Motherhood

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The World We Made: Coming soon...

UPDATE: There’s been lots of interest in this podcast, with about 2000 listens from 30 countries and counting! If you haven’t subscribed yet, we’ve added a few links to make it easier for those of you who aren’t on iTunes, which is most of you. (Welcome non-Apple fanboys.) Don't miss an episode. Scroll down and subscribe now.

"These are the confessions of American Christians recovering from American Christianity. This is the world we made."

Warhorn Media is pleased to announce a new podcast hosted by Jake Mentzel and Nathan Alberson and featuring Tim Bayly. The World We Made is designed to help ordinary American Christians think through the difficult issues we face in our culture today. Season 1 is about homosexuality.

Over the course of the first season, we talk with Tim about how we went from having anti-sodomy laws in all 50 states (just 50 years ago) to where we are today. What are the changes Tim has seen in his lifetime? What exactly do they mean? What part did the culture play and what part did the church play? How are regular Bible-believing Christians supposed to respond? What has Tim learned as a pastor to help equip us for the challenge of ministering to men and women tempted by homosexuality?

These are the questions we'll be unpacking over the course of eight 20-minute episodes. We'll start out slow and easy, and things will pick up steam as we get closer and closer to the end. You won't want to miss it, so check out the trailer (above), and go ahead and subscribe now in iTunes or Android (or wherever you listen to your podcasts—Google Play Music, Stitcher, TuneInRSS feed) so you're ready when the first episode drops (July 17). 

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The good father: so you don't like LaVar Ball?

Have at it. Everyone's put off by him so go ahead and join the haters. Loud? Proud? Profane?

Yeah.

About to set Nike and Under Armour back a few billion?

Likely.

About to give Magic a run for his money, courtside?

After Tuesday, it's done.

The executives of legacy sport brands are howling about LaVar being the worst thing to happen to sports since Tonya Harding smeared peanut butter in Lance Armstrong's helmet.

Actually, she didn't.

When USC complained about LaVar branding his sons while his oldest son Alonzo was playing ball for UCLA, LaVar faced down UCLA and the NCAA—and more power to him, I say. The execs of the NCAA up in Indy know very well what this means. Finally, they're going to have to pay their "student athletes" a few thousand of the hundreds of millions they and their Ph.D.s have been raking in from...


A tribute to my mother-in-law, Margaret Louise Taylor, on her one-hundredth birthday...

Note: Three days ago was the one-hundredth birthday of my dear mother-in-law, Margaret Louise Taylor. This past weekend, Mary Lee and I gathered with Mary Lee's nine siblings and their spouses, as well as Mom's brother-in-law and his wife, Lyman and J. Mae Taylor, to celebrate this wonderful occasion.1 

It would be hard to overstate the blessing Mom Taylor has been to all of us for many decades, now. Twenty years ago, thinking about Mom Taylor and my own mother, Mary Louise Bayly (who at the time was still living), I wrote this article as a tribute to them both. Now is a good opportunity to reproduce it as a hundredth birthday tribute to Mom. I hope it serves as a good reminder to readers of the true nature of biblical femininity, womanhood, and motherhood. Of truly sacrificial Christian faith.

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Mom Taylor studied for her degree in Home Economics during the late '30s and early '40s, graduating summa cum laude from Oregon State University. After marrying her childhood sweetheart, Ken Taylor, she gave birth to ten children in fourteen years.

Engaged for most of the years when the family was young as editorial director of a religious publishing house, her husband, Ken, brought home low wages, so frugality was a necessity and the degree served this young mother and her family very well...


Feminists are the weakest women...

In celebration of International Women's Day yesterday, March 8, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's wife Sophie posted a pic on FB of her holding hands with her husband and the accompanying text, "celebrate the boys and men in our lives who encourage us to be who we truly are." She went on to ask followers to post pics of their own "male ally."

Feminists responded:

This is utterly ridiculous. Shameful really. I think I'll be taking photos with my daughters, female friends and colleagues instead.

So everyone reading this blog knows God Himself says women are the "weaker vessel," right? If not, read 1Peter 3:7 remembering all Scripture is "God-breathed." Don't tire of reminding yourself and your loved ones it's not merely the concepts behind Scripture's words that are inspired, but Scripture's words themselves. The doctrine of inspiration nailed down by our Lord through His teaching ministry is called the "plenary verbal inspiration" of Scripture. Every last word is inspired, including "weaker."

Now, we can argue all day about what God meant when he inspired the Apostle Peter to declare this truth, but in commemoration of yesterday's International Women's Day, let's explore the weakness and strength men see when we observe the weaker sex...


The good father: fight the good fight (3)...

You can't live in this world one sinner married to another without fighting.

