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I met Tony Jones during my recent blogging trip to Sri Lanka with World Vision (please click HERE to help me sponsor ten children from the community we visited!). Tony is a great guy, someone I consider a friend. He is a super smart theologian, a successful blogger, and a widely read author.

He values community involvement and being a good neighbor – not just to his fellow Christians, but to everyone. So when he republished one of his older posts regarding his opinions on homeschooling, I wasn’t surprised to read that his dedication to being missional (allowing his love for those around him to be a witness of Christ’s love) led him to call for the death of homeschooling.

Having the view that homeschooling and being missional are mutually exclusive is such a commonly held, yet mistaken, belief.

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If it wouldn’t be so judgmental, it would almost be humorous, the way we think we can speak into the lives of others on behalf of God in no uncertain terms. It is as if we cannot accept that the Spirit might be among the populace, moving and nudging and encouraging people to do things we cannot understand, even things we do not agree with.

And this is the heart of my disagreement with Tony. I do not dispute his right to believe that public schooling is the best way for his family to be a missional family, reaching out to those in his community. He knows his family best. But to throw a net so wide as to cover every Christian in this country, to infer that homeschooling is a mistake in every instance, seems overly simple to me.

Tony writes that “to withdraw my children from public education is to not play my (God-given) role as a missional member of society.” If he genuinely meant his own family in that statement, then there is no way that I could disagree with him. But it is obvious from the way that the article is written that he speaks not only for his own family, but for every other Christian family out there.

I am not surprised by the tone of the article – this is how we as American Christians communicate about issues these days. There is an alarming lack of humility. There is very little seeking to understand. We continue grasping for formulas on how to live, what to believe, or which political party to endorse. We argue over the best way to raise, discipline, feed, diaper, and clothe our children.

Guess what? There is no formula.

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For over a year my wife took our older two children to a local food bank, the three of them teaching people how to make healthy meals with the food they were receiving. For four months we traveled the country, uniting writers and other creative folks, giving money to awesome organizations we found along the way, meeting in person people I had only known on the internet. We made friendships with total strangers at the various campgrounds we visited. For two springs I coached or helped to coach my son’s baseball team, getting to know the parents and kids in our community. In the past my wife has taught cooking classes to children. We have friends of many different religious and ethnic backgrounds come to our house for dinner and who invite us to their homes for birthdays or nights out.

Can a family homeschool and still be missional? Of course. Can a family send their children to public school and remain isolated? Of course. We have not “opted out of the societal contract” any more than someone who sends their kids to public school has automatically opted in. Perhaps twenty years ago the choice of whether or not to homeschool was an accurate litmus test on a family’s desire to be isolated or protect themselves from the evils of society, I don’t know. But even if it was then, it no longer is now.

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What does surprise me is that Tony’s dogmatic stance towards homeschooling is an attitude I would normally expect to find among the fundamentalist crowd (simply aimed in the other direction and about some other topic like what books you are allowed to read or which political party is God’s party) – not the emergent group. I guess it goes to show that we all allow our own personal axe of judgment to fall from time to time, no matter how open and accepting we may otherwise be.

You know what would be compelling? If there was greater cooperation between the homeschooling world and the public school world, if there wasn’t so much animosity, judgment, and misunderstanding. My wife and I would LOVE to spend time at our local public school, reading to children or doing creative writing classes or volunteering in any way – but I generally feel like an outsider among most of the public school administration and faculty. And Tony’s approach only serves to widen the gap between the two communities, rallying public-schoolers around the perceived negatives of homeschooling and pushing the homeschoolers to circle the wagons in a defensive posture.

I think it’s clear to most that the level of education in our country is faltering. Perhaps if we committed to working together, instead of further splintering the various groups, our children would all benefit – homeschooled, public schooled, and private schooled alike.

Finally, a quote from NT Wright’s Surprised By Hope (via Jason McCarty):

“Of course, no one individual can attempt more than a fraction of this mission. That’s why mission is the work of the whole church, the whole time. Some will find God nudging them to work with handicapped children. Some will sense a call to local government. Others will discover a quiet satisfaction in artistic or educational projects. All will need one another for support and encouragement.”

As a parent, I could use your support and encouragement, as I’m sure you could probably use mine.

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You can check out Tony’s original post here: Death to Homeschooling!

Or, even better, you can help me reach my goal of getting ten kids from Sri Lanka sponsored. Click HERE and scroll down for their names and profiles. Thanks!

Image copyright World Vision; photo by Matthew Paul Turner

I returned from Sri Lanka four weeks ago. I still calculate how many rupees I’m spending on a cup of coffee (usually a day’s wages). I still occasionally wake up at 3am, remember jet lag, and wonder what my friends in Sri Lanka are having for lunch. I think about Diwyan, the little boy my wife and I sponsor there, and wonder how he is doing. I wonder if he managed to hide from his brothers all three packs of colored pencils I sent home with him, as his parents said he would probably do.

