Heads up on this wonderful resource and great deal from Christianaudio.com. If you've never read John Piper's classic book -- arguably his life message -- then make sure to get the audiobook version of Desiring God while it's available for free! Details are below.
"Mind-hammering and heart-warming, Desiring God ignites a passion for God that would set the world ablaze if it were the norm and not the exception today." - Os Guiness
"The healthy biblical realism of this study in Christian motivation comes as a breath of fresh air. Jonathan Edwards, whose ghost walks through most of Piper's pages, would be delighted with his disciple." - J.I. Packer
This Sunday, November 8, is the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. I'll be with the ladies of Alistair Begg's church, Parkside Church, on Sunday. But I trust we will have time to join fellow believers around the world in interceding for our brothers and sisters in more hostile areas.
If you'd like to know more about the persecuted church and why this day has been set aside to pray, watch the brief video below.
Many people who know me as an author and women's ministry speaker are often curious about why I have started a film company. They seem to assume there is a split focus there. Perhaps there is, but because I see media in a more holistic way, one of the reasons I started Citygate Films was to influence the diet, so to speak, of what is being consumed in mainstream media. I also have a heavy concern that the "screen generation" is being fed more harmful images and narratives than uplifting ones.
In her latest book, Choosing Gratitude, Nancy Leigh DeMoss writes, "Undeniable guilt, plus undeserved grace, should equal unbridled gratitude." That's the gospel response in a nutshell. And recently, I've had two occasions to be overwhelmed emotionally by people who emulate that kind of gratitude.
I am so happy to be able to thank you all and to add a postscript to yesterday's blog post about the two Emilys in Africa. Your generosity and interest is incredibly rewarding! Emily Jansen wrote me back in less than a day to say she had received a number of offers to help her in-house worker, Emily Mainga. So she asked me to provide the specific directions to those who were inquiring how to send a financial gift:
Thanks so much for your interest in providing financial support to my inside worker, Emily Maingi, and her two daughters, Mary and Rose. Please make a check payable to "Emily Jansen," and mail it to the AIM (Africa Inland Mission) headquarters in NY. You should put a note inside your envelope saying the following: "This check is intended to be directly deposited in Emily Jansen's ASB account, and will be used as a gift for her inside worker. This is not a donation for Emily's own fundraising, but I hereby give permission for it to be deposited into Emily's account for her distribution to Emily Maingi in Kenyan shillings."
Send the check to Africa Inland Mission, P.O. Box 178, Pearl River, NY, 10965. Please also indicate to me by e-mail, emilyjjansen@gmail.com, how much you are donating, so that I can tally the total amount and present it to Emily at the end of Term 1 in November.
If you would like to find out more about the AIM and RVA ministry and my life as a short term missionary, please visit my blog, www.emilyjacob.wordpress.com.
Thank you so much for your generous heart to give! It is through your partnership in the Gospel that God's kingdom is moving forward and being exalted among the people of Kenya!
What a pleasure to know that through our online networking, we can make a difference in the life of a mother and her daughters in Africa. For me, this is the sweet reward for the time spent in writing and maintaining this blog. Thank you for being truly radical, eternal-reward-seeking women!
My friend, Emily Jansen (on the left in this photo), is spending a year in Kenya as a "dorm mother" and staff support at a missionary school in the Rift Valley. I admire her willingness to live elsewhere for a year to be immersed in another culture and to invest in the young women there. (She is shown with another staff member in this photo.)
Emily is a single mother who has two small elementary-aged girls, Rose and Mary (pictured). With the drought here in Kijabe, life has been harder than usual as of late. The crops were bad, and so the food that they usually depend on is scarce. To make matters worse, Emily had some important possessions stolen from her home last week. These kitchen items and elements (wood, metal tools, etc.) were a part of her livelihood and growing pizza business that she and her sister started. As her two daughters are growing like weeds, and desperately need money for their school uniforms, food, and textbooks, this loss of property is simply devastating. Just this afternoon, she asked to share her heart with me, and broke down crying because she was so discouraged about having to take “steps back.” Despite her tears, Emily was filled with faith and kept saying, “But I know God is in control.” To say the least, it was a humbling, holy moment for me. How can I stand by and watch? How can I simply comfort her and tell her I’ll be praying? I can’t. No…in these moments, I am seeing just how spiritual and beautiful and divine the “practical” and “hands-on help” and “tangible” really is.
