Like it was for everyone else, 2020 was a strange year for us. Not strange: we didn’t post much to this blog. Strange: pretty much everything else. 😂

Jaimie had COVID-19 in the last two weeks of March, and that has had knock-on effects for our family the rest of the year. It scared our girls a fair bit, especially Kate, and it gave us lots of opportunities to help the girls grow through that. They’re doing really well now, though like everyone else they’re more than ready to go back to having a more normal social life.

One upside for us this year was that Jaimie was already homeschooling the girls when COVID hit. Our schedules were not as radically disrupted as many were. It hasn’t been without its bumps along the way, not least because we had gone out of our way to make sure that our girls had lots of social activities to supplement their homeschooling time. All of those necessarily vanished for large chunks of the year—and the loss of their two weekly homeschool coops has definitely been harden both of them. Happily, one of the coops continued streaming its classes, which meant that Elayne was able to continue practicing Taekwondo, and Kate was able to join her. They’re both making fabulous progress, and did a great job at their most recent belt test.

The impact of COVID on the girls’ Taekwondo also led to the biggest upside of the year. It turns out that doing Taekwondo over Zoom by yourself is not easy for an 8-year-old, so Jaimie ended up stepping in to help coach her through it. Jaimie was really good at it. And loved it. The master of the dojong noticed, and actively recruited Jaimie, and now she and the girls are all doing it together and making steady progress.

I could not possibly be more delighted and proud of all three of my gals.

Also, we got a puppy! Moraine is about four months old now, and has been a great source of joy for the whole family, even as (you know, being a puppy) she is a good deal of work as well.

We named her for Moraine park, which Jaimie and I visited on our honeymoon over a a decade ago.

The girls have been taking piano lessons—we switched teachers for Elayne, and Kate got excited about it as well. They had their first recital with this new teacher—Elayne’s second recital overall and Kate's first. They’ve both come an incredibly long way since starting at this studio, and importantly are both learning to love the music as well as picking up theory and technique really effectively. That’s the primary thing I want for them here. (If they go further than that, I’ll certainly encourage and celebrate it, but we’ll never pressure them that way.)

Along the way, we also bought a piano—a beautiful Yamaha upright which has brought Jaimie and me an incredible amount of joy to have and be able to play. I’ve particularly loved hearing Jaimie dive back into piano after main years away from the instrument.

For my own part, I’ve had a very good second year at LinkedIn. Delightfully, and unlike every other job I have had up to this point, I remain quite happy two years in. Every previous job, I could see the writing on the wall by this point, and the longest I have ever made it was 3½ years. With LinkedIn I expect to be here for at least five years total, and quite possibly longer.

Outside LinkedIn, my year has been… odd—partly because of COVID and partly just because of fundamental challenges and shifts at this point in life. I’ll dig into this more in my usual end-of-year writeup on my own website. The short version is that I picked back up composing, put my side project on indefinite hiatus, did more and better than any previous year when it comes to Winning Slowly, and courtesy of COVID did not get to run any races. None of that ended up making for a bad year, though: just a strange one.

In sum, for all that this has been a pretty challenging year for all of us in many ways, I’m grateful to report that we are doing well, and that it has been a good year, too.

Well, dear readers, Chris dropped several not-so-subtle hints in his latest post that I should update readers on life through my eyes. So, as I sit in this ice-cold coffee shop, I will attempt to dredge up some tidbits that might be of interest to you.

Homeschooling

We are in the full swing of homeschool now! I still haven’t “named” my homeschool (it feels silly, and it’s not required by law), a la the last homeschooling post I wrote on this blog. I have a second-grader and a kindergartener, so we’re down to business and, for the most part, loving it. I had to laugh at the aforementioned post, in which I claimed that homeschooling (at least, at the kindergarten level) was “easy.” Nice thought, past self, nice thought. It is, in fact, very challenging at this point...which means it’s also very rewarding.

We transitioned from doing Classical Conversations (you can ask me about that, sometime - it was not a good fit for us) last school year to the Sonlight curriculum (literature-based) for the 2019-2020 year. We love Sonlight, for both girls! It’s simultaneously rigorous and colorful and engaging and well-suited to my girls’ different personalities. I’m enjoying re-learning things I haven’t heard since grade school, as well as experiencing children's classics I’ve never read (such as Charlotte’s Web).  I’m learning how to roll with the emotional and scholastic punches, tailoring my teaching and the material to my and my children’s needs. What does that look like? Skipping a boring read-aloud here and there. Doing an all-science day every once in awhile. Deciding that perhaps Sonlight language arts (difficult stuff for the age level) can be subbed out for something more tailored to Elayne's math/science-oriented brain. In short, I’m learning flexibility, which has never been one of my overarching character traits!

