it's a good thing I like to dance
“The world is rated R, and no one is checking IDs. Do not try to make it G by imagining the shadows away. Do not try to hide your children from the world forever, but do not pretend there is no danger. Train them. Give them sharp eyes and bellies full of laughter. Make them dangerous. Make them yeast, and when they’ve grown, they will pollute the shadows.”
- N. D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl
I was formulating a few paragraphs of thought about Taylor Swift’s new album “Speak Now” but Bob Lefsetz says exactly what I was going to say in excerpts from this post:
Is Taylor Swift Debbie Gibson or Joni Mitchell?
“Speak Now” is Taylor Swift’s effort at self-justification. She wrote all the songs, it’s totally her…and we wish it wasn’t. We wish she still co-wrote, that she used the usual suspect producers, then it would be more professional, less cringeworthy, more radio-friendly and acceptable to those who are not diehard fans.
What you notice first is the terrible sound. Loud and edgy, which does a disservice to Taylor’s voice…
Then you notice that this is not a country album. Then again, country isn’t even country anymore and Taylor Swift inhabits that rarefied world where you’re genre-proof, where your fans accept you for who you are, you don’t have to worry about playing the game…or do you?
Give Taylor credit. Listening to “Speak Now” the radio singles don’t jump out. “Speak Now” is statement, from the mind of a twenty year old, who’s had way too much success way too fast and missed out on growing up but learned so many lessons she wish she hadn’t…
…This is what Taylor Swift specializes in. The honest communication of the teenage landscape. When she tries to be an adult, she gets confused.
In conclusion he says:
“Speak Now” does not augur well for longevity. It’s both too cutesy and too dramatic, just like an adolescent girl. The question is whether Taylor Swift can grow.
If Taylor can be as honest about being a woman as she was about being a girl, there’s hope. But she’s got to work with a producer who flatters her voice, she has to decide whether she’s removed or involved, whether she’s giving us a peek at the life of a star or a regular person.
I’ve written about my dad before and someday, when it’s time to write my memoirs, there will be a lot more. Here’s the third of 5 of my favorite things about my dad.
This is a really good way of teaching responsibility. I actually believed at the time (I was 10) that he had done this accidentally – 
but I had my suspicions. Oh, did I have my suspicions.
I use this same strategy with my own kids and it’s still effective. I set the tone a few years ago when they were taking way too long to clean the basement. “Get it done or I’m coming down with a garbage bag,” I said. They didn’t believe me. You should have heard the weeping and wailing when I followed through.
They still sometimes don’t clean up the basement as quickly as they should. “Do I need to come down there with a garbage bag?” usually accelerates the process.
Other posts in this series:
1 – The Value of Acting Like a Child
2 – Do-it-yourself-edness Is Next to Godliness
Part 1 - My Story
Part 2 - A Biblical Theology of Offending Your Brother
Part 3 – How to Offend a Legalist and Not Sin
This is the part we’re bound to struggle with since it can too easily turn into the wrong kind of offense. You have to do the work of discernment before stepping into the water. 
You need to make sure you’re in the presence of a genuine legalist. A genuine legalist is someone who wants to exercise control for no other reason than to have power over another believer.
You should feel free to offend a genuine legalist in any way your conscience allows. In fact the opposite (playing by your legalist friend’s rules) give tacit approval to his faulty formula for salvation (Faith in Jesus + [NOT doing this or that] = salvation). Once you’ve approved the formula by which it’s determined who is and isn’t a Christian, watch out – more plus (+) signs are sure to follow.
How much light could this have brought to the small-church, selectively legalistic bubble I was living in? Plenty.
1. I could have had a much less burdened conscience.
I had to live with head knowledge of truth and a conscience that was trained to deny that truth in some ways. Some things we did weren’t wrong but we were counseled not to do them anyway on the grounds that some people found them to be a “stumbling block.”
2. I could have done a lot less second-guessing.
Was the way I was dressing and cutting (on not cutting) my hair really offending people or did they just want me to be a slave to their preferences? I battled this constantly. In retrospect I don’t think there was a single person who was genuinely, biblically offended.
