How I Became a Homemaker

Our dining room table

When people ask me about my life these days, I tell them that I feel like a homemaker. No, I am not married. No, I do not have kids. Nor do I have a white picket fence, a dog named Sparky, or awesome cleaning skills. But I feel like a homemaker non the less. Let explain why.

I work for a Christian organization called University Christian Outreach (UCO). One of our charisms is discipleship, or helping our students grow in their relationship with Jesus Christ. One of the ways that we help our students grow in discipleship is by encouraging them to live together during their college years in living situations referred to as Households.

What is a Household? At it's core its a group of same-sex folks ages 18-24ish committed to living together and supporting each other through their Christian walk. While each Household looks and feels a little different, each member of the house commits to several household patterns each week, mainly morning prayer, dinners together, evening prayer, and Saturday Lord's Days.

Preparing for a Lord's Day 

In order for Households to run well, each member also commits to upholding certain rules. Rules give each house member clear expectations for things like bills, curfews, modesty, and service expectations.  The area of house rules was a challenging one for me to accept at first. Especially the rule about no television in house common areas. But overtime, I have learned to see our house rules as a source of freedom, and a way for me to love and serve my sisters.

The women's household in Pittsburgh is an interesting one. Six women, plus a mischievous bowling ball named Bob, live in it. We're a fun mix of backgrounds, college majors, and personalities. All of us are slightly addicted to Pinterest for inspiration for household meals. Our house doesn't have a name yet, but I think we should call it Cookie Manor seeing as we all love to bake. We even have a tradition known as Cookie Thursday where one of us bakes a new cookie recipe to bring to our UCO prayer meetings.

We live in Shadyside, a neighborhood located within the city of Pittsburgh. Despite it's name, Shadyside is one of Pittsburgh's hidden gems with plenty of places to eat, run, and drink coffee. Ellsworth Avenue, Shadyside's main drag, is home to some of the most beautiful homes I have ever seen. The neighborhood is a nice mix of graduate students from local universities, young families trying to figure out how to walk their dogs and their strollers simultaneously, and senior citizens who can trace their ancestry back to Pittsburgh steel tycoons.

Home Sweet Home

The house itself was built in 1900, before electricity, central plumbing, or refrigerators, so naturally we have two fruit cellars. The house is quite spacious-we each have our own room, and can comfortably fit twenty to thirty people in our living room/dining room for parties. Like most turn of the century homes, something is always falling apart, much to the annoyance of our household leader. If you look out from our front door, you can picture carriages pulling up to drop off ladies for afternoon tea.

Horse and Buggy Shot

Living in Household makes me feel like a homemaker because it gives me the structure to create a home for myself, my friends, and college women in the Pittsburgh area. My 19 year old women's studies major is probably rolling over in her grave right now, but I really like my new role. I am very grateful that the Lord has called us together to be a home, a light to the nations, unified by our love for Christ and each other.

The Best Place in Pittsburgh: Seat 107 CLP (Main)

Instagramed shot of CLP (Main) 

While all Pittsburgh natives agree that Pittsburgh is the best city in the world, no one can agree on what the best place in Pittsburgh is.

Sports buffs love cheering on 'dem Stillers at Heinz Field. The Pittsburgh version of the hipster (those uber cool folks who really do bike uphill both ways to school) can tell you which neighborhood farmer's market to go to for the best Saturday morning flowers. Come Lent, parishioners of the 50+ Catholic Parishes of Pittsburgh will shamlessly plug their parish for the coveted Best Fish Fry of the Year Award.

But as a Pittsburgh native, I know what the best place in Pittsburgh is. The Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh (CLP).

I first encountered CLP during my childhood summers. During the summer months, charged with looking after a bookish smart-aleck while her daughter put in long hours in the operating room, Granny was always on the lookout for free ways to entertain said bookworm. Her solution? Tuesdays became Library day.

During the late 1990s, CLP began to sponsor a program called Summer Reading Club as a way to trick (I mean, encourage) kids to continue to read once school let out for the summer. Every time you read a book, you were given so many raffle tickets that you could submit to win a prize. The more books you read, the more chances you had to win. And they were good prizes. Like 164 packs of Crayola Crayons.

Since she lived in Glassport, Granny decided to sign me up at the McKeesport Branch of the CLP. She bravely co-signed for my very first library card,  and gave me my very own cardboard box to carry my ten weekly books back and forth in.

