Breathing

I just arrived at home. There's a candle burning. The dishes are washed. Christmas music playing softly. My sleeping little angel in the corner and his daddy drinking tea and reading in the other corner. I'm ever so thankful for that man and for the peace he and our home pour into me.

*deep breath*

I need to work the knots out of these shoulder muscles and slow down.

I'm keeping up with things and continuing to invest in everyone I need to invest in, but only at the expense of soul rest, you know what I mean?

In the winter I started a new role at my job and I just did so again a couple weeks ago. It was the same way back in February - several weeks of things feeling insane while I attempted to incorporate the changes into a manageable rhythm. That time and this time my writing totally went south until I got a handle on things. It's always sort of ironic because when I'm going-going-going is really when I want to write to get it all out of my head.

And now my sleeping angel slowly started moving and is now sitting up with his paci bobbing his mouth and staring at me with his big blue eyes. This calls for Mommy/Judah snuggles.

Worst Night of Sleep Ever

I have been MIA in the blog world this week because I'm so busy. Good busy, though.

I'm taking in Anne Voskamp's 1,000 Gifts way too quickly in order to be ready for a book group on Saturday.

Last weekend we took a road trip and saw my parents and grandparents and brother, and rain, and the beginnings of a real Fall!

Today we met with a new refugee family we'll be mentoring, and they speak Malay (yay!).

This weekend my sister comes and spends her Fall break with us. (yay!)

So, since I am too busy to write a real post, I leave you with a story.
That is my brother and a friend, about 12 years ago.I took that picture. We were spending the night in a honai, a Papuan hut.

It was probably one of the worst nights of sleep in my entire life - my version of the classic American childhood experience of going to sleep in a tent in the back yard and then being freaked out and cold or hot or rained out and miserably sleepless.

The photo was taken during the still adventurous part of the night. We brought our piles of necessities down from the house, which was a spectacle in and of itself because most people that live in those honais don't own as much as we "needed" for one night. We made a fire, we cooked ramen and had fruit, we played games on our sleeping bags by candle light.

Except, as we were eating and playing games on our sleeping bags we saw roaches crawling up between the slats that make up the floor of a honai. I am not afraid of snakes or spiders or rats, but I loathe (and am actually for real allergic to) cockroaches. Despite disposing of our leftovers, the roaches were still around. Soon Linda and I were huddled on our sleeping bags, attempting to make sure no part of us was touching the floor, since a roach could be on the opposite side of each wood slat. Our brothers laughed at us and told us to calm down. We laughed nervously, continued to freak out, attempted to calm each other down, and then still continued to freak out.


When bedtime hit, the fire still kept the hut hot but there was NO way we were falling asleep exposed to the spiders, roaches, and flies that it was now clear shared the hut with us. So, initially we sweated in our sleeping bags until the fire died out and the darkness left us unable to see what might be crawling around.

I don't know how long I laid awake, but I got very little sleep and was extra relieved for morning. I'd much rather sleep outside on the ground than on the floor of an insect-infested hut! There are limits to the adventurous of this sorta-but-not-really Jungle Girl

7 Quick Takes - 10 months old

At 10 months, Judah is...

1. A determined climber
...must.... get.... higher...
And so if he's standing next to the couch while we're sitting on it, he will stand on our feet. Anything to get a couple extra inches of height. I found him like this the other day:

2. A little quirky. 
You do random hilarious things like... carry your favorite spoon around in your mouth. Just hanging out as you crawl around.


3. Getting into everything. 
You are longing to tap on the laptop keyboards like mom and dad, but dad won't let you. You want to check out all the cabinets and drawers and the fireplace, and the trash cans. You do love the dishwasher, and that is allowed!
4. Learning the word "no" and letting me know when you don't like what I'm telling you. 
When we say "no" you either look at us and try to figure out what we're trying to stop you from doing or you refuse to look at us because if you don't look the problem will go away? (look at that face!)
5. Starting to make friends.
You LOVE other kids. Depending on your mood you'll either sit and stare at them as if you are totally amazed at how fast they run and the way they talk, or you crawl towards them as fast as you possible can, completely delighted by them.