3. When someone is offended by everything, inevitably there are things you allow yourself to do that are genuinely offensive.
It may not be a completely conscience decision, but a heart that is told too often that it’s doing wrong starts to feel like it can’t do anything right anyway, so why not do something really wrong? (Not claiming victim status here, BTW)
4. Offense as a tool was never offered as an option.
That we could have – as Carson describes – wisely used offense as a tool AGAINST legalism would have spared the turmoil of the above three points and probably kept us a bit more “on the path” at times when we were feeling the frustration of point #3 above. When you give people too many things to rebel against they’ll act accordingly.
(I’ve always thought my dad was very wise in this through my teenage years, eben though he was in the unenviable position of being the pastor of the church AND the father of the kid that made a habit of “offending” people. He set boundaries for me but only when needed – and not so many that I couldn’t step out of the house without breaking one. Love ya, Dad!)
So in the end, as long as you’ve done the work of discernment and are sure you’re not offending for the sake of your own pride and ego, you should be able to go forward, with much prayer, and make this your slogan:
Madeleine is my oldest daughter. She’s seven and a half. She’s so much like me in so many ways that I’m proud of: she loves to read; she gets a thrill out of accomplishing things that are difficult; she works hard at tasks she needs to get done.
She’s also like me in ways I wish she wasn’t: she over-thinks everything; emotionally, she gets hurt easily and finds it difficult to recover; she hates looking foolish in public. 
I can always deflect the public foolishness problem with a well-placed witty comment; she hasn’t learned this skill yet.
She’s also like me in one more way: she really pays attention to the tone of someone’s voice. Often the tone tells her more than the words that are being said.
Last night I was helping her though her bedtime routine and she said she felt like crying and she wasn’t sure why. I asked her to think about it for a minute.
“Daddy, I think it’s because you’ve been using your angry voice too much lately.”
Ouch.
It’s true, I have. There’s been too much focus on efficiency in my parenting lately and not enough on patience and love – especially at bedtime.
Bedtime brings out the taskmaster in me like no other part of the day. There are a number of reasons for this:
First, we stay out until after bedtime too often. When the deadline has passed, of course you have to do things in as little time as possible. But by then I’m tired and they’re tired and this just makes things worse.
Second, there are so many things to be done in a short period of time: PJs, pee, brush teeth, get into bed, pray, answer the numerous last-minute questions… whew, if I’m not tired before it all starts I certainly am by the time its all done!
Third, I’m too eager to get to the 3 or so hours after bedtime (less if we’ve come home late) when I can write, read, or spend time with Anne Marie uninterrupted. These are important hours of course, but spending an extra 10-15 minutes sending my girls into dreamtime shouldn’t be too much to ask.
I apologized to Madeleine. I apologized to God.
I’m going to do better tonight.
One “drawback” (if it can be called that) of my new job as a Pastor is that there is infinite work to do, and it is almost all enjoyable work. This is the opposite of my 15 years at my previous job in a factory – there really wasn’t that much to do and what there was to do, well, it really wasn’t of much benefit to me or anyone else. But here at the church things are different. The weight of responsibility is great and the potential for calamity ever present, but the frequency of reward is almost constant.
I think I have moved through the honeymoon period rather quickly. You see, I came into this with my eyes more open than most. My dad was a Pastor, which means I was what we in the industry call a “PK” – a Pastor’s Kid. This is a position in life so special that it has its own two-letter descriptor. For many PKs, being one is an inherently negative experience. There is a lot of church to attend, a lot of behaving to do, and a lot of “dad being too stressed to be a dad” to experience. My childhood was marked with a bit of all those things, but my dad was really great about it. I rarely felt the pressure from him to “behave” externally; he was more interested in the condition of my soul than the condition of my apparel (my mom and sister made up for his lack of concern in that department).
