Paideia Conversations, Ep. 7
Katie Westenberg joins Paideia Northwest’s Melissa Cummings today in a dialogue about motherhood, family culture, book writing, and resting in the peace of the Lord. Katie will be speaking at the Paideia Northwest conference in one week, and this is a sneak peek into the energy, joy, and passion she will bring to our day of Rest. While all the time sharing about the need for open hands and extra measures of grace, Katie has words of wisdom and perspectives of gratitude which translates into exhortations not to grow weary in the good word of raising children in the nurture, admonition, and enculturation of Christ. From resurrecting picture books in her read aloud rotation to digging in to deep conversation with her teens, Katie tells us what the atmosphere of Christian family life looks like in this current season of their home. To the Kingdom!
Links to Resources
Walt Whitman: Words for America
Thomas Jefferson Builds a Library
Outdated by Jonathan Pokluda
Becoming Something podcast
Praying the Scriptures for Your Life by Jodie Berndt
The Tech-Wise Family by Andy Crouch
Poetry by Wendell Berry
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
Episode Transcript
Melissa: joining me today for this paideia conversation is Katie Westenberg. We invite you into this conversation with us as we continue to practice, pursue, and implement paideia. All right, joining me now is Katie Westenberg, and we get to enjoy Katie at Rest coming up next month, but in the meantime I get to have a little chat with her and we get to have a conversation about paideia and rest and all of these things from the perspective of motherhood, and also home educators. So thank you for taking the time to join me and have this conversation. I really appreciate it!
Katie: yeah, it’s my pleasure.
Melissa: so first, just tell us about you and where you are, what you do… tell us about your book, just give us a little background on Katie.
Katie: okay. Well I’m from south central Washington, so like the non-Seattle part of the state. Most people – I guess this is kind of local, but it seems like when I say Washington, people just assume Seattle. But it’s kind of different. It’s dry, and there are a lot of vineyards out here. And I grew up really kind of focused and driven, and so just, in this small town where there’s only, I don’t know, maybe only a half a dozen stop lights. And, but I always yearned to leave the small town for the big town, you know. Just the small town girl who wanted something bigger and different, and it was interesting to think about that lately, because I had a great childhood, and great upbringing, great parents who were followers of Christ. My dad was a pastor, so I, you know, I had a great home, but I, it’s interesting that I wanted to go to the big city. So anyway, after high school, I left for college to get a communications degree, and just plans and dreams of a bigger, a separate coastline maybe. A different coastline. And ended up coming back and marrying my high school sweetheart.
Melissa: I love that.
Katie: and so I, yeah, finished up and went a long way. So I really live like ten miles from where I was born, the hospital doesn’t exist anymore but yeah. Traveled far and wide from there. And, but I had that business degree and kind of plans for that, but it wasn’t, you know, shortly we after, we had started having children, we put my oldest in to preschool at the Christian school that we graduated from, had a great experience there, hadn’t really thought anything different until we really started considering homeschooling. And mainly it was just from seeing other people do it well. You know, I had these assumptions of what it might be but when we saw other people do it well, I thought, wow, this might be something to consider. And so then we did the preschool thing, and then came, brought him home because I thought – like everyone – like how bad can you mess up kindergarten? We’ll just try this for kindergarten. And then the babies kept on coming. So now we have four kids – two girls and two boys – the youngest is nine and the oldest is now sixteen, and we’ve just been educating them at home all along, although my oldest is in Running Start now so that’s a little more hands-off. This is the first year where I have someone doing a little something different, but it’s, I guess all in all, just a story of God’s plans being so much better than my own. Which is probably all of our stories down at the base of it.
Melissa: mhmm.
Katie: and then just in these last few years as they’ve gotten more independent, and my role is probably a little bit less hands-on throughout the day, there’s just been more opportunities to write and speak a little bit, and so God has grown that. And I was able to write a book last year, it came out, well actually I wrote it the year beforehand, it’s a process but it came out last year. And yeah, I just do a little bit along with all my other home duties.
Melissa: yeah, yeah. So, your kids are – three of them, then – you’re homeschooling, and what’s something you love about that right now? Or what’s something that you do with them that you love?
Katie: I love… I just love being a part of all of it. You know, there’s like, inside jokes and relatable moments that come from just being together. Just experiencing life together. Reading the read aloud together, which becomes a joke later on during dinner or whatever. So I just like not missing it, maybe that’s like kind of selfish. But I like not missing any of the moments. Or when the spelling word that was misspelled pops back up at dinner, it’s just the easiest way to teach because I don’t have to think okay, where are they? What do I need to figure out? What do I need to unpack? What do I need to… What do I need to process with them, because that’s not exactly what we agree with? Like I’m here for all of it. And so it just becomes so much more integrated so that’s one thing I really love about teaching them. And even my… so my oldest who does Running Start, that’s all online this year, so he’s here too. So we’re still doing like our Morning Meeting together, he’s still a part of that. And it’s really sweet to hold onto that a little longer.
