orthodoxy

“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” – James 1:22

If you like scary things this time of year, I’ve got a good one for you. It is a hobgoblin of a most frightening kind that none of us like to talk about or admit that it keeps company far too close to home. It is the foreboding specter, the ghoulish ghost, of “consistency.” Let me explain.

This past week, I, too, went afield and traveled up to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, into the heart of Amish Country. The horse drawn buggies were in generous profusion, and it was interesting to watch the world’s buffet of general tourists who are drawn with a certain amount of fascination to all things Amish, me being one of them. If it truly is a gift to be simple as goes the song, the Amish abound in many ways. They certainly have no electric bills to worry about, nor car insurance or TV’s that break down, and the problems of Vista are far from their minds. We loved the clothes lines on pulleys that lifted the family laundry proudly up in the air for all to see, flags of defiance to Maytag and all their kin. They marked the Amish farms in clear distinction to any other well kept farm of the community. There is an enforced simplicity here that makes us all pause and wonder if we are truly better off with all our modern claptrap.

Being a woodworker, I snooped around the tourist shops hawking “Amish made” furniture - peeking at the joinery and noting designs. It led me to inquire and follow a trail that led me to an off-road farm a good way from town to Mr. Stoltzfuss’s chair shop. The family dog tried to announce my presence but no one came out. I followed my ears to the sound of a motor running in a back building. What I discovered was a fairly large woodworking shop humming with business. Mr. Stoltzfuss graciously welcomed me and showed me his upstairs showroom and all around his mini-chair factory. It was a family business that involved grandpa and the whole family as they turned out about 3,000 chairs a year. There were no light bulbs in the shop, no electricity of any kind, but I discovered some of the most sophisticated and up-to-date woodworking machinery available today. These machines were driven by either hydraulic fluid or compressed air supplied by a large diesel engine running continuously in an adjoining room. Preformed wood came by way of shipment from commercial suppliers, and these folks were shaping, sanding, and finishing these parts together in a model of home-industry efficiency.

I couldn’t help but let my mind pitch wildly back and forth from the diesel engine and hydraulic motors to the theology of it all that prohibits one form of modern convenience but allows another. I tried to picture a meeting of the Amish elders sitting around and deliberating the worthiness or unworthiness of power driven machinery, which kinds, and how much. To further the picture of seemingly conflicting systems of thought, I stopped by a roadside scene and took a picture of a team of six horses pulling a single row corn picker as it made its way slowly through the field. As it approached me, I suddenly recognized that a gasoline engine was mounted on the corn picker driving the whirring mechanics of that machine. Evidently it is permissible to mount an engine on your corn picker but not on your buggy.

Being careful not to mock this, to us, a glaring inconsistency, both my wife and I confessed that being consistent is, indeed, a difficult thing for us all. It is the hobgoblin of all Christians who profess a high and holy standard and yet struggle each day to live it out. We say that church is important and then skip at will. We would shun worldliness and then let ourselves and our children watch the unthinkable. We say it is better to give than to receive and then consume untold wealth on ourselves. We hold up the great commission but then flee to the safety of the suburbs and our Christian subculture. Scary, isn’t it, how we can so easily hitch gasoline engines to our horse drawn corn pickers and still feel so orthodox?

Education Ends

Esteem her (wisdom), and she will exalt you; embrace her, and she will honor you. - Proverbs 4:8 NIV

So where are we going with our educational treadmill? That has been somewhat the focus of our past few issues. It is a question we need to keep in mind as we direct and encourage our children to put forth the effort every day to keep up their rigorous pace. How we answer it will in large part determine their future and the extent and direction to which we pour our time and treasure, college or no.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the realm of public education is rapidly losing its way. The threat of an a-moral, secular, Darwinian education is now being surpassed by the corrosive effects of the no-child-left-behind mentality which is spawning a wasteland of mediocrity and intolerance of standards of any kind. (Ask your friends in the public schools about the new minimum grade of “60” for all student work.)

But where are we going and what do we want to maintain as the ballast in the bottom of our educational boats? If you want to tie your thoughts in endless knots of increasing complexity and confusion, there is no quicker way than to pick up some books on education. Just thinking about all the curriculum options available to Christian homeschoolers now is enough to give one a headache. Go to your university library and the volumes of opinions on education rendered over time require a whole wing. In light of that, I have come to appreciate the utter beauty of Proverbs 4:7 which so quickly reduces so many of our endless, human dialogues and all of our continual striving with its one, easily grasped truth: “The principal thing is wisdom; therefore get wisdom.” You have heard me beat this drum before. And you will again. It is our north star guiding us from infancy to adulthood. It influences our K5 curriculum choices and the “if” and “where” of sending our children off to college.

As such, we teach literacy because it is the key to reading the Book of Ages, the fountain of all wisdom. The wisdom of Scripture, in turn, tells us to subdue the earth and so we teach mathematics and science to restore, in part, the damage caused by the fall. As a dividend, Math gives us the discipline and exercise of logical reasoning and thinking. Science causes us to sit and ponder the majesty and mystery of creation and our creator. Scripture leads us also to examine History for it compels us to examine our ways and what we have done with our knowledge of good and evil which we so dubiously chose in the garden. Will all this show up on a SAT test? Only in small parts and pieces.

But regardless of test results, our goal is to bring our children to the point of being able to think clearly and rationally developing a passion for God’s Word as a touchstone of basic truth for all of life. We want them to be more than Bible ‘spouters,’ however, for God’s wisdom should propel us to be not only morally redemptive agents in this world but to be redemptive agents of change for all aspects of this world’s fallen-ness. We fight disease because it is an unintended but natural result of sin. We fight hunger, pollution, political deadlock, corruption, animal cruelty, poverty, crime, and urban blight because God’s wisdom compels us to, out of His love for all men. We are our brother’s keeper. In this, we are tested everyday.

Whether we learn this in our Sunday school classes or the second grade classroom or at our mother’s knee or as David did, out in the sheep pasture, it is of little consequence. The big picture is that we develop a passion for God’s wisdom and play it out to its logical end in the thousands of our daily choices, our places of service, our priorities, and our stewardship of time and treasure. God’s truth, taken to its logical conclusion, is the stuff of what great families, churches, cities, and nations are made of.