Welcome back to Notes from the Fray! Thanks for coming for yet another edition. This month will be a little bit different in that I’m going to do a year-in-review for 2023. I haven’t done one of these before, so it’s a bit of a ramble, but hopefully you find it helpful and interesting. I decided to do this to help myself both review how my reading effected what I was writing about and to see if any larger threads revealed themselves through the process. Due to the length that it would require, I’ve cut the Arts and Culture section for this post. We’ll jump straight to Household Happenings since November.
Household Happenings
As I guess was the case for many of you, December was full of Advent and Christmas reflections and celebrations for us. While we were less consistent this year in terms of our own Advent celebrations and practices, our church had some Advent practices that we were able to join in. We were also able to enjoy Christmas with my parents and brother (now that we all live near each other), which was nice.
My children loved everything about the Advent and Christmas season. My oldest was old enough this year to begin to anticipate Christmas morning and to understand when we discussed why we did what we did during this time of year. It was lovely to see him begin to understand the connection between our waiting for Christmas day and the waiting of generations of people for the Messiah.
At the very end of December, we snuck in an offer on a house that was accepted. We made it through the inspection period and negotiations and closed on the home on February 1st. We moved in on February 10th, with abundant help from church members and family. It’s an older home that needs a little work, but we feel up to the task and are excited to make it our own. This house has a major perk in that it’s less than a mile from where I work. The Lord has been good to us, but it has been a lot of change all at once. Someone from church commented that we just like to get all our life changes in all at once before we take a breather. That’s certainly how it’s felt the last eight months or so. We’re thankful for all of the blessings God has given us, even as it’s been difficult at times to handle everything He’s allowed in our lives, much of it resulting from decisions we made. It’s almost entirely been the difficulty associated with blessing, so we look at it as an opportunity for growth.
The boys are enjoying having a yard again, and Jen and I are enjoying the freedom to make changes to the house, current and planned, as we see fit and time and money allow. God has been good to us in this process, and we are thankful to Him for it.
2023 in Review
And this is where I would normally have an essay or article for you. However, I thought it might be interesting to take stock of all of the Notes from the Fray essays I published this past year and take a step back to see the connections and progressions between them. While, ideally, this would include Reading Journal entries, I don’t have Reading Journal entries for the whole year and, if I did, that would be a task too large for me to undertake right now. Maybe a task I can accomplish next year, but not one I’m up to now. So, we’re left with our monthly selection.
In January of 2023, I published an essay on the slaying of dragons, discussing the necessity of a dragon-slaying mentality, especially for men. I drew on Beowulf and Lewis’s Perelandra, both of which are thick with themes and stories that contribute to the long-standing dragon-slaying motif in literature. I had just come off of reading Beowulf twice (two different translations, which you can see my writing about here, here, and here) and earlier in the year had read Perelandra for the second time, my first time as an adult. This theme has done nothing but seep deeper into my thinking, and I’d love to revisit it sometime soon.
Somewhat fittingly, I wrote next on the productive Christian household. I saw this as fitting because the productive Christian household is the garden which men must guard against the dragons that will come against it. A foundational practice to establishing this kind of household is the slaying of dragons. If you’re unwilling to slay the dragons that come against your household, then you repeat Adam’s sin in the garden. You stand by and watch the serpent deceive your wife and take control of the garden over which God gave you authority and for which He made you responsible.
This essay focused on two foundations of the productive Christian household: covenantalism and, of course, productivity. Looking back, I’m still pleased with this particular essay, which is not always the case when I review my previous writing. I think it lays out the vision I have for our productive Christian household and touches on some of the pertinent issues facing those attempting to establish one today. Specifically, this essay shows that I was just coming to a fuller understanding of what the Industrial Revolution did to the productive household in America.
We centralized everything because it was more efficient and are now dealing with the fallout as we realize that, it turns out, life isn’t all about efficiency.1
Trying to balance establishing a more historically normative household with the fact that I couldn’t be reaching you with this writing without modern technology and infrastructure has been an ongoing work on my part. Some resources I want to dig into more deeply in the coming year to help navigate this work include reading more from two online publications: Hearth and Field and The Front Porch Republic. I’ve dabbled in both of these publications over the last couple of years but haven’t done the work of reading a substantial amount of what they’re putting out. However, I think that if I were to do so, the trail of people to read and ideas to wrestle with would be long and helpful as I try to work out what a balanced, real life looks like in the twenty-first century. To help with this balanced perspective, I recently reread Douglas Wilson’s book, Ploductivity. While I differ from Wilson on a few concepts relating to technology, he brings up several important points that I need to wrestle with if I’m going to disagree. This book remains one of my favorites regarding productivity and how to manage well the wealth of resources God has given us. If you’re curious, you can find my original Reading Journal entry on the book here.