Melissa: okay, so you’re talking about that sort of integrated… integrated thing, which is very – that comes really naturally to us as homeschool moms, I think. And I was homeschooled my whole, you know, pre-college education. So I’m curious since you went to a Christian school, you said, how do you find that different? That whole integration. Do you think it’s easier? Not that you were the mom when you were the student… but do you think the integration of that is just more organic, more natural?
Katie: yeah, certainly, because you can’t, you can’t ask questions you don’t know to ask. Right? When you don’t know what happened during history class, I can’t like extend that learning at home without, I mean, you could and I’m sure some parents do an excellent job of it.. but it would be a lot of work to constantly know where you’re at, to constantly know what figures you’re studying or where you’re at with math, or… it’s almost when there’s a problem, that’s when you dig in to what’s going on there. So there’s little issues that we’re able to maybe mitigate but at the same time, I think it – our lives are so much more intertwined. And so I just grew up with one brother, and, and that’s different too. When we have two kids of the opposite sex. But I think it seems easier, at least from my limited perspective – obviously I’ve only been a mom once, right, but it seems like it, it’s easier to create a bonded family because there’s so much overlap of life and learning and… and even, you know, the learning that comes from negative experiences when we bump into each other and we’re forgiving and all that stuff. We don’t have much – as they get older maybe it happens a little bit more – but particularly when they’re younger, we don’t have separate lives. We don’t have a separate day you need to tell me about. It’s all of our day, all the time, the good and the bad and the ugly and the processing. So it just seems like it builds a really close family. That’s what I notice the difference being.
Melissa: yeah. I feel like that builds that right into that question of the term, paideia, then. So I don’t know how familiar you are with the term or its roots or its application. What is your familiarity with that Greek word, or what does it mean to you? Is it just this totally unknown, brand new – it’s all Greek to me?
Katie: yeah [laughter] I was thinking that. What’s my level of familiarity? I think it means, my level’s at, I know how to say it but maybe not spell it. Right? Like there’s too many vowels that I’m constantly mixing those up. So I don’t know what that says about my level of familiarity, but you might – I love to study Scripture, I love to read the Bible and try to unpack it in my limited knowledge, my growing knowledge. And I… My favorite thing about the Word is that it’s living and active, and you can read it again and again, and things jump off the page that you didn’t know were there.
Melissa: yes. Yeah.
Katie: so I’ve come across paideia mainly, you know, in Ephesians. And wondered what that is. And I think I’ve talked to you about that: oh look, I saw this! This is where you got it, it’s so amazing! So for me, my learning probably has been, like, I didn’t know, even though that was probably part of my life when I was young, I didn’t know the word itself until I was older. But I think of it as a, the cultivation of mind and morals. It is the integration that I was talking about. Right? It’s all of that! It’s not just education, it’s all, like all of life is education. What we’re cultivating together.
Melissa: right yeah, it’s not just at eight to three, and what we do in order to attain a diploma or something.
Katie: yes.
Melissa: or it’s also not just the, what we would call, the spiritual stuff. It’s not just Sunday mornings, it’s not just you know, a quiet time devotional, it’s so broad and deep compared to that. So how… thinking about that, and that depth and that all-encompassing integration, what is a way that you think you purpose to bring that into your home with your children in your family? If we’re talking about it as a term of enculturation, and specifically in Ephesians when it says paideia of the Lord, right, it’s not just – it’s not an American culture, it’s not as in that time a Greek culture or Roman culture – but as citizens of heaven, what is this culture that we’re trying to nurture? What is a way that you purpose to do that in your home?