6. Standing up! 
And now taking your first steps! And today I found your first tooth! *gasp*... please slow down little man! This was just over a week ago, and he's way past this now.


7. Momma's little man.

On Growing Up Together and Old Friends

I have thisfriend, Jared. 

We were in the same class infourth grade, but he tells me he doesn’t remember any of us girls until years later. That’s the kind of guy he was. Mr. Sports, for sure. 

Once we hithigh school, we became good friends. The kind of good friends where he drove mecrazy like a brother and yet I also trusted his character as I did no other guyaround. His mom was my teacher and class sponsor. His dad is the hero of many of my good friends.

When I cameback to college in Chicago, Jared came to visit. Isaac had just shown up andJared taught him to say, “You’re pretty, kiss me” in Indonesian, which prettymuch makes Jared instrumental in getting us together. Okay, not really, but hewas one of my only friends from “home” who met Isaac in those early years. Wekept up with each others’ lives, which were generally pretty similar. Jared andTeresa got married a year after Isaac and I did. My brother and sister-in-law lived with them for a couple of years. They were at our friend Rachel’swedding this summer in London. I just loveit when friends stay friends. You know? I love it that he's still Jared after all this time.

Jared’s wifejust linked to a sermon Jared preached. Really? Jared is preaching a sermon? Inthe words of our former class sponsor, “I can just see you all in 10 years withthe boys still stealing the girls' hair ties.” How did we grow up? And how didJared get to be such a fantastic preacher? 

In any case,I listened to the message and got all teary, for one thing because Jared isgreat and he’s an adult and that’s weird, but also because I love his lifestories – because I lived them too. He told these stories, and you can see my commentsadded in red. 

I absolutely loved growing up in (Papua). I thrived in it,whether it was being carried around in a net bag on my dad’s back or going tothe beach to go snorkeling or spear fishing, Indonesia had lots of outdoor activitiesand I loved that. I loved getting to hike through jungles and go to waterfalls,and most of all, I loved going to the beach (yeah,remember what I said about Jared not remembering the girls in our class? This iswhy. He was too busy playing outside)

As I lookback on my time in Indonesia, one thing that I’m very, very thankful for is Ihad the opportunity to play a lot of football. When I say football I don’t meanthe weird oblong shaped ball you use here in America, I’m talking about the roundkind, a soccer ball, and in Indonesia anything that was round and could bekicked was a soccer ball. I remember when I was about seven years old my parentsgave me a little mini rubber basketball. It did not matter to me that it wasbright orange like a basketball or that it had stripes on it like a basketball,we could kick it, therefore it must be a soccer ball. I remember spending manymany afternoons with my Indonesian friends playing soccer withthat rubber basketball. As I grew up I got to play soccer on a number ofdifferent Indonesian teams and it became a big part of my life and a big partof my story. Heh. I grew up with it too, but notbecause I was playing it – I stink at nearly all sports. More because I waswatching it. I had a massive crush on a guy on Jared’s team so was a big “fan”and went to watch them practice. My most embarrassing moment involved that soccer team. My brother later played for the same team. 

I was 19when I left Indonesia. I can remember like yesterdaythe day that I left, because it was the hardest thing that I had ever gonethrough in my entire life and the hardest day of my life. Si. I wrote about that same thing. I can picturesitting in the waiting room waiting to board the plane withmy family and my friends that were there to say goodbye. Jared left six months after me. When I left, he was the lastone to hug Rachel, Fiona and I goodbye at the exit of that waiting room as wesobbed our way to the airplane. I had a friend named Ben and he cameover with this bracelet that I’m wearing today. Ben wasat the airport with us too. Saying goodbye to him was brutal. It’s nothingexpensive or made out of gold or silver and he didn’t buy it at a jewelrystore. It’s actually a rubber 0 ring, a seal for a fuel drum that was probablyused to fuel a Mission Aviation Fellowship plane. He gave it to me as a waythat I can remember Indonesia. Most durable braceletsever. As I got on the plane I can remember sitting there as it wastaxiing away down the airstrip and I had tears just flowing down my cheeksbecause I was saying goodbye to everything that I knew. I was saying goodbye tomy family, saying goodbye to my friends, to my home. To the point where if Iwanted to come back and visit I would have to get a visa just to get in thecountry. I remember sitting on that plane and looking at this rubber braceletand feeling like it was the only thing I have left of my childhood… of my timein Indonesia. It’s a very difficult sort of loss andtraumatic goodbye experience to describe since it’s so far from the experienceof most Americans. I did it too. The amazing thing to me is that Jared IS going home.

