Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

27 May

My Outpost with the In-Laws

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Family. Tagged: , , , .

20130527-161100.jpgYou don’t just marry your husband, you marry his family!

I suppose some would take exception to this, particularly if the in-law relationship is strained. But for me it is a true and welcome arrangement. Just as my affection for my husband has grown over the past 18 years of marriage, my affection for his family has grown too. Particularly since moving to Texas a year ago, my parents-in-law have nurtured me in ways I never would have expected. Their home has become an outpost for me in my new state.

Our Journey To Texas

My husband and I are from different states. He is (mostly) from Texas and that’s where most of his family still lives. I’m from Ohio and that’s where most of my family still lives. We met in my home state of Ohio when my husband was in seminary. In our early married life we lived a number of years in Indiana, and a short time in Florida. Throughout all that time we always talked about getting back to Ohio–my family was there and my husband had put down roots there as well.

Finally we made it back to Ohio when my son was a toddler. It was everything I thought it would be for getting reconnected with my family. My parents and brother made it to every birthday party for my son, and we got to see each of them at regular intervals in between. I got to go to events for my extended family–weddings, funerals, holidays, family reunions, and more. I was finally home again!

I really thought I would be in Ohio for the rest of my life. When it was time for my husband to find a new congregation to serve as pastor, we tried very hard to find a match in Ohio. Meanwhile, we agreed it would be okay to do some looking in Texas too. I didn’t really take the Texas thing very seriously though. I was sure I was “home” in Ohio, where I belonged and didn’t really want to think about leaving.

The more we talked about it though, my husband made a strong case for getting back to Texas to be near his family. He made a really positive connection with the staff of the synod where we are now serving. Soon after that, this beautiful match came together with our current church in rural Texas. And to top it all off our current church is only 1 1/2 hours away from my husband’s parents.

My Attitude in the Beginning

Objectively, I know this is just part of the price of marrying a Texan–we will never get to live near both of our families at the same time. Naturally, it is only fair that my husband should get a turn living near his family, right?

While I recognize the realities of it, the move to Texas was rather disorienting emotionally. I didn’t take very well to the idea of being uprooted from my home state and my family all over again.

People tried to cheer me up, “Your husband’s family is your family too!”

I have always appreciated my in-laws and enjoyed spending time with them. There have been normal tensions of learning their expectations, but never anything we couldn’t all have a laugh about later. Overall, I’ve had a pretty good relationship with them.

Still, the idea of trading them for my family just didn’t seem like a fair deal. I knew them as well as I could having seen them once or twice a year over the course of almost 20 years of being involved with their son. But I didn’t know them like I knew my own family! And they couldn’t replace my family!

His Family IS My Family

In the interview process we had stayed with my in-laws on two different trips, and when we first moved down we stopped for a couple of nights to stay with them before we completed our journey to our new town. Their hospitality, and their home were familiar things to me in this new state.

After we made the move we seemed to find frequent excuses to make the one-and-a-half hour drive back to Houston to visit with my in-laws. I found that it wasn’t just my husband making excuses to see them, but I was too. I liked being with my in-laws and getting to know them better. Seeing them more frequently meant we could bond more than ever.

I hesitated to say much to my in-laws about the challenges of the move. I didn’t want to “mess with Texas” and I knew they were so excited to have their youngest son back in Texas. But I had become comfortable enough with them that one day I just blurted out a litany of unpacking woes. I shared that I had kind-of stalled out on unpacking having unpacked enough to get by, but not enough to feel really at home.

Without giving it much thought, I rattled off a list of things–mostly kitchen stuff–that I had not yet unpacked that would make life so much easier! The next morning when I came down to breakfast there was a small assembly of exactly the types of things I was missing. My mother-in-law gathered these duplicates from her own kitchen for us to borrow as long as we needed them.

The kitchen stuff was a big help, of course, and I also came to a new appreciation for my in-laws through the whole exchange. It turned out they were not upset by my rant about how hard the move was for me. Beyond that though, they showed that they cared how I was really. Folks for whom I don’t have to pretend to be okay, they’re my people.

So, even though I don’t get to be near the family I grew up with, my husband’s family is my family. I continue to look for excuses to visit them and draw comfort and strength from being with them. I’m feeling more at home in our new town now that we’ve been here for a year, but my in-law’s home is still my outpost where I can go and relax and be myself.