Not bickering, but fighting. Bickering doesn't rise above the personal, but a good fight is principled. (Or should be.)

We bicker over who's pulling the blankets off the other. We fight over how (or whether) to stop our Little Empress from manipulating her playmates and younger brothers.

Your dear wife doesn't think the Little Empress is manipulative, nor does she think it's worth the pain to deal with it. Time will pass, the Little Empress will get older, and if it still needs dealing with, we can address it then. But as you let your wife have her way, you say to yourself that you know where your Little Empress got it from.

What's wrong with you! Say "no" to your wife and spank your precious daughter, already.

If you need help to stiffen your resolve, stop and think about how...


Teddy Roosevelt on motherhood...

In the past few years, several longtime friends—one a nephew on the Taylor side of the family, another a stay-at-home mother and member of Clearnote Indy, and the third a politician running for a congressional seat outside Philly—have each recommended Teddy Roosevelt as good for what ails America. Here's a speech President Roosevelt gave in Washington D.C. to the National Congress of Mothers a century ago.

Times have changed. If you need an incentive to read on:

If you mothers through weakness bring up your sons to be selfish and to think only of themselves, you will be responsible for much sadness among the women who are to be their wives in the future...

No piled-up wealth, no splendor of material growth, no brilliance of artistic development, will permanently avail any people unless its home life is healthy, unless the average man possesses honesty, courage, common sense, and decency, unless he works hard and is willing at need to fight hard...

The speech...


The good father: the fearful romance of marriage and children...

At first, just the weight of responsibility of marriage is overwhelming. I remember waking up the second night of our honeymoon, looking at my dear Mary Lee sleeping next to me, and thinking "the rest of my life!"

Other than following Jesus, I'd never before consciously made a decision about the rest of my life. But now I'd said my vows and I would be responsible to care for my bride and the children God chose to bless us with, and there would be no running. No getting out of it unless I was willing to face the wrath of God and suffer shame before everyone who loved us.

So I lay there thinking to myself... 


The good father: childbirth brings a new standard of beauty...

How beautiful and how delightful you are, My love, with all your charms! Your stature is like a palm tree, And your breasts are like its clusters. I said, "I will climb the palm tree, I will take hold of its fruit stalks." Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, And the fragrance of your breath like apples, And your mouth like the best wine!” It goes down smoothly for my beloved, Flowing gently through the lips of those who fall asleep.

I am my beloved’s, And his desire is for me. (Song of Solomon 7:6-10)

Several years ago we planted a bunch of bare root trees including a couple apple and one peach tree. Four years later none of the trees had produced a single piece of fruit, so we were quite excited this spring when our peach tree set well over a hundred little peaches. When I first saw them they were quite small—maybe the size of the tip of your pinkie. Thinking maybe I should do something to protect the fruit, I went on the internet and read that the little peaches should be thinned, leaving one every six inches or so. So up went the ladder and well over half the peaches were pinched off and fell to the ground. The peach experts told me if I let all the peaches ripen, they would be so heavy they would snap the branches off.

A few weeks later, still during spring, I noticed a friend of mine winced and limped as he walked... 


The good father: money vs. motherhood...

Until late in the afternoon the day my wife gave birth to our first child, Mary Lee and I worked together. We painted houses, cleaned carpet, and were the custodians of a church. Being together twenty-four hours a day was sweet. After Heather was born, though, things changed.

A dear friend of ours had been a grad student in astronomy when she met another grad student in astronomy, and they married. Both Rita and her husband, Jimmy, had serious intellectual firepower. You’ll see the humor, then, of what Jimmy said to Rita when they got home from the hospital with their first child. Laying their little baby boy down in his crib, Jimmy turned to Rita and said, "Rita, this little tike is completely helpless. He can't do anything for himself—we'll have to do everything for him."

Jimmy had completed eighteen or so years of education, yet no one had ever taught him that newborns are helpless and need their mother.

What this meant for Mary Lee and me was... 


The good father: mothers, infants, and nursing...

The past year or two, I've been reading books by shepherds. The Bible is all about sheep and shepherds. Jesus said He was the Good Shepherd and He told His Disciples the good shepherd gives up his life for his sheep. My calling is to shepherd Jesus' flock, so I read books by shepherds to learn how to do my work better. "Pastor" and "shepherd" started out as synonyms.

"Pastor" sounds like "pasture" because both come from the word "fed" or "grazed." Jesus commanded Peter to "feed my sheep," and this is your first duty as the father of a newborn. You are to do everything possible to get the mother of your newborn child to feed her lamb and everything possible to get your newborn lamb to his mother's breast, latched on, and sucking.