One of themost precious things that we could get wasAmerican candy. We loved American candy. Yes. As amatter of fact, Jared and my class took our senior trip to Australia mainlywith money we raised selling American candy to the community. Jared bought me a few packets of my favorite - M&Ms.  Specificallyfor me, my favorite was reeses peanut butter cups. If I ever got reeses Icherished them highly. They were also my dad’s favorite, so when I got them Icouldn’t leave them out in the open because I knew my dad would find them. Itwas something I had to watch out for. So normally when I got the candy I wouldeat a little and then take the rest to my room and hide it. Now inIndonesia that is a very bad idea. For one thing it’s very hot and anythingthat that you don’t put in the fridge will melt very quickly. But worse thanthat there are a lot of bugs in Indonesia and more than few times I went backto my stash of candy and I opened it up and found the chocolate melted and abunch of ants running around with peanut butter breath.  Funny, a missionary recentlywrote about this, complete with photos!

I love it when old friends stay friends

How I worked full time and nursed a baby, and why I'm not sure I'd do it over again

I just assumed I'd breastfeed. It's by far the best thing for the baby if you can pull it off, it's healthier, cheaper, etc.

And then it just so happens we ended up having a baby in the middle of Isaac going to seminary while we're dependent on my job to pay for school and life and health insurance. We ended up working out a deal where I continued working full time and would work from home while Isaac was in classes.

Enter this bulky beauty:


The top-of-the line Medela breast pump I got at a shower enabled me to successfully feed Judah 100% momma's milk for six months, and to go on without supplementing with formula for eight months. And the truth is that I loved nursing Judah. I'm one of those mommas who could wax eloquent about what a beautiful experience it is to snuggle with your milk-drunk baby, knowing that every roll they add is totally from your nourishment. You are protecting their health, you are bonding....It was time to quiet and bond in the midst of the craziness of infancy and change. Judah fed beautifully from the beginning and adjusting to breast feeding really wasn't painful for me.

However......

1. While I loved nursing, I did not so much love pumping. First off the beauty of feeding a child is reduced to a mechanical process, which mostly makes you feel like a cow. It ain't pretty, people. There's nothing sentimental or sexy about it.

2. Secondly, as I mentioned before, pumping at work is a massive pain. There wasn't a place to go and I ended up being shuttled from empty office to empty office with a door-stopper and an easy-install set of blinds to put over the glass door so I could have some privacy. My work tried hard to keep working out an option for me but it's a pain for everyone involved, me included. If I had back-to-back meetings I'd have a hard time getting some time to get away, and keeping up with a schedule (especially at the beginning) is nearly impossible. Then there's the fact that keeping freezer bags of momma's milk in the fridge is awkward.

3. Speaking of those freezer bags, keeping milk ready for a hungry baby was a pain for daddy at home. It meant he had to think ahead and have a constant cycle of milk thawing and warming. It's not as fast as just mixing up some formula with warm water.

4. It's also hard to sync pumping and nursing. If I'd pumped two hours ago and Judah ate four hours ago, I wouldn't be ready to feed him so he'd need a bottle and I'd have to pump again. So - I fed Judah in person even less than we expected.

