HEAVY CHAINS OF GRACE

....grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift.

Ephesians 4:7

I had a newborn baby and two kids in training pants. My husband, an architecture student at the University of Tennessee, spent 12+ hours a day at school either in classes or working in the design studio. After a quick pit stop for dinner, he'd head back out to a night job that helped us eke by month to month. Too little money, a tiny apartment, three small children, and isolated from other adults - that last year of school was a dark, difficult time for me.

But God did not let me despair completely. When I felt particularly lonely, someone from church would call or stop by unannounced, just to check in. Money was running low at the end of the month - Mary, a sweet sister in Christ, called to say she had found a sale on chicken that she couldn't pass up at the local Food Lion. She had bought all the chicken left in the case, but had nowhere to store so much meat - could she bring some of it by for my family to use? When I stood staring vacantly out the kitchen window one morning with tear-filled eyes, praying for some sign that God cared that life was so hard for me at the moment...God sent a tremendous, irridescent male peacock strolling through the yard. A peacock! How weird is that?! I wiped my eyes and laughed aloud.

Physically, emotionally, financially, spiritually - everything about life at the time felt like leaning into the harness of a two-ton wagon. Much labor, much weariness, very little rest or joy. One Sunday afternoon when Steve didn't have to be at school or work and was free to watch the babies, I left the apartment alone and drove to the nearby WalMart to just wander up and down the aisles by myself. I remember as I drove home, thinking, "What's to keep me from just driving all the way to California?" I had the car. I had the gas card. It would be days before anyone would be able to figure out where I'd gone. I could just disappear into the sunset. Hmmmm.... I pulled into the driveway and headed back inside to the yoke.

Later, I told a dear friend that, during those bleak months, God's grace to me had been a short and heavy chain. "What?!" she asked.

"I could have run away," I explained. "There were days I wanted nothing more than to just walk out and leave everything. Lots of women do, you know." My friend looked at me in disbelief. I continued, "But God constrained me to stay."

Nearly 20 years have passed since that dark season. Although the horizon has not been cloudless all those years (rather, it has sometimes been again quite as dark), I can confess that there has been much, much light along the way. Much light that I would have missed if I had run away to California. Not a day passes that I don't thank God for His intervention in my life, for holding me still when, in the flesh, I would foolishly run away. Seems I'm made most acutely aware of my need of salvation in the dark places, and it's in the midst of these low valleys that Grace comes distilled to its sweetest and brightest.

What about you? If you are in a very dark place, if it feels like you are chained in a small box with no light - do not despair. God can squeeze close to you inside the narrowest box, and heavy chains are often forged of Grace.

But the Lord said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

2 Corinthians 12:9-10

TITUS 2-SDAY - MOM'S BASIC MENU

Titus 2-sday won out for the name of the new weekly post - welcome to Titus 2-sday! The plan is that every Tuesday, I'll post something related to life at home...no cosmic lessons here, but maybe something helpful to another wife and mother, especially if you're just beginning this adventure!

MOM'S BASIC MENU
Like most women, I learned to cooked from my mother. Cooking is one thing - planning menus is something totally different. Planning a week's worth of menus is not rocket science, but I thought I'd pass along some tips I've picked up over the years.

My Mom's number one piece of advice - more color for better nutrition. Imagine a plate of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and a roll. Okay, I love all that stuff, too, but picture it - beige, beige, beige, and beige. And oober heavy on the carbs. Mom's basic rule of thumb for meals was - a protein (brown), a starch (white or yellow), always something green, and, if you want a little extra, a fruit or additional non-starchy vegetable. Dinner might look like this...fried chicken, rice, broccoli, and fresh squash. Or, meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, and pear salad. Following this formula, you're less likely to overload on starchy foods high in carbohydrates, and more likely to consume a healthy variety of nutrients. Plan meals with lots of color. This formula provides a good basic guideline for planning menus, but we don't follow it every single night at our house. Which leads to tip #2.

Plan menus to alternate between more expensive/less expensive meals, and between more-labor-intensive/easier-to-prepare meals. We may do the meat/starch/veggies meal three nights a week. One night a week, we'll do a pasta meal - spaghetti and salad, pasta primavera, etc. - or something like black beans and rice with greens on the side. These are easy and quick, but still meet Mom's color guideline. At least one night a week, more often if the budget is tight, we fix soup. Soup is a great meal because it's cheap and is a tasty way to use up leftovers from a meat-&-three dinner. Not infrequently, we fix breakfast for dinner - again, this is cheap and easy, although not typically the best meal nutritionally. Since we eat out very rarely, I suppose this is our equivalent of a modern family's run to McDonald's!

Finally, a thought on proportions. Perhaps because we lived in the country and had a garden every summer, my Mom was big on vegetables. Some meals, we skipped the meat and the starch altogether. Fresh green beans, sliced ripe tomatoes, yellow squash with onions, juicy canteloupe - we would stuff ourselves with produce just in from the sunshine! Many folks build meals around the meat and potatoes, giving these items most of the space on the plate. Banish the meat and starch to one corner of the plate - say, 1/3 or less - and let vegetables, fruits, and salads take over the remaining 2/3 of the plate.

