“We hit a significant marital milestone this year, though the actual day of our anniversary came and went without much fanfare. We were at a missions conference and were only able to escape for a couple hours, skipping an afternoon session to take a walk together in the July heat. It didn’t feel special or remarkable, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. I had expected to feel something.
“It was only after I returned home that I was able to reflect on twenty-five years of holy matrimony. There are ups and downs in every marriage, but for the first eighteen years, I would have said we had more ups than downs. I didn’t really have a construct for anything different.
“The last several years have challenged my assumptions about wedded bliss. I thought we would always be as happy as we had been, and without much extra effort. Because those first eighteen years or so felt relatively effortless. We got along well, and we spent a lot of time together, and we enjoyed each other. We’d been friends since we were fifteen. We thought we knew each other, and we thought we knew how to do this marriage thing.
Father in heaven who loves us, who longs to know us, who longs for us to know You and to know each other in marriage, we confess that we do not always see You or Your goodness in marriage.
But we thank you for Your good plans for us and our marriages. We thank you for Your good plans for Your church across the globe. And we thank you that your plans are not in conflict with one another.
Help us to see the image of God in one another. Help us to rejoice in each other and in our relationships. Restore the joy of first love to us.
Give us the courage to say no to the world and yes to each other. Give us the strength to seek healing from You that we may bring it to our marriages and thus to the world. Let our marriages shine the light of You to others so that they may ask where we found it and want what we have.
Thank you for giving us Your Son, who loved and blessed marriages. Amen.
The early days of homeschooling are intense. You’re afraid of messing up. You haven’t fully settled into your teaching style yet. You’re still getting to know your children’s learning preferences. You’re still uncovering their abilities and their challenges.
And often, you have little ones running underfoot while you attempt to educate your older ones.
Older moms offer advice, and it’s good, but you don’t know how to apply it to your situation. You read books, and they’re good, but sometimes the requirements feel overwhelming. How can anyone do all these things and do them well?
And sometimes the advice conflicts, and you don’t know which to choose.
Now, after 20 years of motherhood and over 15 years of homeschooling, I’ve become that older mom who has advice to offer and guidance to give. And the first thing I want to say is: let’s all take a deep breath. We make better decisions when we’re calm.
Beyond that, there are all sorts of things I could tell you. Things like figuring out your educational approach and your teaching preferences and your family culture and your students’ learning preferences. And those things are all important, and I talk about them with moms.
But the two questions I always ask young moms are the two questions they sometimes forget to ask themselves. They are:
What are you doing to take care of yourself?
And, if you’re married, what are you doing to take care of your marriage?
These two areas are the bedrock upon which a healthy, happy homeschool is built. If you’re burnt out, you won’t bring your best self to the task of home education. You’ll be tired and worn down, you’ll run out of energy and enthusiasm, and you might let too many things slide that shouldn’t be sliding. (What needs to slide and what needs to stay is a conversation for a future post.)
If you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t have the love you need to pour out on your children. Your relationships with them won’t be as good as they can be because you aren’t as full as you could be. You’ll be snappier than you want to be, and you’ll regret those moments.
Answering these two questions can be really hard when you have young children. You’re almost always short on time, and you’re probably short on sleep, which means you could also be short on brain power. Hopefully you can take some time, either in the early morning before your children get up or in the evening after they go to bed, to get quiet and ask your soul these two questions.
Don’t be afraid to ask your husband for help with the children in order to discern these things. You might even need the help of a friend or coach to talk it out. But don’t discount the power of solitary journaling to help you figure these things out. Write out all your angst until the answers appear on the page. And then go live them.
**NEW BOOK COMING IN SUMMER 2025**
The Hats We Wear: Reflections on Life as a Woman of Faith addresses six different aspects of being a woman of faith, with sections on spirituality, emotions, and embodied living, as well as marriage, motherhood, and homeschooling.
This spring I read three of the best books I’ve ever read. One in particular I couldn’t stop talking about for weeks – but it wasn’t the sex book! I had to start with that word, though, because I knew it would grab your attention.
When Christine Paterson of FieldPartner recommended the book and mentioned that it was only $3.99 on Kindle, I figured I’d give it a try. I intuitively knew that American culture held more than just a guilt/innocence worldview and that shame/honor and fear/power comes into our thinking as well, and I was eager to learn the specifics of each worldview.
What I didn’t expect was for the book to so thoroughly rewrite my understanding of culture. I underlined nearly the entire book. At only 80 pages in paperback, there’s no fluff here. Every word seems essential, and every sentence sheds light on world cultures and their differing assumptions and thinking processes. I began to understand shame/honor and fear/power cultures more fully, and I began to see how the Bible beautifully addresses all three cultural concerns (guilt, shame, and fear).
Once my eyes were opened to this, I even began to see these three concerns addressed in most of our worship songs. In Western cultures we tend to tell the gospel story only through a guilt-innocence lens, and while that’s not wrong, it is incomplete. We look to God for help with our problems regarding fear and shame, but we don’t tend to bring these perspectives into our telling of the Gospel story, and this hinders our spiritual growth.
Thankfully, we can offer people a more three-dimensional gospel, one that has the power to redeem their day-to-day struggles with fear and shame, whether in our passport culture or a host culture. God knows the human heart and has offered a solution for all our problems in Jesus Christ.
This book made me fall in love with God all over again.
I remember resonating so deeply with Emily’s podcast episode, “How to Walk Out of a Room,” a couple years ago. The episode was mercifully devoid of details so that her principles could apply to all sorts of situations. When I heard she was writing a book based on that episode, I knew I would want to read it.
