Eternity. You can read more about what’s behind it here. In short, I have three sets of goals for this year. My PERSONAL goals are going well. I worked on each of them steadily and made progress on each one.
My PEOPLE goals are in three areas reminding me of keeping an Eternity perspective:
HOSPITALITY – Impacting Others for Heaven
HOMESCHOOLING – Preparing my own Disciples for Heaven
HOMEMAKING – Creating a Reflection of Heaven Here on Earth
…our homes have the capacity to be a place of ‘refreshment, light, and peace’ — a true foreshadowing of heaven — or a space that is inhospitable, dark, and restless — a foretaste of hell.
Theology of Home: Finding the Eternal in the Everyday by Gress, Mering, and Shrieber
One of my April goals for our home was to finish organizing our storage closet. We just installed shelving in it last month, so I was eager to sort through the piles and make the room look neater. The other goal was to finish the decor in the living room and dining room. I know we have been here a year, but I definitely took my time with this one. I put up the rest of my wall decorations in the living room. Well, my dear husband did while I just directed from the sidelines. We also just got our china hutch delivered which we ordered last August. I was able to set up my favorite Old Country Roses dishes in it before Easter. One of my favorite things is to put fresh flowers around the house, especially during the spring.
HOSPITALITY – Impacting Others for Heaven
The person is the center of all meaning and value, and is always to be welcomed and treated as such, never as a problem to be categorized, solved and dealt with.
Maria Poggi Johnson, in Making a Welcome
Besides the rare treat of hosting my parents for the week, we had dinner guests twice in April and a pizza night gathering. For Easter dinner, we had a lovely group of 18 around two tables. I trust our home is always a haven for family, friends, and those who need family or friends.
HOMESCHOOLING – Preparing My Own Disciples for Heaven
‘Aslan,’ said Lucy, ‘you’re bigger.’
from Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
‘That is because you are older, little one,’ answered he.
‘Not because you are?’
‘I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.’
We are weeks away from the end of school. The younger boys have already finished up their core subjects. We’ve been working together on a Window on the World Bible study, learning about history around the world post-World War II, and studying electricity, magnetism, and metals in science. When we finish up, I’ll purchase their end-of-year CAT tests as a grand finale. Jeffery is close to the end of his Worldview course and Government, but he is cramming a bit to get Geometry done before he takes his ACT. We’re discussing some dual-enrollment courses for the two middle boys next year. I have a busy summer of planning ahead!
My PRINT goals, as I mentioned in my word of the year post, include this blog, another writing project I’m working on (may share when it’s finished) and what I’m reading. With the busy month, I did not do any blog posts besides this one. I also didn’t get much done with my other personal writing project either. Goals sometimes require some flexibility!
What I Read In April:
Devotional Reading: I’m continuing my reading through the New Testament as well as 3 Psalms each Sunday.
I also finished Eve in Exile by Rebekah Merkle. This was one of the best treatments of feminism and Biblical femininity I have read. I could post scores of quotes. My personal background is that I appreciate what feminism did for women in the first wave — voting rights, the right to own property, the right to not be locked up by one’s husband for fabricated madness (see biography below for more on that), and the tremendous work they did for Prohibition. However, I have always had a tension between that appreciation and what the Bible says. Especially on the methods used and where we have sadly ended up in a post-third wave feminist era. This quote from Merkle’s book sums up my thoughts on that:
Will I call myself a feminist then? Not for the wide world. And here’s why. It’s important to identify what to fight against – but it’s equally important to know why to fight and how to fight…superficial agreement on various issues can be so damaging in the long run — [it] is masking the fact that there is actually no agreement at all.
Rebekah Merkle, in Eve in Exile
I can’t help but share a couple more:
Ironically, there’s a whole world, wide open and waiting for us, a world where we could truly run — but the feminists don’t know where it is. Despite the fact that they have been waging a very noisy campaign for freedom, they have actually just led us into a very boring dead end.”
Ibid.
I admire strong women like my great-grandmothers who, on one side, helped her husband run a working farm in West Virginia while raising eight children and, on the other, married an Albanian immigrant and raised four children. I admire my grandmothers who lived in the era when women thought their sole purpose was to look pretty and keep their houses pretty. One of them ran several businesses while legally blind and the other managed a store and a beautiful home with only an eighth-grade education. I admire my own mother, who was there for us as school lunch lady, helped out in school fundraisers, supported my dad as he pastored, offered hospitality to scores of evangelists and missionaries, organized annual banquets for 100 people, and made life fun for everyone she met. (Most of that, she’s still doing…except the lunch lady part.) There is no disconnect….this is what made them different than the militant feminists:
[Her children]…[and]…[her husband] didn’t rise up in the city gates to say, ‘Well we are all really glad she was able to fulfill herself and follow her dreams.’ The Proverbs 31 woman is an impressive, hardworking, high-achieving, high-earning woman — but it is all aimed at her people.
Eve in Exile, again
Biography/Memoir: The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore
Fiction: Homeland Heroes series by Susan Sleeman and pre-reading (but kinda enjoying) a YA series for my boys, The Homelanders by Andrew Klavan
Inspiration for April:
Quotes for Eternity:
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
C.S. Lewis, quoted in The Pour Over newsletter
Live as though Christ was crucified yesterday, risen today, and coming tomorrow.
Martin Luther, quoted in an online class