by Jen Hatmaker
My point is that we were ordinary. No parent catered to our every desire; no one provided artisanal vegan soap or taught us baby sign language or created “mental stimulation centers” in our playroom (we didn’t have a playroom). We moved and struggled financially and fought and failed and fended for ourselves sometimes and went to school with strep throat. And still, here we are, healthy adults who love their parents and each other, remembering childhood fondly, gratefully, tenderly. The main elements of the story were secured, and they alone lasted.
Friends, I’m challenging the metrics. I believe we can take a handful of things quite seriously as parents and take the rest less seriously, and it is all going to be okay. You are doing an amazing job. Your children know they are loved and have felt it all these years deeply, intrinsically. If we get seven out of ten things mostly right as moms, we are winning the majority, and the majority wins the race.
And when in doubt, put a few dollars back each month for their future therapy.
Mama tried.
God made us such a pretty world.
— REMY HATMAKER
CHAPTER 3
BEAUTY, FOOD, FUN, AND NAPS
A couple of years ago, I traveled to Ethiopia with a nonprofit I serve, Help One Now, and a few fellow influencers. We had an audacious goal: generate monthly sponsorships for four hundred at-risk kids to prevent imminent family disruption. It was orphan prevention. Families had to meet several criteria for sponsorship: single-parent, HIV-positive, no extended family, no job. We were serving seriously vulnerable people with zero safety nets.
Adding to this heavy work, our team drove an old van six hours a day to meet all our objectives. In rural Ethiopia. The best way I can describe this experience is by comparing it to riding a wooden roller coaster built in 1925 and missing 60 percent of its parts. We were pretty sure we were going to die any minute. You couldn’t even call what we were driving on actual roads. We were shaken and bounced and slammed half to death hour after hour, and this was all aided by no air conditioning. It was vehicular trauma.
This was serious, sober work, and we labored around the clock, spending long days in the field, then long nights at our laptops, banging the drum, rallying the troops. My mind was brimming with poverty statistics and crushing stories and injustices; our conversations centered around empowerment and reform. In the middle of this work, with my dirty hair and tired body and tortured mind, a text from a girlfriend back home snuck through the precarious web of Ethiopian cell coverage:
“Party at my pool next Friday! All our friends, no kids, and margaritas!”
First thought: Privileged American life. Gross and clueless.
Second thought: I’m gonna get a new bathing suit for this! Yay for pool parties!
It’s so weird to live in this world. What a bizarre tension to care deeply about the refugee crisis in Syria and also about Gilmore Girls. It is so disorienting to fret over aged-out foster kids while saving money for a beach vacation. Is it even okay to have fun when there is so much suffering in our communities and churches and world? What does it say about us when we love things like sports, food, travel, and fashion in a world plagued with hunger and human trafficking?
Obviously, good reader, I understand the dilemma. In this very book you are holding, I seriously discuss trauma recovery and abusive churches as well as Netflix and junior football leagues. I love people. I love curry. I love God. I love coffee tables. I care about the church, and I also care about dinner. Justice and humor are equal heavy hitters for me. I live in several categories wholeheartedly, sometimes in the same hour.
In the complicated world of Christian subculture, there is an unspoken standard, a notorious goal to “win the contest.” It’s there, the contest. We don’t say it out loud, because it sounds ludicrous spoken into the open air, but we all know about it, we feel it. The contest is a race to see who is the better Christian, and beyond the basics of behaving, extra points are awarded to people who do the hardest work with the least amount of fluff.
Obviously, top billing goes to missionaries. This is a given, the brass ring. These are the ones who went all in, the clear winners. Doesn’t matter that they debunk our American notion of international work constantly, telling us they are still normal people with normal friends and sometimes they even have fun or sin. We don’t believe them. They pulled the total-obedience trigger, and now they live on Winner Island with all the other missionaries. (People who don’t own TVs live on the island too.)
