day no. 16,387: missing the gale for want of grit

“Be sure to have your sail up. Do not miss the gale for want of preparation for it.” — C.H. Spurgeon

If you are anxious for new circumstances, you will simply be anxious in new circumstances should they come. Do not be too sure that your circumstances are your biggest problem. If you spend your days wishing for better surroundings, you will not be any better should they come and surround you. If you wish for wind, you must commit to hoisting your sail when there isn’t any. If you spend your days deriding the absence of the wind, you will not ride it when it whistles. 

Psalms 37:34

Wait on the LORD,

and keep His way.

Wait on the Lord by working for Him.

Do not miss the gale for want of grit.

Be grateful for what you have and work hard for what you want.

It is easy to assume that you are better than your circumstances and blame them for not living up to your station, but better circumstances will only serve to highlight how much worse you are than you thought they were should they show up.

Grumblecakes don’t taste any better with syrup.

day no. 16,386: babies are the best revenge

"Babies are the best revenge against the Nazis." — Lily Ebert, Holocaust survivor

Fertility is shots fired. The meek shall inherit the earth by surviving the schemes of the sterile. The fruitless will set their nets and the fruitful will escape them and take their revenge by populating the world that the fruitless longed to take by force. The fruitless want the world to themselves, but they will neither get the world they want nor take it from those to whom God wants to give it.

Matthew 5:5

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

The meek do not fight sterility with sterility, but with fecundity and virility. The best antidote for barrenness is fullness and when grumbling lobs its bombs, it is best to fire back with gratitude.

Romans 12:21

Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

What could be better than a baby? We don't overcome the evil of eugenics by foregoing our fruitfulness in order to fight them. Fruitfulness is how we fight them. Our cheerful reproduction demolishes their strongholds and takes every one of their impotent doctrines captive for Christ. Our happy homemaking and culture building begins with making babies. But it doesn't end there. And they know it. They know a woman's womb is a weapon and that the future cannot be kept from those who happily hope in it enough to fight by faith and fertility for it this day.

Genesis 24:60

And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, "Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them."

Amen! May our wives be the mothers of millions and our daughters of thousands of millions. Let them flood the earth with faithful dominion and prevail against the gates of Hell.

Romans 12:19

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

Babies are the best revenge. No one can make one without God. When you place your faith in God by hospitably welcoming more children into your midst, you make room for God to fight on your behalf. God gets His vengeance on the peddlers of family planning by filling the homes of His people with warriors. Babies are like bullets and God wants to supply His fighters with plenty of ammunition.

Psalm 127:3-5

Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

The gates of Hell shall not prevail against the household of God and it’s children.

Genesis 1:22

And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth."

Babies are the best revenge because they get back to brass tacks. They bring the whole thing back on track. The mission that sin mocked, multiplication embraces. It gets revenge on leanness with fatness. It gets back at emptiness with fullness. It gets the last laugh by laughing.

day no. 16,385: new ideas are often taught by those with no idea

"The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea." — G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

The problem of progressive education is that it insists on finding new ways to teach the oldest subjects. It only considers current views of older perspectives. As a result, the curriculum is often younger than the child. But children were not meant to be the subjects of experiments. They were not born into a place and time in history in order to be raised experimentally as if no other place and time had ever mattered until now. New ideas are often taught by those with no idea. Last things are taught by those who don't know the first thing.

"But this, as I say, is all due to the mere fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my system presupposes that men who govern themselves will govern their children." — G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

Government begins with oneself. God has given each of us a self to govern. We are responsible for who we are and what we do. We all have a small realm to rule inside our chests, heads, and bodies. And God calls every square inch of them to love Him -- all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength.

The one who governs himself is qualified to govern others, but not a moment before.

The self-governed are then obligated to teach others to govern themselves. They lead others to lead themselves. The self-governing must take responsibility for others. 

All self-government must begin with God from whom we receive life, breath and everything else. Thus all government of others must also begin by reminding them of their duty to govern themselves before God who governs all governors and judges all jurisdictions.

day no. 16,384: we must instruct our children

"Suffice it to say here that when I say that we should instruct our children, I mean that WE should do it, not [someone else.]" — G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World (emphasis mine)

We must instruct our children. It is inescapable. Everything we do teaches something. We either teach them that we took responsibility for them or that we didn't. We teach them what is worth learning and where to go to find it. God has given this responsibility to parents. A father who abandons his children still teaches them something. His absence teaches a powerful lesson about life. A mother in the marketplace instead of her home is still teaching her child something about the home.

“We must instruct our children” presupposes "we" to be each parent considered individually and “our" to be each child considered respectively to his or her parents. The parent is responsible for the child and the child is responsible to the parent. There can be no concession to the notion that the child, in his natural state, is the responsibility of the State. 

A parent is permitted to supplement their primary effort with outside support, but they cannot shift their primary effort to be primarily someone else's. A Christian parent, all the more then, must carefully consider what supplements are permissible and profitable.

1 Corinthians 6:12

All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.

Be careful when considering your options not to give yourself or your children too quickly or too completely to something that will require you to ask to have them back.

Romans 6:16

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey?

If you surrender your children to them, you will find that you need their permission to get them back.

1 Corinthians 10:23

All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not.

Also, be careful not to assume that all help is equally helpful. Some things help in one way, but hurt in another. The school may be willing to teach your children, but what is taught will contradict Christ's law.

day no. 16,383: feminism is not the success of women, but the surrender

"In this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance, this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other... the woman has in public surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along; that the public house is really more important than the private house." — G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

Feminism is not a win for the feminine. It is a forfeiture. Feminism is not a victory for women, it is a defeat. It does not justify femininity, it surrenders it. Feminism is not the final triumph of women, it is their final defeat. It is women rejecting womanhood. It is the feminine forsaking femininity. It is the concession speech of the feminine agreeing that all the former fuss was uncalled for.

