Where Nothing is Wasted, or Why My Mother is Awesome

“Waste dishonors the poor.” 

Her example also encourages
me to lead a life of empowered whimsy.

My mother is a woman of adamantine principles.  She does not shop in grocery stores that sell alcohol; as a campus minister, she has seen too many young lives ruined by reckless drinking. She does not buy wares made in China in protest of their human rights violations, and as a fast to remind her to pray for that nation. She does not shop in bookstores that sell Playboy or anything like it, because those periodicals contribute to the objectification of women. When I was a child, these practices affected how our household entered the marketplace, and her example has encouraged me to live a life of conviction. 

 My mother's war against waste, however, is even more integral to my understanding of home. Home is a place where nothing is wasted. My mother and father’s determination to be wise stewards of their resources impresses me anew each time I come home to them.  Looking around the house I grew up in, I can point out many signs of holy thrift. 

-- No air conditioning. In the twenty-seven years my parents have lived in this house, they have never had air conditioning. In addition to saving lots of money and electricity, this lack made the changing of the seasons a reality I could always feel on my skin. It also added a little redemptive suffering to a childhood full of otherwise-carefree summers. 

--In the entire house (a modest 1920s bungalow with three bedrooms and 2 bathrooms), I can think of only three pieces of furniture my parents bought new. Most of the furniture and appliances (as well as clothes, housewares, etc) came from yard sales, thrift stores, or dumpsters. 

-- When Mama decides the dining room chairs need to be recovered, she does it with fabric remnants and a staple gun.

Who needs buttons, anyway?

-- The television in the living room is missing most of its buttons.  The TV was given to us by friends from church nearly twenty years ago. My parents have a remote control, but those broken buttons are an emblem of the way my parents refuse to cast things away lightly.  

-- My mother loves dumpster-diving. (She’s not as bad as these people, though we have been laughing together over the clip).  I see every salvaged lamp or chair as a challenge to the Way of the World, and as a picture of redemption.

-- On her bookshelf, you can find volumes I, II, and III of The Tightwad Gazette.

-- Any time my mother goes for a walk (and she prayer walks for an hour each morning with another lady from church), she collects aluminum cans.  When she has enough, she takes the cans to the scrap yard in and gives the money to Baptist Collegiate Ministry's world hunger offering. 

These are just a few of the ways my mother attempts to make good use of what God has given her. The really beautiful thing about my mother’s absurd wisdom is that she does all this because she is, from heart-core to finger-tips, a minister of the Gospel. She saves because waste dishonors the poor. She saves so she can give. She saves so my parents can do their work as campus ministers, providing pastoral care, counseling, Bible studies, worship, missions opportunities, and mentorship to college students for almost thirty years. 

During this visit, I have found myself newly thankful for the lessons of a home in which nothing is wasted. Now that I am an adult and see the way so many people use their money, time, and resources, my mother seems even more extraordinary. I qualified for reduced lunches during most of my school years, yet Mama and Daddy managed to pay off the mortgage on this house in twenty years. Because of their example, I find myself, at 27, a year away from finishing a PhD, having never had a penny of debt. I want the freedom that my parents have had for so long -- the freedom to look for God’s work and rush to join it, regardless of the pay scale. 

Much groovier than anything
at Hobby Lobby

Banishing waste not only gives my parents the freedom to do the work to which they have been called, but also enables generosity. At its best, a home should teach its children about God, and I learned a lot about God’s providence from my mother’s watchful gathering and saving.  One summer, I remarked, “I’d like to learn to can salsa.” Within ten minutes, she had produced a dented but serviceable canner from the basement, several glass jars, and a box of canning lids. Tomatoes and peppers came from the garden. This summer, I mentioned that I have begun to sew regularly, and need more thread. A spool of thread generally costs between $2 and $4 new, making sewing a potentially expensive hobby.  Instead of driving to the craft store, she and I spent a happy hour going through the boxes of thread she has purchased on clearance, gleaned from relatives, and found at yard sales over the years. I’ll be returning to Texas with a rainbow of threads (as well as a groovy avocado green spool case she found in her work room). If I come to my mother with good desires, desires shaped by the home she built, she has what I need, and gives it freely. 

Nor do they give only to me, their only child. In a thousand ways, they share their money, time, goods, closets, vegetables, and wisdom with those who need it.   

Hard at work in her beautiful home.
And yes, that is a map of Narnia on the wall.

In the coming year, however, my parents will learn new forms of God’s providence. After nearly three decades of faithful work in campus ministry, my parents will no longer have an income after the first of the year.  For many years a significant portion of their income has come from the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board (NAMB), but NAMB is cutting much of its giving to Indiana, and so the State Convention of Baptists in Indiana has eliminated all of its jointly-funded missionary positions, including six campus ministry jobs.  God, however, hasn’t finished his work on the college campuses of Indiana, and my parents don’t plan on leaving. If they plan on eating, and on keeping the lights on in their house, they will need to couple their thrift with the money of people who will commit to support them and their ministry.  If you are looking for a place to send part of your tithe or offering, click to visit Please Feed the Bears and learn how you can give. 

And I can assure you that no matter how much you give, none of it will be wasted. 


Addendum: Mama didn't know I was writing this blog, but after I told her about it, she said I should mention that her life verse 1 Corinthians 15:58: "Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord."
She said that as much as she would hate for a cup of flour or a chair to be wasted, it would be far more terrible to come to the end of one's life and find that it had been wasted. Not wasting her material goods means she need not live in fear of wasting her spiritual gifts.

What principles or values from your parents continue to inspire you?

Making it Home: How a Crock Pot Saved My Life

Do I exaggerate? Of course. There’s no way a crockpot could have saved my life. A bread machine was also involved.  A bread machine, a lamp timer, a mother, a father, and a church, in fact. 