The rest of us still living in the land of plenty are left to battle it out for the remaining prizes. We keep a close eye on each other, paying attention to who is volunteering more, sacrificing more, spending less, misbehaving less. You know we do this. Right this second, you can envision that one person nailing the standard, the one winning the contest in your estimation, the one of which you ask: “What would _______ do?” (Or more likely: “_______ would never _______ .”) This is the person you remember when you need to feel bad about your Christian performance.
Laughably, hysterically, people sometimes put my name in that blank. Sisters, please. Listen, if you think for a millisecond that career ministry qualifies anyone for the prize, you are mistaken. What is “career ministry” anyway? How is my “ministry” any more “ministry” than anyone else’s? Regardless, the contest hits a whole ’nother level up here among us full-timers, those of us who stand on stages and do Jesus-y things for a living. Who is the most Christian? Who complains the least? Who posts the most Scripture references on Instagram? Who requires less downtime? Who works harder? Who does the most good? Who is always happy to be alive and shows the least humanity?
Oh, trust me: the struggle is so real.
Or maybe you favor the individual events in the contest and your toughest competitor is yourself. Am I wasting my life on things that don’t matter? Is God proud of me? Should I be more devout, serious, dedicated? Am I radical enough? Do I “lay down my life for others,” and are all my “treasures in heaven”? Perhaps you don’t look sideways for these criteria but wage a constant, discouraging war against yourself. I cannot think of a greater burden than imagining God’s perpetual disappointment.
The contest is exhausting and demoralizing. And then I remember something else: it isn’t even biblical. It’s not how the family works. Forget for a moment the whole notion of comparing Christian obedience, which is clearly insane, a man-made competition that pits apples against oranges, kale against cheeseburgers. It’s so silly and unregulated and impossible. Total nonsense, a full miscalculation of Jesus’s new way of living, a game with no winners that centers on human performance over freedom in Christ. In a race to be faithful, we succumb to pride, rigging and ruining the whole thing.
But that aside, the idea that winning Christians enjoy the least number of good-and-fun things (all branded as selfish and frivolous) is a mess. These good-and-fun things run the gamut from basic merriment to time off to pretty things to outside interests not found in the New Testament. The Christian guilt that often accompanies these pursuits can be daunting, tempting us to downplay them in certain company.
The thing is, God absolutely created us and His world with tastes and sights and sounds and connections designed to thrill. He thought up humor and laughter and delicious flavors coaxed from the earth. He gave us beautiful colors and dance and music and the gift of language. He invented apples and beaches and sex and baby lambs.
In addition to an overabundance of raw materials, God designed community to connect with Him and each other through feasts and parties and wide tables set with bread and honey and wine. He fundamentally, theologically established the Sabbath, every seventh day for people and every seventh year for the land, declaring rest not just helpful but holy. God proclaimed Jubilee once every fifty years, a year of debt cancellation and universal pardon, a time for reconciliation between adversaries and a radical display of God’s mercies.
In other words, God is into beauty, food, fun, and naps.
It
often feels unchristian to enjoy life, especially knowing what we know and seeing what we see. Appropriately, we are deeply connected to human suffering and setting wrongs right; we care about sharing and generosity and making sure our grossest, basest selves don’t overtake our character. A life spent entirely on pleasure is the emptiest of containers. We know this in our souls, in our Scriptures. God positively told us to stay close to the brokenhearted, the hungry, the hurting; that is where He is and where some of His best work is going down.
But wisdom also embraces the rest of the plan, which includes a beautiful world and beautiful people and beautiful delights meant to be enjoyed. When the story we tell ourselves is that God is a bit punitive and stern and we are only here to serve His bottom line and basically just suffer until we die and finally get to heaven, then it makes sense that embracing pleasure is out of bounds and only lesser Christians succumb, those disqualified for the contest.
