karen mains

One of the great tools of the wise mentor is to ask questions that rise out of wisdom granted by the Holy Spirit. The answers to these questions are never easy; sometimes they take months to consider. When the questions come, however, from the exercise of the spiritual gifts of discernment and knowledge, they can potentially change lives. So approach these questions seriously, and take your time to consider them prayerfully.

One of the ways we can look honestly at the nature of our hungers is to examine the people who attract us, sometimes strongly. In other words, who is it we admire? Whom do we look to as models?

The questions:

• What types of people most attract you? Describe them.
• Is there one person in particular whom you deeply admire? If so, why?
• What kind of a person would you like to be in twenty years?
• Who do you know exemplifies what you have described?
• List a variety of people who are models for you. What are their strengths?
• Now consider whether any in your list are spiritual models. Are any of them hungry for God? How do you know?
• If you have no models, what does this say about you?
• Have you ever been disillusioned (or nearly destroyed) by people you admire?

Your Christian Blogger,
Karen Mains

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I have had all year to think about the natural rhythms God has built into life. Actually, this has been a wonderful thinking process. I found that there was a lot I was taking for granted. As we move into the concept of “Dancing With God: Stepping in Time to His Sacred Rhythms,” take some time (several months would be good) and build a long list.

To get you started, let me include a quote from Wayne Muller’s book Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives.

“Carolus Linnaeus, an eighteenth-century Swedish botanist, became so enamored with the rhythmicity in plants that he grew a garden that could tell time. He planted flowers that opened or closed their blossoms an hour apart, from morning to evening throughout the day.

“All life vibrates to this inner music. The daily rhythms of many living things approximate a twenty-four-hour cycle, even when isolated in a laboratory. These circadian rhythms (from circa, “about,” and dies, “daily”) live deep in the body, are nearly impervious to alteration, and refuse to be extinguished. In normal daylight, mice in laboratories begin running on an exercise wheel about dusk, run intermittently through the night, and sleep during the day. Even when their cages are kept artificially dark for long periods, the mice maintain this circadian rhythm for several weeks.

“Sometimes when I walk the beach at nigh, there is a luminescence in the waves. a microscopic alga that illuminates at night. This algae is nonluminescent during the day—even under artificially darkened laboratory conditions. Circadian rhythms will entrain, or adjust to an artificial light-dark cycle—but only if it does not deviate drastically from a twenty-four-hour cycle. A test animal exposed to eleven hours of light and eleven hours of dark will gradually entrain to a twenty-two-hour cycle; if exposed to thirteen hours each of light and dark it will entrain to a twenty-six-hour cycle. But as soon as the artificial cycle is removed, the natural cycle returns. If the cycle is varied too much—if we try to entrain an organism to a thirty-, thirty-five-, or forty-hour cycle—the creature will soon give up trying to adjust, and return again to its original twenty-four-hour rhythm…

“Most organisms have more than one circadian rhythm. In human beings, different circadian rhythms govern the wake-sleep cycle, glandular secretions, highs and lows in body temperature, and the retention and excretion of urine. Despite all external manipulations of light, hours of sleep, or changes in nutrition, even under the most constant laboratory conditions, no organism can ever be completely entrained away from its true inner rhythm.”

NOW, START A LIST OF THE RHYTHMS YOU CAN IDENTIFY. Take your time. This exercise can become the platform on which we begin to dance with God!

Your Christian Blogger,
Karen Mains

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The last three weeks have been nothing short of miraculous. I’ve made progress in the house and yard unlike any previous time in my life. My husband, David, and I started working our way down through the mess in the garage because our adult kids set up a small “garage fund” and gave us several hours each for tearing down old pegboard, setting up some industrial storage shelves for books, and starting to roll paint on walls. The completion of that job was delayed until I organized the garage attic and put all the Christmas stuff away that had been stored in the middle of our two-car space.

I am two-thirds done with organizing the attic; the Christmas stuff (all but two boxes) has been stored (along with the spring stuff, the autumn stuff, the canning stuff, etc., etc.).

We are picking up new pegboard this Saturday, the “garage fund” has paid for a new work table, and—really, really important—we should be able to get the car (we only have one) in the garage by the end of next week. Amazing!

This has made me think how frequently it is the starters and boosters in our lives that get us going. A small gift of unexpected funds is great, but mostly, it is the people who give us a half-day, a couple of hours, who help lift the stones that are too heavy, or who move the table that doesn’t work up the basement stairs and the one that does work down the basement stairs. It is the father of a daughter-in-law who not only installs two new outdoor garage lights but teaches you how to install the third one (by the front door) yourself.