What about you - any favorite menus to share?

Next week....what if your kids don't like vegetables?

TEST DAY!

Breakfast is over and the dishes are washed. Animals are fed and morning chores checked off. Time to start school.

Me: "Helen, are you ready to work on your math?"

Helen: "Sure. What lesson are we on?"

Me: "You have a test today."

Helen: Her face lights up. "A test?! Yay!"

Helen bounces across the room with a smile, grabs a sharp pencil, and settles down to work through Math Test 21. Why can't I react like that to a test?!

Actually, all my kids like tests - at least the kind they have to do as part of their schoolwork. The reason for this fondness for tests isn't too complicated. On a non-test day in math, for example, we check over any missed problems from yesterday's homework, then read through and discuss a new lesson. Finally, depending on age, each child works through 25-30 problems in the new problem set, reviewing familiar concepts and practicing new ones. For my 5th grader, this means about 30-40 minutes of math work...for my highschool sophomore, maybe an hour and a half. But on test day - no review from yesterday, no lesson to discuss, and a cool 20 problems in black ink on a white sheet of paper. Because they spend so much time practicing their math on other days, because they really know the material, tests are easy cheesy and take only a fraction of the time required for a regular lesson. A test is really a kind of holiday - WooHoo!

I've written before about how miserably I handle tests in life. I usually don't even recognize a test until I'm in the middle of it and either freaking out or swinging punches or both. But maybe if I prepared more deliberately every day for tests - like my school kids - I could approach tests differently. If I took more time to study the Book, to think about (pray about) the lessons, then maybe, when I find myself facing a test, I could respond like Helen. Maybe I could respond with joy.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness...

James 1:2

SIGNS OF SPRING

While taking the dogs for their "long" walk Sunday afternoon, we stopped at the Robin Hood Tree so that three of the kids could practice their climbing. The Robin Hood Tree is a HUGE sycamore with great spreading branches perfectly spaced for climbing halfway to heaven. While Steve and I rested in the sunshine, I noticed unopened buds at the ends of the sycamore twigs. Buds! I mentioned The Greening in an earlier blog - but there are other signs that "Aslan is on the move" and winter is finally melting into spring. At our house, I've noticed....

Egg production is up in the henhouse. Ben's hens are laying over twice as many eggs as they were laying just a month ago. Egg salad sandwiches for lunch today - yum!

Everything with fur is shedding. The dogs are shedding all over the house - yuck. Martha says when she brushes Little John, she has to pause often to clean wads of winter hair out of the bristles.

Green things are poking out of the ground! I've found little green bumps at the base of last summer's dead hydrangea stems, and the irises and daylilies are pushing shoots up toward the sun.

The neighbor's bull was in our field again this morning. Have you ever heard an amorous bull, stalking the neighboring bull's herd? It sounds something like the low, rolling, prolonged thunder of a lion roaring out on the savanna. Scary, really, if you didn't know what it was. That's what I woke up to this morning. In the Bible, the phrase "it was the time of year when men went to war" is used to refer to spring. On the farm, we could say, "It was the time of year when bulls jump/knock down fences."

We are counting down lessons in our school work, racing to the back cover of the book. My fifth-grader has taped a poster to the wall showing the number of math lessons left in her book, and every day she marks a square off. This is more fun than watching the ball drop on New Year's Eve!

The countdown to turkey season has also started - poor Nate, I don't think he's shot anything in over a month. Ben is working on a paper mache turkey decoy, which now occupies one corner of the living room, and various other "turkey gear" is beginning to appear around the house.

I'm hearing more and more talk about possible summer jobs - funny how teenagers seem to be so interested in making money.

I have a growing urge to go outside and dig in the dirt.

Flip flops in Wal-Mart!

What about you? Any signs of spring in your neck of the woods?

JUST FAIL ME

"If I were in regular school, my teacher would just fail me and I could be done!" My highschooler was struggling with a new math concept, had been struggling for two days now, and was ready to just concede failure and move on to something else.

"You are not in regular school, and you are not going to 'fail' this," I insisted. "Maybe if we approach this problem from a different angle..."

We persevered and, eventually, the light came on. "Ooooooh, now I get it!"

My homeschooling adventure began over 16 years ago, when my oldest daughter was five years old. One morning, my lesson plan indicated that we were supposed to cover Lesson ___ in math: learning to count by tens. According to my teacher's manual, I would spend about 20 minutes explaining and illustrating the concept, after which my "students" would need to practice, with my help, counting by tens. By the end of the week, my kindergartener should be able to count by tens without assistance.

"Today, we are going to learn to count by multiples of ten!" I began enthusiastically.

"Oh, you mean like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60....?" my daughter replied.