We’re endeavoring to meet the 4 hours per day for 172 days requirement with enthusiasm and verve! Like in any job, some days are harder than others. Some days, the last thing I want to do is teach. But once we get started, the girls and I find comfort in the familiar schedule and delight in the fascinating material. Like, for example, how cool is ancient Egypt?! Extra points for anyone who knows what a hemhemet is (Elayne had to remind me...).

We’re still using Saxon for math, and loving it. Elayne requests that I give her math worksheets in her free time. cough The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, CHRIS. cough

I’ve concentrated on what Elayne is doing (since she’s doing more  “official” school), but what about Kate? Well, Kate’s thriving. She just finished her Kindergarten math book and is about to move onto first grade level math. She’s 5 1/5. I’m in for it! She also just started reading in earnest, and is proving herself to be as much a bibliophile are her sister and, well, both her parents.

The Silmarillion

I’m reading it. If you’ve never heard of it, Chris might un-friend you. Just kidding. Am I?

What a delightful foray into JRR Tolkien’s imaginarium! I’m learning details about the underlying subtleties of The Lord of the Rings trilogy that are legit blowing my mind. The man was a true artistic genius! Of course, I have my husband and good NC friend Caleb to help walk me through the confusion of the various names in made-up languages. You’d think that, as a fantasy writer, I’d be used to it by now.

Sundry Topics

Speaking of being a fantasy writer...I’m still writing. At least, I was a few months ago. I’ve let it go because I felt stymied. I do not commend this course of action.

I'm working on a fantasy novella that I’ve shared with a grand total of...two people. It’s in progress. Might be for awhile. But good things are worth taking time on... what? What’s that you say? Self-justifying? Codswallop!

I joined a CrossFit gym with my neighbor Nicole. Why yes, I do consistently hurt in places I didn’t know existed.

It’s cool, though. I actually kind of love it. We did rope climbs today. ROPE CLIMBS, people! If that’s not cool, I don’t know what is. I felt like Mulan trying to retrieve the arrow from the top of the post.

I love my church and my neighborhood. So. Very. Much. I’ve been involved in coordinating the women’s Titus 2 ministry, teaching Bible study, serving in the nursery, serving on the worship team as a singer, and hosting a small group, among other things. You could say I’m very entrenched in our church now and LOVING it. Churches are made up of sinful people (of which I am not the least), so there is difficulty, but I’m beginning to see it as a beautiful kind of difficulty. Slowly but surely.

My mental heath is really good, overall. Praise God! I can say with confidence I’m doing better now than I have been in the last decade. And I’m going to leave you on that note because it is just such a testimony of hope - hope that I want to encourage you with.

Oh, wait. I guess the note I want to leave you on is this: I don't know WHY my husband wanted to post that particular picture of me in the last blog entry. Seriously, guys, with every year that passes, I lose two or three wrinkles and look two or three years younger. Like Benjamin Button. Really. The picture is a lie.

It’s been a while! A long while. Jaimie and the kids and I have been going pretty steadily for the last year, and I’ll let Jaimie cover some of that (if I can persuade her to post again), but the main thing to say here is: things are good!

They’ve been a bit busier than we expected, in part because I changed jobs at the beginning of the year: from Olo to LinkedIn. It has so far been an absolute dream of a job—the best I’ve ever had, both because LinkedIn is a great employer and because it’s the best fit for a job I’ve ever had. The combo has been really, really good. It has let me recover fully from the burnout I experienced last year.

But it has involved a good deal more travel, because I now fly out to Sunnyvale California (the heart of Silicon Valley) 3–4⨉ annually, and I also flew to our New York office in August. That had its own upsides, too, though: our office is in the Empire State Building, and I got to visit the top.

I also taught a workshop at EmberConf again, and then just a couple weeks ago spoke at All Things Open. Since ATO was in Raleigh, our old stomping grounds, we took it as an opportunity to travel out as a family and see a lot of our old friends—most of whom we hadn’t seen in two years.