Katie: a fun way that we’ve done this in the last year is… and I think it’s without like explicitly saying, it’s getting, I mean, what we’re saying is that you can’t really put this in a box, right? We want to. So I could have memorization time with my kids, and there’s nothing wrong with memorization, right? But they so easily want to put things in a box that they could think like, oh yeah, this is our Jesus time and this is our rest of the time, or whatever. But I’m trying to get them to see the bigger picture of, like, this is all of it. Like it’s all for Him. So one fun thing, and maybe unsuspected thing in our home… in the last, probably year, is that I’ve incorporated picture books again. So Bo is my youngest, and he’s nine, and so, as it kind of is with the youngest, they get kind of shortchanged on some things, you know. We round toward the middle usually, right? So I guess everyone besides the middle, you know, doesn’t get shortchanged. But, so I just realized a couple years ago that I hardly had read him any picture books. Like he’s heard so many more chapter books than maybe the oldest did when he was his age, and so I started like on Sunday afternoons we’d sit and just pick three picture books I want to read you. Cuz like he didn’t know who Frances was, from Bread and Jam for Frances, and I was like, I am doing something really wrong! [laughter] How are you missing this? And all the other kids are just horrified that he doesn’t know some of these characters. Anyway, so then I talked to a mom about a year ago, and she incorporates picture books all the time, and my first inclination was probably a little bit prideful like, why would you do that when you could be reading chapter books? Why would you be reading picture books every day? But I started following a couple who recommend picture books all the time. A couple accounts on Instagram that read, like, good quality picture books. Some of them are biographies, some of them are just excellent art, some of them – I think I was telling you about this – one was about Walt Whitman’s life, and how he used his words basically to help the wounded troops and how he wrote his poem about Abe Lincoln, you know, and all of that… and just stories we never would have known otherwise. People we never would have known otherwise, and just, just, just living their life in normal ways. Right? Like, look at the beautiful artistry in this – how could this reflect God’s glory? And I’ve seen my kids, my older ones, my teenagers – like, as I have that open, if they can be there for Morning Meeting, I love it when they can, and then they’re just like drawn closer. They’re across the room and they’re coming closer, because they want to hear the words of this book or they want to see… it’s kind of comical right? I mean, because it’s a picture book. There’s only a couple hundred words in the whole book. But they’ve been really instrumental for like, just using beautiful language, seeing beautiful words, hearing beautiful stories, and learning more about beautiful lives that maybe we would’ve put in a box like, those things are for chapter books. But no, this is just more to our day. More beauty, that we never even saw coming. So that’s just been a really fun way to do that.
Melissa: yeah, yeah. I think it’s really interesting too, because my teenager is… I only have one teenager so far, but he’s the same way. Even if I’ve… I try to just read one on one with each child now and then… and if I’m reading something with the five year old that the thirteen year old remembers or he thinks, oh that sounds interesting, he will stop doing, you know, what he’s doing! Even though he loves computer programming, he notices Mom just sat down to read a picture book with the little brother! He wants to come over and see it. It is. It’s really funny. I mean, I love picture books! Yeah.
Katie: yes! yeah.
Melissa: but I think they also can be a catalyst for further research. We had a picture book on… was it Thomas Jefferson Builds a Library, I think is what it’s called? And we loved that one. And so then the kids wanted to find out about Thomas Jefferson. Or that… Winnie… Finding Winnie. They wanted to find out about Winnie, I think that one’s illustrated by, is it Sophie Blackall? Anyway, she’s lovely. And they wanted to find out about this bear from World War I that was then, you know, the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh. And so they wanted to take what they got from the picture book and go explore, you know, well, then what? What happened next? So it’s almost like they’re just little introductions, especially for the older kids. You know, my five year old will read Hello Lighthouse and just say, oh that’s a great picture book, I love the art, I love the story. But then my oldest is like, well, now I want to go study the architecture of lighthouses and the historical connections that they have with the navy, and all these different things. I’m like, oh, wow, I didn’t realize that was going to send us off on that rabbit trail. So, yeah, I think that is such a good, good tip! Such a good way to build those connections with our kids and… how did you put it… beauty is what you said. Just how to incorporate beauty.
Katie: yes. And it’s so, at least for me, was just so under utilized. I just kind of thought we had graduated from those, but, I mean, it really is like five minutes, ten minutes a day. And then you gave them that, that they can take elsewhere and I find that we don’t, I mean, chapter books take a while. Particularly when we read them together, because one kid might be gone in the afternoon, and so nobody reads without the kid that’s gone, you know, so we might read all together four days a week. So they’re kind of slow. And that’s fine. We still enjoy those of course. But I can give them so much more. I can’t get to all the chapter books I want to read with these kids! There’s not enough time for how many books I want to read.
Melissa: oh, it just breaks my heart! [laughter]
Katie: I know! Isn’t it sad? But I can supplement with these picture books, and like, hey look, we learned about this today, we learned about this person. And who knows which one is going to inspire them or which art style is going to inspire them. But it’s just exposure that’s really sweet. We can do it a little bit at a time, and yeah, it’s great learning.