5. Baby adjusts to the bottle. While we did great at feeding while I was at home, once I started back at work Judah started to adjust to having a bottle the majority of the time. The fast flow was preferable, and over the months he got less and less patient with waiting for my let-down, sometimes resulting in a screaming baby and definitely NOT a beautiful bonding nursing experience.

6. Supply issues. It's harder to keep up your supply when you're not with your baby. It's a weird hormonal thing, and you have to do things like keep photos of your baby around your office. While of course things were great for months,  at about four months my supply started to struggle. I took fenugreek (which makes you smell like maple syrup), ate oatmeal, drank dark beer, and drank lots of water. My supply recovered and my momma friend Katie helped supplement until I was over the slump. However, after that I was always just barely meeting Judah's demand and sometimes not meeting it and relying on the supplement. At 8 months my body just sort of decided it was done, and we bought formula to supplement. Now, two months later, I've got nothing left.


So - given all of those difficulties, it's hard for me to know if it was worth it. I suppose that since I was given a pump (they're expensive!) and got to work all of this for free, it was worth it. After all, Judah was given the health benefits of momma's milk and has only gotten mildly sick once. Sometimes it's just hard for me to remember that when I see how simply the formula is going now (however, $$$!!)

But then again.... by far the best way to kick me back to a weight I haven't been since high school with almost no working out and definitely no dieting? Feed a baby for 8 months.Seriously. I feel so good.

Bart Ehrman vs Daniel Wallace - "Is the text of the New Testament trustworthy?"

Isaac and I went to a debate on Saturday night between Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace over the topic of "Can we trust the text of the New Testament."

It was SO much fun.

I do realize that thinking a debate about textual criticism is fun officially makes us complete nerds. These are my thoughts after the debate, but I am a lay person. For the thoughts of someone that is himself studying these issues, you can see this blog, which when I stumbled upon it I realized was written by the guy sitting beside me, who I did not talk to. My apologies, sir.

In any case, this debate had a lot of buzz surrounding it and we bought tickets immediately. The first 500 went fast so they moved the debate to the larger auditorium on the campus of SMU. 1,500 people sold out the place. Why? Because of the speakers. Experts in the field of text criticism with opposite conclusions. I put both of their bios on the bottom of the post. In the crowd I saw DTS students, people with "atheist" on their t-shirts, Isaac's professors, church staff, and a couple I know where she is a Christian and he's an atheist.

It was fascinating. Both men were lucid and funny, but it ended up not being a debate so much about the evidence for the New Testament text as it was about presuppositions. I expected Ehrman to attack the text itself, since he is a textual critic and that's what the title of his books hint at. Instead he sort of argued from our points of ignorance - the first 150 years after the texts were originally written before our early fragments and manuscripts. Ehrman granted so many of Wallace's points - that the New Testament has a vast amount more evidence supporting it than any other ancient document. That while there are lots of little variants in the text, the vast majority of them make no difference in the actual meaning, and few if any make any difference to Christian theology. That even without the early documentary evidence that we have, the early church fathers quote the scripture so much that you can almost recreate the entire NT from their quotes alone.

What was his point? The statement he made again and again was that while the evidence for the text was good and actually unparalleled, we don't know for sure. Can we be certain? Is it proven? Wallace kept coming back and pointing out that he wasn't saying that we could absolutely know for sure or that we couldn't know for sure - he was just examining the evidence and saying that based on the mountains of evidence it looks as though we probably have a trustworthy text today.

It was fascinating. Wallace sounded like the scientist, since he was the one following where the evidence led him. Wallace gave loads of evidence, often from Ehrman himself, for the unmatched reliability of the NT text, and for the field of text criticism to help solve the places where there are variants - to get back to the "original" text. Most of it Ehrman didn't disagree with. Ehrman just kept saying that before the earliest fragments begin there's a gap and so we can't know for sure that the text is trustworthy.

It's so interesting that this was Ehrman's point. Can anyone that's read his books tell me if this is his main argument? It doesn't make any sense to me considering that his life's work and expertise is in textual criticism, a field that assumes that you can examine text and if your textual evidence is good enough and you use good textual criticism principles, you can discern the errors in transmission and discern the original. And yet here he is undermining his own field by saying that no matter how excellent your evidence is, essentially if you don't have the original, the readings can't be trusted.

