Winning

The modern way of things has lately been a source of irritating frustration for me, just to be completely broad and general about it. As the children have gotten older the pressure to Do things, to engage in activities at a set time and location, for money, has increased. This combines itself naturally with the relentless nature of church activities, and they're being so often in the evening. I find myself saying, practically all the time, “I really don't want to do that, we already have something every night of the week.” And frequently the person I'm talking to will say it back in a nodding and comiserating way.

Why must this be so? Why must we have so many activities, so many times where we're running in chaos out of the house to the next thing, screeching for children to put on shoes and get on a pair of trousers that will stay up. I probably know the answer to these questions. It's the way things are. Children aren't allowed to play freely outside, unsupervised, so they have to go various kinds of classes. The church does the basic things it must do, and everyone has to work to make a living, and so church activities have to be in the evening. It's just the way it is. And we can't completely remove ourselves from this way of life because then we wouldn't have a job or any friends and the children would drive us mad.

But we have something, or a couple of things, call them circumstances maybe, that occurred to us, that would let us game the system. And, let me say, before I go on, that this delights me So Much. I feel like I'm scoring off Babylon, or something.

So, as you know, we live right next to the church and we are homeschooling. You might think both of these eventualities are a burden, not a blessing. Sometimes it feels like they are. But Not Any More, Suckers. Sorry, getting carried away by Joy.

Matt works incredibly hard. I added up his hours and he does between 60 and 80 hours depending on the week. And then he does big piles of work here. He is the person who cleans before company and cooks on the weekends, among myriad other tasks. And I do a little bit of work myself. Occasionally. But we figured out that if we thought about it before hand, we could all sit down and eat lunch. Because he is right there, or sometimes here in his office studying, we can actually stop everything, between noon and one, set the table, light a candle, turn on some music, and eat an actual meal. All together. For real. Every. Single. Day. I'm not kidding. We can eat lunch together every single day.

We test ran it last week and it turned out to be the answer to all our problems. For starters, (heh heh heh) we're all hungry at lunch time, ravenously so. And lunch has always been a screaming crying mess. You get through it, everyone trying to find something to eat, it has to be cleaned up, and then everybody gets back to work. Once you've gotten through that unpleasant time, and are just settling into the afternoon, you suddenly realize that you still have to think about supper. Your work, as it were, is never ever done. As you're trying to cope with supper you remember that there's a lesson or a meeting and so you ramp up the hysteria, abbreviating everything, shouting at a greater frequency. You slop it on the table, everyone picks over it, someone is left home to clean up the devestation, and everyone else runs out the door. You go to bed bitter, muttering about the stupidity of modern life.

Whereas, in the New Way, one of us thinks ahead slightly and budgets time for a nice lunch. We work hard all morning. We stop, we collapse around the table. We eat something real that hasn't come out of some impossible to beat your way into package. We sit around and talk about something or other. The children all calmly and whiningly clean it up. Matt and I solve the world's problems for a few minutes and then drift back, calmly, to work. Around four o'clock, because I ate something, I'm not hungry. Let me just pause a moment for that to sink in. By 4 o'clock, I'm not hungry, because I ate actual food. It's so extraordinary. And the children, those of them that are, get something to eat if they feel like it. Everyone goes to whatever evening thing they have. Rather than cleaning the kitchen for the whole rest of the night, I read out a few pages of an improving book.

Of course, now that I've said it, that that's what we're doing, something terrible will happen to wreck it all. Everything that's now in the evening will move to exactly noon. Or we'll forget the source of our true happiness–Lunch…..I'm sorry, I meant, Jesus.

Have a lovely day!