Daddy, you are the shepherd of your ewe and her lamb. The doctor or midwife is not the shepherd. They are the vets. They are only professionals, and following birth, their work is only cleanup. The doula is not the shepherd. She's a woman and shepherds are men.

You are the man...


The good father: childbirth turns your bride into a mother...

When I speak with fathers whose wives are pregnant with their firstborn, I warn them the birth of their child will be an adjustment and they may feel a wee bit jealous of their newborn son or daughter. "It's normal," I tell them. "Your bride is about to become a mother, and after your child is born your relationship with your wife will change. She will no longer be your bride and lover. She will have become your child's mother and you will be relegated to a distant second place in her priorities." (Yeah, I'm overstating it, but work with me here.)

From the moment your newborn infant is placed in your wife's arms and begins to nurse, that child will own her, body and soul. Don’t make the mistake of thinking of her as merely a "parent." She is now a mother. Other than a fool caught in his folly, there's no more cosmic force on earth...


Michal Crum's Mother's Day meditation...

Over on Warhorn Media, here's an excerpt from daughter Michal Crum's piece, "Mother's Day mandate...":

Of all the positions of authority in this world, there is no office that is imbued by nature with such tenderness and intimacy as motherhood. There’s a reason that we are moved to tears when we watch Planet Earth and see a mother elephant and her baby get separated in a dust storm. Look around at your children, whatever their ages. You carried them in pregnancy, or carried the burden of their marginalized existence in your hearts, in the case of adopted children. You nursed them as infants, stroked their applesauce-matted hair as toddlers. You read to them as children and listened to them as teenagers. At Mother’s Day especially, the tenderness is palpable.

But what about respect for the office of motherhood? We have to start by respecting it ourselves. In a culture that has lost its way, we need to demonstrate why mothers must be respected. And we start by exercising authority and cultivating respect within our own homes...

Read on...

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Cruzin for a bruisin...

For what it's worth, my prognostication is that The Donald sews up the Republican nomination for President in Indiana, today. Carly Fiorina was a finger-in-the-dike move that went against type. It got Senator Cruz nothing and he's now toast, so come November, it's going to be The Rodham against The Donald.

When President Bill Clinton was in his first term as president, the New Yorker ran a piece reporting that the talk in the White House was about First Lady Rodham Clinton (as she was then known) succeeding her husband, and from that time on I've believed Hillary would be president someday.

The Donald may surprise us, for sure. It would be interesting if two men the likes of supercilious Barack Obama and macho Donald Trump were the ones who frustrated Hillary's shrewish ambition. Senator Rodham Clinton is about as unappetizing a candidate as I've seen in my lifetime...


A father's surprising answer...

[NOTE FROM TB: A dear sister in Christ e-mailed this to my wife and me a couple days ago. We've spent years benefitting from her wisdom privately, so when we were together recently, I asked her to write up some of her wisdom so others could benefit. She declined, but a couple days later she surprised us with this gem. I hope there are more, forthcoming. We're running this piece under the pseudonym "Anonymous" because, while I am resigned to slanders on Baylyblog against the men who write here, the worst bile spewed out on Baylyblog was directed toward a dear woman we love very much. Her post was one of the best, but since it was critical of the abandonment of femininity by women today, it aroused hatred unlike any we've seen before or since. We won't allow any woman to be attacked like that again.]

When my husband and I moved to a new town in 1986, we came with the hope that we would purchase our first home. We had set our budgeted price at $55,000 and began to look at houses. We saw several we liked in the $60-65,000 range, and then I found the home I loved. It was in the neighborhood of our new friends, and it was beyond cute. The asking price was $65000. I called my father and said to him that it seemed that the homes that we would like to buy were about $10K more than we felt we could spend, and that, in fact, we had found a home that we loved for that amount. This was his cue to say that he would give us $10,000, which would have been nothing to him. In fact, I believe that his impulse to do just that must have been very strong, and that it almost certainly took a tremendous amount of self restraint to answer as he did, "Then you will need to find a cheaper house."

wax-1175873_640.jpgThis answer was in sharp contrast to the backdrop of my life.

In kindergarten, I was the only child in my class to have a new box of crayons half way through the year. The crayons were provided by the school, but I didn't like the way they looked by January. So my father found out who supplied the crayons and purchased a box, which he delivered to the kindergarten.

In high school, I remember a day that the choir was to sing, and I had a run in my stockings...


An early Valentine for your wife...

Daniel Meyer provided the link to this Millennial emoting about how his marriage is so good that he and his wife decided they'd keep their love for themselves. That's not exactly what he said, but reading between the lines, you know that's what it all adds up two. Not three.