Feminism is an apology and a repentance. It offers femininity as a burnt offering to masculinity in order to say, "I'm sorry," and promises never to pursue girly things ever again. It does an about face and abandons domesticity (husband, home, and children) in order to embrace promiscuity.

Feminism abandons the feminine ideal. Few things are more chauvinistic than Feminism. It is bad enough when men get together to throw shade at the things in which women delight, but how much more so when women do?

Masculinity never suffocated the flame of the feminine so successfully as the feminists have. Nothing has been more hostile to domesticity than vixens in the city.

Feminism is not a procession of feminine virtue, but a concession. Feminism is not the imperialization of femininity, but the capitulation of it. It is the weaker vessel forsaking all weakness. It is fine china conceding that plastic is supreme. It is rose petals arguing for fake flowers and lace making a case for burlap.

What the sister soldiers assumed to be advances turned out merely to be the strategic retreats of chauvinism. The feminists then have this in common with the chauvinists — they both hate what women have traditionally loved.

Feminism is the final concession that masculinity is the ideal. It joins forces with the men by agreeing that their domain was the only one that ever mattered. Nothing has done more damage to domesticity than women teaching other women to despise it.

Titus 2:3-5

The aged women likewise, that they be in behaviour as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things; That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.

Where women forsake the Word of God, womanhood is forsaken and the world taunts the Word.

day no. 16,382: private omnipotence and small scale universality

"The female holds up with two strong arms these two pillars of civilization (thrift and dignity); we say also that she could do neither, but for her position; her curious position of private omnipotence, universality on a small scale." — G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

A woman is given a kingdom to call her very own. She is the be all end all of her domain. She has domestic omnipotence. She is universal in a given place. The smallness of its scale provides the largeness of its responsibility. She is given full reign to rule as she sees fit: from the color of the sheets on the beds to the portions of meat on the plate, she rules the roost.

The man is often striving simply to acquire secular competence. Far from being sovereign, he is subject to the whims of his masters. The man works hard to develop skills that will keep him employed and out of trouble. If he works well, he may be promoted to another level of competence under another master. The man must aim for public competence. He must be a specialist because the largeness of the work demands it.

The man strives to be something at work so that woman can be everything at home. He needs to be someone to everyone while she gets to be everyone to a few people.

A wife is a queen of a whole world. A husband is often a servant in part of someone else's. A mother is a sovereign under her roof. A father is often under obligation under someone else's.

The woman is free to rule her own domain; the man is often enslaved inside another's. The woman in her home is her own boss. The man at the office must answer to multiple.

Feminism encourages women to enslave themselves for the sake of saying that they are as free as men to submit themselves to many masters. Feminism calls women to forsake their sovereignty in order to serve someone else's for the sake of being just as enslaved as men. Feminism calls slavery "freedom," and servitude "emancipation" It has convinced women to freely submit to the chains of the office in order to abandon the oppressiveness of being unbound at home.

"Feminism is a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands." — G.K. Chesterton

day no. 16,381: laurelai is TEN!!!

Happy Birthday, Laurelai!

You are officially a decade old. You have been such a lively, lovely addition to our family. You have so much energy and so much love to give. You can be as bouncy as Tigger's tail and as sad as Eeyore's. You put a lot of yourself into whatever you are doing which sometimes means a lot of spontaneous eruptions of quickness and at other times means long meditations on handwriting. You love doing things well and take it hard when things don't turn out the way you wanted. You love people and like doing nice things for them. You don't like being at odds with others and do your best to be at peace with them. You are accommodating, but not a pushover. You are willing to do whatever the group wants unless it means going against your conscience. You like making others happy, but aren't willing to do whatever others want.

You love riding your bike around the neighborhood.

You like wearing your cherries jubilee shorts.

You like doing your hair and often put your own braids in. You don't like getting your glasses dirty or sweaty and often take them off when going out into the warm summer weather to avoid either.

You like hugs and often track me down when I leave my home office to get more coffee. You like being one of the last ones to say goodbye when I leave for my afternoon walk and you like being one of the first ones to greet me home.

You have become a mother hen of sorts and have taken on the responsibility of taking care of the chickens most mornings and evenings. You like making other people's needs one of your priorities. 

You have an amazing drawing style. Your cartoons are awesome and you have a unique way of capturing the world in pictures.

You loved the Lord of the Rings and often ask to make sure we don’t miss Story Club. You don't like it when the nights run late and we end up missing our time in Middle Earth. You love Bilbo and Goldberry. Makes sense. Combines two of the best things about you: you are a beautiful, little lady. 

You also love Couchechism and often ask to do it. It would be easy for someone to think that you just want more treats, but they'd be wrong. You genuinely love couchechism and hearing lessons from the Bible from your dad.

You like listening to audiobooks and are making your way through the Harry Potter series for the first time. As it's gone along, you've hit some bumps in the Hogwarts' road, but you've hung in there despite the disappointments.

You are a good sister and spend most of your evenings staying up too late with Penelope goofing around. You love watching the plays that she puts on just for you.

You make friends easily and have a few pen pals that you write back and forth to. You have loved our new neighborhood and church and have made friends with lots of people. You find people to sit with during our fellowship meal following service each week.

You read the whole New Testament for the first time this summer doing Same Page Summer with your sisters and we still read a chapter or two from your Bible every Saturday morning during breakfast burritos.

You are a great daughter and I love being your dad. You are beautiful, smart, funny, caring, considerate, cuddly, strong, fun, and funny. I hope you have a great birthday and that you continue to grow in wisdom, stature, and favor with God and people.

Happy Birthday, Laurelai Rush!

Here's to many more.

Love,

Dad