[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."
This 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...
"These are the confessions of American Christians recovering from American Christianity. This is the world we made."
Have at it. Everyone's put off by him so go ahead and join the haters. Loud? Proud? Profane?
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.
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."
You can't live in this world one sinner married to another without fighting.
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 
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!"
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.
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.