Rachel Simmons’ book may indeed correctly characterize lots of American girls right now. Her book takes her experiences leading girls leadership camps and offers some healthy ideas for parents to recognize the “curse of the good girl” in themselves and their daughters. Her main points:

The power to become a Real Girl is already inside you. This book is a compass of sorts that can help point a girl back to the self she may have disconnected from or hidden.

Not everyone is going to like you or be your friend. Girls do not need to be friends with everyone, but they do need to respect everyone. And just as a girl may not like everyone, not everyone will like her. That’s okay, too; the measure of her worth is not her relationships but who she is. Relationships nourish us, but they cannot be the only source of our fulfillment. We are less likely to seek others’ approval when we know who we are and what we want; developing a passion, whether through work, a hobby, a religion, or a sport, is key to accessing this knowledge.

When truth and friendship cannot coexist, get rid of the friendship. If you cannot safely be honest with another person, you should not be in the relationship. A friendship that lives without truth is an empty husk, an automatic indication that the relationship must be repaired or discarded.

While I don’t think these are huge issues in my family, I do think it is important to ponder how younger girls around us may have been shaped by these fears and behaviors. The first part of the book was interesting (mostly because I don’t fit the “good girl” profile very well). Unfortunately, the chapters tend to blend together, and Simmons gives multiple examples that seem to fit several “good girl” problems.  But it’s an easy read and I think it would do a lot of Southern California moms good to read it.

Recommended if you are a teenager who has ever said, “My teacher hates me!”
Or if you are a mom that has ever stomped off to school because she believed it.

“Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. I t fails to appreciate that we always marry the wrong person.

We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is … learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.”

SOPA  (obvious reasons)
Avulsion fracture (family member)
Craig Finn (new album. Hold Steady)
Pieter de Hooch (ghost in his painting about a lady drinking?) 
Nada Surf (new album)
Latin pronunciation (does anyone speak it correctly?)
Martin Luther King Jr. Day (birthday? anniversary of death?) 
Janelle Monae (singing with fun. Is she the cool one or the creepy Monaj chick?)
Augustana (I like “Boston…”)
oyster sauce (vegetarian option?)
PowerLab (work research)
Take My Hand Precious Lord (is this song about dying? Need it for a list)
Nicolas Steno (Google doodle!)
Aortic body, vascular resistance, heart transplantation (work research)
List of Hunger Games characters (who is the tall blond dude?)
The Band (apparently I’m supposed to know these guys)
Osteoporosis (family member)

Frederick Beuchner, in Wishful Thinking

And this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very passage when he says, "Love your enemy." And it’s significant that he does not say, "Like your enemy." Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Quote from ”Loving Your Enemies,” delivered on 17 November 1957 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. 
Read the entire sermon here.

Here’s today’s…

I have been reading a book on being a parent of a teenage daughter – “The Curse of the Good Girl.”  It’s been an interesting book – thinking about what I can apply to young people in my life, and thinking through how these ideas of social pressures on girls might have affected my life and decisions.  One of the major themes of the book is that girls are driven by relationships. They value friendship above all, being seen as “nice,” “smart,” “humble.” Death to a girl is taking a risk that might be perceived as conceited or weird.

And then I trip over Richard Beck’s post about liking pink. And his interest in how “weird” that makes him, and how interesting that social perception is.  And then the spiritual connection:

Most people wouldn’t ever cross a social boundary like this (e.g., getting a black and pink iPhone), even at the expense of their own preferences. The shame, the "sticking out" it just too heavy a burden to bear.
But I wonder. If Christians are supposed to be a "peculiar people" we might need to learn to inoculate ourselves against social shaming. We might need to practice, on a regular basis, small acts of social non-conformity. We need to get used to not caring what people think. We need to become immune to shame.

Oh, that’s a touch headwind to lean into.

I haven’t bothered to watch the video, but there has been a goodly amount of push-back.  Which is awesomest when it comes from the more “alternative” voices of the church.

So…I believe in Religion AND Jesus.  I believe in the Gospel.  I believe in the transformative, knock you on your ass truth of what God has done in Christ.  I believe that I can only know what this following Jesus thing is about when I learn it from people I would never choose out of a catalog when we all gather together as the broken and blessed Body of Christ around the Eucharistic meal.  I believe that I am the problem at least as often as I am the solution. I believe in participating in sacred traditions that have a whole lot more integrity than anything I could come up with myself.  I believe I need someone else to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to me because I cannot create that for myself.  I believe that Jesus is truly present in the breaking of the bread and that where 2 or more are gathered he is there.   That’s religion AND Jesus.  May God make us worthy of it all.

Nadia Bolz Weber

Inasmuch.

It’s funny how these old-fashioned words stick around in my head, thanks to all of those years of memorising Bible verses out of the King James. Inasmuch is one of them.
When I feel it all, too much, when I feel like my life is small and my work is small, when I am here in the living of raising tinies and it feels like that long obedience in one direction that Peterson wrote of, an essay test of spirituality and guts and love, for some reason that one word comes to my mind: inasmuch. It’s just the Old English way of saying "to the extent that." Which means nothing, in and of itself, I know, but it’s the start of a verse of the Bible that goes like this:

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
(Matthew 25:40b)

There are a lot of ignored and overlooked, a lot of "the least of these" in our world. And three small souls and my work might be one of them. It might not look like much to the outside world when there are big things to do, big dreams to dream, a big world to go out into.  But rescue starts somewhere, small things can be done with great love, we’re all being changed by these days and if anything matters, everything matters. I don’t like being inward and so I do fight to keep us tied to the bigger stories going on around us, but sometimes, its good to remind myself that inasmuch as I do for this small tribe, these beautiful souls, my own self even, I’m making space for God, too.

You showed admirable courage under very difficult circumstances.
You recognized beauty and chose to sacrifice for it.
You proved we are not slaves to past poor decisions, even though the consequences may last for a lifetime.

Plus, you had the spiritual gift of sarcasm.

Posted response:

"You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief.
One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion."

It’s reassuring to know that my confusion means I am solving a problem