It’s interesting to me – having seen the work that World Vision does, my return home hasn’t left me dragged down by the chains of guilt. I saw the hope in the people’s eyes as they spoke eagerly of welcoming World Vision into their community. They realized that because of World Vision, their children would be better off.

Laura, one of my new friends from the trip, wrote over at Hollywood Housewife:

I didn’t come home from Sri Lanka brokenhearted.  I know I’m not supposed to say that.  I know that I should tell you how hard it was to meet the poorest of the Sri Lankan nation, how my soul melted into a puddle at the sight of their anguish and how I wanted to come home and sell all of my earthly possessions.

But that is not how I felt.

…Our first stop was at a parade, where the joy was palpable.  The next few days were spent meeting people in great need.  They needed resources, education.  They needed clean water, a hug, and more food.  They needed access to electricity and drivable roads.  What they did not need, it seemed, was an explanation of hope. 

All of this to say that I’m not writing to you in an attempt to make you feel guilty, but rather with the goal of helping you to see that by spending only $35 a month you can help fulfill this hope for someone. Give them access to clean water, education, employment, and give them the hand they need to create a sustainable community.

I have set a personal goal of trying to get the following ten children sponsored in the next two weeks. They all live in the same community as the little boy that my family sponsors. Check out their profiles and consider sponsoring one of them (once you choose a child and move forward with sponsorship, please email me at shawnsmucker@yahoo.com and let me know so that I can take your child off the list).

Click on any of the names below to find out more about the child or to become their sponsor:

I VIDANELAGE D, K Hiruth V (4 year old boy)

HITIHAMI A, Kawishka (4 year old boy)

M SAJAHAN M, Sajan (4 year old boy)

LASARASLAGE, Shaluka Nethmal F (4 year old boy)

MARASINGHE A, Thisarana R (4 year old boy)

MOHOMMADU SAJIT, Fathima Nihma (6 year old girl)

ANBURAMANI, Madushnavi (5 year old girl)     SPONSORED! THANKS!!!

INKARA PRAKASH, Nimeda Praba (7 year old girl)     SPONSORED! THANKS!!

NERHTHI K, Navindi Thrimasha A (3 year old girl)

FATHIMA, Imara (2 year old girl)

 

Thank you thank you thank you for considering this. And please help me to spread the word by sharing this post on Facebook, Twitter, or on your own blogs. Let’s work together to get these ten children sponsored. I’ll let you know as we make progress.

I cringed, hoping he wouldn’t see me. I stared intently at my newspaper, not even looking up while I took a bite of my large cheesesteak with extra cheese, sauce, peppers and hold the onions please. I read that paper so hard that I wasn’t even reading it – I was boring holes into it with my newly acquired super powers.

“He” was a man I had run into before in that farmer’s market, the kind of guy who locked on to you like a heat-seeking missile and, once engaged wouldn’t stop talking. A very large man, his walk was more like a waddle. His thick glasses magnified his sad and awkward eyes. The last time I made eye contact with him, a few weeks before, he talked to me for nearly fifteen minutes about who-knows-what.

So I stared at my newspaper, and I prayed he wouldn’t see me.

* * * * *

Later that night, I was trying to leave the same market when an older Amish man started asking me questions about my mom’s store. Turns out he runs the same kind of store in a different farmers’ market.

“Ha!” he laughed. “I charge one cent more for this. Can you believe it? CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?”

He stuttered when he talked and his bottom lip caved into his mouth so that I wondered if perhaps he had forgotten to put in his bottom row of false teeth. He dressed very sloppy, for an Amish man, and was also very talkative. I was not in the mood for talking.

At 35, I am mostly an old stick-in-the-mud.

So I tried to ignore him or shoe him away and finally, to my relief, he turned to go.

“Wait,” he said. “Can I try one of those?” He pointed to one of the chocolates in the case. “I don’t have one of those in my store.”

I sighed.

“Look, I really should be going,” I said.

“Oh, of course!” he blurted in a cheerful tone. “Of course, of course.”

* * * * *

I am beginning to realize that I am annoyed by all the wrong people. That is, if I’m going to attempt to live with Jesus as my model. Talkative down-and-outers routinely put me off, drive me away, and set me to biting my nails in a how-can-I-extricate-myself-from-this-conversation kind of way. I have far too little patience for people who do not impress me.

This is embarrassing to even write.

Jesus, however, was all about these people. He called Zacchaeus down from the tree and invited himself to Zacchaeus’s house for a meal. He not only spoke to these people – he spent entire afternoons with them! Voluntarily!

