Jennifer Dukes Lee’s “Love Idol”

We all have them, those little whispers, reminders that we are not quite good enough, that we need to do more to succeed, buy more, look better, go with the flow, be part of the in-crowd, that then, and only then, will we be considered worthy. Collectively, in all their many permutations, they’re all about our need for approval.

We pay attention to these little whispers. We listen closely and hard. They become so familiar to us that we embrace them and internalize them. They become part of our thinking and our personalities. We do what they say, often without thinking. They become our idols, and in effect we worship them.

In Love Idol: Letting Go of Your Need for Approval and Seeing Yourself through God’s Eyes,  Jennifer Dukes-Lee says it doesn’t have to be this way.

A former political reporter for the Des Moines Register (she’s since been promoted to full-time farm wife and mother), Dukes-Lee might have been one of the last people you’d expect to have problems with approval. But she had them, and she still has them. The difference is she’s aware of them of them now, and sees how they come creeping into the most common and mundane of activities.

Like her daughter’s spelling bee. A missions trip to Haiti. Lusting to be assigned that career-enhancing newspaper story. Work. The desire for influence and authority. Volunteering at church.  

We want to be noticed, recognized, and applauded. We hunger for this approval.

Dukes-Lee was as caught up in this as anyone can be, and then slowly realized that she was already preapproved. All the things she was doing for approval were not only insufficient, they were unnecessary.

Love Idol is written squarely for women readers. If no one’s said it before, then let me be the first to say it: men hunger for approval just as much as women do. As I read her words, written in an engaging, straightforward style (I recognize the former journalist), I am reminded of my own need for approval and the ongoing struggle that continues within my mind and emotions.

It’s not only a good book with an important message; Love Idol is a needed book. Reading it will make you squirm at times, because its honesty hits home. Most of all, it’s a hopeful book: it doesn’t have to be this way. As Dukes-Lee keeps pointing out, we are all preapproved.

Illustration by Piotr Siedlecki via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Three Reviews and a Question

Three reviews were posted on my novels last week – one on Dancing Priest, one on A Light Shining, and one on both.

Chip Etier, writing for the Examiner.com, reviewed Dancing Priest. “Readers learn,” he said, “through Father Kent’s trials and tribulations, that every race, no matter how much it looks like the others, has its own story.”

Jennifer Dukes-Lee, in a posted review on Amazon of A Light Shining, recommended reading Dancing Priest first and then said that A Light Shining “should come with a warning like this: ‘Do not start reading unless you intend to stay up way past your bedtime.’"

Sherry at Semicolon Blog (perhaps the most voracious reader of books I’ve found on the internet), reviewed both books together. “I would recommend these companion novels,” she said,  “to anyone with an interest in well-written Christian-themed fiction, Anglican church fiction, adoption and street children, Olympic cycling, or the politics surrounding the British royal family.” You can read her review here.

Sherry noted something (in the tags) that some others have commented on. She tagged the books at both adult and young adult fiction. I’ve received emails from several readers who told me their teenage sons had picked up Dancing Priest and read it straight through, almost non-stop. One reader said her son wouldn’t wait for her and husband to finish A Light Shining and bought his own copy.

If you’ve read either or both books, do you see the appeal to young adults, especially teenage boys?

Lorraine

Lorraine was born in 1923, the fourth of six. There is one photo of her from her childhood – a blurry, rosy-cheeked little girl with her father kneeling next to her, his arm around her shoulder. She has a scarf in her hair, like girls wore in the 1920s.

Her adored father died in 1935 of a ruptured appendix, right before she turned 12. This was the Great Depression, and they were already living in one of the poorest sections of New Orleans – even in the 1930s, the Ninth Ward was a poor part of town, where people grew vegetables for the farmers’ market at the back of the French Quarter (still in operation today). With four children still at home, her mother went to work scrubbing floors at New Orleans movie theaters.

