Since I spent a year at the University of Chicago and managed to earn a degree while I was there, I get a monthly email that includes the Ivy League Association of Southern California events calendar. Other than the occasional hike or concert, I don't usually attend the events. One upcoming forum did catch my eye: "Wharton Women: The Decision to Stay Home or Go Back to Work" If you read my blog, you will know I'm interested in the issue, plus there's been some discussion at work of trying to recruit stay-at-home moms who want to go back to work (among many, many other groups) since we're having serious problems recruiting enough employees. So I clicked to read the description of the forum. There are three panelists:
1. "In addition to years as a nonfiction magazine writer and editor, Steiner has an MBA degree in marketing from the Wharton School of Business. She launched Splenda Brand Sweetener around the world for Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest consumer healthcare company. Over the years, she has turned her professional experience into advocacy for abused women as a spokeswoman at The Harriet Tubman Center in Minneapolis. She joined The Washington Post in February 2001." She does not currently stay at home.
2. "[The panelist] is Manager in the Los Angeles office of The Boston Consulting Group. [She] was initially based in the New York office and she subsequently relocated to Los Angeles. She has primarily consulted to clients in the biopharmaceutical, consumer goods and retail industries. She also served as the Recruiting Director for the Los Angeles office... She also serves on the Strategic Planning Task Force for the Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation headquartered in Los Angeles. She is the mother of 15 month old boy/girl twins, Max and Zoe." She does not currently stay at home.
3. Oh yes, and the token stay-at-home mom who used to be a Disney executive, but now stays home and also serves on the Corporate Committee at Children's Hospital LA.
Granted, this event is targeted at women graduates from one of the top business schools in the country, so there is bound to be a higher than usual proportion of busy, career-driven types attending, but I have a lot of trouble believing anyone will walk away from the event feeling great about a decision to stay at home full time with children, especially if no hospital board memberships are readily available to them. I could be wrong. It is on a weekday morning, which I would imagine makes it kind of tough for people already in the workforce to attend. (Although I suppose if you're a Disney executive, you can get to work any time you darn well please.) I wonder whether kids are welcome. Hehe. :)
I am taking a pause from packing to blog for a moment. "Packing for what?" you ask. A weekend visiting my awesome hoochy friend Kwin in La Jolla, baby. Not only that, but while I am there, I intend to learn to surf. I've gotten tired of waiting for it to snow so I can cross country ski in the local mountains, so I'm hitting the beach. If surfing is out, I'm taking my boogie board and buying myself a wetsuit. I used to be one of those people who laughed at Californians for making a big deal about living a short distance from surf and slope, but I will now admit that it's pretty darn cool. When one doesn't work out, there's always the other. Good thing I finally learned to enjoy swimming in the ocean. It's not very fun to lie in the sun on the beach when the temperature is only about 50-60 degrees during the winter. :)
By the way, apparently the new spell-check function on my blog publishing platform does not recognize the word "blog". Go figure.
For those of you wondering how I am going to respond to my Uncle Jeff's comments on my post, here we go again :), I am working on them. I am a bit befuddled (and pretty busy holding the fort while my hot mister prepares for his final qualifying exam), so please have patience.
For those of you who posted such wonderful, encouraging comments to my post 1/3-life crisis, well, I have been intending to thank you each personally for your kind words of encouragement, but it has now been almost a month since that post, so I guess I will thank you en masse instead. Thank you! It is always so good to know that so many people I admire and respect struggle through the same issues I do.
In the meantime, what's new in Southern CA? Well, we celebrated yet another holiday yesterday with horrendous traffic. It's very festive, and seems to be a tradition for just about every special occasion in these parts. Except New Year's Eve, when traffic was even better than on a normal Saturday night. Go figure. What else? Oh, I discovered Graham's 10-year tawny. Nutty, rich, and fabulous. My favorite port used to be Graham's fruitier, gooier Six Grapes blend, but I think it has been topped by its cousin. Thanks goes to work buddy "Also" Amy and her brother for introducing me to tawny port. For some reason the word "tawny" used to turn me off and I'd never tried it before.
And so, so easy to make. It's Epicurious' recipe of the month. Josh doesn't like spinach, so we had asparagus fried in sesame seed oil and red potatoes to go with it. Absolutely heavenly.
My brother, Will, has been having an ongoing discussion with our Unce Jeff about politics and the Church. I've mentioned this topic on my blog before. Rather than posting a ridiculously long comment to Will's most recent post on the subject, I am including my comment in its entirety here.
Uncle Jeff, you keep describing us as being at war on all fronts, including political. I agree that there is no such thing as an irreligious government, that secularism is a worldview with just as many religious undertones as an overtly religious one, and that, as our government strives to achieve what our society considers to be religious neutrality, it really becomes more and more hostile to authentic religious beliefs, especially Christian beliefs, and undermines its own legal and moral authority in the process. The more it does so, the more its actions and laws will be diametrically opposed to the truths of the Bible, and in that sense, Christians will constantly be in conflict not only with the worldly government of the United States, but any worldly government until the earthly reign of Christ. All governments, to one degree or another, serve the ends of sinful men. (Ours is only different from others in that some Christian ideals influenced its founding, and in that it serves the ends of a larger proportion of the selfish people under its rule than other forms of government.)
