A Perfect Love

Valentines Day... probably my least favorite holiday of the year. If you want to see me roll my eyes 150+ times in one day, just come hang out with me on Valentines Day. I’m a Valentine Scrooge you might say. Lance loves it... I mean he loves the fact that I hate it. I will, however, never turn down chocolate even if it comes in a heart shaped container or pink wrapper. Chocolate is the only redeeming value of Valentines Day.

I’ve mentioned before how God has a sense of humor and he knows I like it when he’s funny. Well, last year on Valentines Day God made a funny. Just as I was rolling my eyes for the first time at all the hearts and flowers on my FB wall, I got an email from our adoption agency and upon opening it I was in love at first sight... on Valentines Day. On the day where normally I’m busy internally making fun of all the mushy love stuff, I was a complete puddle of mushy love stuff over the three faces before me. I’m telling you, he’s funny!

This year, while I’m still a Valentines Scrooge (confirmed by my rant to Lance on the phone yesterday about how dumb Valentines school parties are) we will be celebrating February 14th as our “Seen Ya Day!” (kind of like “Gotcha Day!” but not to be confused with the day in New York where high school seniors dress up and get special privileges... I realize those sound exactly the same). So, what better place for us to celebrate our love for our daughters than to attend the Empowered to Connect Conference in Birmingham! To say that I’m excited about this conference is a total understatement! Thursday cannot get here fast enough and I don’t care if roads are bad! We are going! I think this will be an amazing opportunity for Lance and I to further prepare ourselves for our girls to come home and also be alone for a couple of days. I am so stoked to be able to hear Karyn Purvis (the “child whisperer” as I call her) in person and fill up at least one notebook full of Godly wisdom!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Empowered to Connect or the book The Connected Child, this is basically a conference about a particular type of parenting for children from hard places. We call this type of parenting “Trust Based Parenting” and the concept is that your main goal in all interaction with your children is connection, trust building and healing. We have begun learning and implementing these techniques with our boys. It is hard! It’s hard because it brings my selfishness to the surface. It’s hard because it doesn’t come naturally. It’s hard because it requires consistent WORK! 

Karyn Purvis is one of the authors of The Connected Child (The Trauma Mamma Bible). The book itself is not “Christian” but it certainly is based on biblical principles. Because of this, she actually wrote a bible study that coincides with the book called Created to Connect. I’ve gone through this study once earlier in our adoption process with a group of other moms, but I decided to go through it again by myself. I have been so encouraged and convicted by this study.

In yesterday’s devotion, I read about love and fear. 1 John 4: 18-19 says, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.” Later in the day, I read a blog from Lifeline about discipline for adopted children and they quoted this verse, too. Coincidence? Nah. I thought this was so very timely. I have had a pretty rough couple of days with the boys, and these words really penetrated my heart. There is no fear in LOVE.

For most of my life, I thought that I had genuine love for God, but what I really had was fear. I was afraid of his punishment for my sin, so I did all the “Christian things” in order to be sure that I was “saved” from that punishment. Despite all my efforts, I had not been perfected in love and I was blind to this fact. But one day, God opened my eyes and I truly saw how much he loved me... how he had loved me all along, forever and always, even when I didn’t love him. I realized that he had relentlessly pursued me with his love and that perfect love cast out fear in my heart. Now THAT is a love story that I can get excited about this Valentines Day! Amen? 

What’s totally awesome about the Christian life is the fact that in every aspect of it we have the opportunity–and responsibility–to reflect the love of the Father. I believe this is especially true in marriage and parenting. When you think about your children and your spouse in the light of the gospel, everything changes. 

I’ve realized that I don’t want my children to obey me and do all the right things out of fear of punishment. I want them to respond out of love for me... love that flows willingly because of my love for them. I want my love for my children to visibly reflect in some small way how God loves me. I want love to cast out fear in my children’s lives. 

I believe in order to love my children in this way, I must truly seek to love them biblically. Love isn’t just a feeling and a smile. Love is the outpouring of yourself in many different ways. Let’s look at what 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 says about love:

love is patient

love is kind

love does not envy

love does not boast

love is not arrogant

love is not rude

love does not insist on its own way

love is not irritable

love is not resentful

love does not rejoice at wrongdoing

love rejoices with the truth

love bears all things

love believes all things

love hopes all things

love endures all things

love never ends

This is what perfect love looks like. Think about how this should translate into love for our children and our spouses? 

I admit this is an intimidating list when I lay it next to the list of all my shortcomings. There’s not a single one of these attributes that I could check off as having mastered. However, when I lay this list next to the cross, it matches perfectly. When I focus on God’s perfect love for me and then understand that I have been perfected in his love through the cross, my fear of failure is cast out, because perfect love casts out fear. That's just so  beautifully encouraging to me!

When my children are swinging like Tarzan from the last sliver of patience I have, I can look to the perfect love of God and reflect God's patience back to my boys. When rude and unkind words threaten to burst forth from my mouth, I can look to the perfect love of God and ask him to give me kindness. When I'm irritable and selfish, I can look to the perfect love of God as an example of how to lay down my life for my family. When I'm crumpled up in my bedroom floor crying because I just can't handle it anymore, I can look to the perfect love of God for hope and endurance. 