But Granny, always on the lookout for ways to tame my already healthy ego, knew that she needed to find some kind of service for me to do lest Tuesday's turn her granddaughter into a reading monster. One day, her sister-in-law mentioned that she planted fresh flowers on the graves of our relatives at the McKeesport Cemetery. But Aunt Mammie worried how she would find the time to care for the flowers between her work schedule, and caring for her mother and brother? Granny told her not to worry, she knew just the eager eight year old for the job.

From then on, Tuesdays became Cemetery and Library day. Every Tuesday morning during the summer we would load up Granny's blue min-van with four empty plastic milk cartons, two knee pads, and a small shovel and travel to McKeesport Cemetery to weed and water.

At first I was not happy with our weekly trips to the Cemetery. I saw them as an unjust encroachment on my library time.  I may or may not have thrown a tantrum or two. Or three. But Granny was insistent. No cemetery. No library.

I look back now and see those summer Tuesdays as the highlight of my childhood. Spending time with Granny in the cemetery taught me  a lot about my family history, respecting my elders, and creating beauty in an ugly world. CLP's Summer Reading Club helped me to fall in love with reading, learn to finish tasks I started, and appreciate the consequences of breaking rules (i.e not returning your books on time).

Granny passed away from ovarian cancer during my senior year in high school. At that point, I was working as a page at another CLP, and would soon begin my studies at the University of Pittsburgh as an English Literature and History major.  Granny was buried with the rest of our family in the McKeesport Cemetery. A couple Tuesdays a year, I drive to the cemetery to scrub bird poop off her tombstone, and water her plastic flowers.

As I sit here and write this from seat 107 in the reading room of CLP Main, I hope she's looking down from heaven and smiling.

Love Both Young People AND the Church

I just spent the last week and a half attending the Campus Outreach Academy in Lawton, Michigan with about 100 students and staff from University Christian Outreach. The goal of the academy is to equip students and staff workers for discipleship and evangelism on their college campuses.

Every year our teachings and discussions center around a theme. This year we learned about Christian virtues. One of our speakers, Dr. Thomas Bergler recently published a book entitled The Juvenilization of American Christianity (Eerdmans 2012). I thought I'd take a few minutes to share some reflections on the book and how it applies to my life as a UCO staff worker on the University of Pittsburgh's campus.

Bergler argues that American Christianity became juvenilized in the post-war era as a way to appeal to the youth whom adults believed the moral future of the world depended on (Bergler 5). He uses case studies from Liberal Protestant, Roman Catholic, Black, and Evangelical churches to provide examples for how different segments of the American population responded to juvenilization. He concludes by arguing that juvinilization revitalized American Christianity at the expense of individual spiritual maturity (Bergler 225).

I particularly enjoyed his analysis of the Black churches response to juvenilization. Before reading this book I knew that the civil rights movement, and particularly the sit-in demonstrations, grew out of and in a lot of ways depended on Black churches. Bergler's analysis convinced me of the importance of community (a group of people united under a common vision and mission) in standing up to juvenilization. For example, Bergler argues that, "unlike white Protestants, African Americans did not need to create a 'hip' version of Christianity to provoke young people to embrace social justice... dramatic injustices forced every young person to realize that some things were more important than fun and entertainment" (Bergler 93). 

Unfortunately, Black churches did not escape juvenilization when they decided to trade in the gospel of Christ for the gospel of racial justice. This case study forced me to think about what I've traded the gospel of Christ for in my own life? Maybe my gospel is a belief that my life is supposed to matter, so how can I make a difference with my life? What schools do I need to go to to land a high paying job? What moral compromises am I willing to make to get ahead?

Overall I found the book very helpful and accessible. He makes a thorough historical argument for the juvenilization of Christianity across social, political, and economic lines with language accessible to the youth workers he seeks to reform. His book reminded me of Romans 12 (do not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind) and encouraged me to think critically about my consumption of American culture.

My favorite part of the book, however, was his conclusion were he offers advice for youth workers trying to reach out to students living in a culture saturated with the effects of juvenilization. I'm going to end this post with his tips. Then tape them to my whiteboard.

Tips for Taming Juvenilation

1. Teach your students what the Bible says about spiritual maturity (i.e every Christian need strive for it!)

2. Educate yourself about juvenilization and serve as a cultural gatekeeper for your organization (i.e think critically about teenage culture and prayerfully discern its usage)

3. Love both young people AND the church (or risk losing both the best of the new and the treasures of the past)

23 Life Lessons, 23 Years in the Making

It's probably presumptuous of me to assert that I've acquired any real wisdom by 23. But since it's by birthday, I thought I'd share with you 23 Life Lessons, 23 Years in the Making...