Melissa: yeah, yeah. So that sort of is this idea of… a glimpse of paideia is what we’ve been calling it at Paideia Northwest and Paideia Southeast… is a glimpse of paideia. So that’s, right there, I’m imagining you, you know, snuggled up with your nine year old, and the older ones coming in and looking over your shoulder and listening in. Seems like a great glimpse of paideia. Are there any other things that come to mind with, what’s something that you’ve seen in your home or with your kids that sort of just speaks that enculturation to you?
Katie: lately it’s been a lot conversations, and maybe this is the factor of my kids getting older. So the oldest is sixteen and then thirteen, and eleven and nine. And there’s so many conversations to be had, particularly in the the world right now. There’s things that they’ve never seen before, or we’ve never seen before. The amount of vitriol that you see or hear or this person or people we agree with or don’t disagree with – it’s so interesting, you know. What does this mean? And it’s, so they’re hearing new things about mandates and such, and they’re trying to figure out how to process that. But the opportunity for conversation is soo ripe, like never before. And talk about, so let’s integrate, what does this mean to be Christlike in this situation? What does it mean to love well when you disagree? You know. What does this look like? So it feels like were working in real time. Like the opportunity is so rich just to have those conversations and talk about when it’s hard and talk about when we… they’re always asking, well what are you guys gonna do? What are you gonna do, Mom and Dad? About anything that comes up. What do you think about that? What do you think about that person who said, you know. And it’s hard because sometimes we’re processing too, you know. And we’re just honest. We’re praying about this. We’re asking the Lord. I don’t really know. This is a really hard situation. You know? This is hard when people don’t agree, when believers don’t agree – all of that. So right now it’s just conversations. And even as hard as they are, I can be thankful that I get to walk them through this when they’re in my home. We’re lucky to have all the time in real time.
Melissa: yeah. That’s such a blessing. So you mentioned picture books as sort of this broad category of, like a resource for encouraging an enculturation of – yeah, godly, just that godly culture and that pursuit, that intentional… what is a specific resource that you would encourage other moms to try out?
Katie: yeah, okay. Well, I would say first of all… and, I feel like I’m an old mom because I keep on saying these older kids. And I don’t know when that happened! But it changes as they get older. So one example is that with my older son, he’s sixteen, okay, and we’re not pursuing the dating thing or anything like that now. But my husband and I had an initial conversation about, we want to have those conversations in some ways before he’s ready because before emotions are involved right, before we’ve gone down a lane, like let’s talk about these… I want all of those things to be things that we talk about progressively, and so you know as they go along, so it’s not just like: so one day, here’s how it’s gonna be let’s process how these things go. So sometimes as they get older it’s not being afraid of the resources because we can process, if we have these great lines of communication then we can discuss them together. So one thing we just discussed was Jonathan Pokluda’s book Outdated for older kids. And he has a podcast too that my son likes, Becoming Something. Okay? And so he’s talking about common topics and then we’re discussing them together, so they come back and they’re bouncing off us. But the other day, so Tyler came in and he was telling me about some podcast he was listening to. And it was talking about… actually we were listening to it together… we were traveling and so we were listening to it together. All the younger kids weren’t there to learn about dating at nine years old or whatever. So we, because there are age limits for these things, right? But it was talking about honoring one another. Like, this is what we do when we form relationships: we seek to honor other people. Which is such a great thing to process in any of our relationships, in sibling relationships or whatever. So we were talking about honoring one another, and then also, as you potentially pursue something to define the relationship. To be really honest communicators. To not manipulate anyone. To be really honest about where you are and what you’re thinking, you know, all of those things. So processing those things, and talking with Tyler, and he’s easy to talk to because these conversations haven’t been some big weird cliff we jump off at some point. So anyway, I was talking to a friend a couple days later, and she and her husband are considering some major changes because, because of the world being the way it is. Major changes. And they were hard to process. And she said, I don’t know, my husband came and said, considering a move and all of these things. And she said, however, one thing that has really helped me is that he has always been the best communicator with me. I know he’s not like hedging things back or maybe like not telling me cuz I can’t handle it all. From the time we started dating, he came up to me the first time and said, I am interested in you, I would like to know you more, can we go have lunch. And so here he is, being this honest, honoring her with the communication and now they’ve been married twenty years, and she has this trust in the way he communicates. So, and it just, I had listened to that podcast with my son, so I was able to go back to him and say, you know what, like, this isn’t just for dating, this is like building relationship and trust in your communication for all of life. And it was just one of those sweet moments, that… I don’t know… sometimes I wonder if like half the stuff just goes like, I don’t know why you’re talking about this. But I think he got the point. When you, when you honor other people in the relationship it’s not just to get yourself a wife. Like this is not just about dating. This is about how we maintain good and healthy relationship through all of our life, and I was able to give him the example of that. So I thought, how sweet, Lord, that You could see this and show it to them. And I don’t know, sometimes it’s like, any of our learning, like reading a picture book. Sometimes it is throwing spaghetti at the ceiling and seeing what sticks. But we do: we keep on doing it, we keep on seeing the opportunities and being thankful for them, and who knows how the Lord may use those.