Where are your outposts in life? Who are the people you can be yourself with?

18 May

Stuff You Learn After You Say “I do”

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Family, Inspiration. Tagged: , , , , .

My husband saved a turtle that was stuck in the middle of a busy highway.

I thought I knew my husband pretty well before our wedding day. But no matter how much you think you know a person, there will always be those quirky things you never saw coming.

We were friends for quite some time before we ever got romantic. We got to know each other quite well through letters we exchanged as friends. The friendship eventually became so obviously more and we finally confessed our true feelings for one another. We went from “just friends” to practically engaged pretty quickly, but a year-long engagement gave us even more time to get to know one another.

My beloved had been in Seminary when I met him, and he was ordained by the time we were married. So I knew going into it that I was marrying a pastor. He had seen me at my worst, I knew of his vulnerabilities. We both recognized that we were the youngest child in our respective families and had a sense of the challenges that would present for us. We talked for hours about faith, hopes, dreams and more.

Then on our wedding day, after the reception, on the car ride back to my mother’s house, there I learned something about my new husband that I was completely unprepared for.

On a country road he suddenly slowed and became very tense. I was worried that something serious was wrong with the car.

“There’s a turtle,” he said.

“Oh.” Imagining the turtle to have been safely camouflaged in the grass, I was bewildered how he even saw it. And I couldn’t understand why this sighting had such an effect on him.

He sensed my confusion, “It’s in the road,” he said.

So that’s how he saw it! I still didn’t understand what that had to do with him.

“Turtles are slow,” he said.

I nodded.

“I’m afraid he’s not gonna make it across.”

“Ohhhh!” I was beginning to catch on. This was starting to be really sweet.

“So, I, well… would it be okay if I saved it?”

How could I be so oblivious?

“Do what you have to do!”

And he did. He pulled the car over to the side of the road. And in his wedding tuxedo he walked out in the road and picked up that turtle and put it safely in the grass.

As he headed back to our car, other cars began to drive up. They saw my groom on the road and me in my wedding dress waiting in the car. They stopped to check on us. But all was well now, he explained, because he had saved the turtle.

The other drivers honked their congratulations and rejoiced with us in our new marriage and in my husband’s valiant deed.

The thing I learned about my new husband is that he is the kind of guy who will save a turtle. And I loved him a little more that moment, confident I had chosen well to get my life knotted up with his.

This month, on May 20th, we will celebrate 18 years of marriage. Almost as if to mark the occasion, my husband saved another turtle just the other day. And I loved him a little more in that moment too. Each day since we were married I continue to learn new things about him and find new things to love about him. I continue to be so grateful to have our lives intertwined.

Happy anniversary, my love!

11 May

Teaching Kids that People Are Not Objects

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Community, Family. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

Teaching kids that people are not objects can open a lot of conversations.

[Trigger Warning: Sexual abuse]

When I was in training to become a Lutheran Deaconess, one of the requirements was to learn about recognizing, responding to and preventing sexual abuse. It was my first real understanding of the dynamics of power and abuse. Now as a parent, I teach my child about abuse in age-appropriate ways so he develops healthy ideas about giving and receiving respect.

People Are Not Objects

It seems to me that a lot of abuse happens when people stop seeing others as people. In this distorted and sinful perception of others as objects, real people are beaten, bullied, and discarded at will.

But people are not objects! They are living beings with rights, needs, and feelings. All people are worthy of dignity and respect, no matter what!

Object Lessons

I often use the phrase, “people are not objects” when I talk with my son about abuse in all forms. It is simple to grasp, yet opens many conversations.

We discussed “people are not objects” in a simple form when my son was in preschool. “We do not hit other kids because they have feelings; it is okay to hit your punching bag because it does not have feelings.”

When he was in public school, together we attended a presentation about bully-prevention. Since then we continue to talk about how bullies treat other people like objects and that is wrong. We talk about ways to avoid being bullies as well as the importance of standing up for ourselves and others.

When my son told me that his peers referred to girls as “hotties,” I told him girls are not just things to be judged by their appearance. When we discussed this year’s Super Bowl ads, he said, “You probably don’t like that ad because it treats people like objects.”

Framework for the Future

These are just a few vignettes of the types of conversations we have. While we have never had to face the horror of serious abuse, we have been talking about milder forms for years now.