Lorraine remembers times when there was no food in the house. Nothing. She remembers what it was like to go to bed hungry. She remembers next-door neighbors – African-Americans – sharing food with them. This was 1930s New Orleans – but poverty and hunger didn’t know there was a color line. When there was food in the house, she remembers eating everything on her plate. Everything. She would require the same of her children. Occasionally, there would be a splurge with a dessert – a piece of buttered French bread with sugar sprinkled on it. Her children would grow up thinking “bread, butter and sugar” was a pretty cool dessert treat.

She was smart, likely the smartest of all the siblings. Her dream was to teach, and to teach Spanish. She took four years of Spanish in high school and was president of the Spanish Club. She wanted to go to college, but the fact that her mother could barely afford to send her through high school told her that college was not possible. Her second-oldest sister (who would become my godmother) had quit high school out of embarrassment – she couldn’t afford to pay $1.25 for the required gym suit.

In high school, she met a football player named Joe. He boarded at Holy Cross High School, just a block from where she lived. He was from Chicago, and she had stars in her eyes. They would marry in late 1942, right before he shipped out for Army duty in Europe. She found out she was pregnant after he left, and her first child, a boy, was born in late 1943. He had a problem with faithfulness, and he broke her heart, likely several times over.

They were divorced in 1946, and she went to work as a secretary at a trade publishing firm. Her boss was this Southern-talking, nice-looking charmer from Shreveport. They were married in 1950. Their first child, a boy, was born in 1951. Their second, also a boy, was born in 1961.

She had a desire to achieve, but she gave it up (and gave up going back to work) because that little boy born in 1951 didn’t like what today would be called day care. He cried for two straight days, and she gave up the job.

To transport him to the kindergarten at the Lutheran church they attended, she had to learn to drive, something she never felt comfortable doing. She preferred taking the bus, and to see a movie (she loved movies, especially romantic movies) she and her son would walk a block to the highway and catch the bus for downtown New Orleans. Disney movies: Pinocchio, Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella. Sometimes dramas that made her son cry. Or comedies like Some Like It Hot.

She wasn’t a great reader, but she read to her son, books like Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Bible stories for children. She encouraged her son to read; her first child wasn’t known for reading or scholarship and she didn’t want the same thing to happen with her second. In fact, the second son turned out be a lot more like his mother than his father – doing well at school, known for being somewhat distant and quiet, rather shy but also seeing everything that went on.

For the first 12 years of my life, she was the major influence on my life. My father started his own business – and often weeks would pass without me seeing him. But she was there. She was always there.

Jennifer Dukes-Lee is hosting a link-up for writing about a person who had a major influence on your life. Check her site at Getting Down with Jesus to see all the posts submitted. 

Photograph: Lorraine Young with granddaughter-in-law Stephanie Young and great-grandson Cameron Young, June 2010. Photo taken by Travis Young.

Thanksgiving Post Featured at Jennifer's Place

Jennifer Dukes-Lee has featured my Thanksgiving post from last year as a report at her blog, Getting Down with Jesus. Take a look -- and remember to be thankful to farmers every day, not just Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving: Of Such Is Greatness

My first thought is of roads.

Quiet roads. Roads busy with traffic only in the spring and fall, when planters and combines and tractors are being moved from shed or barn to field, from farm to neighbor’s farm. At other times, empty roads, a little busier on Sundays when families head to church or on weekdays when the school buses are picking up children, but quiet roads nonetheless.

The roads meander between fields of corn and soybeans, wheat and sorghum, dairy farms and a few orchards here and there. Roads connecting farms and towns, neighbors and friends, work and rest. Pickup trucks carrying seed and supplies travel these roads, as do trucks hauling corn and beans from the harvest.

When we think of what ties countries together, we think of information networks, interstate highways, airline schedules, train tracks. And yet, these roads that have names like “A” and “D” or FM 27 are our geographic arteries and blood vessels. Without them, and the work they support, all the rest wouldn’t matter. Silicon Valley exists because your average farmer In Iowa or Ontario produces enough food each year to feed 150 people. People like me and my family.

This fall, I spent a few days at Laity Lodge in Texas with a group of writers who are part of the staff for The High Calling. One of them lives off one of those roads in Iowa. The other lives off one of those roads in Ontario. They’re both writers, mothers and farm wives. And neither of them would bristle at being called a farm wife because they and their families know exactly what that means.