Melissa: yeah, yeah. Now, I think that’s beautiful. You said the book was called Outdated?
Katie: Outdated by Jonathan Pokluda. And so, we bought… we’ve been through some of it. And so I’m nervous trying to endorse the whole thing. But that’s the deal. That’s all of life when they’re moving at that pace when they’re older and then we’re processing it together. Like, what does this look like? What do you think about this? What do I think? And what does the Bible say? And he lines things up with Scripture incredibly well.
Melissa: I love how you use the word honoring. To honor one another. I want to use that with my kids actually. I use the words, you know with their sibling interactions, I tell them, you know, respect one another and be kind with one another. But if you combine those two things together, respect and kindness, it would boil down just to honoring one another. That’s, that’s straight shooting terminology right there. That’s beautiful. I appreciate that!
Katie: one fun tip that we’ve been doing with definitions is memorizing definitions. And my pastor is good at this, so he’s influenced me. And being a word nerd, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it on my own. But sometimes we say “honor” to our kids and they’re like, okay, I’ll act like a soldier. Like, they have, they have all kinds of different ideas. So what does it mean? We’ve been going through the definition every day of love: it’s preferring one another, sometimes at great personal expense by the help of the Holy Spirit. Like, let’s give you terms, that, what would that mean? What would it mean today? And then if we were going to prefer one another, what does it mean right now when we’re all wanting the food or you want to watch your movie, or you know? So I would encourage, just definitions to those terms too.
Melissa: yeah. Oh that’s such a good idea. Definition of honor! Yeah. I’ll start there.
Katie: right?
Melissa: something I was discussing recently with someone else too was this idea that we’re raising our kids in the culture of the Lord for His kingdom and yet we are being shaped right alongside them. And so these things that I want to give my children, and bless them with – it’s also a gift for myself.
Katie: right, constantly!
Melissa: yeah. These, these conversations! It’s not just about us, you know, by God’s grace, being this culture-shaper for our children. It’s – God is the culture-shaper of us! You know. We’re His children. And He’s doing that for us as well. And it’s so big. It’s so big.
Katie: which makes aging not all that scary, right? We just have so much more to learn! A lot more time to learn it.
Melissa: it’s true. Yeah. So talking about all these things, and having all the kids and the conversations and the books and the home education and your speaking and your writing… I mean, it sounds like a lot! It sounds exhausting, right? How does the idea of pursuing rest come in to the picture for you? As an individual or as your family, your family culture, how do you find rest necessary?
Katie: well, it’s vital. And usually we don’t recognize that until we hit the wall, you know? Until we crash and burn in real life. And, yeah, I’m missing something here. One thing for me is just margin on the calendar. I used to be someone who’d look at a calendar, and a blank space is open space. And until you filled all the spaces in and realize you can’t pivot, and maybe that’s getting older, more kids, all the things. Like pivoting day to day to different things can really add up quickly. So then it became something as simple as, okay if this is what’s happening this day, maybe the afternoon before it is full too. You know? Like just putting, like I had to write in margin because I didn’t seem to think of it on my own. So if we’re traveling this day, that means I actually write it the day before. We’re big campers, but prep day for camping can be more exhausting than a whole camping trip, right? So I need to know the day before, that no, I’m just gonna say no. And it didn’t feel like- you know, if it’s open you can’t say, no, I’m busy. But you can. I have to make space for that. Because it’s a limited quantity. My capacity is limited. And so I think I need to recognize that no, I can’t just keep on adding. Because it’s gotta take from somewhere else, right? There’s nothing else to give. And all of a sudden we’re picking up McDonald’s because I’m just too exhausted, right? And that’s not, that’s not the way I want to live. I have to have capacity for that. So keeping those margins. And then I’ve kind of adopted a process which is not, I mean it’s nothing set in stone, but it’s just what seems to work for our family. Andy Crouch, I think it’s Andy Crouch, who has the orange book. Tech-Wise Family. Okay? Yeah, checking your family. And he takes a break. He tries to encourage taking a break, one hour a day, one day a week, one week a year. And I in my head formulate rest to being the same way. Now is that always possible? Absolutely not. And there’s some days where, I remember this just like where my kids were little too, and they don’t sleep through the night. It doesn’t really change what you have to get done during the day sometimes. Like there’s no time for a nap, so then you’re just gonna rely on the Lord. This is what I have before me, and I’m gonna ask that any rest that I need today comes from You. And whenever we do that, because I would still calculate the math of how many times I got up–oh yeah, you know, I got up four times last night–I would just like keep track, like tallies on a prison cell or something like that. When I forgot, when I would stop