Tiny Houses and Quiet Spaces

            

            I’ll admit it: I’m obsessed with HGTV’s “Tiny House Hunters.”  Over the years I’ve been hooked more than once on home improvement shows, dating all the way back to the days of TLC’s “Trading Spaces.” Remember that show? Neighbors would swap keys and redo a room in each other’s houses. Sometimes it was amazing; sometimes it was awful. But it was always entertaining. And as the Food Network has taught me a lot about cooking, HGTV has inspired me more than once to tackle projects around our house, to decorate and renovate, and put my own creative touches on the space we call home.
  

            I always find the relational dynamics of the people on these shows every bit as interesting as the renovations themselves. The way people communicate, negotiate, and compromise as they are making decisions about their home tells a lot about how they navigate other areas of their relationships.

            The tiny house trend is fairly new, and while I love the idea of simplifying your life, minimizing your footprint on this earth, getting rid of excess stuff, and living below your means, I would have some concerns about the practicality of living in a house that’s less than two hundred and fifty square feet and uses a composting toilet. I think that like a new prescription drug, we’ll have to wait awhile to fully understand the long-term risks and side effects associated with moving your entire family (pets included) into a house the size of a shed.

            I know that for our family, the immediate effects of us living in a tiny house would be disastrous. And it would be mostly because of me. I’m an introvert, and the truth is, when I watch Tiny House Hunters I fantasize about what it would be like to have one. But I’d want to live in it alone. Not every day of course – I love my family – but maybe once a week. Or an occasional weekend.

            Am I a horrible person for saying this? Because I sure have felt plenty of guilt over the fact that I need time and space to myself. But being an introvert doesn’t mean I hate people. It doesn’t mean I’m shy. It doesn’t mean that I don’t value and need connection with others. It means that I tend to be energized by spending time alone (or with someone one-on-one), and that being with people tends to be draining for me.

            And yet, even though I understand this about myself, I still feel bad. I feel bad because I don’t enjoy ladies’ night out; I’d much rather meet one or two friends for lunch or coffee. I feel bad because I hate going to our annual block party; but I love when I run into one of the neighbors when walking the dog and we stand on the sidewalk and chat for twenty minutes. I feel bad because when I’m really depleted, sometimes I want to stay home on Sunday morning (and have the house all to myself) because we go to a megachurch with thousands of other people, and sometimes crowds exhaust me. And I felt bad over Christmas break, after having had a group of teenagers in our home a couple days in a row, telling my daughters that the kids needed to find another house to go to that night. I love my kids’ friends. And I always wanted our house to be the one where they all want to hang out. But with the stress and activity of the holidays, with various social events, with all the noise and commotion, I had a headache that wouldn’t let up for two days straight. And as I stared out our kitchen window while washing the dishes, I wondered if we could renovate our kids’ playhouse into a tiny house. A retreat for me to get away once in a while.

            

              I’ve always known that I need solitude, but it has never been more difficult to find than in this season of life. We’ve got three kids with lots of friends. (Did I mention I love their friends? They are the greatest kids on the planet.) I work part-time out of the home, and my husband works full-time mostly at home. So on my days off, he’s here working. His office is our dining room, and we have an open concept living space. You get the picture. On the rare occasion that I find myself alone in the house, it’s exhilarating. It’s energizing. I love the peace and quiet. I love to write and not be interrupted. I love to read. I even enjoy tasks like cooking and cleaning in total silence. Solitude restores my soul.

            People in general are becoming more aware, I think, of the differences between introverts and extroverts, with best-selling books even being written on the topic. Each of our family members have taken personality tests, and it’s fascinating to analyze our temperaments and personalities and understand how God wired each of us. We are learning to value our differences, and that begins with understanding one another.  

            A couple of my goals for the new year are to be more aware of my energy levels, and when I start to feel depleted, to do something restorative. Go for a walk. Go to a coffee shop to write. Meet a close friend. Go to my room and read. I’m working to get better at figuring out what I need. And then I’m learning to voice those needs – not in a demanding way, insisting that other people meet them – but in an observing, accepting way.

            Right before I sat down to write this post, my husband called. He had picked up our daughter and her friend for lunch, and he asked me a kind, beautiful question.

            “Would you like to have some time alone?”

            “I wouldn’t mind,” I replied. “Why, what are you doing?”

            “Well, if you’d like to have the house to yourself, I could go to the coffee shop and do some work before I pick up the girls from school.”

            “That would be great,” I told him. And then I ate my leftover beef burgundy while watching House Hunters, swiffered the floors, and then hunkered down in the kitchen and wrote in silence until the family came home. It was heaven.

            I don’t know what marriage experts would think of this, but I think it’s awesome. It’s awesome to be understood. And it’s amazing to be valued and loved just the way I am. Maybe even because of the way I am. What a gift.

