Our Holy Chaos

I walked through the empty door frame of my son’s bedroom. Doors are a privilege in our home–not a right–and slamming them is likely to get them removed from their hinges. My son’s door had been removed, alright. It had been slammed, too, several times. To describe things in dad-speak: “It had not been a great evening.” De-escalation had happened, which is why he was remanded to his doorless room. Consequences were coming soon. The delicate work that comes between those steps was about to begin. The secret second step of forgiveness. The room’s only light came from a strip of soft, blue LEDs along the edge of his bed. He lay curled up in a ball with his back to me. The blue glow should have been calming. Honestly, he looked like he’d fallen into a tanning bed, or the biggest bug zapper known to man. I kept the observation to myself but praised God for the little gift of lightening my mood. We had a quiet conversation; punctuated with pauses and tears. Fifteen or so minutes later, I tra...

  So, what is this "Our Holy Chaos Blog" all about and what qualifies me to write?   For most of my married life I have been found to say that family life is chaotic.   It is not bad chaos, but instead holy chaos.   I love every minute of the chaos that God has gifted me with.   We got married and within four months found out that our world would be tipped upside down as we were (unexpectedly) expecting our first child.   This was not our plan, but I am so thankful that it was God’s plan.   God does not call the qualified, he qualifies the call…and a call to beautiful chaos is what He has given to us.   In this blog we will share our experiences.   We will share some of our lives with you, in hopes that we can help others to learn from our mistakes and grow from our successes.   I am a mother of five very diverse children.   The wife of a permanent deacon and a full-time supervisor who works more than 40 hours a week to provid...

  A high school teacher once assigned me a research paper about racism. The Internet was brand-new, so I plugged something into  AltaVista —I'm old—and clicked the first link. The article was confusing. It was about a woman who regretted marrying a man of a different race. After scrolling up, I saw that I had randomly arrived at a fan site for the Ku Klux Klan. I've paid attention to the source of my information ever since. Media bias is a strange topic to open a blog about living the Christian faith amid family life. But stay with me. What do you have faith in? What truths do you trust to shape your actions, words, and perspective? What's the foundation of your conviction? You want to know these answers before jumping into a new blog. Don't you? "Consider the source" is the first rule of research. Understand the source's biases. Account for the source's assumptions. Decide if you trust it. The goal of this post is to make your job easy. You'll kno...