Here's some of the man's public airing of his and his wife's dirty laundry:

On the eve of the procedure [his vasectomy], there was a sense of anxiety around the house. Not just mine, knowing I was about to undergo a bit of trauma in an area I'd heretofore protected so vigilantly. There was something else. This sense between Amy and me of, for lack of a better word, loss. We didn't have children. And we weren't going to. Ever. It was a serious thing, this. And serious things tend to touch our deepest emotions.

We both got a little sad. A little weepy. My wife, through a few tears, said the sweetest thing. "I know some people have kids because they want to see themselves in their children. But I would have wanted to see you."

Spare me. Why do Millennials take their most shameful private moments and broadcast them to millions? All previous generations of men and women grieved over their...


Gospel Coalition joins the gay celibate movement (7); the heart of the issue...

For a man ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. (1 Corinthians 11:7)

Evangelicals have no doctrine of sex. We have Biblical commands we are scrupulous to obey and Greek words we are scrupulous to defend the meaning of, but we have no theology of sex.

Actually, though, it's worse than that: we are opposed to any theology of sex.

Yes, some of us still believe the husband should be the head of his wife. Some of us also still want the father to be the head of the home and the guy preaching Sunday morning to be an actual guy. Some of us, also, still think our church's elders should be guys.

Other than those few things, though, we believe in little more than body parts. Probably women should still be the sex that gestates and men should provide food for gestating women. Also, in most Christian homes, it's likely still good for the mother not to have to put her kids in daycare—especially while she's nursing.

Beyond men having servant leader, tie-breaking authority in private Christian places and Christians having certain scruples concerning the proper use of body parts, though, we have no theology of sex. This is the reason Evangelicals have no problem with the "gay Christian" lobby as long as these "gay Christians" living with one another in "spiritual friendships" promise not to have sex with each other. If they go off the reservation and say they're going to go ahead and have sex with each other, after all, we finally find our principles and tell them it's sin. But without the improper use of body parts, there is no sin. Identity is one thing. Body parts are something else. Body parts are serious business. They're visible. They don't lie and they have to be obeyed...


To the fearful would-be mother...

[My wife, Mary Lee, forwarded this to me and I asked the writer, Mrs. Lucas (Hannah) Weeks, for permission to post it here—which she kindly granted.]

You recently mentioned your fear associated with many aspects of motherhood. It seems that these fears are a major factor in your decision to put off the big leap, as well they might. But may I be so bold as to encourage you to take a new perspective on those fears, although I am a mere acquaintance?

I write "from the trenches” as they say. As a mother of five children six and under, including an infant with special needs, I could hardly be more qualified to address your fears. However, after a year of trials with our newest addition, my observations are bound to be a bit raw. The thing is, I don’t intend to assuage your fears. You might say my goal is to help you embrace them.

There are lots of women who would be happy to tell you all the beautiful things about motherhood. In fact, when you walk through the grocery store with a baby in a cart, you’re bound to be stopped by an older woman who tells you to, “enjoy it, it’ll be over before you know it.” They’re very sweet, and certainly well-meaning. And it really is a good reminder. But the truth is that, generally, the passage of time has given a golden cast to the years when they were raising their own children and they don’t remember (or don’t realize) that the best attributes of their character were molded, not by the days of bliss they seem to remember now, but by sleepless nights, worry-filled days, and the weight of constant care they carried for the little ones they raised. 

And then there’s another type of woman you’ll meet...


The Crime Alert IU will never send...

A couple weeks ago, Indiana University started filling the inboxes of Bloomingtonians with urgent notices of crimes in progress. For instance, this one rolled in last night at 3:11 AM...


The increase in chemical abortions requires a change in method...

Surgical abortions (the gory kind) are declining as chemical abortions increase. According to the baby-killers themselves, chemical abortions (what they call "medical abortions") now have grown to twenty percent of all abortions.

But murderers lie to cover up their bloodshed, so when these people talk you have to listen carefully. They changed the medical definition of "conception" from fertilization to implantation fifty years ago, and since then they have removed a huge number of abortions from the count including all the little ones barred from attaching themselves to their mother's uterine wall by the Pill, IUDs, ellaOne, Minipill, NuvaRing, Yaz, Yasmin, the Patch, Depo-Provera, Plan B "morning after" pills, etc. So the number and percentage of chemical murders of tiny babies is growing much more rapidly than they admit, making the number of abortions much greater than they admit, also.

Mothers don't need to have a doctor commit their chemical abortions. Midwives can do it, although...


Babies want mama to smile...

The conclusions of a study at UCSD: "The results of our analysis show that by the time infants reach four months of age both mothers and infants time their smiles in a purposeful, goal-oriented manner. Mothers consistently attempted to maximize the time spent in mutual smiling, while infants tried to maximize mother-only smile time."

BTW, couldn't these La Jolla scholars be a little less sexist in the way they announced their findings?

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