Gems in the Web 8/23/13

I am getting up early, most mornings, and running in the cooler air, listening to podcasts and audiobooks so that the silence doesn’t smite me. I am simmering chili, and marinating chicken, and baking granola bars. I am scrubbing ground beef off porcelain plates, and folding clean underwear, and sweeping the crumb-strewn kitchen floor. I am sitting on the couch or a blanket in the yard, reading picture books aloud in the sunshine. I am taking three young children to the library, the grocery store, the park, and, almost every day, the pool. Consequently, I have the best tan I’ve had since becoming a mother seven years ago. I am reading my own books and listening to my own music—different books, and different music, so that they don’t remind me of things I used to feel and think and hope. I am taking pictures of my children, and texting my friends, and trying to find a new moisturizer that I like. I am picking up toys, and clearing the piles of paper off my desk, and staying up too late watching TV shows with myhusband. I am living my life, and if you see me in the checkout line at Costco, I will probably look healthy and cheerful—at least as cheerful as a person can look while her small fry are whining and badgering each other and getting in the way of the cart. But that doesn’t mean I am fine.

Read the rest of How is Too Hard.

Time magazine has stirred up the social pot again, with its recent cover picturing a couple clearly reveling in “The Childfree Life.” In her cover article Lauren Sandler offers a vivid glimpse into the fast-growing world of women “having it all without having children.” She not only lets us see the statistics; she also lets us hear the voices of the women they document. The statistics themselves are dramatic: for example, about one in five American women now bear no children, compared to one in ten in the 1970s. We’re talking about remarkably quick demographic change.

Read the rest of The Problem with the Child-Free Life.

All of us have complained at one time or another about being too busy. Time for spiritual, emotional, and physical health keeps getting shoved off to “one day.”

But busyness leads to burnout and Christ came so that we might have life and have it abundantly (Jn. 10:10).  If, therefore, Christians struggle with busyness, then ought not brothers and sisters in Christ protect one another from this life-draining lifestyle?

Read the rest of Christians, Protect Each Other from Busyness.

1. Calvinism is not a system of theology that denies God’s universal love.

While there are some Calvinists who do deny God’s universal love for all men, this is certainly not a necessary or a central tenet of Calvinism. Calvinists do, however, believe that God has a particular type of love for the elect (an “electing love”), but most also believe that God loves all people (John 3:16). It is a mystery to Calvinists as to why he does not elect everyone. (More on this here.)

Read the rest of Twelve Myths About Calvinism.

Several years ago I met with a woman distraught by her son’s rejection of Christianity.

She said, “I did everything I could to raise him right. I taught him to be like the ‘heroes of faith,’ with the faithfulness of Abraham, the goodness of Joseph, the pure heart of David, and the obedience of Esther.”

She wondered why he rejected Christianity.

I wondered why it took him so long.

Read the rest of I Wonder if Sunday School is Destroying Our Kids?