Stubborn for God

            I love Little House on the Prairie.  Always have, always will. (I tried really hard to get my 9-year-old daughter to dress up like Laura for Halloween this year, but she refused.)   I remember the location in my elementary school library where the Little House books were lined up in a beautiful, long row.  Little House in the Big Woods, On the Banks of Plum Creek, The Long Winter…week after week I happily followed the same routine: I would return one Laura Ingalls Wilder masterpiece and check out another. I loved the adventure, the hardships, the love and the simplicity of prairie life.

 

            When I got a little older, I regularly watched the television series after school.  The show, I thought, was even better than the books.  The characters were perfectly depicted by the actors, so much so that I didn't even think about them being actors at all.  They just seemed like the real people -- Pa, Ma, Laura, Mary, Carrie, and Grace -- living out their adventures right before my eyes.  Pa was so strong and loving.  Ma was so gentle and kind.  And the girls were so innocent and relatable.  The show tugged on all my heartstrings, and I learned good values about family and faith.  There were always obstacles to overcome, like a drought destroying the year’s crops, or Pa struggling to find work.  There were wagon accidents and barn fires, and if you saw the episode where Mary goes blind, you will never, ever forget it.  The biggest hardship of all, it seemed, was dealing with the Olesons.  Nels Oleson was a good man, but his wife, Harriet, was dreadful. Nellie was a thorn in Laura’s side, and Willie was always causing trouble (although I thought he was cute.)  No matter how hard things got, the Ingalls family pulled through.  I loved when Pa and Ma would eat fire-popped corn in bed, Mary and Laura would conspire with one another when they should have been going to sleep, and sometimes after dinner, Pa would play his fiddle while the girls clapped and danced around.

            My third daughter was born in early August, and that summer during the last couple months of my pregnancy there were two things I consistently craved: Dairy Queen and Little House on the Prairie.  We borrowed the DVDs from the library, binge-watching most of the nine seasons.  We had to skip several episodes because some of the story lines were traumatic and scary.  We got to where we could tell during the first few seconds of the show, because of the music they would play, if it was going to be happy, sad, or scary.

            In one episode Pa was away, working for the railroad, and Ma was overwhelmed with taking care of everything at home.  One night, after it had grown dark, she heard the animals riled up outside, and when she went out to check to make sure everything was OK, Laura and Mary followed her.  They were by the fence when Ma told the girls in a hushed, urgent tone to go inside.  They looked startled, but they immediately obeyed, quietly making their way back to the house, and it was a good thing they did, because there was a black bear in their front yard!  

            I realized with stunning clarity that night as I cuddled on the couch with my two daughters, that if that had happened in our yard to our family, the story would have ended differently.  See, if I would have told my strong-willed daughters, who were 6 and 4 at the time, to quietly go inside, they would have questioned me, and argued with me, and said, “No, I want to stay here with you.” And, “Why do we have to go inside??”  And little did I know that the baby in my enormous belly would have the strongest will of all of my daughters.  That bear would have eaten us for dinner!

            Everyone in our family is strong-willed in varying degrees.  I remember telling my Mom about how stubborn my daughters were, and she graciously reminded me that I was also strong-willed – in fact, the strongest-willed of her five children– and that she didn't view it as a bad thing.  It may have been challenging when I was little, but the upside was that as I got older, I was not easily swayed.  Sometimes that meant I stubbornly resisted new ideas and wasn't open to new things, like when the girls’ basketball coach tried to get me to play basketball in 7^th and 8^th grade (I was 5’8”), but I knew that I didn't want to do it.  I never even entertained the idea.  And sometimes it protected me from making bad choices, like in high school when someone close to me tried repeatedly to get me to smoke cigarettes - I had decided I wasn't going to ever try it and I stubbornly persisted in my refusal.

            For several years when my children were younger, I met once a week with a friend to pray for our kids.  One week, my friend prayed an unusual prayer - one that I had never heard before.  She prayed that her kids would be stubborn for God, and that they would follow after Him in a determined, persistent way.

            I've been thinking about what it means to be stubborn for God. There are plenty of  times that I am stubborn for myself, because I want my way, I want my point of view to be understood, and I want to be right.   To be stubborn for God would mean laying down my own agenda, my own desires, and being determined to do what He wants in any situation.  

           Jesus was stubborn for His Father in the way He lived, 

the way He loved others, the way He forgave, 
and the way He chose to do His Father’s will.  

He spoke out against injustice and meaningless religiosity. 
He loved the unlovable. 

He was determined to persistently go after those who were lost and hurting.  

He was stubborn all the way to the Cross, not stubborn for his human desires, 
but stubborn for God and His plan.  He was stubborn for us.  
And death could not overcome Him.  