Seeing our friends was good for our souls. I have rarely felt so refreshed and energized after traveling… though admittedly, “energized” has a very specific meaning here that also means “Can I take a nap now?” It was especially delightful to see our girls pick up friendships right where we left off. I very much hope we’re able to do this every few years—keeping in touch digitally is great, but seeing people in person is always better.

These last few months of the year will not be any less busy: I am in Sunnyvale the first week of November, then my whole family is in Virginia seeing my mom’s side of family for Thanksgiving (for something like the second time in 25 years! It’s a big deal!), and then Jaimie and the girls and I will travel to Texas the week before Christmas to spend time with Jaimie’s family and celebrate Christmas and the many December birthdays.

I’m also working on an interesting side project:

rewrite

I’m building an ambitious research writing environment for macOS, iOS, web, and more.

rewrite.softwareChris Krycho

I have also been writing a newsletter this year, with a Tolkien-themed titled (of course):

Across the Sundering Seas

A (roughly) weekly newsletter, sent always in the hope that you’ll reply! Comes in two basic shapes: Most weeks, I’ll highlight a couple things that I read over the week that fit together in some way, and offer some commentary—often pulled fairly directly from my notes on the subject. Longer-for…

I also taught a month-long adult Sunday School class at church, digging into the doctrine of Christology: what is the full Christian understanding of who Jesus Christ is and what he has done?

Christology: God With Us and For Us (Chris Krycho) — Forestgate Presbyterian Church

<p>A Church Community in Northern El Paso County</p>

Forestgate Presbyterian ChurchChris Krycho

(You can find more details on that here, including links to listen to those lessons in a podcast player if you like!)

All in all, we have had a lot going on, but it has all been delightful and good. This has been one of the best years I can remember our having, and I am profoundly grateful.

Hopefully Jaimie will follow this up soon with a post hitting on some of these things from her perspective… including her ongoing (very excellent!) adventures in homeschooling the girls.

The last year, as I alluded to in an earlier post in this space, has been pretty full. We moved across the country, we walked through the most difficult phases (so far, and Lord willing for good) of my dad's treatment for an aggressive brain tumor (he's winning, praise God), joined a new church, and moved into a new house.

This after half a decade of seminary life where I was working part time as well, where we added another kid to our family's life and walked through some of the hardest parts of Jaimie's struggle with depression.

It's not really a surprise that I'm dealing with some burnout. Life has been hard in a bunch of different ways! So I'm continuing to practice resting well. I made myself play video games a few times this week – that way of putting it is intentional; it really felt like making myself do it. I expect it may take a while for me to be back to normal, and that's okay.

It's okay in one sense because this is just how life goes. But it's also okay because life is genuinely really good in many ways right now. We live in a beautiful place, for one thing; and that is a comfort and joy to my soul many days.

For another, our little girls are thriving here. The move and all these changes haven't been without their struggles and challenges and pains for them, of course. Both of them tell us regularly that they miss their friends from North Carolina, and both of them have more than once told us that they miss living in North Carolina.

And who can blame them? Jaimie and I are both very happy to have moved here, but we miss our friends in North Carolina sometimes!

How in the world are they already 4 and 6, though?

We're trying to find our new rhythms in all of this. We're leading a small group for our wonderful church, and Jaimie is serving with the women's discipleship ministry and in the music team, and Kate is doing kindergarten and Elayne starting "first grade" – put in quotes because she's already reading up a storm: she loved The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and we need to buy her the next volume of The Chronicles of Narnia. But all of that is new! We don't have our routines in place yet; we haven't figured out what our day-to-day and week-to-week routines and patterns are.

Part and parcel with that: I'm still figuring out my own work rhythms and routines, and trying to find (or better: make!) time for building friendships. In North Carolina, I hit a coffee shop at least once a week, just to get out of our apartment. I feel the need for that somewhat less keenly here in no small part because my home office setup is really, really great. But a big part of what I gained from going to a coffee shop every week was social interaction outside my house. For the first time since I started working remotely, I've found myself seeing no one but my family except on Sundays for church – and I need to change this up!

Most of that is neither good nor bad, exactly; it just is. The worst I can say for most of it (now that we seem to be through the worst with my dad's brain tumor) is that it's low-level-but-constantly-stressful! That's not all that helpful for getting rid of burnout, but it's not the end of the world, either. And we're still really happy to be here, grateful for our congregation at Forestgate, glad to be nearer to family, happy to be by the mountains, happy to have a house we can use to host and bless others.