But if we absorb the full counsel of Scripture and acknowledge that God sincerely loves us and gave us a whole world of gifts and joys, we discover many secular things we love are actually sacred. I was on Voxer with five dear girlfriends yesterday, and my beautiful friend Sarah reminded us of “the ministry of a new haircut.” Oh, my stars and gardens, yes. It’s like a rebirth. We made a quick list of various ministries that buoy our spirits and quicken our steps: an old pair of comfy jeans, a crisp pair of new jeans, a pedicure, Spotify, freshly cut grass, a new bra (this ministry is so real, you guys), toes in sand, chips and salsa, a career accomplishment, a really outstanding concert, chopped onions and garlic in olive oil, a fuzzy blanket, a squishy baby, a new reading chair.
This world is hard and scary, and it is also phenomenal and gorgeous and thrilling and amazing. Reader, there is a middle place, holy ground, where we learn to embrace the fasting and the feast, for both are God ordained. There is a time to press into sacrifice, restraint, self-denial, deferment. There is also a time to open wide our arms to adventure, laughter, fulfillment, gladness. A Christian in tune with God’s whole character neither regards herself as too important or too unworthy to enjoy this life. Yes, we are part of God’s plan to heal the world, but we are also sons and daughters in the family. We are not just the distributors of God’s abundant mercies but also their recipients.
Back to Ethiopia. As I mentioned, we were working with an incredibly fragile community plagued with food insecurity, sickness, and economic collapse. These were not frivolous people with the luxury of outside interests. We lived in two entirely different worlds, one marked by privilege and one by poverty.
And yet.
Each home we visited had at least one beautiful piece of fabric hanging on the wall. Even the most humble hosts offered coffee in lovely cups. Kids, really vulnerable kids, screeched and laughed as they played soccer up and down the streets. The whole town vibrated with Ethiopian music, Teddy Afro, the national favorite, aggressive and blaring and always too loud. The town square practically sizzled with the spicy smells of berbere and tibs and doro wat.
In other words, they were also into beauty, food, fun, and music.
Of course they were.
God gave humanity many healing tools, and they exist far beyond circumstances. Some of them are traditionally spiritual: prayer, communion, sanctuary, Scripture. The sacraments have always brought us back home to God. But so many others are tactile, physical, of soil and earth, flesh and blood. Some are covert operators of grace, unlikely sources of joy, like a beautiful piece of art, a song, a perfectly told story around a dinner table, a pool party with friends and margaritas. These also count, they matter, they are to be consumed and enjoyed with gusto, despite suffering, even in the midst of suffering.
God gives us both Good News and good times, and neither cancels out the other. What a wonderful world, what a wonderful life, what a wonderful God.
I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.1
— OSCAR WILDE
CHAPTER 4
GROCERY STORE THEOLOGY
Look, I realize I put five children in this family on purpose. I did not accidentally end up with an enormous family against my will. And I also realize that this many dependents requires more of everything—more money, more work, more energy, more cell phone tracker apps (I am a laid-back mama, but I will track a phone so hard). This is part and parcel of Big Family Life, and I’m down.
The only thing I wish my multiple kids did less was eat.
Y’all, they want to eat every single day. Several times!
If you could see how much food five children and their friends go through, you would swear on a stack of Bibles they all had tapeworms. It is actually insane. They deplete my pantry by 30 percent within fifteen minutes of a grocery store run. It is like living with savage wilderness people who come across a fresh animal carcass.
This is partly why I loathe the grocery store. I realize people who love food as much as I do typically swoon over shopping, but not this home cook. I’ve let the fridge and pantry whittle down to half a package of rice and an old bottle of fish sauce before finally dragging my butt to the store to fend off starvation. Why is it so hard? Wasn’t I just here? Are malnourished robbers breaking in at night and eating our food? It seems physically impossible these people devoured all the food I bought just one minute ago. There has to be a different explanation than simply my kids demolishing it all like champion competitive eaters.
But I also despise the grocery store because of all its horsecrappery.
