Posts from the ‘About Priority Stewardship’ Category

Back Story 4

Custom Designed Homes

After all these years and all the figurative baskets, bags, and boxes I’ve filled with home thoughts, I’m still an apprentice to the Builder.

After seeing hundreds, maybe thousands, of families clearly care for their families at least as much as I care for mine, I know biblical home building is not developing a tract home subdivision. Biblical homes are not built from pre-fabricated materials. When everyone does exactly the same activities, in exactly the same way, the result is a peer pressure factory, a cult center, or an agenda apartment, rather than the ideal community of single-family, custom homes.

Principle Homes

Biblical homes are built from pre-designed principles. When everyone uses the same principles in their home building, the structures are all solid and unique, the floor plans all distinct, but equally effective, the designs all different, yet coordinating with the community.

Not that there aren’t problems building a principle home. Sometimes an apprentice gets enamored with one part of the structure, and neglects other parts. Or a whole group of apprentices decide they want someone else’s design. Or one apprentice thinks other apprentices would do better to follow the plan for their house, rather than follow the plans they were given for their own houses. Or another apprentice expects lots of help with their project, keeping others overtime for the benefit of their house, and to the detriment of the other houses.

The apprentice-builders are to work together. The plan does not call for individual, insular, walled fortresses dotting the countryside, but a delightfully designed community with abundant green space, fresh running water, a vibrant corporate worship center, prime empty lots for someone new to begin construction, and every door, an open door.

In my dream house, there is always a fire to sit beside to talk. Come, sit by the fire. Let’s talk about time and biblical house building.

Back Story 3

Schooling vs. Learning

No doubt the fact that I liked school helped me survive the obstacle course institutional education puts in the way of learning. I was a good student, but more than that, I liked learning. When all you know is schooling for most of your conscious existence, it is hard to realize that the most vital challenges for your mind are not the ones offered to you by teachers following lesson plans.

Some other part of me was always trying to make school more like learning. I tried to work smart doing homework. I liked putting creative effort into stodgy assignments. Long before I knew DayTimer or Franklin Covey existed—maybe even before they did exist for all I know—I bought a 5.5 x 8 inch binder, for all my school notes, thus initiating an ongoing search to keep the odd sized paper available for when I’d need it. In college, I read extra books that weren’t assignments, took harp lessons “just for fun” and started a habit of studying the Bible using an amazing little book published by Intervarsity Press called, Decide for Yourself by Gordon Lewis (still available, by the way).

A Different Bible View

The book evenhandedly summarized various theological positions, presented pertinent Bible verses about the topics, and provided the opportunity to assess which position, if any, aligned most closely with the biblical one. That and other studies made it clear to both my husband and me that the Bible was not as obtuse, bigoted, nor irrelevant as it had often been billed. Sometimes it was funny, other times passionate, often strikingly nuanced, refreshingly practical, always substantial.

It became one of the ready reference books for life: the Joy of Cooking for any cooking questions; the Reader’s Digest Book of Home Maintenance (along with a tender, thoughtful gift from my husband, the You Don’t Need a Man to Fix It book) for home problems—and for finally figuring out how electricity works and how water gets to the second floor of a house—something overlooked in school lessons; the Bible for just about everything else.

It turned out that time was pretty important in the Bible—and roles, life priorities, motives, ambitions, plans, family relationships, finances, children, love, work ethic, spousal needs—everything I’d thought was important about home and a whole lot more. Stepping across the threshold into a biblical home opened up the world, the mind, and eternity. Here was a work environment worthy of best practices, an executive career worthy of the investment, a product matched by no other—and the Boss? Unsurpassed in every way. No superlative super enough. Brilliant Mind. Pure Spirit. Unlimited Resources.

And He was willing to show me how to build a home.

Priceless.

Back Story 2

Sitting on the green sofa, looking at the pink walls and the orange carpet day after day put me onto an important truth about home. Its most powerful resource was time.

Such thinking may have only been psychological compensation: consoling myself with thoughts that having time made up for not having money. We certainly were never going to get more time, and there was always the slim chance we might get more money. Limited resources are more valuable, right?

Renewable, though, time was renewable—every day a new day, every hour a fresh hour. What renewable resource could be valuable if it was that plentiful? Not only plentiful, but already distributed and saturating the whole market. What does everyone have that anyone values?  The entire economy rests on people needing or wanting things they don’t have, not something everyone already has for free.

On the other hand, time couldn’t be hoarded or saved, like gold or money; that would be a point in its favor for being valuable. Back and forth I’d go, considering the relative merits of time.

Asking the Right Questions

I will admit to quickly running out of ideas of what to do around the little homestead. I mean, how much vacuuming and dusting does a one bedroom apartment need? Wasn’t that, however, more a problem with my mind, rather than a problem of either the homestead or our scheme to have me at home?

I completely missed the significance of that question intruding in my mind. Not until long after did I recognize it as an early example (in my life, at least) of an important life skill: getting the right answer requires asking the right question.

Just as an infinite number of unmarked points reside between any two points on the number line, so between any two questions lay answers to a myriad of unasked questions. The best lawyers, policemen, and parents know how to fish in that sea between obvious questions. I was none of those, so when I started wondering with myself, “What more should I know to make the most of my time at home?” it was a wildly unfamiliar sensation. Part of me was creatively challenging another part of me to stretch myself and not settle for status quo or mediocre. Part of me was making another part of me uncomfortable. Part of me was acting like a teacher or a parent or an impertinent friend to myself. It was a game changer.

Back Story 1

I was a dinosaur from day one. Less than three months after completing my undergraduate degree in three years (Phi Beta Kappa), I was not heading to graduate studies, a high-paying job, or a clinical internship. No, I was off to a small, furnished apartment with pink walls, orange carpet, and a green sofa as a twenty-one year old cultural anomaly: a stay-at-home wife with no children and no disabilities.

Honestly, who can relate to that?

Whatever were we thinking, my fresh-faced young husband—who had to go prematurely gray before people stopped asking if the “man of the house” was home when he answered the door—and I?

Didn’t we know I would be bored sitting at home all day with nothing to do? I mean really nothing to do, because in another swing at radicalism, one of our pre-nuptial agreements was to not have a television for at least three years—the better to spend time together, my dear.

Didn’t we know we’d need more money than he would make? I mean really need money, because another pre-nuptial agreement/experiment was to not go into debt for items like cars or refrigerators or sofas or vacations.

All we had was an eager, vibrant expectation that home was vital for society, and we wanted to give it full-time concentration.

Thus began our adventure as a single-income family with, eventually, eight children and a salary with a current buying power that is still less than the buying power of his first salary. If “our kind” was an endangered species when we started, the group is probably code red extinction level by now.

Our chosen path is unlikely to resonate with, or even appeal to, virtually anyone old enough to read, so my quixotic investment in time, the home and its processes may very well sit dusty on the cyber-shelf. A receptive ping or two bouncing back from distant reaches or mindsets would, of course, not be unwelcome. Even dinosaur bones generate their share of modern discussion.