In the Q & A later someone asked Ehrman what sort of manuscript evidence he would need in front of him to convince him of the reliability of the text. He said that he'd want a copy made within the first week of writing and with .01% variance. Really? So essentially he says it's not trustworthy unless it's one step away from the original. Wallace's first and perhaps most necessary point was that there are three paths to take, and Ehrman walks the far left - radical skepticism. Wallace is a moderate. He may be a theological conservative, but his approach to the text is moderate.

And yet later in the Q & A someone asked a ridiculous question about how the New Testament was decided at the Council of Nicaea (a view perpetuated by The DaVinci Code). Ehrman dismissed this as a modern myth. His phrasing caught my ear though. He said something like, "We know what happened at the council, it was written about, and that (deciding the scriptures) didn't happen." Okay, so in Ehrman's standards we have textual evidence enough to "know" about the Council of Nicaea. And yet we have a vast amount MORE textual evidence backing up the New Testament, and yet he said again and again that we "can't know". Why the double standard?

I thought both men did a great job. Of course I'm biased because I agree with Wallace, but he did an excellent job.  I've been thinking about what Ehrman's intent was, and I think that more than anything it's to cast doubt into the minds of the conservative Christians who know nothing about how we got the Bible we read today but base their faith on a literal reading of the Bible. For someone who has just assumed that this is the scripture passed from the disciples on down in this exact form, understanding how various letters and manuscripts came to be accepted and passed down in this form can shake up your faith. Indeed, a KJV only person asked a question, and another person asked (accusatorily, as if he might catch Ehrman in his tracks) if in all of his work he'd found any pages or even paragraphs added to the NT text. There were silence and chuckles as Ehrman pointed out a few examples that he'd already used in the presentation and that anyone who has studied the history of the Bible or textual criticism is very familiar with. It's funny to us, but the reality is that there really ARE a lot of Christians that are ignorant about their Bible, and to them Ehrman's message is daunting.

In any case, it was great. The Q & A part of the program exhibited the ignorance of a great many people on either sides of the issue. A number of times someone asked a question angrily as if they were really making a strong point, and the audience would first sit in amazed silence that such a stupid comment was actually just made, and then would collectively burst into laughter. Sort of sad, but really, really deserved. I mean, really deserved. One guy thought he was calling Wallace out by pointing out that the New Testament is about Jesus but Greek doesn't even have a "J". Hah! I mean.... has this guy never learned another language? Or someone else who asked if these scholars that copied scripture were the same that condemned Galileo. What?

The debate was recorded but it isn't accessible yet. I highly recommend you listen to it when it comes out!


Bart Ehrman is a professor and scholar in the field of textual criticism. He literally wrote the book of textual criticism with his own professor, Metzger. Isaac has had his books as textbooks in his graduate studies on textual criticism. He's also become known on the popular level, though, because he came out of fundamentalism to evangelicalism to liberalism to agnosticism (he's a Moody and Wheaton grad). At the moment I'd call him an agnostic evangelist, and that's why he intentionally is willing to do debates like this in the Bible Belt. He wants to engage conservative Christians and directly challenge their beliefs. He's written books like Jesus, Interrupted, Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible, and Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. His work is quite personal to me not only because of his attendance at Moody, but because his writings have drawn my friends away from Christianity.

On the opposite side you have Daniel Wallace. Wallace is also a textual critic, and on the scholarly level has written the textbook on Greek grammar that everyone uses, Harvard, Princeton, etc. He's started the Center for Biblical Manuscripts, which is going around the world doing high quality photography of all of the ancient biblical manuscripts so that they are recorded for history. He's a professor at Isaac's school and has directly engaged the ideas of Ehrman in an essay, "The Gospel According to Bart: A Review Article of Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman." He is an evangelical Christian and one of my husband's professors.