I, like all reasonable and decent citizens, traverse the exact same grocery store path every trip. This is just civilized. I have a couple of friends who shop helter-skelter—different starting places, different routes, random patterns—and I’ve recommended them for intervention. Listen, it’s a free country, so I respect your right to start with the middle aisles and end with the perimeter (I guess), but do the same thing every time, for the love of the land. This seems like baseline grocery store theology.
Anyhow, I begin my odyssey in produce. I immediately identify which shoppers I am now going to awkwardly encounter for the next hour. The, say, four of us have launched our journeys at the same time, and we will now follow a nearly identical path through the store. Right when you think you’ve broken free from the pack, one of them turns down Aisle 7 from the opposite end: We meet again, Lady in Green.
This is approximately one thousand times worse if it is someone I know. Because now we are required to dialogue on each passing, and what really is there to say after the first grocery store conversation?
Oh, spaghetti sauce, I see. What would we do without Prego, amirite?
Your basket is looking full! Which, I guess, makes sense. Because of the shopping.
Hey again! I don’t usually buy this crap cereal. This is for a class project. (Lies.)
Criminy! How are we maintaining an identical pace through thirty thousand square feet? This is the only time I will disrupt my route, to untangle from the socially awkward prison of repetitive small talk. This is the introvert’s nightmare, and I am not above dismantling my orderly system to escape another eight-second discussion on the price of wheat bread. So I skip the dairy section and go straight to paper goods this time . . . what is this, the Spanish Inquisition?
Then there is the hypocritical dance required every time I grocery shop. If you’ve been around me the last few years, you know I’m pretty committed to real food and whole ingredients, and I’ll pay double for organic in a hot minute. Our meat is carefully sourced, and I cook almost everything from scratch. I forced my whole family to watch Food, Inc. and Super Size Me, and we listened to Forks Over Knives on audio on a road trip once (the Hatmakers know how to party).
So I don’t know how to help you process the $6.99 box of Flavor Blasted Goldfish and coffee creamer made entirely of chemicals I purchase every.single.time. To say nothing of the Oreos and Totino’s frozen pizzas. Premade, processed pudding cups? Sure. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese? We take vitamins. Not all
our food comes from someone’s farm, is what I’m saying. If 75 percent hails from the actual earth and 25 percent comes from a steel vat of partially hydrogenated oil in a laboratory, I’m willing to make this ideological leap. Mama’s busy sometimes.
But admittedly, some items in our modern grocery stores feel like they are heralding end times. In the deli department, a wandering eye will spot such delightful foodstuffs as an “olive loaf.” Surely you agree that anytime the word “loaf” is applied to a meat product, we are approaching societal breakdown. We have a brand called Steak-umm, which is a “chopped and formed emulsified meat product that is comprised of beef trimmings left over after an animal is slaughtered.” These are the sorts of exported products that make the rest of the world admire America. Oh sure, Italy, you may have hand-rolled pasta from a local wheat mill and cheese made from your cousin’s grass-fed cows, but we have chicken nuggets made from factory runoff meat slurry. Waste not, want not, is what we say, Italy. Here’s a low-quality fast-food restaurant for your nation’s capital. You’re welcome.
Also, I’ve never mastered the art of meal planning (and by “art” I mean basic diligence exercised by most healthy adults). The whole idea of planning out two weeks of meals and recipes and lists makes me want to cover my eyes like a southern damsel. I mean, I write entire books but can’t muster the discipline to compile a one-page list. It’s too much work! What am I supposed to do, think about it in advance and write it all down?? Adulting is hard. So instead, I go to the grocery store and spend three times more money than necessary.
But at least five times during every trip, I recall some dinner idea and spend five minutes pulling up the recipe on my tiny phone in the middle of Aisle 4, like a rock in a river everyone has to flow around. This is immediately followed by a text to whoever is home: Can you check if we have coconut milk? Do we have any green onions left? How many ounces is the can of tomato sauce in the pantry? Is there still a jar of ghee in the back of the fridge? (Everyone loves my grocery store texts. This is how families bond.)