Who’s afraid of a challenge?

Apparently I am.

I’m placing the blame of my blogosphere absence squarely on the shoulders of one blogger. It should be myself, but who likes to blame themselves? Ronnica of Ignorant Historian wrote a post, several weeks ago now, on five words and what they meant to her. These five words were given to her by someone else. No picking of words allowed. She challenged her readers to do the same. Wow, I thought, this will be a great opportunity to get off my bloggy butt and write a good post.

Uh. Yeah. Ronnica kicked my butt. She emailed me my five words on, let’s see, 18 August, and they’ve been sitting in my inbox ever since. I saw the words and immediately began back pedaling. Mistaken was I thinking that she would just pick five words out of the air and I would be all flowers and rainbows and happy dancing fingers over the keys. Instead I sank into a deep, dark blogging depression. How would I live up to these words and do them justice at this time in my life? We’re trying to get the house settled. We eat dinner and then it’s somehow time to go to bed. No time for even short blog posts, much less thought provoking, detailed ones.

Days went by and nary a word was typed at Not So SAHM. I’m not sure I even have readers anymore. My bloggy depression seemed to be permanent. Would I have the stamina to get past this writing block/paranoia and blog about all of the cool and funny things that have been going on here? Not likely.

Then the holiday weekend came. And I took a two hour nap today. I’m going to tackle the five word post the best I can and hopefully that will jump start me back to blogging freedom again. So here goes. My five words are:

• culture
• politics
• family
• home
• right

What are you doing to me Ronnica! I’m trying to become less political (bad for business around here with hubby’s job) and here we go with words laden with meaning and opinion and depth. We’ll see.

CULTURE I love culture. Culture is a means of expressing the lifestyle of a certain people group. I love all kinds of culture. I love plays and art exhibits and concerts and symphony performances. I can go to a highly cultural symphony one night and then a very cultural monster truck show the very next day. And feel at home at both. Symphonies and monster truck rallies are both just part of cultures I have grown up around. And I cherish all the cultural influences I have been fortunate to be exposed to.

However, and here is where I think Ronnica was thinking I would go, our culture in America, and indeed the world, has become so devoid of God that any and everything is encouraged to be accepted. And within Christian culture it is becoming acceptable to question truths and Truths that we have held as undeniable until now. This is sad to me. Secular humanism, the ideas and philosophies in this post modern world, is so accepted that it’s crept into even the most sacred of places. Most people, who claim to be Christians, when given a test to determine their world view, end up with varying amounts of secular humanism in their thought processes. And it’s everywhere: in our schools, our extracurricular activities, parenting philosophies, and even some pulpits. This part of culture I do not appreciate.

POLITICS If you don’t know my position on politics then where have you been? I’m a strong Christian conservative with little patience for other viewpoints. I mean, you are just wrong. That is it. That’s not very loving and definitely doesn’t open up the table for much discussion though does it. Living in the DC area, I would die if I tried to defend my political viewpoint every time I turned around. I am learning much patience up here for the political world. Thankfully the only access I have to politics is CSPAN radio and whatever I find on the internet. We don’t have cable, I don’t read the newspapers and so I am not exposed to the daily ins and outs of all the political chicanery that goes on here nor am I exposed to the stupid viewpoints that many people have about that chicanery. It’s been a good buffer to introduce me to DC politics slowly. I do plan on visiting the floors of the House and Senate and the Supreme Court. Can you imagine me getting thrown out for yelling “that’s just stupid!”? Yeah, I can see it too. I still need to work on biting my tongue and loving you even when you are wrong.

FAMILY I believe nothing more sincerely (except for the salvation work of Jesus) than the fact that family is where it all begins and where it all ends. You can look at all of society’s problems and all of our cultures missteps and trace every single one of them back to poor family situations. Not even terrible family situations, just families who don’t care, or don’t take enough time for each other, or families who focus more on what’s outside the house walls than what’s inside. I think that we all need to be seeking a closer relationship with God and if we were all doing that then our families would be much stronger. And if our families were much stronger the kids coming out of those families wouldn’t be so messed up. And if those kids weren’t so messed up then they wouldn’t grow into messed up adults. And then there would be much less messed up adults to mess up our world. Obviously a good family situation at home isn’t going to solve all of the world’s problems, but man, it would be the best start to getting them solved! I believe we need to work on getting our families strong again. That’s where our effort needs to be! That is the real fix. Everything else we’re trying to “fix” right now is just being patched up with bandaids. Education, health care, the economy, abortion, and every other social issue is just being patched up with bandaids right now. Unless we focus on healing and strengthening our families none of these temporary fixes is going to work.

And what I am truly shocked about is how easily the government is destroying our families. It is a lot easier for the government to take control of our everyday lives if they can wrestle our children away from us, get them used to being handed everything by the government, being told what to think, and then letting them loose to have their own kids. Then we don’t even expect to have to parent well or have the right to parent as we see fit. The Nanny State is the death of the family. And our government is headed that way, and it was headed that way before our current president ever stepped foot in the White House.

On a side note, if we as a country ratify the UN Declaration of the Rights of a Child we have just signed away the ability of families to remain strong and grow stronger. This is a poorly veiled attempt at continuing the one-world government agenda that the UN has. Once we sign our names to that, the words in that convention supersede the liberties that we have within the constitution, either specific or implied. This is serious stuff and we’re trying to be made to feel ashamed since we are the only country other than Somalia that hasn’t signed it. You know what? I don’t care. It is fallacious logic to state that the United States has ill intent towards our kids since the only other country that hasn’t signed on is Somalia. Stupid and dishonest.

HOME See above.

Home is many places for me. Home is Pensacola, where I was born. Home is Georgia where I grew up. And for the last fourteen years home has been wherever my husband’s job sees fit to send us. Seven different places if I count correctly. Seven in fourteen years. That truly shows that home is not necessarily where your roots are. Home is where you are planted at the moment and it’s your job to grow while you are there. I love the fact that I have been able to call so many places home. In fact, when we do settle down I’m not sure that I’m going to like having to call just one place home. I may be a perpetual traveler, calling the road Home.

Home, for me, in the spiritual sense is a place that I have only hoped for so far. My ultimate home is a mansion that is being prepared for me in Heaven. I hope it has a wrap around porch. Do You take blueprints Jesus? Kidding, I wouldn’t even dare.

RIGHT Oh, Ronnica, this has so much meaning behind it. I’m right handed. I live on the right coast (as opposed to the left coast), I’m on the right of the political spectrum. I am right. Except for when I’m shown just how wrong I can be, especially sitting in the pew on Sundays. I have so much to learn and I’m being made right everyday through the work of the Holy Spirit.

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And there you have it. I feel a big weight off my shoulders. Thank you so much Ronnica for providing me with this exercise. And no, the blame doesn’t sit on her shoulders at all. I will not, however, be extending the invitation out two the one or two readers I may have left. Talk about another intimidating road block. If you want to do this then pretend I sent you five words. Make them nice though.