That's pretty much it as far as life right now goes. It's up and down, and that's what we expect it to be until our King comes again.

This is a new kind of Saturday for me, and one I've been looking forward to for a very long time: one in our new home, with little that needs doing (and all of that of the fairly ordinary chore sort).

Moving in was a busy few days, of course: we signed papers for our mortgage^[1] last Wednesday (10 days ago), moved all our boxes and beds and things on Thurdsay, and unpacked all day Friday and Saturday. Sunday ended up being a really wonderfully restful day for our family: it snowed, and snowed hard. Hard enough that we opted not to mess with the drive to church – a drive that is thankfully much shorter now, and probably fine that day given it mostly involves high-traffic roads, but we were all fatigued enough that we simply opted not to risk it.

Monday I was back at work... in my new office.

I got very spoiled with my office view in North Carolina – an upstairs bedroom that looked out on a forest filled with tall trees and the occasional bald eagle. But I think it's fair to say this is not a step down. Those mountains you can see in the background are mere miles from here – I can run to the base of them (and already have) – from our home here in the foothills.

And now I'm sitting here on a Saturday, updating our address in a few places and mostly just enjoying our home and staring out our kitchen widnow at the view as a write this. (I keep getting distracted!)

It's strange: though we have been in Colorado for three full months already – and they have been full indeed – there is a real sense in which we are just starting this new phase of life now. We did what we could, especially in starting to engage with our new church, while still living with my parents. But we were a full thirty minutes drive then from what is now our neighborhood and community; we could hardly get a YMCA membership or otherwise find our new rhythms and routines. And our schedule was necessarily (and not at all in a bad way) one of working around my parents' schedules (and they ours!). We could not really host people in our home, as has long been our practice.

Now we can. It's delightful.

I'm looking forward to – Lord willing! – many decades of Saturdays sitting at this little island in our kitchen, reading and writing; and breaking to help my little girls as they play and sign and dance around their play room and our living room. It's nice to be home.

Since we moved to Colorado, a few pretty major things have happened.

1. The house

The timing for our house got bumped around. A bunch. We moved expecting that we'd likely end up moving in sometime in December, and shortly after getting here, we got scheduled to do a final walk-through on the house on December 15 and to close December 22. We planned to move in on December 23, and enjoy a family Christmas in our new home.

Then there was a problem with the cabinets. And cabinets delayed a bunch of other things. And we have a good builder, and so they opted to delay… but that includes needing to delay past the Christmas break, and then that bumped into other people's closing schedules, so we got bumped back nearly a full month. New final walkthrough date: January 10. New closing date: January 17. New likely move-in date (because who's around to help move in on a Thursday?): January 20.

Given that, as I'm writing this, we were originally hoping to be in our house already... we're disappointed. It'll be okay, of course, and we're now less than four weeks out, but it was an annoying bump, to say the least.

On the other hand… it’s still gorgeous, and we’re giddy to get to live there in short order.

2. My dad's health

The much bigger bump for us, which I haven’t written about publicly yet at all, is that less than a week after we got here we learned that my dad has a brain tumor, which turned out to be relatively aggressive—though, thankfully, not as aggressive as it could be: it’s a Stage 3 and not a Stage 4 tumor.^[1]

“Has,” I say, not “had,” because although he’s had a very-successful-under-the-circumstances surgery that removed ~80–85% of the tumor, there’s still that final ~15–20% hanging around in his brain. He'll be starting chemo and radiation early next week, with the aim of preventing further growth—because killing this kind of tumor isn’t really an outcome the neural oncologist even looks for. The outlook is good, as far as brain tumors go: this treatment approach has an average outcome of 10–15 years of management of the tumor.

Still: this isn’t exactly news you ever want to hear. It’s been a bumpy road. God has given us enormous grace to walk through it, but we are tired.

3. Our church

Gladly, the last major thing that has happened in our lives is that we’ve joined a healthy church here in the area—Forestgate Presbyterian Church (PCA)—and it’s already been a great blessing to us. If it seems odd to you that we joined a PCA church immediately after I finished my M. Div. at a Southern Baptist seminary, well, the hilarity of it isn’t lost on us, either. But that’s where we’ve landed—and by conviction, not by convenience. I’ll probably write at some length on my personal site about how we chose this specific congregation. I doubt I’ll ever blog about the transition from being a Baptist to being a Presbyterian, as it’s the kind of post that’s apt to generate more heat than light. (I’m happy to talk about it in personal conversation, of course!)