"Yeah, just like that." Now what was I supposed to do for the next 19 1/2 minutes? We skipped right to her worksheet, which took about 5 minutes to complete, then played sorting and counting games with Legos.

One thing I really like about homeschooling is the freedom to modify lesson plans and schedules to actually meet the educational needs of each child. My son, the reluctant math student, is correct - in a traditional classroom setting, he would probably "fail" a homework lesson or a test, and then just be drug along with the rest of the class as his overwhelmed teacher struggled to meet her course objectives for the majority of her students for the semester. And my kindergartener would have had to sit through a week of lessons hammering the concept of counting by tens, learning nothing new and probably bored out of her gourd. "School" would have quickly become synonymous with "tedium".

Reading over this again before posting, I am reminded of how very personal, specific, and deliberate God is in orchestrating the events of our lives to accomplish our sanctification. The lessons and exercises He has designed for me are very different from those He creates for my husband or my child or my next door neighbor. No standard curriculum or one-size-fits-all lesson plans in His book!

Also, I am reminded of the importance of fellowship with the body of Christ. My tenth-grader was NOT GETTING Lewis structures in Chemistry. His Mom was NOT SUCCEEDING in expanding his understanding. But his college-aged brother, weilding a rainbow of markers, enthusiastically explained Lewis structures in a way that "clicked" in only a matter of minutes. How often a sister or brother in Christ has said or done something that opened my eyes in a new way to the riches of the Gospel, or that pointed me clearly to the practical implications of Christ's work on my behalf!

Just fail me? No way. My Teacher will persevere, sanctifying me in the school of life, until He brings me to Glory.

WHAT SHOULD WE NAME THIS BABY?

Spring is in the air - and that means my brain is buzzing, waking up from the gray fog of winter. It's been full of random thoughts, ideas to write about, gears whirring and humming.

After doing a little research about blog writing, I almost decided to rename The Hurricane Report. Most people under 50 don't get the word play in the title - maybe it would make more sense if my name were Katrina or Andrew, instead of Camille. And I don't write about hurricanes, although I have had visitors who found The Hurricane Report by Googling hurricanes and Hurricane Camille and even writing a hurricane report.

I was thinking about Plain Living - because I mostly write about life, and my life is pretty plain. Or, Titus 2 Mom, because I'm a mom and an "older" woman. But if I changed the name, that might confuse folks. And, I've been associated with Hurricane Camille for as long as I can remember. "Hello, my name is Camille. Glad to meet you." "Oh, like the hurricane! Boy, that was a whopper!"

Then, I got an idea from Christian satirist, Jon Acuff. Jon writes a humorous blog - you can check him out here. Very silly stuff. But on Wednesdays, he sets humor aside and writes some fantastic, serious stuff - calls it Serious Wednesdays. Actually, although I enjoy his regular posts, I like his Serious Wednesday posts the best.

Instead of Jon's Serious Wednesdays, I've decided to add a new post each Tuesday to unpack all the random ideas flitting around in my brain - thoughts about raising children, cooking dinner, helping your middle-schooler write a research paper, picking wild mushrooms. Come to think of it, maybe I've been into the wrong kind of wild mushrooms!

This is where I need your help, Dear Reader. Should the new weekly post be labeled Plain Living, or Titus 2-sday? You can vote in the box on top of the right-hand column of The Hurricane Report. (Oooooh, I feel so techno-savvy - I added that feature all by myself, with no help from one of my teenagers!)

MAN HUGS

All my kids had their six-month dental appointments recently. Our dentist's office is great - they schedule everyone at once, and we just sort of commandeer the facility. Six kids in and out in just over 30 minutes - pretty awesome, huh?!

We drove to town in two vehicles, partly because we don't all fit in one car and partly because my oldest son needed his brother to drive him back to campus that afternoon.

When the two oldest boys came back into the busy waiting room from having their teeth cleaned and x-rayed, they gathered their jackets and caps and prepared to depart. Then, they came and stood front of me as if waiting for some final instructions. It took me a moment to realize, these big boys were waiting for hugs! I set aside the magazine I'd been reading, stood up, and embraced each of them. "See you at the end of the week," #1 Son commented as he gave me a big squeeze. Then #2 Son - "Love you, Mom." Finally, my two huge, hulking man children headed out the door and down the highway.

Those hugs left me smiling for the rest of the day. It blessed me to think that these young men wanted to show their mom some affection - even out in public, in a crowded dentist's office. And it blessed me to think what a natural and comfortable thing that had been for both of them - no hesitation, no self-consciousness or embarrassment to pollute a sweet moment.

We've all known teenagers - cool, bored, disengaged teens - who act embarrassed to even be seen with their parents. I can only imagine that for such kids, hugging their parents in public would be a source of near-fatal humiliation! I am so grateful God has kept my sons from the false notions of propriety that keep many of their peers from blessing their parents with a simple but beautiful gift - a genuinely affectionate hug.

If any kids are reading this - to paraphrase an old TV commercial, have you hugged your Mom today?