So, on the February 14th, as we are surrounded by teddy bears and red roses, let’s look to the cross of Christ and remind ourselves of what love really is... perfect love that casts out fear. I challenge you to pray and ask God to show you ways that you can reflect his perfect love to your family. Let me warn you though, if you ask for this, be prepared to be convicted over and over again. 

Happy Valentines Day Seen Ya Day! ~K

An Open Letter To Whom It Concerns

 Dear person who came up with the idea of the “romantic” breakfast in bed, please do us all a favor, and inform everyone that you are in fact a caregiver at a nursing home and that there is actually no romance involved with eating meals in bed. Please save some husbands and children some effort by explaining that unless you are bed ridden, meals, including ones on Valentines day and Mothers Day, should be eaten in the proper place, aka the table. I feel that I am not alone in my hatred of dirt, crumbs, liquids, and bugs in my bed. I believe your silence has led to thousands of like-minded women suffering through burnt toast in bed and cursing every crumb that falls while trying not to spill scalding coffee with not enough sugar all over our clean sheets that were just put on the day before. There are plenty of romantic things to do in bed, but breakfast is just not one of them. Please, for the love of a good night’s sleep without waking up with scrambled egg stuck to our back, tell the world who you really are and who really needs to eat breakfast in bed. 

Dear person who invented Double Stuffed Oreos, I hate you. We are not friends. That is all.

Dear bowling alley owner, my family came to your place of business a few weeks ago. We were the family with two young boys who were itching for something fun to do and two parents who would rather throw our backs out playing a lame game of bowling than go to Monkey Joe’s or Chuck E Cheese’s. You don’t remember us? Oh, well that’s probably because we left immediately upon finding out that it would cost our family over $64 to bowl for two hours. I’m sorry but WHAT THE WHAT? The game is not THAT fun, and please don’t forget that you have to wear nasty-a shoes the whole time! Oh and you also have to deal with all the drunk people who were CLEARLY drunk before they came to your establishment because they willingly forked out all of that $$ on bowling... b-o-w-l-i-n-g! Yeah, the Ogdens will stick to bowling on the Wii. :) I'm sure you will do just find without our business.

Dear people who went to said bowling establishment and thought that $16 per person (adult or child) was an acceptable charge, what is wrong with you? Also, where do you work and do they have any openings? I’m talking to a lot of people here, because there was a freaking wait-ing list for a lane! There are 56 lanes! Please help me understand why our country is in a recession, people are complaining left and right about being broke and jobless and yet you people are WAIT-ING to pay gobs of money for this game. I. Do. Not. Understand. You.

Dear company who makes leather cleaner, you disappoint me. Let me explain. Weeks ago, my son drew a picture. While I normally appreciate my children’s creativity, I was not very fond of this piece of artwork, because the canvas was the seat of my favorite, cream colored, comfy, leather arm chair and the medium of choice was a blue ball point pen. After shamefully flipping my lid upon discovery of this new piece of art, I went to work on getting rid of it. I looked to your company’s product to make it all better. I slathered and scrubbed and yet your product failed me. I even went for the last resort of alcohol. No, no, not to drink... although that may have helped in other ways. I applied alcohol to the leather. That did get rid of some of the ink but it also bleached the color of my leather. I gave up and resigned to the fact that we just can’t have anything nice. Here is what I was left with...

Now that many weeks have passed, I believe I have found a better “art removing” solution, and I would like to help your company (even though you did not help me) by passing on this bit of advice free of charge. Please note this picture from today...

I’m sure you must be astonished by the stark contrast from the photo above and are wondering how in the world I managed such a remarkable improvement. Here’s the answer: My butt. Yes, you read that correctly. I sit in this chair daily to do my devotional and apparently all my leather needed was a good booty rub for 20-30 minutes a day. Feel free to add this cleaning tip to all your leather cleaning products. Your welcome.

Dear teacher who assigned my 7 year old child a report, I understand that you are working very hard to develop my child’s research, writing and public speaking skills. Thank you for your dedication to my child’s educational development. However, I have two complaints. 

Firstly, you MUST have purposely picked my busiest week ever to assign this report. Therefore I can only assume that you hated the handmade soaps I gave you for Christmas. Noted.

Secondly, I’m not sure you thought things through very well. You wanted my child to write a report on a historical African American figure of our choice that includes the following information: “Tell when and where the person was born, died, any interesting facts about his/her life, and tell what accomplishments and why this person is important to the history of our country. Describe some of his/her most important historical contributions. You may discuss interesting facts that you learned about this famous African American.” You wanted us to include a rough draft. Was this last paragraph your example of what a rough draft looks like, because it was not clearly marked as an example, but surely this is not your best work. Also, you wanted my child to include all this information but you expected “the final paper [to] be written on the attached paper” which consisted of about 10 primary writing lines. Let’s be honest... you knew that wouldn’t work. Thank you for helping me work on my fine motor skills as I was forced to draw out four more pages of primary writing lines.

I give you a C- for this assignment and will be sure you don’t ever get anymore of my yummy olive oil soaps. 

Dear people who read my blog, I still think you are at least somewhat mentally unstable for doing so, but I really, really appreciate that you took the time to read my open letter. Now, please also take the time and view our Both Hands project page!

http://www.bothhandsfoundation.org/lance-and-kristian-ogden

Sincerely, 

Mrs. Ogden