He cozied up for a conversation with the outcast (and rather talkative) woman at the well. He berated his disciples and told them to “let all of those annoying little children come to me” (or something like that). He never seemed to be exasperated with the down-and-outers, the outsiders – not even the notorious sinners. He treated them with dignity and respect and love.

Instead, Jesus saves his greatest outbursts of annoyance for those who appeared to have it all together. The ones who, by word and deed, kept the outsiders from coming to him. The ones who made up impossible rules to follow and then made everyone feel lousy about themselves when they didn’t live up to the legalism. The successful people. The esteemed.

When will I get it through my thick skull that the awkwardly lonely, the one hiding her hurt, and the one that everyone else avoids or laughs at is, in fact, the one that I should respect? Make time for? Assign value to?

When will I finally realize that these people are Jesus in disguise?

This is an excerpt from a short story, “Chicken,”  written by my friend and author Rob Stennett. It takes place in a chicken restaurant, but it’s not really about a chicken restaurant – it’s about the people who go there or don’t go there. It’s about the employees who are caught in the middle. And mostly it’s about a young cashier at the restaurant who happens to be gay. Here’s the excerpt from the short story:

I was trying to take things just one customer at a time. After I gave the teary eyed woman her chicken sandwich, she said, “It’s so nice to be served by someone who has the same values as I do.”

I nodded as she walked away. Just keep smiling. You can do this. My next customer was a man in a camouflage jacket with a thick
tangled orange beard. Unlike the others, he didn’t meet my eyes. He fished for change in his pocket and said, “I’ll have one of those chicken biscuits and a coffee.” I rang up his order. As he handed me his change, he told me, “I’m not normally much for crowds, but if buying chicken is a way to tell the gays what we really think, it seems like the right thing to do.”

These are just words, I told myself. They don’t mean anything. If it upsets you, don’t listen. Pretend he said something else.

“We need to let those fags and dykes know they’re not going to run our country,” he said.

Sticks and stones, break our bones, but words go places sticks and stones can’t reach. They seep into our thoughts and strangle our souls. At that moment, I felt like I couldn’t just say please and thank you. I couldn’t pretend he didn’t say anything.

You can get an e-version of the entire story for .99 at Amazon HERE. No matter which side you found yourself during the recent chicken restaurant hubbub, you should check this out because Rob uses his excellent story-telling skills to raise all kinds of important questions. I hope you’ll take the short time it takes to read this and let Rob or I know what you think.

Today’s guest post, brought to you by author Karen Henry Clark, is their story of adopting a little girl, finding out that she had been abandoned on the steps of a leather factory, and then recreating that child’s lost first year. Enjoy.

When the nanny handed our daughter to us on a summer day in China, I remained calm.  The journey was finally finished.  Little did I know.

I smiled brightly until my husband gave me the orphanage report: “Baby found forsaken on steps of leather factory.”  I realized this tiny girl would always live with a mystery.  She would carry unreachable memories locked forever in her mind, her bones, her heart.  I began to imagine a history for her—something beyond the confines of that basket balanced on a step.  She needed a way to think about the first year of her life.

She was eleven months old and spoke Chinese baby talk, refusing to repeat the words we recited to her once we returned to America.  Then one night in our yard a cloud drifted away from a full moon hung in a navy blue sky.  Leaning out of my arms, she pointed up and said, “Moon!” with a sense of certainty and joy that made me believe they had been dear friends from the very first day of her life.

What else in China could have made such an impression on her?  What could she have seen there that still lingered in her memory?  I looked around her room.  She loved books about a turtle named Franklin.  She was fascinated with a peacock feather.  She played faithfully with a sock monkey.  Each night she slept with a stuffed panda in her arms.  And like an Asian Huckleberry Finn, she happily carried a miniature pole over her shoulder with a plastic fish affixed.

Who’s to say a turtle, a peacock, a monkey, a panda, and fish weren’t somehow part of her early life?  That rice basket on a step in China, just like the one in our living room, could carry a baby down a river from claw to paw to wing.

These became the snippets of tales I told her, trying to fill those first days of her life.  Then I wrote it down.  Once upon a time, I had imagined myself as a published author, but decades of rejection had eroded my resolve.  I had given up.  Until now.  I had to show her the importance of trying one more time to collect the pieces of a shattered dream.

This one was the charm.  My first picture book, Sweet Moon Baby: An Adoption Tale, was published by Alfred A. Knopf.  What began as an answer for her ended up being an answer for me.

After I read the book at a school, an adopted Chinese kindergarten girl announced: “I’m the real Sweet Moon Baby.”  I understood it was an answer for her, too.  In the past few years, other families have written to me to say the story offers a powerful metaphor for their adopted children.

And to think it all started with one baby found on the steps in China.