There was this one time when I was about 16, during a congregational discussion at which I was present, when a man in the church said that my dad was unqualified to lead the church because, looking at me, it was obvious that he wasn’t in control of his own family. That hurt, but dad didn’t take the bait. It couldn’t have been easy for him. He could have agreed with the man (which would have been lying) and destroyed his relationship with me. He could have told the man he was an idiot and created division in the church.
To be honest, I don’t remember how he handled it but I remember, on that day and many others, being proud to be his son. I remember feeling loved and protected.
At times I was (and probably still am) a challenge. I was not a rebel in conventional ways; dad never had to have a talk with me about parties, alcohol, or drugs, but in a rather conservative church, the Pastor’s son listened to very loud, very fast music, wore a chain wallet, baggy cords, and plaid shirts. He had a goatee and and buzz-cut scalp (back in the day when those things were considered “edgy”). And dad didn’t talk to me about that stuff very much at all. He didn’t like some of the music I listened to, especially when I would kill the ignition in the car with the stereo on 10, only for him to start it up in the morning and receive a heart-attack inducing assault of speed metal at full volume. (sorry dad)
And so now, as a Pastor myself, I seek to emulate his grace for me in extending it to my own kids by not expecting them to be “better” than other kids by not doing things that PKs aren’t supposed to do.
There was another time, during another congregational discussion at which I was present, that a man spoke up and said that he had seen some kids in the mall that looked like me, and for the first time, because he knew me, he didn’t assume that they were bad kids.
1. I started dating Anne Marie when I was just short of my 15th birthday
2. I married Anne Marie when I was just short of my 20th birthday
3. In between those two dates, I didn’t always treat Anne Marie as well as could have. I hope I do a lot better now.
4. I get annoyed with people’s idiosyncrasies, and my own as well
5. I sometimes exclaim: “Man, I am SUCH a freak!”
6. I don’t think Johnny Cash really made that great a contribution
7. I demand too much of my little girls sometimes… but much was demanded of me when I was little and I’m now thankful for it
8. I haven’t written many new songs in the last few years and I sometimes worry that the gift is gone. If it is gone, it found it’s way to Shane. Shane writes good songs.
9. I can sleep anywhere… and it doesn’t have to be quiet either
10. I have wasted many years at my current job. I plan to fix that problem in the next couple of months
11. I once took too many free balloons from the grocery store. My mom made me take them back. I was frightened and humiliated and that day I learned a valuable lesson
12. Some things that I think are funny are actually mean (peace out Shane)
13. I sometimes shamelessly promote my blog
14. I cry almost every time I hear Counting Crows “Miami”
15. I cry when I watch that cheesy “You… complete me” scene in Jerry Maguire
16. I cried for about 10 minutes – actually I wept – after watching Charlize Theron in “Monster” http://www.imdb.com/title/
17. I can’t find or imagine finding another family as knit together or unique as the Krahns.
18. I have three daughters and no desire to have a son
19. I don’t fear aging, in fact I’m looking fwd to it
20. A few years ago, I almost converted to Roman Catholicism. I still consider Thomas Merton a mentor.
21. I like books
22. Sleep is a necessary evil
23. Jack Layton makes me nauseous
24. I have a lot of hope for Barack Obama, although I wish he’d change his views on abortion
25. If anything goes wrong in the USA, Jack Bauer can fix it with threats of violence… and violence.
I’ve been thinking more about the Tim Challies post I wrote about earlier this week. I don’t want my kids to be as “overchurched” as I was.
I should explain what I mean by that term. I don’t mean that I want them to be pseudo-Christians or secret Christians. I want them to be bold and prepared and I want what they believe to play out in the real world. Even though I never went to a Christian school, I was so immersed in church and church culture that I avoided making non-Christian friends and to this day I often find the concept of not being a Christian hard to grasp and that makes communication difficult at times.