So, I am here blogging on this unusually quiet afternoon to ask for YOUR help. Can we partner together to help ease the pain and hardship of Emily’s burdens? Can we sacrifice just a small portion of our own funds and income to give Rose and Emily a happier, more hope-filled future? At the least, can we pull together enough funds to help keep them well fed and healthy for the rest of this school year?
You’d be surprised at how FAR just a little can go…15,000 Kenyan shillings each month (approx. $200.00 USD) would sufficiently provide for their needs. In total, it would cost $2,384 USD yearly.
As my heart broke for Emily this afternoon, I was reminded of the parable in the Bible that Jesus tells about the man who closes his door to the one knocking…unwilling to help, cold-hearted, and lacking compassion. I shuddered at this thought…what a horrible existence—to have the freeing and glorious power to act, and instead to shrink in the powerless state of selfishness and greed.
Oh, Lord! May my heart never come to such a hardness…may you soften it and make me be the hands and feet of Christ himself! I don’t want to get to heaven someday and have to swallow a lumpy, tough piece of regret of having chosen to NOT help someone because I want to stay seated on the savvy cushion of ease and wealth. THIS is where the rubber meets the road for me, Lord. This is where I learn to walk your road…
If you are interested in making a donation for Emily, Rose and Mary, please contact me at emilyjjansen [@] gmail [dot] com. [Note: edited to prevent spam.]
The American Emily is there in Kenya on missionary support herself, so she knows firsthand what it is like to trust God for your finances. But I love her desire to be a blessing in more ways than she counted on when she arrived, and how she is willing to ask her network for help. That's why I'm joining her in the effort to spread the word. One or two fewer lattes or one sacrificed movie outing is all that is required to make a significant difference in another woman's life halfway around the world.
TIME magazine just published a special report, "The State of the American Woman." The Rockefeller Foundation, in collaboration with TIME, conducted a landmark survey of gender issues to assess how individual Americans are reacting. What they wanted to know was whether the battle of the sexes was really over, and if so, did anyone win? I guess it depends on how you define winning, because one of the more challenging aspects of this report is what was said about women's happiness:
Among the most confounding changes of all is the evidence, tracked by numerous surveys, that as women have gained more freedom, more education and more economic power, they have become less happy. No tidy theory explains the trend, notes University of Pennsylvania economist Justin Wolfers, a co-author of The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. "We looked across all sectors — young vs. old, kids or no kids, married or not married, education, no education, working or not working — and it stayed the same," he says of the data.
This has also been reported elsewhere. For example, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote an op/ed piece in September about the same trend, titled "Blue is the New Black." These media reports have in common the Wharton study released in May titled, "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness." In my opinion, the Wharton study uncovered one important reason for declining female happiness in an age that upended what feminist Betty Friedan saw as the problem back in 1963: the trapped housewife syndrome. Now that women are no longer bound by what Friedan saw as the primary problem of women, you'd think we'd all be happier. But the Wharton study noted the emotional ties to home still affect women:
Arlie Hochschild’s and Anne Machung’s The Second Shift (1989) argued that women’s movement into the paid labor force was not accompanied by a shift away from household production and they were thus now working a “second shift”. However, time use surveys do not bear this out. Aguiar and Hurst (2007) document relatively equal declines in total work hours since 1965 for both men and women, with the increase in hours of market work by women offset by large declines in their non-market work. Similarly, men are now working fewer hours in the market and more hours in home production. Blau (1998) points to the increased time spent by married men on housework and the decreased total hours worked (in the market and in the home) by married women relative to married men as evidence of women’s improved bargaining position in the home. However, it should be noted that the argument went beyond counting hours in The Second Shift. Women, they argued, have maintained the emotional responsibility for home and family: a point that is perhaps best exemplified by the familiar refrains of a man “helping” around the house or being a good dad when “babysitting” the kids. Thus even if men are putting in more hours, it is difficult to know just how much of the overall burden of home production has shifted, as measuring the emotional, as well as physical, work of making a home is a much more difficult task.