The details of how we ended up there aside, the congregation has been incredibly welcoming to us; it’s no exaggeration to say it’s the most hospitable congregation I’ve ever even visited. We’ve begun to make friends, and look forward to continuing to make friends in the months ahead; and we’re incredible excited for our house to be done so we can start using it for hospitality to others ourselves! We’re also looking forward to digging in and finding out where best we can serve now and thinking about what it will look like to plant deep roots here and serve for the decades ahead as well. (There are people, including elders, who have been at Forestgate since it was planted in late 1986—before I was born. That’s incredibly inspiring and encouraging to us!)

Hello! By the time you read this, we will have been in our new (temporary) home in Colorado Springs for about five days. Five days to process a new normal. Five days to reconcile our bodies to the two-hour time change. Five days to mourn the loss of an ending and rejoice in a beginning.

To be honest, these first five days have been difficult for me (Jaimie). I thrive on routine, and the loss of my normal routine means that I have been grasping at straws to make things feel like nothing has changed. There are some things that will stay the same - I'll still have my old friends, albeit too far away to interact with tete-a-tete. I'll still have Brooke's Pilates workouts. I'll still have my husband and children. Most importantly, I'll still have the consistent, steadfast love and faithfulness of my Lord and God.

At the same time, nothing will go back to the way it was before. And that's a good thing. It's a new time of life, and for things to always stay the same would mean not growing and changing accordingly. I don't need to always be in my comfort zone (though, like anyone, I like a good comfort zone). I'm going to have to make new friends, memorize new maps, learn new driving skills. I'm going to have to visit a new library, a new grocery store, a new church. All of these things are good, even if I don't always see them that way.

In the meantime, you can pray for us. The girls are adjusting really well, so I thank you for your prayers in that direction already! They are so pleased by the extra attention they're getting from grandparents (as you can imagine). The weather has been a bit cold, but beautiful, so we've enjoyed some helpful time outdoors, as well. I've driven a few new places already (if you know me well, you know driving new places is a particular point of nervousness for me), and I'm cooking dinner for the whole family (6 to cook for, now!) tonight for the first time. Baby steps. Breathe in, breathe out. It'll all be okay.

In the meantime, I appreciate all the calls, texts, letters, and prayers that you've already been so faithful to give us. They help, a lot! They remind me that I wasn't alone in North Carolina, and I'm not alone in Colorado, either. They bring to mind that everything we need for life and godliness goes with us.

As we adjust, know that you all are missed, but goodbyes are only "until next times." Love you all.

I figure I owe y'all a photo dump of what we've been doing in homeschool lately. Elayne is greatly enjoying math (Saxon), science, and writing (D'Nealian), and improving every day in her reading skills. Our schedule is chugging along nicely, though that will change when we drive out of Wake Forest on October 15, Colorado-bound!

Ellie is particularly good at remembering organs. shrug She can name the brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, intestines, and bladder.

Practicing handwriting. Re-learning, in detail, how to draw the letters has made me pay more attention to how my handwriting looks!

Saxon math is big on the use of manipulatives. Ellie finds the whole shebang game-like, so she will play with the manipulatives on her own time. It's amusing and encouraging!

Her recreation of "Elsa's Ice Castle."

An attempt at an art project. The paint bubbles were meant to print onto the paper in a pretty design when you rolled the paper over the top of the bowl. Instead, we ended up experimenting with blowing the paint around on the paper directly. Unsucessful, but still fun.

"School pictures!" My beautiful Katherine Danae.

My peppy Elayne Kaylee.

This morning, as we were all going back and forth being silly (as we so often do), Kate declared to me:

Daddy, you're the icing on the monster cupcake!

(We have Cookie Monster cupcakes from a birthday party the girls went to.)

My brain melts from the cuteness sometimes.

Header image: Sheelah Brennan

Some people like to name their home schools. I would like to name mine, "My-Kind-Of Homeschool." Because so far, teaching kindergarten, at least (I'm SURE it gets a lot harder and I do not diminish that in the least!), has been pretty easy.

It took a few days to adjust our schedule, but now that we have, we three girls are having fun!

Ellie and Kate did their first "official" science experiment for school this week. It was the easiest thing ever, but they were absolutely entranced by it. Plus, they learned some science-y words like chemistry, dissolve, and density. In case you want to try it, here's what we did!