What a gift extra hands are!

A friend who is a wonderful Christian woman, but honest enough to deal with the perplexities of faith, said to me as we washed plaster dust off the kitchen decorative ware (we also replaced drywall in three rooms this month), “You know we Christians do a lot of good things in the church. We do meetings well; we are great at bringing tasks to completion. We are project-managers extraordinaire. But we do not know how to do living together. Somehow we have lost the lore of jumping in and helping one another dig out of life’s messes.”

I agree. This has been a lesson really learned this past year. With just a little bit of help that gives me a boost and gets me started, I can go on and complete huge projects—all on my own. What a gift! What an immeasurable offering—a couple hours of time.

It makes me wonder, though. What kind of booster and starter am I in the lives of those I love—in the lives of my own friends and family? Perhaps I need to tune my own booster and starter abilities.

Your Christian Blogger,
Karen Mains

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Why is it that we do big messy jobs for other people that we need to do but have neglected to do for ourselves?

My husband and I are spending two weeks grandparent-sitting while our daughter and son-in-law are in Israel. Although the house has been cleaned, there are still proverbial “pockets of poverty”; wastelands of homemaking neglect—the laundry room, the Chevrolet Suburban, the top shelves in the two-floor-high living room and family room, and the garage. It took me three days to conquer the first-floor laundry room, a day to empty the car and another 139 bucks to have the outside washed and the inside detailed, and considerable balance to angle myself on the ladder so I could pull down the décor pieces and scrub away four years of dust.

I figure I’ll let the garage go—but then, I just might get inspired somewhere in the second week; who knows what extremes a Christian woman might go to for her daughter?

What is interesting to me about all this is that my own laundry room is not in the greatest of shapes, the tops of my armories are also accruing dust, and due to a lack of time and organization, the garage is so full we haven’t been able to park the cars for a couple of years.

So why am I going to all this effort for my daughter?—whom I love, of course, but who is also younger than her mother (of course). Why spend three days cleaning her laundry room when about two to four hours of labor would bring my own into good shape?

I found myself pondering, I don’t remember anyone—not my mother or my mother-in-law—doing this kind of work for me. But I do clearly remember the clean clothes stacking up on the laundry table in our century-old house in Oak Park, Illinois. I do remember, how, with four kids, an inner-city pastorate and a number of young-adult live-ins, just the simple materiality of life could become overwhelming.

I don’t remember anyone doing this kind of work for me. Perhaps that is the clue to why I am working so hard to put these physical spaces to right. People did other things for me—Mother never came to my house empty-handed, my father swooped his grandkids up to spend weekends at the retirement farm, and my in-laws were great about taking us out to restaurants (as well as keeping a pool cleaned and open for terrific swimming Sunday afternoons).

However, there just wasn’t much help for me when I was a young mother, with the purely physical labor of life.

I have a friend who is a near saint, and as far as I can tell, who survived an emotionally deprived childhood. In addition to her own offspring, my friend and her husband took in her grandmother as well as her younger siblings—one to love into death, the others to love into life. One of my friend’s brothers was mentally disabled. “How can you give to others what you have never received yourself,” I once asked her—because that is what I now observe her doing. She smiled and answered, “But that’s the point, isn’t it? I always try to give away what was never given to me.”

I think this is what is happening with my daughter’s laundry room. I am doing for

her what was never done for me. And instead of letting my act of love descend into onerous comparison (No one ever helped me with my piles of neglected work. So why should I do this for someone else—even a daughter?), like my friend, I need to learn better to give away the gifts I have never been given. And I must remember to do this intentionally—because there is something reciprocal that occurs. We do this giving what we have not been given for others, but we also do it for the sake of that self still within who was once neglected.

I must do this giving simply because I know what it means to get behind with the laundry (and the car, and the high dusting, and the garage); to give the gift because I remember what it is like to move children through the days (day after day) all the while trying to live my own demanding life too. This is what a Christian woman should do—love a daughter (neighbor) as herself.

Something amazing happens when, like my saintly friend, I intentionally give as a gift what I never was given—it heals the little deprivations and neglects from the past that still sometimes gnaw at my present.

Oh, heck!—perhaps I’ll tackle that garage after all.

Your Christian Blogger,
Karen Mains

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