Though the goal of second-wave feminism was to severely diminish the importance of home--the private sphere of our important relationships--it is clear that this isn't possible because the feminine capacity for nurturing and bearing life still courses through us. That's not to say we don't enjoy other tasks and goals outside of the home. It means that the simplistic approach to modeling women's life structures after men's is ridiculously stressful. The home does matter and the relationships nurtured there do carry a priority.
In fact, you can see this is the results of the Rockefeller/TIME poll. The theme of relationships courses throughout the poll and dominates the issue of priorities:
If a happy marriage and children is the highest priority for more than half of those surveyed, then I believe we need to be more intentional about helping our culture achieve those goals. The timeless truth of the Bible still speaks to us today and we who know the Word should not shrink back from leading others to learn it.
A headline like this one is tempting fodder for many comedians. But it's no joke. According to the Institute for American Values, the institution of marriage has been in a steady decline for the last four decades. No surprise there. What may be surprising for some to consider is that the private act of marriage has such a great impact publicly. In an article titled, "For Better or Worse: Report Says Marriage's Best Days Have Gone By," the Washington Post reported:
The U.S. Marriage Index, the brainchild of David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, seeks to quantify the health of marriage in the United States in the same way economists use leading indicators to parse the state of the country's economy.
"We're just proposing a way of numerically capturing these trends so that people can see them," he says.
The index combined five statistics -- the percentage of adults between the ages of 20 and 54 who are married, the percentage of adults who reported being a "very happy" with their marriages, the percentage of first marriages intact, the percentage of births to married parents and the percentage of children living with their own married parents -- to reach a composite score illustrating the state of America's nuptial unions. In 1970, that score totaled 76.2; by 2008 it had dropped to 60.3.
Almost 90 percent of children were born to married parents in 1970; last year it was 60 percent. Of adults between ages 20 and 54, 78.6 percent were married in 1970, compared with 57.2 percent in 2008. The portion of first marriages that remained intact dropped from 77.4 percent in 1970 to 61.2 percent last year.
According to Blankenhorn, statistics show that children who grow up in homes with married parents where their parents are "less likely to live in poverty, to have emotional or behavioral problems, to engage in premature sexual activity, to use drugs or commit suicide."
"Every single pathology or problem or difficulty a child can experience -- every single one -- growing up outside of a married-couple home elevates the risk," he says.
Blankenhorn's hope is that the index, a collaborative effort by 15 academics, researchers and policy experts intended for release every other year, will become a bellwether signaling the direction marriage is headed in the United States. And that it will galvanize concern and support for the institution.
"It's impossible, really, to make progress unless you have some shared understanding," he says. "There's no disagreement among us about high rates of unemployment -- nobody runs around saying it's fine to have 20 percent of us unemployed. But we really are not at that level of agreement about marriage."
I like Blankenhorn's economic analogy. But as I wrote this post, many single parents came to mind. I think it is worth pointing out that statistics are helpful to analyze large trends. But God's grace freely interrupts those patterns! So if you are a single parent and tempted to fear or worry, I advise that you turn those temptations into prayer and worship. God is the great Redeemer and his work of grace covers our many sins, failings, and weaknesses. While I believe we need to soberly consider the larger trends here, it's also good to keep in mind that if you are a child of God, you are no mere statistic.
This week, the True Woman blog featured a post about infertility and how to live with that unfulfilled longing to be a mother. It is a useful article for anyone who has been disappointed in life. Here's an excerpt:
that road, too. I've had my times of sobbing in private after a friend tells me she's expecting. Ranting at God it's unfair that I can't have a child when there are all sorts of people who don't even care about Him who seem to have no problem at all. Those painful Mother's Day church services as I watched all the beaming mothers stand up around me and knew it was a club I was not a member of.