Ash Wednesday: Thoughts From a Friend

So this is great.

My Hutch-friend Jen has some great thoughts about Ash Wednesday - the liturgical celebration as well as the poem by T. S. Eliot. Here's a snippet.

Lent begins again this week. I’m going to give something up. I’m probably going to fail too. And yet, I still want to come, ash marked, to lay my own tiny sacrifice on the altar of grace. 

This is the tension. Teach me to care and not to care.

Read more over at Greener Trees.

Tips For Dads: How (And Why) to Remove Poop Stains

The Easy Part: How

Ingredients (Stage 1):
1 poop-stained article of clothing¹
1 willing papa
running water
dish soap

Ingredients (Stage 2):
medium mixing bowl (full of water)
Borax (or your favorite stain remover)
bleach (if the stained area is white)

Process (Stage 1):
First things first: rinse it off as soon as you can after The Event. I prefer cold running water in a sink with a garbage disposal. (Cold water is best for body fluid stains; warm water is better for other stains, such as strawberry juice.) Your goal is to get any chunks and all of the slimy stuff out while keeping the affected area as small as possible (avoid spreading it around).

Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty. You have soap and water in your house for a reason, and you can wash up after you're done. If you are Exceedingly Weak of Stomach, try to think of the feces as just a highly processed, disagreeable-smelling food. That's what it is, after all. And remember: the quicker you rinse, the quicker you can forget precisely what you're cleaning up.

Once it's rinsed off, I apply some dish soap directly to the stained area. Rub it into the stain, again being careful not to spread any remaining fecal matter around. Lather, rinse, repeat as needed. Your goal at this stage is to use your fingers to rub out as much of the stain as possible. About half the time, this will do the trick.

If the stains don't come out after about five minutes of vigorous rubbing, rinsing, and repeating, it's time to step up your game.

Process (Stage 2):
Fill a bowl with water. Let the garment soak for at least half an hour. If you got most of the stain out in Stage 1, soaking can often help you finish the job. After the soak, return to your dish soap and water tactic.

If soaking doesn't help, it's time for stronger chemicals. Always read and follow the directions on these. I find Borax is often helpful for getting stains out. There's also bleach, but be careful: regular chlorine bleach will discolor just about anything, including many shades of off-white. Color-safe bleach is a better bet for most garments other than white onesies. Clorox2 is an example - it has a milder, oxygen-based bleach instead of the chlorine one.

Don't go overboard on chemicals; too much can cause your colors to fade.

I've found some combination of soaking and solvents to be successful 99.9% of the time. Patience is a virtue, here, fellas.

Good luck!

The Harder Part: Why

I wish I had a dime for every time I've said to myself, I'm a highly skilled, well-paid technical professional. Why am I standing in front of a kitchen sink washing poop stains out of clothes again?

For many people in my position, the benefit simply don't seem to be worth the effort. Why not just dispose of the filthy clothes and be done with it? My time is worth much more than this. This is beneath me. I'm an important, dignified person, dadgum it!

So here are some answers I came up with the last time I was rinsing my son's feces out of a sleeper:

1. I am cheap. I'm not sure I know of many cheaper people than me. And clothes (even baby clothes) can be very expensive. When I visit Babies "Я" Us, I see outfits that cost more than a week's groceries. Besides, it rubs me the wrong way to discard a perfectly serviceable piece of clothing.
   
2. It shows my wife that I care about her. Sure, we could buy new clothes, but she's attached to some of these outfits. Plus, I'm not the only thrifty one in the family -- she appreciates me helping to stretch the clothing budget a little bit farther.
   
3. It demonstrates to my sons that I love their mother and don't think her desires are less important than mine. I want my boys to grow up knowing what a loving husband and father looks like. These poop-stained Onesies are an opportunity for me to show them.
   
4. It brings me down closer to where I ought to be. I believe that God resists those who are full of their own importance and gives grace to those who realize their imperfections and their need for a Savior.² Bringing myself low to serve my family is a way for me to be like Jesus, who humbled Himself to serve those he deserved to rule over.

So, that's why I do it. I'm sure these reasons aren't compelling to everyone, but they are to me.

And now off to start a load of laundry...