keeping track and just trust the Lord for what I needed, I would get to the end of the day, and I would realize, you know, I didn’t even get as tired. I’m not here, I’m not relying on this strength and staring at my weaknesses, right? So anyways, it doesn’t always work that way every day now. But if I can, inasmuch as I can, when we’re here, I try to have an hour of quiet time, and it’s Rest Or Rest we call it at our house. So you can read if you want to or you can rest: those are the options, you know. And then on Sundays, I try to make space for that as much as possible. Because I’ve just found that lifegiving to my family. So if something comes up, and we’re invited to go to dinner somewhere, or, you know, we make those decisions as they come. If we’re able to do something as a family, that’s fine. But I love to have, it’s been lifegiving to all, to everything. You know, kids, when they get around other kids too much, they have that separation between them sometimes – I’ve talked about this with you – just the ingenuity and the creativity that comes from being bored. But they’re not bored very often, right? Because we’re going. But what happens when I try to print out some things like… what’s been fun lately… those dot to dots that are like adult dot to dots… like a thousand dots? Those are fun! So I set them on the table, make sure there’s books there, and now we’re just gonna give each other a break for a couple hours and have that quiet time. And then if we can make time to have a vacation too, away time just to rest, put it all away. And those built-in rests… again, not hard and fast rules, not things I want to be a slave under by any means, but they do bring joy to our family.
Melissa: yeah. Yeah, JOY. That’s an underpinning of rest. We can still be busy in the things that we need to get accomplished… or… going on a vacation can be exhausting. Especially with kids, right? [laughter] We call them trips in our house at this point, because we still have a fresh two year old. So they’re trips. They’re not vacations yet! But they can still be restful in that way, and I think it’s that joy. The joy that gives us that foundation of feeling rested. So pursuing that rest in your family culture, you mentioned Sundays. How do Sundays look different? Obviously, you know, we celebrate the Lord’s Day on the first day of the week, but, you know, they’ve asked me, what was the purpose of that seventh day? What did God do? And so talking with them about, that’s a really good question, what did He do? He enjoyed the fruit of what He had done, that labor. Was He physically exhausted? You know, could He not continue working? Well I mean, He’s God. He is all powerful. But it had to do, yeah, with setting it aside and pondering the good things that He had made. I really enjoy talking about that with my kids. Like how can we make this day joyful and fresh and festive, and, yeah, restful. In that, not just physical way, but the soul-filling way.
Katie: which, what a gift. Like, why would we not want to, and like, that was a gift for us. It’s a gift for our renewal. Like why, what wouldn’t we want to enjoy that?
Melissa: right! Sabbath was made for man.
Katie: yeah, right! I don’t want to make it another cleaning day or another shopping day.
Melissa: right. So what would be a resource, an idea… is there a blog or a book or particular music or something that you would suggest to another mama who wants to pursue rest while laboring for the Kingdom of God?
Katie: so my first recommendation you can’t go without saying to be in the Word. You have to! Like, pursuing rest is pursuing Christ.
Melissa: amen.
Katie: right? So I have to be found there, and it’s amazing how much the habit of faithfulness in the Word is just transformative. Like, so I have to be there, I have to see. I love… I think I already told you that… I love the living and active Word. How different circumstances that are going on in my life, like, just Scripture jumps off the page. So whether you start in the Psalms, whether you do a cover to cover reading plan, like there’s a lot of fantastic options that will do the job. You know. Whether you’re studying comprehensibly in one book. But just to be faithful there so He can provide! I need to absorb the Word, to remind me, because we’re such good forgetters. Like, I need to be reminded, like, this is where my hope is found. Tell me about this living hope, Peter, I need to know this again and again so it gets drilled through my head. So first and foremost I would make time for that. And time in different seasons looks a whole lot different, right? So if it’s just a couple of Scriptures, it’s a couple of Scriptures and I promise He can make it enough. Like, loaves and fishes kind of. That can be enough. but there are seasons where you get to go deep, and it’s just like dwelling in your head and heart all day long. So I would definitely start with Scripture. One thing, so I’m not a big devotional person just because there’s only so much time. And so if there’s time, I’m gonna be found reading my Bible. But this last… shoot, was it August? July? I mean, the last couple years have been intense, right? Politically, socially, all those things. But I found it, for the first time, really hard to read my Bible. Like my brain is just spinning. It’s thinking about news, and I’m trying, it’s not sinking in as much. And I’m in this study thinking like, ah, why does my brain just spin? I read Praying the Scriptures Over Your Life by Jodie Berndt. Jodie Berndt is a friend of mine, she’s a mentor, a woman who follows Christ intensely and she’s always been about praying the Word.
