Book Review: A Breath of Fresh Air
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be Jo March when I grew up. While my friends were playing house and cradling Barbies, I was recreating Little Women's "Pickwick Papers" (writing under the pen name "Roderick Fisk."). As my sister folded tiny doll clothes, I folded newspaper creases. It wasn't that I didn't value motherhood or the virtues of the domestic life; they simply didn't come naturally to me. I couldn’t envision myself in those roles.
That little girl with a pen in her hand had no way of knowing the wonders motherhood would hold. At the time, I couldn’t imagine that my “ministry” or “vocation” would include three wild, snuggly, messy boys, but now, I can think of no sweeter work than nurturing, shepherding, and endlessly feeding those precious souls.
My younger self would be proud to know I still call on my “Pickwick” energies. While I love parenting, it doesn’t come naturally, so I surround myself with books. There are the classics with broken spines and dog-eared pages: Parenting with Love and Logic, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, and Give Them Grace. There are also the abandoned, collecting dust in the back corners of the bookshelf (sorry, Dr. Dobson).
But of all the brilliant (and less-than-brilliant) books I’ve read, few have shaped my motherhood as much as Meredith Miller's Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn't Have to Heal From. I love it so much I can almost forgive the dangling preposition.
The discovery of Woven was quite timely for our family. As a unit, we Kauffmans have been in a season of transition. We have been yanking deep-rooted weeds from our faith—pulling at the stems of depravity-heavy spirituality, rigid gender roles, and boot-strap obedience. We could never leave Jesus, but guiding our children through His kingdom felt tricky with so much churned-up ground. I craved language to contextualize and guide our experience. I found it in Woven.
Woven came like a breath of fresh air. Its gentle and intuitive guidance encouraged me to be flexible. Using the metaphor of a spider’s web, Miller invites the reader to consider that faith is something meant to be broken and rebuilt. She contrasts this web of faith with the image of a wall, assembled brick by brick, on what has been learned. If one brick crumbles, what happens? The whole wall of faith is unstable. But a spider’s web is meant to be torn down and rerouted. It withstands wind and rain because it is built around several anchor points that keep it standing. These points are the unmoving support system for the whole evolving web. Do the strands of a long-held belief fall apart over time? No problem. Rebuild between the anchor points, which she identifies as Jesus's goodness, power, justice, joy, and nearness. Rather than schooling children in a rigidly constructed system of thinking, parents can guide them into a growing experience of God's character.
Woven provides practical solutions for this work, encouraging readers to construct their own family’s web. “Begin by naming two important things,” she writes. “First, name the season you’re in … Second, name your options. ” What does the family value? What might prayer or Bible exploration look like in each individual system? Instead of approaching the ministry of parenting with a checklist of “things Godly families should do,” Miller encourages parents to look at their lives and create faith practices based on their family’s unique likes, schedules, skills, and habits.
Woven freed me to be curious rather than critical. Were my dinnertime devotionals a bust? Yep. No problem. Curiosity allowed me to reject the ideal expectations of a “perfect family devotion time.” Instead, I started praying on the car ride to school when the kids were fresh and focused (and restrained with belts and buckles). Instead of googling volunteer opportunities, I doubled the dinner recipe I was already making and had the kids run it to the neighbors. The line between sacred and secular blurred. As we named our season, identified our options, and invited Jesus to join us in the lives we actually had, we found He was already there, waiting for us. Faith was no longer a systematic theology or manifesto of right action; it was a way of knowing God together.
By using the anchor points of God's character as revealed in the Word, we are free to play. The Word now writes a tender story in our family: no longer a "how-to" guide but more a love song. Jo March would be so proud.
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