Let’s see if I can tell this story properly.  In the summer of 2006, I moved to Texas to begin graduate school. I had always loved school; after my first week of kindergarten, I cried when I wasn’t allowed to go back to school on Saturday. Thus, while  I was grieving for the loss of my undergraduate friends, teachers, and world, I was excited about beginning my PhD in English Literature. I was even excited about living by myself; I had very good roommates all through college, but the idea of setting up my own household, with all my own pots and pans, my own curtains, and my own cleaning schedule was very satisfying. 

I rented a little garage apartment, and soon I had all my worldly goods (including over 900 books) arranged in my little nook. As I stocked my cupboards with food and dishes, I prayed that my nook would be a place where I could practice hospitality, where others could come to feel at home. Everything seemed perfectly arranged for a bright, companionable, studious little life. 

By November, however, my nook had not become the home I had imagined.  Nothing about my life, in fact, felt like home.  My new friends, though lovely, were (at that point) let’s-grab-lunch kinds of friends, not the let’s-drive-out-and-see-the-stars, let’s-study-around-this-common-table kinds of friends I had made so quickly in college. My classmates at school were kind and interesting, but my courses seemed designed to convince me that my sense of vocation was naive, and my work as a scholar either impossible or futile. 

And then, every night, I would come home to a dark apartment.  I realize that it takes little effort to flip a light switch on, but somehow that darkness seemed to condense all my anxieties, dissatisfactions, and fears into one terrible mass. 

It was usually at this point--after trudging up the stairs, dropping my bag, and fumbling for the light--that I would cry. I know it sounds excessively pitiful to say I cried every day my first semester here, but they were honest tears.  In part, I was crying for myself.  2006 had been a difficult year even before moving: I had broken up with a very serious boyfriend of several years, my grandmother had died,  I had graduated from and left my beloved college, and I had once and for all moved out of my parents’ house.  An only child and an introvert, always quite happy to be alone, I was, at 22, really and deeply lonely for the first time in my life. 

However, I wasn’t crying only for myself. Of course I knew that there were lonely people in the world, but until that fall I had never had a sense of what it actually means to come home, every night, to an empty apartment.  To darkness. No one to ask about your day, no one to tell about his or her day, no one to eat with. Some times I would become almost frantic for these unknown others. I wanted to find them, to knock on their doors and grab their hands and hand them a handkerchief. I wanted to keep them from feeling as wretched as I felt. 

These desires to find “homeless” people usually roused me from self-pity, but then I would look down at my supper of tepid tea and granola bars, I would remember the dingy look of my apartment when the light first came on, and I would think, Do I even have a home I can offer to others? Granola might be okay now and again, but why should I bring people into a home that is dark and cold? 

More troublesome than the granola, however, was my spiritual and emotional life. I had no contentment, waning joy, little hope--how, I thought, could I be of any good to anyone? 

Enter the crock pot. I cannot claim that I was actually thinking about spiritual concepts of “home” when I decided to start using the crock pot my mother had given me.  Really, I was just tired of cold and scanty suppers. I knew how to cook, but when I would come back from campus at 8 or 9 PM, I was either anxious to begin my night’s studying immediately, or I was simply too tired to cook. The crock pot solved this problem. Before leaving in the morning, I could put in all the ingredients for a stew, or a bean ragout, or a soup, set the pot on “low,” and return eight hours later to a warm and ready meal.  

It was heartening, to say the least, to come home to the smell of warm food. A few weeks later, when my parents came down for Thanksgiving, I mentioned how depressing it was to come back to a dark apartment each night. My parents offered a very practical solution: a timer for a lamp. The timer my father bought me is the same kind people will use for their Christmas trees, or radios when they are out of town. I could set it to turn the lamp on just before I arrived home each night. And then, at a yard sale, I paid $2 for a bread machine. The bread machine also has a timer, so I could synchronize  a loaf of bread, crock-pot stew, and the lamp.  

Light, soup, bread: I had never realized how precious they were. For the rest of that school year, I blessed that timer and crock pot every night, prayed that their inventors had lived long and happy lives.  

What then, did this salvation-by-crock-pot teach me about home? about church?

First, I realized that I could not wait for someone else to make a home for me. When I was a child, my parents created a safe and delightful home. As a teenager and college student, I was shy, so my more outgoing friends usually initiated our friendships; planned our parties; called (sometimes carried!) me away from my books to supper or a spontaneous road trip.  For years I had been saying that my wholeness came from my life in Christ, and for the first time, I was testing the truth of that claim. If I was to be a person a hope, a person of peace, a person of love, I needed to find that personhood in God. If I wanted to invite people into a bright, welcoming home, I needed to realize that I had the power to make the lights shine. 

Second, I realized that one way the church (not just the local congregation, but all the saints) makes a home for me is by reminding me that I am already “at home” in Christ. My parents knew that I had electricity, a lamp, and light bulbs. They simply gave me a tool that helped me use what I already had.  Calvary Baptist Church rescued me from darkness by showing me that I was already at home in Christ;  by affirming my decision to become a teacher and a scholar; by saying, “We see Christ’s love working in you. Would you use this love to serve the church in such-and-such a way?” 

My crock pot and my timer reminded me that my nook was beautiful, and that I had something to offer others. My church reminded me that my wholeness was in Christ, and that until I recognized that truth, I would never feel at home in any church or calling.  

Now I want to hear from you.  If you have ever lived alone, what were some practical things you did to feel “at home” in that place? Have you ever been a part of a church that recognized and named the good things in your life?  Have you ever been part of a church that has made you feel incomplete? 

                                              My nook, lamp-lit.