The grave could not hold Him.  
Jesus Christ - stubborn to save, stubborn to love and forgive, 

stubborn to live again and give us life eternal.              

book reports, teen drivers, and ISIS

         Recently my nine-year-old daughter was working on her book report assignment while I was watching T.V.  She had to fill in a chart explaining different components of the story and her thoughts about it: main character, setting, plot, etc…  She ran up from the basement with her paper and pencil and whispered in my ear, “Mom, what does the “plot” mean?  I told her it’s like when we play Balderdash and you have to write down a summary of a movie title, telling the gist of the story in just a few sentences.  She runs back down to the basement, and then a few minutes later she’s running back up the stairs.  She whispers again in my ear, “Mom, what is my opinion of the book?”

        I laughed and told her that I couldn't tell her that – she needed to write down what SHE thought of the book!  Later, I thought about how when our kids are little, we do pretty much tell them what to think about things.  Sure, they have their own will (some stronger than others!), but they mimic our opinions on all sorts of matters such as what we think about certain people, personal styles and tastes in food and clothing, and political and spiritual viewpoints. I always got a kick out of the comments my kids would make about their “mock elections” at school during presidential election years.  It was obvious that many kids were “parroting” what they had heard their parents say about the candidates and issues.

        Contrast that with the teen years which are largely about our children branching out and separating from us.  They sometimes take on different viewpoints, shaped by their experiences with friends, in school, and in our culture.  Our oldest daughter just got her driver’s license, and our middle daughter is fourteen. We have had animated - even heated - conversations over social issues and current events, and I am seeing first hand that they are in a different level of discovery mode from when they were little. And they are not at all asking me to tell them what they think about things. 

       As a parent, this can be scary, but I am learning that this breaking away is not only OK, it is necessary.  Because we can only hold onto other people’s values, beliefs and viewpoints for so long before we must decide these things for ourselves.

 

       And at a certain point, our faith must become our own.  Many people identify themselves as a certain religion or denomination because that is what their family is, and that is how they were raised.  Religious tradition can define us like an ethnicity defines us. We’re Italian, we’re Greek. We’re Catholic, we’re Methodist. But authentic faith involves a choice - a personal relationship with God.  All of my daughters have questioned elements of our faith at times, and my prayer continues to be that their questions and doubts will cause their hearts to seek truth, and that their seeking hearts will find answers that lead each of them into a deeper, more authentic faith and relationship with God.

       I recently heard an interview with Kayla Mueller’s family, and while her story is heart-wrenching, it shines hope like a bright star in the darkest, blackest night.

       Kayla was an aid worker, and 25 years old when she was kidnapped by ISIS. She spent eighteen months in captivity until her family confirmed her death earlier this month.

       Kayla’s parents are Christians, and in an interview on the Today show they shared their story: they remembered their caring, compassionate daughter who always wanted to help others, they spoke about their faith in God, and how He has given them strength throughout this horrible ordeal.  Then they read a letter from Kayla, written during her captivity – they received it from fellow prisoners who had been released.  Here is an excerpt from www.today.com:

          “All that I have said in the previous letter stays true. Give your suffering to the      Lord, let our creator support you. Continue to pray, by God I feel your love and  your prayers.

          My heart longs to be with you all as... I have never felt before, but praise be to God you are in my dreams almost every evening and for just those brief moments in my sleeping conscious that we are together I am given a warmth. It's warmth enough for me to wake with a smile. Warmth enough to keep me company through the days, and warmth enough to keep my heart near to home and therefore to God, Mark 12:28-30. "The first of all the commandments is hear O' Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy souls and with all thy mind and with all thy strength. This is the first commandment.

          All my everything,

         Kayla

        This is not just her parent’s faith – it is her own.  She writes about God’s comfort and strength, about God in her waking, God in her sleeping.  She writes scriptures the best she can remember them – God’s word stored in her heart.  She encourages her parents to give their suffering to God.  This is a faith that sustains, and it is a faith that one owns. 

        In my suburban world, I am occupied with book reports, work, play practices, and a new driver in the house.  And more than once I've woken in the middle of the night afraid, thinking about ISIS and what is happening in our world.  It’s hard to really know the extent of the evil that is taking place and I worry how fast and far it will reach.  I worry about our safety, my daughters’ safety and their children’s safety, and I hope.  I hope that God will stop the evil, and I hope and pray that whatever comes, my faith will be strong and I will be found faithful.

       And I hope and pray for my daughters - that their faith will grow strong and become their own.  That God’s Word, planted in their hearts from the time they were little, will grow deep roots, will guide them, protect them, keep them on course, and give them strength throughout their lives. These three remain, and no one can take them away: Faith, Hope, and Love.  And the greatest of these is Love.