Greetings, friends!
We are celebrating a minor medical miracle here in our home this week. Last Friday, my husband had surgery on his left ear. In just a few hours’ time, David went from almost deaf on one side, to hearing better than he has in years. It’s been a little bit like those viral videos of babies hearing for the first time — you know the ones: when the audiologist turns on the cochlear implant and they look around amazed?
Instead of that, it’s been more like this:
DAVID: Are you talking normally right now? Like, are you yelling?
ME: I am not yelling. This is the volume at which I usually talk.
DAVID: *turns up TV to volume he used to watch it at; slowly turns it down*
In the car:
DAVID: What’s that rumbling sound?
ME: It’s the engine running.
The human body is wondrous, created by a God who took joy in the design. To understand a tiny piece of that — literally tiny, concerning the smallest bone in your body — increases our awe all the more.
The Part Where There’s an Essay:
Thought Trends in 2021
Recently I’ve been trying to put into words the thought trends that I see influencing the evangelical Christian church in 2021. There are more, not fewer, than this. As a writing exercise and to encourage dialogue, I’ve attempted to keep the definitions brief.
To be clear, I’ve seen each of these in my conversations with my various communities. They are not pulled from internet interactions with strangers. They are in play in the minds of my friends, family, and myself.
Individualism vs. Corporate Thinking
I hear pastors struggle constantly against individualistic thinking. “Think for the body,” they encourage their church members. Our encouragement can bring life; our sin can bring death. There are decisions that affect those around us every day, even as we may remain ignorant of it.
Many people are reveling in their “personal freedom” these days (more on this term later), seemingly unrepentant about how their individual choices affect those around them. Viruses need only a body in which to mutate and multiply. Covid, in particular the Delta variant, is not even a little bit picky about who to choose. We would do well to think more corporately and less individually -- both in the church and in the larger society in times of a pandemic.
But there is a larger dynamic at play here: no one makes a truly solitary decision. What we are witnessing is people making decisions for different, or smaller, groups than we expect. So instead of thinking for the entire church body, we think like the CrossFit portion of our church. Or the homeschool friends at the co-op. Or the corporate America office-goers. (Read Hannah’s excellent thread on this matter here)
This is why, in my corner of America, where Evangelicals just aren’t getting vaccinated or masking up at the same rates as others, those who are vaccinated feel like they have to hide. Every time I post on Instagram about considering vaccination (which isn’t often), people private message me and thank me for saying something. They feel like freaks for having taken the advice of trained medical professionals. Their unvaccinated friends have made them feel crazy -- like they are “lab rats,” as some posters in my local school district proclaim.
The Westminster Confession teaches us: What is our only hope in life and death? “That we are not our own but belong, body and soul, both in life and death, to God and to our Savior Jesus Christ.” We belong to the Lord. We also belong to one another.
Next week you’re off the hook! I will not have one of these downer essays. I will regale you with a hilarious tale from our family history. Happy Thanksgiving!
For the Anglophiles
I used to be a Pharisee about when you ought to decorate for Christmas. Black Friday was the only acceptable first day of Christmas decorating. When my husband and I traveled to England in 2014, I became a softie and changed my mind. Why? Well, for starters, it’s very dark in England in November. The sun sets around 4 pm. All that darkness can crush your spirit if you don’t try to combat it.
Secondly, and this may surprise you, they don’t have Thanksgiving in England. It seems like the unofficial marker for holding off on Christmas decor is in fact November 11th, Remembrance Day, what we know here in the States as Veterans’ Day. We were fortunate enough to land in England for the first time during the week of Remembrance Day in 2014, when the Tower of London was host to the public art installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red. The moat surrounding the Tower complex was filled with ceramic poppies, one for each life lost in World War I:
The losses suffered by the UK and its colonies during WWI were staggering. “In Britain, 921,000 soldiers were dead, more than 2 million wounded; one of every three British households had a man killed, injured, or taken prisoner.” (from Joseph Loconte’s excellent book A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War)
Everywhere you turn in early November, there are poppies on war monuments. It’s deeply sad, and the light wanes every more and more every day. And then….it’s the 12th. Dawn breaks. That evening, the lights have been switched on. It’s sparkles, candlelight, and twinkling wherever you turn. A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices. My heart grew three sizes that year.
And so I say to the early decorators: be blessed. Winter is dark, life is difficult (more difficult of late), and whatever you can do to lend some light to yourself and others is a delight.
Reads & Listens of the Week
Samuel James’ newsletter is always a good read. Since talk about purity culture has been so prevalent lately, he does the good work of placing it in the time and place in which it sprung up: the 80’s and 90’s. As someone who grew up in purity culture and understands some of the criticism, I thought it was a good nuance to the conversation.
This is not really a read, but a tip on a sale coming up. I’ve used the menu planning site and app Plan to Eat for many years. They have an annual Black Friday sale coming up next week. If you’d like to take advantage of it, you can start a trial membership today and then swing back around during the sale to buy it.
The For the Church podcast had a nice episode this week about “Low Maintenance Church Members.” “Being low maintenance means saying ‘Everybody is off the hook with me.’”
No one talks about food like Ina Garten does, and in this episode, she talks to Stanley Tucci about Julia Child, Italy, and France. These two made me smile so much. In one breath they can say “I don’t like fancy restaurants, I like good restaurants,” and in the next, they can talk about drinking champagne in that amazing souffle restaurant that the Obamas like, and I don’t even care how pretentious that sounds. It was Julia herself who said, “People who love to eat are the best people.”
Perhaps that is what it is like being with other people. Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the world in ways you would rather not. - Piranesi, Susanna Clarke