Moving forward, I zoomed in on the covenantal foundation of the household and discussed the New Testament’s codes for Christian households. Looking back, I got a little lost in the weeds here and covered a lot of the same ground I’ve covered before but with a little more detail. It would’ve probably been better to focus on another aspect of the topic. That said, it did seem to be helpful to you all, which is the goal.
Coming back to work after a couple of weeks off to visit family, I was hit by the unnatural nature of a lot of workplace mandatory training and seminars. Most of it seems to be a weak replacement for what the household should be doing. The workplace is a great place to learn a specific skill; how to handle loan applications, install different types of flooring, or brew an excellent cup of coffee, for example. But seminars on how to treat your coworkers, explanations on how to handle your own mental health, and reassurances that yes, you can talk to your manager about your personal issues are all pretty frustrating coming from an employer. Looking at this idea now, it seems to me that many people want to know that the government will take care of them when they’re not working (so they can amuse themselves), and they want their employer to take care of them while they’re working; the slightest discomfort or difficulty and some people begin to bad-mouth their current employer or look for another job.
On the other hand, the frequency with which people who like their employer and coworkers refer to them as “family,” and the fact that employers even seek to foster this kind of community in their work environment, should set alarms off in our heads. How disordered is our society that people are now turning to the somewhat random collection of individuals with whom they work outside the home as their primary community? Some of it surely comes from spending more time with these people than our actual households, but that’s a topic for another post.
Along these lines, the next Notes From the Fray essay covered the functions of the Biblical household, namely to multiply, care for, protect, and educate. While I spent only about half of this piece actually discussing the roles, spending the other half talking about the practical implications of these roles, this post was a turning point for me in my own clarification of what I expected our household to accomplish. Having defined roles and responsibilities makes a huge difference in effectiveness, whether for an individual or a community like the household. Even just reviewing that post for this one reminded me of a few big-picture truths that had gotten lost in the details of the last eight months. For example:
…preach about God’s loving provision through your legacy. God has said that He shows love to thousands of generations of those who love Him. You should also show love to your descendants by spending yourself to plant trees the fruit of which your grandchildren can enjoy. Much of the vision I have I know will only be accomplished, if at all, through generations of work. My task is to lay a foundation, or maybe even simply clear the land so that my kids and grandkids can lay a foundation, on which later generations can build. You can’t take the nation in your lifetime. But, with hard and consistent work, you can prepare the ground and maybe see your town significantly changed by the gospel. Then, Lord willing, your kids will expand that work.2
It’s easy to become distracted and start thinking that I need to try to accomplish it all. Instead, I need to be faithful and work hard, trusting the Lord to give the appropriate increase in my lifetime and to allow it to compound at the right time for my descendants.
From there, I turned back to one of my greatest loves in writing: applying literature to life. In Bear the Fruit of Joy, I discussed the Tom-Bombadil-like character we should strive for and my own shortcomings in this area. Beowulf received an honorable mention here, although the bulk of the article focused on Bombadil. My discussion of the joyful countenance with which we should face the striving of everyday life and the joy that awaits those who persevere was my way of reminding myself of the necessity of these attitudes. Unfortunately, I can’t say I’ve improved in this area as much as I’d have hoped. There’s always this year.
In July, due to the move and household upheaval, I adjusted the format of the posts to allow for a fuller post each month in place of the Reading Journal’s weekly posts. In addition to adding an Arts and Culture section, along with a Household Happenings section, I wrote on freedom, risk, and responsibility.
I won’t rehash the whole argument here, but the core concept of that piece is that life is risky, and wisdom is not knowing how to avoid risk altogether but knowing which risks to take. This principle has made a big difference in how I make personal decisions and how my wife and I discuss decisions for our household. It’s no longer a discussion of what the safest option is or what option has the most guarantee of success; it’s about how we can faithfully spend and deploy our resources to result in the greatest return for our household and our community. Looking back on 2023, adopting this principle was one of the most significant changes in my thinking last year.