1. "Trust in the Lord your God with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge him and he shall direct your paths." Proverbs 3 :5-6. Learned this lesson the hard way. Life just works better when you put your faith in the Lord and not in yourself.

2. A day that begins with coffee is usually better than a day that does not.

3. You should try to do at least one thing everyday that scares you. How else are you going to come up with the chapter titles for your autobiography?

4. "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art..it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that gives value to survival" (C.S. Lewis)

5. If your bookshelf is taller than you, you'll never grow up.

6. A cluttered desk indicates an organized mind.

7. Pray often. In fact, pray as though your life depends on it. Because it does.

8. Men are different than women. For men this is self-evident. Most women do not discover this until they start working with them.

9. Sometime's it's smart to due dumb things. Like volunteering to serve as a missionary the year after you graduate from college. Smartest life decision yet.

10. There are few problems in life that a good run won't solve.

11. Being single is a gift. Embrace it. Treasure it. Delight in it.

12. Take the time to figure out what you want to do with your life. Why? Because "freedom son's a dirty shirt/The sun on my face and my shovel in the dirt/My shovel in the dirt keeps the devil gone/I woke up this morning shackled and drawn." (Bruce Springsteen "Shackled and Drawn")

13. Take the time to learn how to cook. Not all of us were created to be great chefs, but none of us were created to live on microwaved dinners and frozen pizza.

14. "If you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bullshit." (Dad)

15. If a book isn't holding your attention by the third hour into it, put it down. Life's too short.

16. "For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord; plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future" (Jeremiah 29:11)

17. "Tis better to sit back and have others think that you're dumb, then to stand up and prove it." Spoken by Mr. Shaner, my seventh grade language arts teacher.

18. A best friend is someone who's got your back, and will kick your butt.

19. Do not post anything on Facebook you wouldn't want your grandmother to see. Or your high school English teacher, or your ex-boyfriend's mother, or your cousin that you only see at family reunions. Because they ALL will.

20. If you forgive those who've hurt you, you'll stop hurting yourself.

21. Your early twenties are the perfect time to develop an eccentric hobby. When your eighty, you want to be able to tell your great grand kids about the time you thought it was a good idea to take a yoga class in a 90 degree studio in the middle of July.

22. "All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king"( J.R.R Tolkien.)

23. The only constant in life is change.

Catching My Breath in a Room of My Own

One of my favorite essays that I read as an undergraduate at Pitt was Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. As I was setting up my bookshelf yesterday in my new room, I couldn't help but skim some of my highlighted passages. In her essay, Woolfe argues that women are great writers, but cannot write in their current social environments because "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (Woolfe 4). Such a simple statement. A statement that helps me make sense of why I've been unable to write in the last month.

About a month ago I moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan back to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to spend time with my family before moving into Household and working for University Christian Outreach (UCO). The first two weeks home were really difficult for me because of the culture shock. I went from living with nine women in a space designed for 3 to living with my mom and sister in a space that could easily fit double that. My mom works the daylight shift as a nurse, and my sister works evenings as a waitress, so I spent a lot of time at home by myself. The suburbs can be quite a lonely place on a weekday afternoon when you have nothing to do. Also, my mom and sister are the type of people who eat a pot of coffee for breakfast, sunflower seeds and a piece of fruit for lunch, then everything but the kitchen sink for dinner. I'm the type of person who skips a meal only when violently ill.

Another area I struggled with being at my parent's house was having a consistent prayer time. It's hard to find a time to pray when you're living out of boxes and unsure what's going on. Eventually I realized that if prayer time was a priority for me, I'd have to prioritize it one day at a time. By the third week I started driving my mother to work (at 6:30 am!) and having my prayer time right when I got home. In consistently offering my loneliness and frustrations over to the Lord, the culture shock began to lift. I began moving my things into Household, and a moved in officially last night.

What can I compare to the joy of sleeping in your own bed for the first time in 11 months? In a room of one's own? It feels like catching your breath after running a race you didn't think you could finish. Now that your blood's no longer pounding so violently in your head, you can hear your internal voice again. The race stretched and challenged you, but it's the cool down that makes you feel most like yourself.

When I look around my new room, I see a tangible expression of how the Lord worked through me on my GAP year. My mom's old chest of draws, my sister's desk, a desk chair from my grandparent's kitchen table remind me that my family loves me and will continue to support me wherever life leads me. My bookshelf crammed with everything from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to Dr. Seuss' O The Places You'll Go! encourages me to learn something new everyday. The sunlight streaming across my black prayer chair reminds me to fix my eyes on the Lord during this time of transition. And my fireplace (ps. our house was built in 1900!) covered with the photographs of the women and men I've met along my journey reminds me of the Lord's love for me.

