Life Lessons In The Kitchen...

I love our kitchen...  It's nice and open, it has a big island in it, many of our teachable moments are lived out in the kitchen.  We have a big table in the kitchen and it's where most of our family meals, and some great conversations, take place...

Some of my all time favorite conversations were what it means to be transformed instead of conformed...  When we were praying about adopting...  Creation vs. evolution...  What does it mean to do everything to the glory of God...  How to deal with a bully... I wish I had kept a journal of all of our topics...

The conversations have been fewer in the last year, but only because we didn't want Abby to feel left out, so we kept it to more topics that she could participate in...  But tonight was one of those great conversations...

It wasn't planned, they rarely are, but it started when something was mentioned about praying while cutting the grass...  And one of the kids said, "You mean you can pray when you are doing other things?"  After all these years, how did we miss making that clear?  It's funny though, I didn't learn that until I was well into my 30's...

Like our child, I always thought prayer was something you did a couple of times a day when you had a few minutes to sit down, center your thoughts on God and talk to Him...  It was all very formal...  I was embarrassed if I would accidentally burp when I was praying, I mean good grief, I'm before the King of Kings and I burp, how rude (seriously, I really thought that...  I seemed to forget that God created me to burp!)

But one day I read, Practicing His Presence by Frank Laubach and Brother Lawrence.  Brother Lawrence was a monk who lived a really long time ago, but wrote letters to his friends about trying to live moment by moment in the presence of God.  And then Frank Laubach is a present day missionary who tried to live out what Brother Lawrence wrote about and wrote letters to his father about his experiences.

It was through this book that I began to understand that prayer is really about constant communion with God...  It can happen anytime, anywhere and it is what we should strive for 24/7...  Prayer keeps us in humble dependence on God and in close connection with Him.  The book COMPLETELY changed the way I looked at prayer.

So tonight, we had an incredible conversation about prayer...  Hopefully our kids have learned what it took me over 30 years to learn...  That the proper posture of life is a posture of prayer.

But then things kind of went downhill from there...  Since the kids are old enough (well, Abby is still exempt from this) their responsibility is to clean up the kitchen after dinner.  But lately, every week or so, we've had a major discussion over "it's not my job."

It inevitably starts with someone who didn't do their job earlier in the day and things have piled up and it dissolves into grumbling, complaining, and whining about how it's not fair that I have to do their job.  Tonight, I decided to let Scott handle it and I just kept playing with Abby...  But I was listening...

As I listened to this conversation, something occurred to me...  Where is their sense of family?  Of team?  It's all about protecting their time...their effort... about not having to do more than another person...  making sure that everything is fair...

And then it occurred to me, we (Scott and I, but really me) created this selfishness with our stupid job chart.  Several years ago, I got the bright idea to create a revolving job chart...  I spent hours developing a job chart that cycled by week, making sure that everyone had a fair amount of responsibility in the house.  As the years passed, the work became more balanced as the kids grew older and could take on more.  On the surface, it sounds great...but what I realized tonight is that it has created a very selfish attitude in them...

There's no sense of "he/she has a busy week this week, let me help them out..."  All I hear is "But that was my job last week..."  Or having to negotiate, since____ is gone this week, you do the dishes and next week, ___ will take your turn (what... I'm the mother... I don't have to negotiate ANYTHING...just clean out the dishwasher for crying out loud...)  But this cursed job chart had created all of that...

Well the job chart came off the wall tonight and went into file 13...  The garbage can...  Gone with it... "But it's not my job"...  Excuses to not take initiative... Reasons to not support a brother or sister...  Now, I am not disillusioned into thinking the battle is over, but at least we are back on the road to learning what it means to be and live as a family...  I'm a slow learner, but thankfully God got through...  Amazing, I was listening for once instead of lecturing!

Children need to learn responsibility, but that has to be balanced with a sense of team...of helping each other...of laying down your life for someone else...even if it is just cleaning out the dishwasher for them...  It has to start somewhere...  And once it again, it began in our kitchen!  I would say it was a rather productive evening!