At the end of July 2023, we moved to East Tennessee. My brother and parents live in this area and for reasons laid out in August’s post, we moved here from central Oklahoma. That prompted me to revisit the idea of a multigenerational legacy. Now, revisiting that post a few months later, it provides some good reminders. I’ve been caught up in getting my family settled here, finding a house to buy, getting settled in at work, getting involved in church, etc. Living amid the details, it’s been easy to lose sight of the big picture of why we moved and what my vision is for our household. The fact that is helpful to remember is that I don’t have to do it all today. Lord willing, I and my wife have decades in front of us here to work and live out that vision.
We spent most of August 2023 in Washington State, where we visited with the majority Jen’s side of our family. In September’s essay, I explored the idea of a merry warrior, drawing primarily from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King; a chapter titled, “The Scouring of the Shire.” This essay came about largely because I read that chapter of The Return of the King right around the time I heard an episode of the King’s Hall podcast on the same topic, both of which convicted me of how often I run about trying to get things done as efficiently as possible instead of out of joyful living. This has recently been combined with some deeper contemplation on The Wind in the Willows, with the help of The Literary Life Podcast, which has me thinking about leisure as the basis of culture. That concept is an idea from Josef Pieper’s book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which I’ve heard referenced in many places, this being the most recent. But I digress. My point in mentioning all of that is primarily to say that I’m still very much working through the concepts I wrote about in that essay and my failings in this area are still coming to light.
In October, I published an essay on household libraries as gardens, which seemed to resonate with you all. This idea still comes to mind often and I anticipate developing it into a full-fledged essay eventually. The idea goes like this: your household library can be pretty closely compared to a garden. A household library takes tending, weeding, planting, and reaping for it to be of benefit to the members of the household. It should also reflect the members of the household and their history. For example, I mentioned how I’ve kept some books that, while I might agree with them less than I have before, formed a significant part of our family history; I keep them to remember.
Then, due to the birth of our daughter, I decided to wait to post again until December, when I wrote about some of the issues I have with trying to make church services casual. If we’re going to meet with Almighty God, then we should take it seriously. If we wouldn’t meet our city’s mayor dressed the way we come to church, then there seems to me to be an issue. I understand the concerns, as I mentioned in the post, and we should certainly not be turning people away if they’re not dressed up to our standard. However, we should expect that as we all get a better idea of what we’re doing on Sunday mornings, our dress and behavior will begin to reflect the honor appropriate to such an occasion.
Now for 2024
And that brings us into 2024. I have a few plans for the publication in 2024, but I’ll focus here on the one I’m the most confident in executing: I currently plan to bring back the Reading Journal in 2024. Looking back on those posts and the interaction and feedback I received from people both on Substack and in person, the Reading Journal seems to be where people were consistently built up by my work. It would be foolish of me, having realized this, to neglect to bring it back. The whole point of my writing is to offer what value I can to readers; it seems pretty clear to me that the Reading Journal is a significant mode through which that can happen. In addition, looking more into education as our oldest child approaches the age where we’ll need to begin his formal education, I’ve been reminded of the Charlotte Mason principle of narration and realized that that was what the Reading Journal was for me: a narration of what I’d been reading and a way for me to make that learning my own. And, to be frank, I just miss writing it. I love books and love sharing that love of books with others, and the interaction and sharing of what I’d been reading was such a wonderful part of each week that I can’t imagine letting it lie dormant any longer.
All of that said, you can expect to be receiving Reading Journal entries back in your inbox and timeline sometime around June 2024. And for the less exciting news, as you may have noticed, it’s become increasingly difficult to keep up even the monthly schedule for Notes From the Fray the last several months with everything going on in our household. Unfortunately, things don’t seem like they’ll calm down around our household for a few more months. That being the case, I consider it best to move forward with long-form posts like this one on an irregular schedule. I don’t know exactly what the frequency of these posts will be, but rest assured they won’t stop completely. Come this summer, I hope to get back on track to my former monthly schedule for these posts incorporated with the weekly Reading Journal.
That’s everything for now. Please feel free to leave feedback or start a discussion in the comments section, as always.
So go with your family to sing, eat, drink, and laugh with the joy of the Lord in your heart and your sword at the ready; and let fussy tyrants everywhere tremble at the sound of your mirth.3
https://danieltadams.substack.com/i/98719119/the-productive-household
https://danieltadams.substack.com/i/118449370/what-does-this-look-like
https://danieltadams.substack.com/i/135875471/gaining-ground-through-joy
Congratulations on the new house! 👏
Reading Journal! Thank you!