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Swim Team

Tuesday 25 May 2021

E has joined a swim team at a local pool, primarily because his three best buddies from school have joined the same team. I am naturally thrilled because competitive swimming was an important part of my life. I began swimming competitively in elementary school when I competed for the small community pool to which we belonged.

In high school, the swim team was my only athletic endeavor. I certainly would not have gone out for football or basketball, and while I ran track during my freshman year, an awful case of tendonitis made running more than a quarter of a mile excruciatingly painful: I quit after the first year. But swimming had always been kind to me, and even though I was always mildly frustrated that the swim team never got the kind of recognition that the basketball, football, or even baseball teams received, I would have continued swimming competitively even if the other swimmers and I were the only ones in the pool.

It’s not that I wanted to be seen as a jock — certainly not — but a little recognition for the amount of work we put into our sport would have been nice, I thought.  We did have one occasion to bask in a little attention. It was during my junior or senior year, and the head swim coach arranged for some of the cheerleaders to come to support us. A cheerleader stood behind the starting blocks for the home swimmers and cheered us on from there. That I can’t remember whether it was my junior or senior year and that I am only partially certain they were standing behind the starting blocks to cheer us on (that just doesn’t seem right) show how relatively insignificant the event was for me, so I suppose I really didn’t care that much about that recognition.

For the most part, what I liked about swimming was its solitary nature. Except for relay events, swimming was just the swimmer in the water. Everything else seemed to dissolve into the muffled yelling of the few spectators — mainly parents, boyfriends, and girlfriends — who came out to support the team. To train or to compete, we didn’t need anything other than a body of water.

I also found that training had a certain meditative quality to it: back and forth and back and forth. One two three breath; one two three breath; one two three breath. Count the strokes in each lap. Count the breaths in each lap. Get a song going in your head and just let it run in cycles. I lost myself in swimming many times.

The Boy, though, is just beginning. He doesn’t have a good breathing pattern. He takes as many strokes as he can and then pulls his whole head out of the water to gulp air for a few seconds, then plunges his head back under and goes at it again. There are so many kid on the team (probably close to 30) that I doubt he’ll get much one-on-one stroke help, so I’ll have to do that as soon as school is out, and we start heading to the pool together on a regular basis.

He also stops swimming when he gets too tired. That means he swims the first length entirely. In the second length, he stops at the 15-foot red markers. After a few more lengths, he’s stopping almost midway.

“That’s when you’ve really got to push it,” I tell him. “You’ve got to ignore that pain and push through it. That is how you get stronger.”

It looks like we’ve got a summer goal cut out for us.

Riding in the Back

Monday 24 May 2021

Treasures

Sunday 23 May 2021

I’m not sure how it happened, but everyone — L, E, and K — took turns going through Nana’s old jewelry. It’s been stowed away in Papa’s room since they moved in two years ago, and I think it’s only now that they’ve gone through it.

Crossing Over

Saturday 22 May 2021

The Boy returned to scouting this year after a year's absence (or was it two?), this time joining a troop that includes his three best friends from school. He moved from Bear to WEBELOS (We'll Be Loyal Scouts).

It was a strange scouting year, an abbreviated scouting year, due to covid, but we made it through, learned a thing or two, and most importantly, strengthened friendships.

Diagramming

Friday 21 May 2021

As our last group of starters, we began some sentence diagramming today. Most classes spent about 15 minutes on it before moving to Great Expectations character presentations.

In school, I always felt a little like a freak because while everyone else was complaining about diagramming sentences in school, I enjoyed it. Taking a jumble of words and placing each one in its own slot to indicate its precise function in the sentence felt like drawing meaning and order out of what would otherwise be near chaos. Sentences are a jumble of words that we comprehend without giving it much thought (if we’re fluent), yet within that apparent jumble is a simplicity that we can demonstrate graphically, even if it is a bit tricky to find that order for some sentences. Other kids groaned and complained about it, but for me, each sentence I had to diagram was a little puzzle I could crawl inside with a tool belt and take the whole thing apart as if it were a toy the inner workings of which had entranced me for ages. I knew, though, that I could put the sentence all back together, and I didn’t have that kind of assurance when pulling apart toys.

Yet even today, there are a number of sentences that flummox my diagramming ability. Look at that last sentence, for example. Had I not originally written “when I was pulling apart toys” I wouldn’t have seen the subtle, almost-hidden clause in the revised “when pulling apart toys.”

It’s these little idiosyncrasies of language that I hope to help students discover by going over sentence diagramming with them as a starter these final days.

Sports Banquet

Thursday 20 May 2021

The Girl gets some recognition: “This person almost won [the most improved] award in tryouts.”

Back to BIAY

Wednesday 19 May 2021

Although I haven’t listened to a Bible in a Year podcast in over a month now, I’m still following a couple of groups on social media. Every now and then, I’ll see something that interests me: someone expresses a doubt or a worry, and I immediately begin listing the ways people will try to help. Sometimes, I make my own comment.

Today I read,

Although I had a lot of children’s bibles growing up, went to catholic school, and go to Sunday church so I know the stories of the Bible for the most part – this is my first time really “reading” the Bible all the way through with BIAY.

And honestly – I’m struggling. Every day it just seems like one depressing story after the next. Every day it’s just horrifying tales, little Joy, and lists of names. Men being awful and women’s lives being ruined. […]

I decided to use the line of reasoning that’s not entirely true at this point in time but was true some months ago:

I had similar problems. So much of the awfulness comes with God’s tacit approval or, worse, at his command. I’ve taken a break, but it’s done serious damage to my faith.