Notes:
¹ Onesies, sleepers, t-shirts, jeans -- you'll probably see them all, if your children's bowels are fairly healthy.
^{2 See James 4:6}

Hutchmoot 2012 (Part 1: The Spiritual Stuff)

If you know what a Hutchmoot is, you won't be surprised to hear that Hutchmoot 2012 was an occasion of breaking (the good kind), challenge (also the good kind), and immense blessing (I don't think there's a bad kind) for me.

That's the short version of how this event affected me. To explain why, we're going to have to take a scenic drive through the ugliness of my festering, not-quite-dead-yet flesh. Feel free to exit the vehicle at any time if you find yourself growing ill.

Light at the end of the tunnel: If we make it through my old self's rotting corpse in one piece, I'll tell you why Hutchmoot was one of the most beautiful things to happen to it in a long time.

So here are three things you need to know about me:

1. I'm insecure. Debilitatingly so. I crave validation and acceptance and live in constant fear of not being good enough to receive them. I thrive on praise and cringe at the slightest hint of criticism. I use other people as benchmarks, caring more that I can compare myself to them than that they are made in the very image of God.
2. I'm selfish. I seek my own pleasure, my own goals, my own way, with every wretched breath. I march, jackbooted, over the needs and desires of others. (The exception is when their needs or desires coincide with mine, in which case I tolerate them for a while, as Hitler tolerated Stalin before Operation Barbarossa.)
3. The first two things about me are lies. Well, they're starting to become lies. Chapters 4 - 6 of Paul's Letter to the Romans tell me this is true. Like Abraham, I have believed the impossible, and my faith in Christ has been credited to me as righteousness (4:19-25). God has restored my relationship with Himself and given me a glorious hope (5:1-5). In large part, this hope springs from the fact that my old self is dead. When I came to Christ, I died, just as surely as if a divine executioner had stood me up against a brick wall and used an expertly aimed hollow-point round to turn my brains into soup (6:1-7). In my old man's place lives the new man, the image of Christ in me.

Still with me? Good. So how did Hutchmoot 2012 change me? How did it make Thing #3 truer while making Things #1 and #2 falser? (And is "falser" even a word?)

God used my sweet communion with Hutchfriends, my tummy full of Hutchfood, and the megadoses of truth in the Hutchsessions to clear up my cloudy vision a little bit. And, quite frankly, I didn't really like what I saw. I realized that my flesh was still much too alive. Rather than giving wholeheartedly and unstintingly to others, my old self wanted to measure my skills, talent, experiences, and accomplishments against theirs. It wanted to use these precious friends to my advantage. Perhaps talking with certain people would give me the appearance of being important, of being worthy of spending time with. Vicarious power and prestige? Yes, please.

I saw these natural tendencies and found them utterly disgusting.

Here's the really beautiful part: This clarity of vision was accompanied by encouraging words of truth from Scripture. Russ Ramsey gave a devotion on I Corinthians 4:3-4, reminding me that I am not my own judge, and that no other human is, either. My worth and value are judged by the One who thought I was important enough to sacrifice His Son for. Sally Lloyd-Jones followed this up with a two-word sermon that I needed badly: "Never compare."

So what do I take away from Hutchmoot? Three things, conveniently enough.

1. The remembrance that God loves me and that He alone judges me. This means I don't need to try so hard to be lovable or admirable. He sees me with all my faults and still gave His Son's life for mine. This frees me up to love others in the same way rather than seeing them as competitors.
2. God made me in His image, and He made me to share my creativity with others. I suffer from a sort of creative attention deficit disorder -- it is very difficult for me to finish things I have started. I realized this week that if God is going to use my work to encourage others, I need to complete what I start. I will do this not out of obligation or guilt, but because I believe God has given me resources so I will use them. This means I am going to make a concerted effort to first finish all the half-done things sitting around my mind, and then diligently let new things flow out as often -- and as completely -- as I can.
3. I need to keep dying. I've been dying for two and a half decades so far, and sometimes it seems like the flesh is stronger than ever. The good news is that one day, I will finally attain death, and then I will be more alive than I ever dreamed was possible. In the meantime, I will keep seeking out other believers to encourage me along to greater depths of love and sacrifice, as I do the same for them.

I am planning to post at least one more time on my favorite Hutchmoot 2012 moments, so you can look forward to that later this week (if the Lord wills). For now, I'll end by saying I'm extremely humbled by and grateful for this experience. You can check out other responses to it at the Rabbit Room.

And, oh, yes: "falser" is apparently a real word. In Scrabble, anyway.