Melissa: I printed out a calendar of hers that’s Praying the Scriptures Over Your Children, and it’s just a calendar.
Katie: yeah, she has a series of books. Praying the Scriptures Over Your Children, Over Your Teens, and Over Your Life just came out and she sent me a copy. It was just late this summer. And so I picked up that book and it’s all about abiding, it’s that John 14 or 15, right in there. And just the days to read that in a time where my heart feels so weak, so tired of hearing everything that’s gone… like, things you just can’t even process, where you feel like it’s just spinning. And just being reminded each day to abide and let’s pray over this, let’s know who God is. So anything that can, that is gonna be like theologically sound and point you back to Christ daily is a healthy thing. And that was such a healthy thing for me to read in that season, and probably a good thing to be reminded that there are so many good tools out there at our disposal. I don’t want to say like, yeah, don’t mess with devotionals, just read the Word. I want to start there. But there are other things that can help me in certain seasons. So I just had a friend the other day who was overwhelmed. Just one of those moments where she hit the wall. And she was hungry, desperate for the rest. And I was thinking, I ordered that book right away and was able to take it to her. Like here’s something when you can’t, like when your brain just can’t take in much else and you need someone almost just to process it for you, right, to help you, like, walk me through in baby steps and point me back to truth, point me back to the Word. It’s a fun thing to have that at your disposal, like, yes! This is what I was able to give her in that season.
Melissa: yeah. Yeah, so, trying to connect it: you mentioned that you speak and you write occasionally, can you tell me about I Choose Brave, and how… how God used that as… how did He use that in your life as a way to bring you closer to Him? The writing of that book.
Katie: mhmm. Well you were by my side for much of that story. You prayed me through the launching of that and stuff like that. So that’s always a process, writing the book takes a couple years and then it comes out, and so studying precisely the fear of the Lord and what godly courage looks like… it’s felt like the job of my life to be able to, like, this is my job to study the fear of the Lord. Study like, what is holiness? What have I thought about this? Being a believer. You know, I was raised in the church. So I’ve kind of known these things, but there’s so many things in that familiarity that we just kind of skim over. And like, do I really know what holiness is? What does it mean to fear the Lord and not fear man? What does that look like? So interesting and timely that it would come out in the middle of all of this. But, okay, what did it look like to write that and have that come out? When you sign a book contract that’s before you begin writing the book, and so you have a year or so to write the book, and it’s gonna come out a year after that, and when I signed the contract for that book, I signed a contract for two books. And that was an option, right, like you have an agent and they work with a publisher and you have these options. So the hardest thing about signing that contract was not knowing what life would be like. Right? So in two years, the first book comes out. I can kind of imagine what my life might be like in two years. Like add two to every kid, and these grades, and I don’t plan to move in two years. You know, like, that control. I’ve got two years under control. A couple years later, I have no idea beyond that. Right? I mean, shoot. Kids could almost be married. You don’t even know! Like, a lot could happen in four years. So what was concerning us was the second book, not the first book. I got this one under control, I got my life under control, but what is it gonna be like? Anyways. Pride is hilarious at times. Because it wasn’t just long after I signed that contract that life just flat turned upside down. Like we had some stuff with extended family that came out of nowhere, and divorce and just really complicated messy things we weren’t expecting – not mine, but like extended family. You know. Like really painful things. When you hurt for other people and you’re in it with them. And those are, I don’t want to call them distractions, but here I had this work and this focus and this time in front of me, and my heart is somewhere else. Like my tears and my mind is spinning not as much about the fear of the Lord. I’m just thinking, how do I help? What do I do here? You know? So your mind is consumed with that, and it was just a couple months later that my dad had a heart attack and my dad was pretty healthy at the time, so it was, he didn’t have any heart trouble, so it was totally unexpected. And then he had a bypass surgery that didn’t go well, and then he had… gosh, he was just weakening day by day… well he ultimately ended up getting a heart transplant. I had my marketing call, my first marketing call for the book, from the eleventh floor of the ICU at a hospital. Like, time out with Dad so I could go, you know, who plans these things? It’s just, it was comical to me. And like, Lord, You went before me. Because here I thought I had this all under control, and I had no idea. And so I was leaning on Him for courage in ways I hadn’t even expected, hadn’t even planned for. And He made time and space. I was editing when he was recovering from the transplant at the University of Washington hospital. Like, okay, I could take the book with me and I could edit, you know, he’s asleep still. He’s not, he’s just coming out, so I could do it. And who makes time for that? No one would sign up! I don’t have the courage to sign up for that. Thank goodness. Like it’s a grace not to know what lays ahead. But to live that out and to see day by day, I can trust Him for enough, to get what, to get done what needs to get done today. He always provides. Like what an awesome thing to experience. So much like what you said: we are just learning as we’re parenting our kids, you know. Here I’m just learning even as I’m writing, and He’s reminding me who He is while I’m trying to write the same words about other experiences I’ve had in the past. And He’s reminding me, yes, I’m still that God, Katie. This is Who I am here. And then to get done and not to be overwhelmed by it, and like, that happened and He did it. You can’t take any credit for it because you had no idea the train wreck that was coming. So it was an amazing experience, a really awesome experience.