Granted, I’ve rejected faith altogether (again), but I did go through this process. I was wondering (again) how people would respond. Typically, there are a few responses to “Oh, that gory stuff in the Old Testament is troublesome.”

  • It’s for the Israelites, not for all of us.
  • Just because it’s in the Bible doesn’t mean God approves of it.
  • God in the Old Testament is slowing bringing about moral change. It’s a slow, gradual process. These are the first steps.
  • God said to do it, so it is right. Who are you to judge God?

Eric jumped right in with the tried and true “just because it’s in the Bible doesn’t mean acceptance” argument, almost word for word:

Assuming the existence of tacit approval is a dangerous move to make. It assumes that because a bad thing is recounted, it is recounted with approval, but that’s just not how biblical texts are written. I’m sorry to hear your faith is wounded, but rest assured God does not approve of immoral actions, even when He brings good out of them.

This reply always frustrates me because it misses the point. I’m not saying that the immoral behavior of various characters is troubling: I’m saying the immoral actions and commands of God are troubling. I replied:

Just look at all the awful punishments he commanded. Look at the genocides he commanded. That goes well beyond tacit approval.

His response? The classic “God said to do it, so that makes it acceptable” line. He didn’t ask me directly “Who are you to judge God,” but it was implicit:

OK so for those, did people other than God make those commands, or was it God, who after all does decide, every day, who lives and who dies? If I commanded that, or my national leader, that would be wrong, but when God commands punishment of people that are very clearly morally in the wrong, isn’t that the one time it’s OK?

It’s important to point out that according to this theory, the only thing that Islamic suicide bombers got wrong was the god. The reasoning behind what they’re doing is sound: God commands it; that makes it right.

Still, I didn’t go that line. I simply asked, “To punish by stoning?”

At this point, Eva jumped in:

God had to do a cleansing, just as he will when Jesus comes again. After all the evil in the world God still gave his son for our salvation. How much more can we ask of God? The world is lucky God is making the decision not mortal man because I as a human would have given up on humans a long time ago.

“God had to do a cleansing” sounds an awful lot like “God had to do an ethnic cleansing,” and that’s because it’s exactly what he does in the Bible. He commands the Israelites to wipe out whole nations. The Bible says it’s because they’re so immoral, but that just sounds like propaganda to me. Add to it the fact that there’s no evidence any of this immorality that keeps appearing in apologist arguments (namely, that the Canaanites burned their children alive as offerings to Ba’al). There’s simply a claim in scripture, which sounds a lot like after-the-fact justification.

Eric also replied, using another of the popular arguments: it’s a gradual movement to a more moral society:

Remember that God was leading his people gradually to an end point. The original moral framework He gave was just the 10 commandments. But when Moses came down Mt. Sinai and the people had sinned, God gave more laws—a lot more. And those extra laws are the ones that contain more age-specific laws that we rightly shake our heads at today.

Jesus himself made this exact point when he said that Moses had allowed things like divorce, it was not b/c that’s how things should be, but b/c that’s what the people were capable of at the time, but it was not always so and hence that’s not the rule now. Laws and commands for a people in 1000BC were tailored by God for them at that time. They weren’t His vision for How Society Should Work; they part of a larger plan for guidance, so they only needed to be Better Than What Came Before. Case in point: the lex talionis “an eye for an eye”. This sounds terrible compared to today, but the comparison we should make is with what proceeded it. “An eye for an eye” was *limiting* revenge to something approaching proportionality. And so on with other decrees of the law of Moses. You absolutely have to judge them in comparison to the societies Israel was surrounded by.

I’m sorry, but stoning someone is not a moral step up from anything. I can’t think of anything that would rank below that. Still, it shows how people fall back on familiar tropes to justify the unjustifiable because the alternative (rejecting the Bible, even in part) is utterly unthinkable.

Nerf Gun

Tuesday 18 May 2021

Birthday Present

Monday 17 May 2021

He's been begging for it for ages now.

"I really want an electric guitar!" became the Boy'smantra. Yet we were afraid that, like so many other interests, it might just fade away, so we told him to use L's old pink guitar to show that he's really interested in playing, committed to playing, disciplined enough for playing.

I'm not entirely sure he proved all those things, but he made a valiant effort. He learned a few chords (really mastering a couple of them) and got to where he could switch back and forth between them. He practiced chromatic scales to get single-string control along with finger sequencing. And he talked about it a lot.

Of course, he had a point: an electric guitar, with its lighter gauge strings, is easier to play than a steel-string acoustic. A nylon-string acoustic/classical guitar would be the easiest and the gentlest on his fingers, but he wanted an electric guitar. Passion is important, and he was passionate about this, and we want him to keep that passion.

Down the Drain

Sunday 16 May 2021

We’ve played soccer in the front yard for countless hours. We’ve fired innumerable shots into our neighbors’ yards. We’ve retrieved every single ball, no matter where it’s gone. Until tonight. L’s shot went wide, sailed into the neighbors’ yard, rolled down the ditch, passed into the culvert, and disappeared, for his culvert doesn’t just pass under his driveway: it empties into a basin with another culvert and the drains into the creek behind our house. That basin is covered with an enormous concrete cover that we could not possibly move to retrieve the ball, so chances are, it’s gone.

That wouldn’t have been a big deal if it had been his old, beat-up, scratched, and scared ball. The ball we’ve kicked into the same neighbors’ yard countless times. But this was his new ball. His birthday gift ball. Which he got only on Friday.

He’s heartbroken about it.