Emily is a spiritual director and has a master’s degree in spiritual formation, and she has a way of walking with people in discernment that is quiet and calm. She offers a “non-anxious presence,” as they say in spiritual direction circles. (Full disclosure: I’ve been meeting monthly with a spiritual director for about the past year, and it’s been a huge part of drawing my heart back into conversation with God after some dry, lonely years.)
I had a feeling this book would be important, and so I decided not to mark it up but to leave it empty and, in a way, sacred. Instead, I would rewrite meaningful sections in my journal. This helped slow me down and really savor Emily’s words. It helped me process the past, it helped me learn how to make better decisions, and it gave me peace in the decisions I was making. Then one day I looked around and realized I was making decisions much more easily than I had in the past, even small daily decisions, and I had to wonder if this book had something to do with it.
The thing I love about this book – and that sets it apart from other books purporting to help people recover from restrictive religious environments and explore a more expansive relationship with Christ – is that Emily gives tangible steps people can take to process the past and discern their present and their future. To walk with Emily is to learn together how to listen to God.
This is the book every woman needs to read before she gets married – or after, if things in the bedroom aren’t working, whether she got married a year ago or 30 years ago. Sheila co-wrote The Great Sex Rescue with two other authors, and it’s a great research-based book that helps people untangle their unhealthy and unbiblical beliefs about sex, but The Good Girl’s Guide really gets into practicalities.
I heard it recommended by a Bible college professor who teaches classes about sexuality, and I wanted to check it out myself. There was an earlier version of the book, but just this year it was revised and expanded, so I read the revised version. This is the book I will give to my daughters when they are engaged or newly married. I still recommend Aanna Greer’s Darling: A Woman’s Guide to Godly Sexuality for those who are quite innocent or naive about sex and their bodies, but Sheila’s book is a necessary follow-up.
Sheila, along with her pediatrician husband, also wrote The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex: Because Good Guys Make the Best Lovers. I haven’t read that one, but I’m assuming it’s good because that same Bible college professor recommended it and because it’s from an author I trust.
I hope these books will help you or someone you love.
The cry of my heart for ever so long. I encounter God so deeply in science. My girls gave me this mug for Christmas. I love it, and I love them for giving it to me.
My firstborn explaining trusses to me. I took Statics 20 years ago when I was pregnant with him, and here he is 20 years later taking the course himself. I actually remember very little about it, but it was fun to geek out with him over the E (engineering) in STEM.
My four children overlooking Horse Bluff at Camp Tahkodah. Their great-great-grandfather Dr. George Benson cashed out a life insurance policy to purchase the campground — that’s how much he believed in it.
The older I get, the more I’m thankful for such a heritage for my children. (They have a beautiful heritage of faith and family traditions on my side too.) Benson later sold the camp to Harding University, who still owns and operates it.
Horse Bluff has always been my favorite bluff.
In many ways the song “Sing My Way Back” from Steffany Gretzinger represents the year 2023 for me. Re-entry challenged my faith and seemed impossibly hard at times. In a very real way I lost access to the one thing that could have strengthened and sustained me in that time.
My relationship with God thrived on the field, but upon returning unexpectedly in 2020, I found that not only had I changed while I’d been overseas, my passport country had also changed.
For a long time everything felt dark, and I felt dead inside. But somehow in 2023 I found my way back to His heart.
Much of this change was accomplished through working with a spiritual director. I’m so grateful to Danielle Wheeler for answering my questions about spiritual direction and for connecting me with a potential director.
We are more completely our true selves when we are in communion with Christ. That’s part of why I felt so much unlike myself during re-entry. I’m thankful to be making my way back to both God and myself.
Brooke Ligertwood’s “Honey in the Rock” represents another aspect of my year. I first heard it a couple years ago and disliked it. I wasn’t experiencing life like this and thought it was out of reach.
But 2023 has changed all that. It started at the beginning of the year with some financial challenges — we had to make major foundation/crawl space repairs, and the bill for these necessary repairs frightened the living daylights out of me.
I’d had anxiety around money for decades — ever since adolescence when my family faced adverse financial circumstances. I’d carried that anxiety through life, memorizing and reciting Matthew 6:25-34 over the years and praying for my daily bread with the Lord’s Prayer. But the anxiety remained.
I had to do some deep inner work on my money fears this year, and it wasn’t pretty. About halfway through the year I began to find some healing.
But that wasn’t the only way I found “honey in the rock, water from the stone, manna on the ground, no matter where I go.”
This year was a series of progressive healings, only one of which was with money. There was healing in relationships, healing in my ability to reach out to others. The manna God offers isn’t just physical nourishment, but I hadn’t experienced His manna in a long time.
Of course, now I can look back over all the years of re-entry and see honey in the rock everywhere. But for so long I couldn’t see the stars, I couldn’t taste the honey.
24 years ago this handsome guy asked me to marry him at this camp (albeit a different bluff). We’ve returned to this place as often as we can over the years — it’s as close to Home as he gets.
And it’s been the place where we’ve often made big decisions. The decision to start a family (remember that big tall guy explaining the trusses?), the decision to go to nursing school in KC, the decision to go to the mission field.
There were no big decisions to make this year, but I came away with a very grateful heart for 2023 and the God (and people! you know who you are, College Heights Church!) who brought me through it.
“Home is wherever I’m with you.”
Re-enacting our engagement for our children.
There’s no one else I would rather do life with. Here’s to 24 more years — and 24 more years after that.
Jonathan & Elizabeth Trotter 