Although politics is one area where Satan attacks Christians, I am not convinced it is an area in which we are expected or commanded to conduct aggressive counter-offensives the way Christians have been doing or the way my Uncle seems to favor. I have three reasons for thinking this:
1. I don’t see the biblical precedent for Christians seeking political dominance in order to further the kingdom of God. I can only think of counter examples, the most obvious being the life of Christ. He was offered dominion over all He could see by Satan and refused. The crowds expected him to be a political savior and hailed him as an earthly ruler during the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, but he never so much as hinted at desiring political dominance. While I believe He will succeed to David’s earthly throne when He comes again, His mediatorial rule over the earth is not presently administered through political means. When God did rule through political means (Moses, the Judges, the Kings, for example), He was a lot more hands-on in selecting the rulers and commanding them to do His will in specific matters than He is with today’s politicians. If you want me to believe we are called to do political battle, show me the Scripture to back it up.
2. I am not convinced that the opposition of the government to biblical beliefs has ever really hurt the church or the message of Christ. In fact, I think the opposite is probably true. . .
. . and that political attacks on biblical principles serve more to distract the Church than to harm her. Two centuries of government supposedly rooted in Christian principles have seen the American church turn into a soft, dithering, appeasing club where you go to learn how God can make you rich or how getting religion will make you feel more fulfilled. The gospel thrives when Christians are forced to rely on God for everything, when non-Christians can see what we are willing to put up with for the sake of the gospel. The early church had it pretty bad, but they didn’t complain about their rights being trampled upon. Did you know that Chinese pastors are praying for the persecution of the American church, so that we will be made stronger?
3. Because we are basically prevented from discussing laws in terms of morality and Truth, political dialogue in the United States is now generally conducted in terms of personal rights and freedoms. The church has fallen into the trap of arguing politics in these terms along with everyone else. While treating all human beings with dignity and respect is a principle that permeates the Bible, from beginning to end, and while Christians are to conduct themselves that way regardless of what the governing authorities tell them they can or cannot do, I don’t think there is a scriptural basis for demanding one’s own rights when they are denied. Abortion aside, most recent Christian political arguments seem to be based on the assumption that we are personally wronged by the immorality and anti-Christian views of other people, and that we have the right to demand better treatment. Homosexuals shouldn’t be able to marry because it diminishes the value of a heterosexual marriage. My marriage is being threatened, darn it! Prayer in schools? My children have first amendment rights, too, and boy howdy, am I mad that they’re not able to exercise them! Don’t you see I’m being wronged here? Hello?! Christians have rights, too! Don’t even get me started on the teaching of evolution in schools.
It is certainly understandable when Christians get up in arms over being treated unfairly under a government that promises us equality and a voice. In spite of the best intentions of the founding fathers, though, our ultimate authority does not tell us that we ought to expect these things. In fact, we are told just the opposite (see Matthew 5 and John 15). We have no god-given right to expect to be treated justly, in spite of a god-given mandate to treat others so. We do not have the god-given prerogative to demand our rights when we don’t get them. The lives (and deaths) of so many of the Church fathers demonstrate the opposite. Ultimately, the only person who is truly wronged by sin and has any right to anger or retribution is God, and He has offered everyone on earth His unconditional forgiveness. Our job is to tell people about how they have wronged Him and about the forgiveness He offers in an attitude of humility befitting our own dependence on His grace as sinners.
“But,” you may say, “I am not fighting this political battle for myself but because of my righteous indignation over our country’s flagrant disregard for God’s laws.” Two brief points about righteous indignation: First of all, as people with naturally sinful tendencies, we can never be too careful when we assign righteous motives to any of our thoughts or actions, especially those normally associated with sin. Secondly, many people point to the story of Christ overturning the tables in the temple as a model for us of righteous indignation. A few weeks ago, someone in my Sunday School class pointed out that all of the instances of Christ’s indignation in the New Testament were directed not against those who openly flouted God’s laws (prostitutes, thieves, etc), but against people who misrepresented God to the people and cloaked their sin under pretenses of godliness. Hypocrisy, false teaching of God’s word, and using God’s holy place for personal gain were the activities that drew Christ’s ire. With that in mind, it would appear that it is really the Church and those in it who are most likely to be the objects of truly righteous indignation.
In conclusion, I am not arguing that Christians should completely wash our hands of political concerns. We do live in a unique era of history, when we have some say in the way our country is governed. In so far as we have the ability to change the course of political power in our country for good, we have a responsibility to do so. Politics are not unimportant, but I think the Church has lost sight of its primary mission in the political haze. As Will already pointed out, our ability to impact the general moral state of the country and its laws is completely dependent on our ability to evangelize. Wherever there are unredeemed people, sin will find a way to flourish, within or outside of the law. If Roe vs Wade is overturned, there will still be as many souls on this earth that day that are destined for eternal torment as there were the day before. Ultimately, we will not be judged as a culture based on whether our government had some legal semblance of morality, but individually, by the state of our hearts.
As it stands now, I think we have turned the Church into nothing more than a political action campaign in the eyes of many people. I do not advocate bending over backwards to make the gospel message and the Church as appealing as possible. I do, however, object to presenting the bride of Christ as something she is not, and to the selfish and self-righteous motives often cloaked within the moral rhetoric of the Christian political movement. The political movement of the Church is hurting its proper presentation of the gospel of Christ for the sake of winning a battle that does little, if anything, for victory in the war for souls.