Jennifer Dukes-Lee and her husband Scott farm in Iowa. Jennifer was the political correspondent for the Des Moines Register before she and Scott moved to his family’s farm to take his dad’s place. I could tell you all kinds of things about the Lee family – I’ve been following Jennifer’s blog for more than year – but you should visit her there first. And you will learn a lot about farming, and family, and values, and faith, and what’s important in this life.

About a year ago, Jennifer was writing with a catch in her throat; I could sense it and feel it with every blog post. It was Scott’s first harvest to manage on his own, and it was one of the most difficult harvests in recent memory. Planting had been late because of wet weather; and harvest was equally late. Scott was often in the fields at midnight and later, and he finished and shut the barn door on his equipment just as the snow started. A lot of farmers weren’t so fortunate, and were harvesting in the snow. But I could read the tension in what Jennifer was writing and see it in the photographs she posted.

Ann Voskamp and her husband David farm in Ontario. At Ann’s blog, you can learn about family, and faith, and tradition, and values, and the beauty of day-to-day living. Both Voskamps come from farming families, and family is an idea that will surface again and again in her writings.

This spring, the time had come for her oldest son to climb up into the cab and learn how to till and plant fields. She captured his nervousness exactly, because it mirrored her own. And one picture told the story: her father-in-law, her son’s grandfather, sitting in the cab with her son, his hand on the young man’s shoulder, her husband holding on to the side as he listened. Teaching, passing on knowledge, the embracing of a tradition.

All of what happens on that farm in Iowa, and all of what happens on that farm in Ontario, is the stuff of what makes countries like the United States and Canada great and prosperous nations, even when economic times are bad.

And all of that greatness comes flowing down those roads, eventually finding its way to each of us.

My thanks to Jennifer and Scott, and my thanks to Ann and David.


Photograph: In the Country by Bobby Mikul, via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Eighth Day of Christmas: Farm Life

Most of my online friends know I work in the agriculture business. If you don’t, well, now you do. Over the last three months, following a fairly extensive reorganization, I’ve found myself doing some new things and some old things in different ways.

And one of those is that I’m doing a lot more writing at work, and that’s a good thing for me. I’ve become one of the four corporate bloggers, and I’ve been able to spend a lot less time “administrating” and a lot more time talking with employees, customers and other people in the agriculture business. I now lead a team responsible for online strategy and the corporate web site. And I love working in this business.

In recent months, I’ve been following blog posts by people in farm families – men, women and even some older children. Ann Voskamp, for example, lives in Ontario with her farmer-husband and children, and she writes an incredible blog of text and photos called Holy Experience. Maureen Doallas did a post on her the other day that I couldn’t hope to improve upon; you should read it and find out more about her.

And then there’s Jennifer Dukes Lee, who has a blog called Getting Down with Jesus. She writes about her family and she writes about farm life, and she writes well – no surprise that in her spare time she teaches college journalism. The Lees live in northwest Iowa, and while I took some liberties and made it a bit more general, they were indeed the inspiration for two of my favorite posts since I’ve been doing this blog – “A Farmer in Northwest Iowa” and “Harvest Thanks,” a poem I posted on Thanksgiving.

This year has been hard for farmers – a wet spring that delayed planting; a wet fall that delayed harvest to the point where there is still unharvested corn standing in a lot of fields. In early November, Jennifer wrote about the late harvest, with photos illustrating the story – her husband on the combine in the fields at night. At Thanksgiving, there was still corn in the fields, and she described the encouragement of a letter from 1912. And she did a post about the worry of a late harvest and the faith that sustains a family that is simply a beautiful thing to read. And when I asked her via email if they had been able to complete the harvest before winter weather hit, she said yes, they did. In fact, her husband was closing the doors on the combine just as new snow started.

So I can read articles in farm publications and reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and my own companies news releases, and learn a lot of facts, data and important news. And then I can read Jennifer’s blog and learn a lot of the reality of farm life, and faith, and family. You should, too. You'll be the richer for it.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)