I know even grade schools have changed in the two decades since I was there but I don’t see the doom and gloom and I never have and, frankly, I’m not sure how useful it is. The threat of secular humanism does exist, but what more am I going to do about it? What will it change about the way I do things? My kids will go to the same schools, I’ll keep living my life the way I am and if at some point in the future that becomes more difficult to do and there are consequences, then so be it. Where I would certainly take action is if there was ever a threat of serious physical harm, and I know in the US that is a real concern in many places.
Some call that “burying my head in the sand” reasoning. I don’t know, I mean I have three kids and a full time job – there’s no time to fight the secular humanists after bedtime. So my part in the fight is raising a family that will stick out in society. That includes sending them to a public school, having them talk about Jesus there and probably being persecuted for it.
I don’t think that we should pray for persecution… I can’t remember that being in scripture anyway – but we should expect it.
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Just for fun, click here to see Google search results for the word “overchurched”
Tim Challies takes a look at public schooling vs. private/home-school. I couldn’t have put it better myself… so I won’t try. Go read it.
Over at the blog Piece of Mind, in a post called Doubt is a Higher Calling, Mark Tokarski has challenged me to define my thinking about childhood indoctrination a little more clearly. It’s a valid challenge. It’s worth reading his post before you read the following response:
Mark,
I’m glad we’re having this conversation… and this is good – you’re getting me started on my post about indoctrination. You don’t mind if I steal my own comments off your blog right? 
The reason I have “dealt with this somewhat, but not thoroughly” is that my kids (all girls) are 4, 3, and 1 and when it comes to parenting I try to live by the rule that I don’t comment – not with apparent authority anyway – on things I have not yet experienced.
So, with my oldest being only 4 she is starting to ask questions, starting to pick up things here and there that she hears about “God”. This is where you and I differ – you have older children and you’ve already been through this. So I do appreciate your insights, and for that matter the honesty of your post.
I am in the process of determining proper responses to my daughters. Am I going to bombard them with theology that they have no hope of understanding? No, of course not. Am I going to answer their childlike questions in equally childlike terms that they can understand? Yes I am.
Where I have determined that I have found Truth I will tell my children. Where I have doubts I won’t pretend to be certain. That’s the way I work.
As for your childhood experience… yes, things tend to be overspiritualized in many ways. It’s an error I try to avoid. You have that in common with another one of my other commenters who I went out for a Guinness with last night (I still don’t like it BTW – I try to like it every 2 years or so). His point was similar to yours: things were so overspiritualized for him in a negative way that he couldn’t be in a dark room alone without being afraid.
Now this is all very unfortunate when it is the result of religious fearmongering. Do I believe demons and angels exist? Well, as a Christian, of course I do. But the manner of their influence is considerably more subtle, as a rule, than what is portrayed in a Frank Peretti book or for that matter a Stephen King book/movie.
The extremity of your treatment is common to some Catholic communities; I am far more familiar with extreme fundamentalism though, which is very common here in Southwestern Ontario (Canada). You have these groups nailed and I agree with you that they are involved in malicious indoctrination. I know many such people personally and they don’t even consider me a Christian. Seriously… especially if they read this and find out I had a beer.
If you don’t mind me asking, what was the “bolt of lighting that knocked you off your horse”? I’m assuming this is not the same flash of light that knocked St. Paul off of his.
You’re right on this too: children should know all of it, the good and the bad together. And here’s another point we won’t agree on but from personal experience many of the friends I grew up in church with ditched their Christianity when the other half of the truth was known. My belief is that they, along with a couple of generations in North America would still be Christians today if they had known all of it and been able to work out their faith with the knowledge of both sides.
I’ll make an assumption here so correct me if I’m wrong, but would your thinking be that given all the evidence anyone who honestly wrestled with it would choose Atheism?
You have my vote on doubt. I even wrote a song about it called
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The song is about the benefits and challenges of embracing doubt.
Cheers Mark, here’s to many more of these conversations.
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For more posts in the series on Richard Dawkins and The God Delusion return to the Richard Dawkins page.
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(if you liked that song, there are more at http://www.michaelkrahn.com . Shameless self-promotion, I know, but this is MY blog after all.)
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