Typing with Nine Fingers

This week in summer household, we're reflecting on the Lord's peace. I find this topic particularly fitting, and perhaps a tad ironic, because I'm feeling pretty anxious these days.

Less than one week from today I move back to Pittsburgh. See my last blog post for my thoughts on transitions. In the next six weeks, I will be moving twice, seeking employment, preparing for summer camp, and preparing for UCO staff work. Not to mention catching up with the family and friends I haven't seen in the last year. Plus processing the emotional and spiritual vestiges of my GAP year. In the week to come, I need to pack, schedule goodbyes, coordinate the move, buy my sister a birthday present, finish my newsletter, write out thank-you cards, and finish my career counseling course. All while participating fully in the last week of summer household. 

During my personal prayer time this morning I basically presented the Lord with a list of my anxieties and asked him to bless them. The Lord in turn showed me that my to-do list of anxieties point to a lack of trust in his grace and goodness. Instead of offering my fears of the future over to God, I'm internalizing them and turning into a basket case. 

Case in point. I'm currently writing this blog post from a laundry mat. I was in such a rush to get out the door this morning (aka start crossing things off my mile long to-do list) I left my money at home. When we arrived at the laundry mat, I started frantically digging through my bag for the money I left at home. In the process, I pricked my finger on a pencil and dripped blood over half the contents of my laundry bag. Thankfully my housemate gave me one of those "you're-being-an-idiot-stop-it" hugs and lent me the money to wash my cloths. 

As I sit here trying to type with nine fingers, I'm realizing that I can't depend on circumstances to bring me peace, or I'll never be peaceful. I can choose to respond to stressful situations with peace or  with anxiety. Not the fake peace that comes from disengaging from reality, but the true peace that comes from trusting in the Lord. My need to rely more on the Lord for peace reminds me of the passage in Exodus 14 right before the Israelites cross the Red Sea into the Promised Land. Petrified by their fears of the unknown they ask Moses:

 Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? ¹² Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!”  Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again.

The Lord did not call me out of Egypt (my post-GAP life) to have me drown in the Red Sea (my GAP year) before reaching the Promised Land (Adult Christianity). The Lord knew what he was doing when he called me on a GAP year, and I trust that he will continue to provide for me in this next step. I trust that the Rebecca that will be moving back to Pittsburgh is not the Becky who left it. 

On that note, I think it's time to take my laundry out of the dryer...

So, I Don't Do Transitions Well...

When I was a child, I was always that kid who turned into a brat the last month of school.Most kids turned into brats because they were too excited about the approaching summer. I turned into a brat because I didn't want the school year to end. From a young age I knew that the end of a school year ment my schedule was going to change, and I resisted that change by being moody and throwing temper tantrums.

I hate transitions. In conversations I often jump from one unrelated point to another, and become frustrated when a friend or co-worker can't keep up. I received an A- on my high school senior thesis because I forgot to transition from one body paragraph to another. 

Part of the reason that it's been a month since my last blog post is because my life lately has been a series of major transitions. Three weeks ago I moved out of my home on Elizabeth Street and into the apartments above the Word of Life office to participate in Summer Household, a six week summer residential program. Saying goodbye to the women I lived, and sought the Lord with was tough. The move itself was tough, let alone living with nine new women in a space designed for thee. 

Two and a half weeks ago my GAP year officially ended. In a span of 48 hours I parted with part of my identity, twelve of the craziest, sweetest, solid partners in crime I've ever known, and the structure and stability that comes with a clear sense of vision and purpose. The day after my GAP year ended I had my second sob fest since I arrived in August. The first was a reaction to the pain of my ruptured galb bladder. 

What makes this period of transition particularly painful is that there does not appear to be an end in sight. In three weeks I move back to my parent's house for two weeks before I move again into the house I'll be living in for the next year. While I'm adjusting to life in Pittsburgh again I need to find a part-time job, figure out how to locate and afford a used car, and catch up on the relationships I've put on hold for a year. All while trying to rest and prepare myself for the exciting adventure known as your first year of UCO Staff work. 

As I'm processing all of my fears and anxieties about the next several months, I'm reminded of a scripture passage from Jeremiah 29:11

"For I know the plans I have for you says the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, 

plans to give you hope and a future."

I do not know what the next several months are going to look like. I do know that the only way to find out is to trust in the Lord and in his plans for my life. I may hate transitions, but my life is a testament to the way in which the Lord can transition the lives of people who are willing.