I have deliberately given him words to identify the problem with treating others as objects. The framework we’ve built can support our future conversations. As the threats and temptations get more serious, we can relate new concerns to established ideals.

I recognize that I can’t protect my child from every possible threat. And as time goes on, he will be responsible for the decisions he makes in how he treats others. Still, talking with him about it throughout his life is the best way I know to help him recognize, respond to and prevent abuse in all forms. These conversations are imporant because people are not objects.

29 Apr

The Power of Family to Shape Faith

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Family, Inspiration, Leadership. Tagged: , , .

20130430-231747.jpgHeather Caliri wrote a great post the other day about the power of family culture. Heather and her family live in Argentina. So powerful is their family culture, that her children, who are homeschooled, have been slow to learn Spanish (the local language).

She says she is not surprised, but she learned something else too:

The real lesson for me is the power of family to insulate you from the culture surrounding you. It’s almost complete. And that is both frustrating (for someone who was trying to immerse) and heartening (as a parent who loves being in a family).

She goes on to call family culutre a “super power”! Reading this got me thinking about the responsibility to use a “super power” for good.

One of the ways in which we can use the power of family culture is in passing on the Christian faith to our children. Many families may not realize the impact that their day-to-day family culture has on their children’s faith.

Church and Sunday school are only a couple of hours a week. If you think about it, that’s not that much exposure to the faith. But when the family culture is infused with faith-talk, praying for one another, and reading the Bible together, the potential impact is much greater.

A lot of my thinking on this has been influenced by Faith Inkubators. The church where I did my Deaconess internship used a lot of Faith Inkubators materials. One of the pastors there taught me a lot about the importance of equipping parents to “incubate” faith in the home.

On his blog, Faith Inkubators founder, Rich Melheim wrote a Top 40 Principles of Faith Inkubation. I’d like to highlight one of those principles:

19. 3/4 of your youth ministry must be committed to helping parents DO and BE who and what God once called them to do and be when they first held their child in their arms.

This is important because it calls the whole church to responsibility for helping families use their “super power” to pass on the faith to the next generation.

Some families naturally weave faith into the fabric of their family culture and that is wonderful. But in my experience as a church worker and being married to a pastor, a lot of families don’t know where to begin. Either way though, it is counter-cultural to raise children in the Christian faith and families need the support of their church to do it well. After all, every super hero needs a trusty side-kick.

What do you think helps families weave faith into their family culture? What best practices can churches do to support faith formation in the home?

26 Apr

My Son has Surpassed Me

Posted by Jennifer Clark Tinker in Family. Tagged: , , , , .

20130426-230602.jpgMy son loves history and geography. He and his dad, a serious history and geography buff, often discuss ancient civilizations and where in the world current events are happening.

When my son was quite young he started getting National Geographic Kids magazine. As his reading fluency increased he began pouring over each issue, regularly coming to me with fascinating facts about the wide world.

Lately he has even been reading the grown-up National Geographic magazine to which my husband is a long term subscriber. Somehow my son reading the big people’s version of the magazine on his own signifies to me that my baby is really growing up.

I mentioned before my distaste for trivia. While I don’t like trivia as a rule, some categories confound me more than others. I loath history and geography questions most of all.

See, not only is my baby growing up, but he is engaging subjects that baffle me. It’s a little intimidating having my 9 year old boy delve into topics that I take only in measured doses.

I knew this time would come, the time when my son would surpass me. I am glad he has a dad who can dive into this stuff with him because I just can’t.

I try not to let it get to me when my son is better than me at something. Rather than lamenting it, I delight in it. I rejoice that he is coming into his own and that my limitations aren’t holding him back.

This parenthood thing takes a careful blend of forming life-giving bonds and fostering healthy independence. I wonder at what point “holding on” is holding my child back. I worry over whether letting him try something hard on his own is letting him down.

But when my son so clearly distinguishes his interests, this I see as a gift. I don’t have to worry about my role when I know he is taking charge.

Even if a small part of me misses being more “in the know,” the greater part of me is glad I don’t have to know it all. Even more, his wide-eyed wonder about all things historical and geographical makes these topics more interesting to me than ever before!

Yes, my son has surpassed me in his love for history and geography, but I’m okay with that. If he asks me to play a game with him though, I will ask that it being anything but trivia.

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