Top 10 Tuesday!

My top 10 practices to maintain Mommy Sanity.
10. Daily prayer and meditation.
9. Roughhousing with my little one: releases stress for both of us!
8. Go to work 5 days a week - I am not blessed with the ability to be a stay at home mom.
7. Make Daddy take charge of the little one 1 morning each weekend.
6. Delegate my brain to my phone: calendar, to do list, grocery list, EVERYTHING.
5. A glass of wine or a cocktail while cooking dinner.
4. Daily sensory treats: a nice smell, music I love, a good book, a nap. I do something each day to treat my body well.
3. A list of friends I can call who will sympathize with me without any judgment.
2. Healthy boundaries
1. Acknowledging daily that I'm not perfect and forgiving myself.

Teaching the Bible in Sunday School is Probably Heresy

I attended Sunday School from the time I was potty trained. I learned Bible stories, I memorized Bible verses, and I took notes. But I also read the Bible for myself. I was reading Leviticus and Numbers at age 10, along with the Psalms and Proverbs and Gospels. So I learned something crucial pretty early on.

Sunday School was lying to me.

Moses was a murderer before he was a prophet.
David was an adulterer, traitor, and murderer all while being a "man after God's own heart."
Adam was standing right next to Eve while she talked with the serpent and took the fruit to eat it.
Esther encouraged the king to allow widespread murder and pillaging BY the Jews instead of genocide OF the Jews.
Rahab was a prostitute, not an innkeeper.
Samson was married and committed random violence over his girlfriend before he ever met Delilah.
The 10 Commandments don't prohibit using swear words.
The 10 Commandments don't prohibit sex before marriage.
Paul taught that we were free from the Law, but Sunday School taught me that I had to obey certain parts of the Law.

I still remember the moment when I realized that some of the Bible stories I had been told were TRUE. Notice that? I already knew that what I was being taught was actually NOT the Biblical text. Yet on Christmas Eve one night, waiting for service to begin, my father opened the pew Bible to Luke 2, and handed it to me to read. As I read the Nativity Story, I was amazed. Here was a Bible story that was actually IN the Bible. One shining story that was true to the text I had been taught to study and memorize.

Look, I understand why we censor and clean up the Bible stories before teaching them to children. A five year old doesn't need to know that kids her age were kidnapped and enslaved. She shouldn't be taught that the first born Egyptian babies were killed by God in order to set the Hebrews free. The story of Samson killing all the men at his wedding lacks a good moral and is quite violent.

But maybe we shouldn't be teaching the Bible at all then, if we have to censor it so strongly. We can teach them songs, teach them prayers, heck, even teach them the Gospels - most of those stories don't need censoring.

I was lucky, in that I had a very real and personal relationship with God, so as I realized that Sunday School was teaching me a distorted view of the Bible, I didn't rebel against my faith. I just accepted the tension and thought for myself. That's not the norm.


So is it heresy to teach the Bible in Sunday School? If the church believes, as most do, that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, then how do they justify teaching censored and distorted versions of that sacred Word? And what are the consequences when our children begin to read the Bible for themselves and learn that they were not taught the actual Word? Food for thought.

The Top 7 Female SuperHeroes

With all the popular comic book movies coming out, a common observation is about the lack of strong females. Iron Man, Captain America, The Avengers, Thor, none of these movies have strong female leads. In fact, most of them don't even pass the Bechdel test!

Thank the powers that be for fantasy and sci-fi, which has been quietly offering women strong role models for decades now. My superheroes don't have figures that make Barbie feel fat, and they don't play second fiddle to their male counterparts. They get the job done, unconcerned about being called "bitch" or "masculine" or "ball buster." As I think about my growing up, and being allowed to watch movies like Alien and Aliens, and the Star Wars movies, and even Star Trek (which became less sexist with time), I see how I learned how to be an assertive, powerful woman. I didn't need Wonder Woman or Batgirl. I had Ellen Ripley and Eowyn.

One of my earliest memories, in fact, is watching the cartoon Lord of the Rings, and being blown away by Eowyn's battlefield gender reveal. That moment awoke something in my heart: not only could a woman be strong and powerful, but in fact, her gender could be an asset. ONLY a woman could have killed the Witch King.

So I say, let the comic book people have their men in tights and women in fetish fantasy outfits. I will continue to let sci-fi teach my daughter about how to be a powerful woman in this world.

Ripley: disobeying orders and killing aliens whenever she wakes from hypersleep. And oh, yes, recovering from the loss of her own daughter by saving an innocent girl from the alien queen.

Captain Janeway, one of the best captains in Star Trek. Tough as nails, capable of making the hard decisions, and oh yeah, kicking Borg ass when necessary.

Starbuck: It's not just men who can be awesome pilots and total assholes. Self-destructive but never apologetic for her gender.

Maleficent, who in the end found true love to be that between a mother and daughter, not a man and a woman. Oh, and capable of ruling her own realm and mustering an army without any help, male, female, human or fairy.

Olivia Dunham: strong, feminine, smart, in BOTH worlds.

Twist on the classic: the princess does the rescuing!