Melissa: yeah. Oh that’s beautiful. So then, I guess, the next obvious question is, are you working on that second book?
Katie: I am, yes! But I have no expectations now, right? [laughter] I know we can get through this one, because you only have a heart transplant once, right? I mean, seriously. I’ve been working on the second one. The deadline is not even until March of next year and then a year following, so they gave me great space on that. That is, that’s another thing. Like you think that the calendar’s full, there’s a lot on my plate, but there’s a lot of space in there too. So that helps to work with people who get motherhood and get what your life is like, and aren’t trying to push a round peg in a square hole. Like we have capacity for this. That’s the only way I’m able to do it, is lots of time.
Melissa: yeah. Resting in between maybe.
Katie: that’s right!
Melissa: so sort of a final, bring-it-in-for-a-landing question… what have you been reading lately? Obviously Scripture. We talked about that. What has brought the blessing of a godly paideia to your own soul?
Katie: so I have been reading more fiction, and I’m not a big fiction reader, and that’s probably the productivity side of me. Like, why would you read fiction when you could read real stuff, you know? And that’s a change – I would never tell my kids that – but that’s been a change in my own mind to think the beauty of fiction is mostly what my heart needs in this season. And I guess that’s something I tended to do even with the last book, because you never want to absorb somebody else’s ideas. So when I’m writing, I tend to read fiction anyway. But it has blessed my heart in ways I haven’t expected. So I’ve read more Wendell Berry, I think I’ve read his books in the last year. I’ve always like his poetry, which I know some people don’t love, but I’ve loved his poetry. But Hannah Coulter, I just finished that one a couple months ago… so beautiful. It felt like sitting with a mentor. Like, how is this not even real, right? Like, how can I process…
Melissa: and how is this written by a man?
Katie: oh! I already asked that question! Isn’t it amazing? Extraordinary! It’s like she’s mentoring you through life. You’re seeing it in a different perspective. Like the depth and the breadth and the width of it all. And it makes these, everything that’s going on in the world, it just shines perspective on all of it, so that was a huge gift to me in this season. And now I’m reading Jayber Crow which doesn’t move quite as quickly. I’m probably only halfway through that, and not loving it as much as Hannah Coulter, but I still, I just love the pace of Wendell Berry. Just the pace of his words seems really healthy in this season.
Melissa: mmm, yeah. And the way that he, you know, he does tie reality to beauty to imagination, because yeah… Hannah felt like a real mentor, and so when her heart broke, my heart broke in a way I don’t think other fiction had… I struggle to call that fiction because it felt like such a biography.
Katie: yes, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.
Melissa: and so, Wendell Berry. Yes. So good. So good. Well, I… I really enjoy chatting with you. And I’m so excited I get to see you in person in just a few weeks.
Katie: me too.
Melissa: and I’ll chat with you more there, and sit under a talk by you! That’s such a blessing. I’m just, I’m really grateful. So thanks for taking the time out of your day today to have this conversation with me, and chat about motherhood and Christian culture and all the things.
Katie: yes, it was a joy. It was a joy.
Melissa: and that brings today’s conversation to a close. You can find more conversations on paideia at PaideiaNorthwest.com and PaideiaSoutheast.com for more resources and practical encouragement. Join me again next time for another paideia conversation. And in the meantime, peace be with you.