Karen Henry Clark wanted to be a published author for as long as she can remember.  But her life took many turns.  She has been a teacher, college administrator, bookstore shelver, costume shop clerk, advertising copywriter, and newspaper and radio book reviewer.  No matter how she earned her way, she was always thinking about possible story lines and jotting down character names.  She dreamed of having her own ISBN number.  SWEET MOON BABY: AN ADOPTION TALE, about adopting her daughter from China, is her first published picture book with ISBN 978-0-375-95709-3. You can also find Sweet Moon Baby on Facebook.

If you’d like to submit a post telling the story of a poignant moment that occurred during adoption or foster care, please email your 500-word submission to shawnsmucker@yahoo.com. Thanks!

Prior adoption and foster care posts include:

Do You Tell Them There Are Millions of Orphans in China? – Adoption Stories with Kelly Raudenbush
Open Adoption and Who Gets to be the Mom on Mother’s Day – Adoption Stories with birthmom Ashley Glick
The Problem With Permanent Marker – A Foster Care Story With Jeffrey Lane
Fear and an Open Adoption – Adoption Stories With Rebecca Wenrich
I Saw Our New Son and the Voice Said, “Run Away” – Adoption Stories With Kim Van Brunt
Checking ‘Yes’ to Everything: Adoption Stories With Sonya Judkins
Because Someone Has To: Adoption Stories With Shar Halvorsen
Momma For a Moment: A Foster Care Story, With Tamara Out Loud

It basically comes down to this: I cannot explain my life.

I’m beginning to realize, in hindsight, that this is why I blog: these posts are an attempt to find meaning. To rationalize my fight against the weight of our culture’s materialistic expectations. To maintain the courage to live an unexplainable life. To live simply. To live with purpose. To take risks.

Blogging helps to remind me why I keep trying to do all these things.

Yet as my own life continues, I find myself often afraid of that very calling. Or at least confused by it. Or full of doubt, wondering if I’m too conceited or self-obsessed – maybe I need to conform, to sit down, to stop speaking. What if, after encouraging people to live an adventurous life, my own journey comes to an untimely end? The last thing I want to be is yet another example of how taking risks is just another form of irresponsible living.

Or even worse: what if I reach the point where I’m no longer willing to live the life I am endorsing?

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In June we returned from our trip, weary and uncertain, financially poor and full of doubts. We were aglow from the burn of new adventures. During that time, and after much consideration, we decided that moving to the city was the right thing to do. Since we homeschool our children and do not get the easy interaction that comes with having children in public school, we believed that living in close proximity to people would better allow us to contribute to a community.

It was with much excitement that we began looking to purchase a house in the city of Lancaster. I still didn’t have work lined up, so we started slowly, patiently, unwilling to commit to purchasing a house until a new project came through. During that time, we lost out on multiple houses we would have loved, simply because we felt a still, small voice whispering, “Wait.”

Then, a new project, and we felt the reins loosen a bit. We got more serious about buying. Still, each place we looked at, and liked, fell through for one reason or another. The ones we liked the most sold to other buyers almost immediately. We shifted our search to a small town south of the city. We found a place. We put in an offer. They countered.

Maile and I prayed. We prayed hard. Is this where you want us, God? Is this what we’re supposed to do? Is this where you want our family? Maile even told me later that on the morning we needed to submit our signed offer, she prayed, God, if you have something else for us, you’d better make it happen quickly.

Before signing the counter-offer, I happened to talk to a friend.

“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before,” he said. “And you’re free to move forward with the house if you’d like. But I’ve got a cabin on 40 acres in southern Lancaster County. You’re welcome to stay there for one year if you’d like. It’s up to you.”

The picture at the top of the post is of my dad helping me clear the yard where we’ll be living for the next year.

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There is a peace that comes when I do not hold tightly on to my own desires. When I allow the Spirit to move me and nudge me. When my prayerful wife and I submit to one another, knowing that we are both seeking with all of our hearts. It is with great peace that we accepted his offer, and it is with great excitement that we look forward to November, when we will move, once again, into the middle of nowhere.

And this is where my not understanding comes into play. This is when I cannot explain things. Because, logically, I agree with Christians who say we should live in cities. We should live among people, where we can help the poor and the sick and be good neighbors. I understand that. I agree with it. What I don’t understand is why God continually leads us, as a family, in a different direction, into remote places of peace.

Could it be that God believes I am a more productive writer in that environment? Could it be the best place for our family at this point? Could it be that life is full of seasons, and that some day we will be the outwardly missional family I envision, but that right now, for some reason unbeknownst to us, we are supposed to live in a 40-acre wood at the end of a half-mile lane?

I don’t know. I don’t always understand. I cannot always explain my life. But I know this: as Maile and I struggled to remain patient, God was there for us. When we don’t understand, he is there for us. When bad things happen, he is there for us. When we ran out of money this summer, he was there for us. And, when unexpected grace after grace falls from the sky, he is there with us.

This is why I blog.

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When’s the last time you were confused by God?