We are using "More Mudpies to Magnets" for Ellie's classical kindergarten curriculum. Clearly, my thumb-sucking 3-year-old is also ready to learn some science.

First, I explained density in layman's terms to the girls, and had them guess which was denser: oil or water. Ellie guessed oil. We mixed some oil with water in a clear glass, and watched it separate out.

Then, I let Ellie (my bad - Elayne. She wants to be called Elayne now) pick some food coloring, and guess whether the color droplet would float on top of the oil or pass through it. She rightly guessed the little drop would travel through the oil and mix with the water beneath. Good job, Elayne!

Let's let Kate put in a few drops of yellow.

See? Science is fun AND pretty, too! Kids, by all means, try this at home, just PLEASE don't drink the resulting concoction. :p

Lately, I've been thinking about my 30th birthday. It's never too early to start thinking about your 30th birthday (#snark), and I'm only 2 years away from mine.

I recently read a magazine blurb in which a 90-year-old woman got a long-desired tattoo of a flower on her birthday, and I thought, "Eureka! I've always wanted a (small) tattoo (somewhere tasteful and discrete, of course)!"

My idea was to get a tattoo of the scripted text "Romans 7:24-25" on the ring finger of my right hand.

My reasons were manifold:

1. I want a constant reminder of the passage.
2. I see tattoos as an accessory, to be used in moderation and with an eye for aesthetics.
3. I think tattoos look edgy and cool.
4. I want people, particularly non-Christians, to see me not as some sanctimonious do-gooder, but as a normal person striving to live as Christ lived, with all that that entails.
5. I want the tattoo to open up conversation with people about Christ and what he has done and is doing.

One of the people who will be most directly affected by my getting a tattoo is my dear husband, as he is married to this particular manic soul embodied in this particular 4'11" body (for better or for worse).

That saying, I asked his opinion on tattoos, knowing full-well what I was in for.

We had a rousing conversation in the car about how to think biblically and well about tattooing. Here are some of the main points we came up with:

1. Our bodies are "temple[s] of the Holy Spirit...[we] are not our own, [we are] bought with a price" (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). While not all tattoos are equivalent to "vandalism" of the Holy Spirit's temple, some certainly can be.
2. We have received our bodies from God - we had no control of the making of them in the first place. Therefore, it behooves us to consider what my hubby calls "the givenness of our bodies" as we decide whether to make a permanent change to them. Is it right to make a permanent change to something that doesn't belong to us in the first place?
3. Part of "the givenness of our bodies" is that we are given to aging. What kind of signal is your tattoo going to send when you're 80?
4. In fact, what kind of signal is that tattoo going to send in 10 years, or today? Right now, the cultural significance of getting a tattoo is pretty minor and unobtrusive - I'll grant that. However, what if that meaning changes with time into something you don't want to be representing?

All in all, the Bible doesn't speak unequivocally about tattoos, so what we have in front of us is a wisdom decision; an issue of Christian freedom.

So far, I see more convincing evidence in the negative category than in the positive category. As Chris pointed out, all of the things in the positive list can be accomplished in ways that don't have to involve a tattoo.

However, I still kind of want one, and I'm interested in getting a number of perspectives from you, the readers.

What do tattoos signify to your age group, gender, race? What's your personal artistic opinion on tattoos? What's your personal moral opinion on tattoos? Lay it on me!

One of the apparently-small but huge for me things I'm looking forward to in our new home—into which we'll move sometime in early 2018—is lower humidity. Yes, you heard me: lower humidity.

This is a thing that has wearied me for 12 years now: from the moment I stepped outside the car into the sweltering, sweat-inducing, hot and humid air of an Oklahoma summer in August 2005 to start my undergraduate work, to this very evening where I sat outside for as long as I could bear, trying to enjoy the relatively cooler weather while working on a rather more technical blog post: I have been distinctly grumpy about humidity. And for cause! Even well after the sun went down this evening, I was getting sweaty doing nothing other than sitting in a chair reading a book and typing these blog posts! Absurd! Ridiculous! Not to be treated as anything other than a sign of the brokenness of creation, longing for restoration!

I have learned to deal with it, of course. I took a 20-mile run in 95º, 50% relative humidity heat last July, and if that sounds nutty to you, well, I got a nice case of walking pneumonia out of it, so I'm inclined to agree. But the point is: I can endure it just fine. I just don't like it. Never have. Never will.

And, Lord willing, next year I won't have to. Whereas (yes, whereas: I'm Chris Krycho and this is how I write) it's currently a miserable 77% relative humidity here in Wake Forest, North Carolina; Monument, Colorado, is currently enjoying a whopping (and relatively high for the area!) 31% relative humidity. One day earlier this week, I saw that just before it rained there, it made it all the way up to 49% relative humidity; here, on the driest day of the week, we made it all the way down to 51% relative humidity on the same day.

I'm really, really looking forward to sitting out on my deck this time next year, writing a blog post, and not sweating while I do it.

I am righteously angry.

I'll tell you why in a minute. But first, some epic awesome:

One of my favorite moments in all of literature is from The Return of the King, when Éowyn rides forth to fight the Witch King of Angmar. He has mortally wounded her uncle, and as she approaches him, he warns, "Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shriveled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.”

That's some scary stuff right there.

But then:

A sword rang as it was drawn. "Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may."

"Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!"

Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel.

"But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him."

Um, wow.

I think this blog post is over.

Kidding (though Tolkien is just that good). I recount that passage to highlight a point: men are not the only ones called to fight. To fight injustice. To fight sin.

To fight for their marriages.

Here's a way we can do just that.

Recently, this article has made the rounds within my circle of Facebook friends. I found it interesting, particularly because the women who posted it already have godly husbands who are "fighting for" them.

As I read "Fighting for my Wife", I began to wonder: what is it about this article that has captured the attention of over 2.5 million readers, to the point where many felt the need to repost to men who were already proving themselves worthy of the title? At the same time, I realized that some of the words in the post made my heart beat faster, and made me wish, in some unconscious part of me: "Wow, I wish my husband would think and talk about me that way."

While I'm fairly certain the author's intentions were good and pure when writing, he effectively created a list of "vows" in sort-of "dream man" fashion that, in my opinion, creates high, high, way-too-high expectations for each of our own husbands. Not that there shouldn't be any expectations in a marriage - if a man commits to treat you a certain way before God and others, you should both expect and help him to succeed (and forgive seventy times seven when he fails)!

But does your expectation require him to say of you (particularly on social media, where, let's be honest, we're writing for other people's eyes) that he "lives, laughs, sleeps with the real Wonder Woman?"

One of the vows was, "To get into the wilderness regularly. Not just with dudes, but with God." If you know my husband at all, you know this is the last thing he would add to a list of vows - not only does he not use the word "dudes," but he's not outdoors-y.

Does this make him any less of a man? Or make the author of the article any more of a man than him? If I start wishing that my guy would add that to his list of ambitions, I'm wishing for another man.

News flash: God says that's bad.

One of the lines that profoundly bothered me was the vow "to speak to her with a heavenly tone, and with words that make the angels cry with jealousy." Wait, what? That line was, um, saccharine theologically shaky at best.

I'm not saying all this to hate on the author - indeed, I don't even know who he is. I'm saying this to highlight that, ladies, one way we can fight for our marriages is to fight expectations like the ones created by comparing our husbands to said anonymous author.

Our husband doesn't have to speak to us "with words that make the angels cry with jealousy" to be loving us well! Beware the whisper that says, "Don't you wish your husband would call you Wonder Woman?"

Maybe your husband shows you he loves you by working hard at his job, then saying "thank you" to you for doing yours (whether you're a stay-at-home mom, a soldier, or a doctor).

Maybe your husband loves you like Christ loves you when he decides to take you out to Olive Garden instead of saving the moolah for that new iPad he wants.

Maybe your husband whispers, "I love you" in the way he cares for the screaming children, even when he's tired and frustrated, so you can take a much-needed shower.

In any case, let us learn how our husbands say they love us instead of waiting for them to fulfill some Hollywood-movie fantasy we've constructed from all the bits and pieces of romance we've acquired over the years.

In the end, this has little to do with The Edges Collective, and everything to do with being content with what you have. While I'm not a fan of the article myself, perhaps the readers didn't find it as distasteful as I did; in fact, maybe they found it encouraging. I hope so. I just don't like the culture that holds men up to an unmeet-able standard that women pine over while women simultaneously expect to be loved just as they are.

I mean, I want to be loved just as I am, but so does my husband.

...

Rant over.

Srsly tho. You'd think after two babies I'd have hips...