Shawna R. B. Atteberry

Here is the pitch I came up with for Career Women of the Bible:

The Bible says a woman should be a wife and mother. A woman’s place is in the home. But is this what the Bible says? Yes, women were wives and mother, but biblical women were also prophets, judges, merchants, and queens. These are the Career Women of the Bible.

What do you think? What would you change?

I work from home too much. I do. I am a self-employed homebody. “Oh you poor thing,” you’re thinking, “such a curse.” Sometimes it is. Because sometimes it makes me feel like a glorified housewife. I’m a writer. I’m a freelance writer. I’ve sold some, and opportunities are slowly trickling in, but I have yet to approach anything like a regular, consistent income. I work at home, and I don’t make a lot of money. Then something happens that really makes me feel like a glorified housewife instead of a writing entrepenuer.

My husband and I have friends visiting this much. Earlier in the week (but after the weekend), The Hubby says, “The deadline for the project I’m working on is due Friday, so I’m going to be working late this week, to get it done.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t marry until I was 36. I can eat supper alone for a few days. But that’s not all.

“While B & J are in town, they’ll probably be coming over, so the place really needs to be cleaned.”

But he’s working late every night this week. So that means…. Yep, that means me. Thankfully Lainie is coming over to help, so I can get some work done today. But still why couldn’t he (or me) think of the cleaning over the weekend (after all we knew they would be here) when we were both not working and both home?

With my fear of being a glorified housewife who’s just pretending to be a writer, I assume that he assumes that I am the one who should be cleaning the house. Of course, I know better. He does help. But the last couple of weeks, we…well let’s just say we have not been the best housekeepers. Things have piled up, the floors are filthy, and there are cat hair tumbleweeds the size of guinea pigs rolling around. When The Hubby makes a comment about the state of the floors, I automatically get apologetic. After all I should have been doing a better job. What? Wait a minute! Back up! Why am I assuming it’s automatically my job to keep things clean? We agreed when we got married, he was helping with the housework. I was not doing everything. So why am I assuming that I should have been the one keeping the floors clean? Instead what I should have said is, “Yeah, we should have been doing a better job of cleaning the last couple of weeks.”

Of course, when I feel like I’m a glorified housewife who’s pretending to be a writer, and thinking that I should be doing a better of job of “keeping house,” I get snarky. And I was snarky before The Hubby left for work. (Sorry honey!)

So there you have it: the curse of being self-employed working at home. So may be I need to work at the library more.

This is one of the many reasons why Neil Gaiman absolutely rocks!

I know that David Tennant’s Hamlet isn’t till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush…

“To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll…. More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you’re looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and… for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?”

I can hear David Tennant as The Doctor saying this in my head at this moment! And David is going to be Hamlet? Okay, that I am going to have to see. Anyone think he’ll be as broody as Kenneth Branagh was?

If you’ve never read Neil, I suggest you make a trip to the library. He’s a wonderful sci-fi, urban fantasy, modern fairy tale, with a little horror thown in for good measure writer. The man knows how to tell a good story, and you can see from above he knows his way around words. My favorite book is Neverwhere: A Novel and my second favorite is Stardust. I cannot wait until The Graveyard Book comes out. His blog is a very good thing for all writers. Writing is always hard work even for those who are published multiple times and famous. They still have to put their butts in a chair and do the work, whether they feel like it or not, or feel inspired or not.

Now I need to hit the button on my Doctor Who Tardis 4 Port USB Hub, so the light will flash, and it makes the Tardis sound. My Wonderful Geek of a Husband got it for me as part of my anniversary gift. *que Dr. Who theme*

The image is from ThinkGeek.com.

I’m sorry I have not responded to comments in a timely fashion. I have not been feeling well. I saw my primary care doctor on Friday. I am awaiting blood tests. She has referred to me a surgeon for the lump under my right armpit. Since it’s been there for a month and hasn’t changed, it probably needs to come out. So that’s where we’re at right now.

On the writing front, my article “A women’s place is where?” will be coming out in the Spring issue of Mutuality. I have also received another assignment from Credo. Yeah! I am continuing to work on the book proposal for Career Women of the Bible. I have set March 14 for the deadline. I also need to get started on Sunday’s sermon.

Please continue to pray for me. I do not have a lot of energy right now, and I need to use it wisely.  Thank you.

Shawna

My book review of Brian McLaren’s The Secret Message of Jesus is now up on The Ooze.

I just heard from Beacon Hill, and they did not accept my book proposal, Spiritual Direction 101. Bonnie said they liked how I started in a conversational tone with personal experience, but then I would go into teacher/academic mode, and it wasn’t consistent. I need to be able to have a consistent voice throughout that engages the reader. I’m having this same problem with the Career Women of the Bible book proposal. Right now it has conversational/academic schizophrenia. I haven’t figured out how to have good scholarship in a conversational tone, and I really want to learn how. She offered to send me specifics of what the committee said, and I said yes! Hopefully, I’ll get some ideas on how to tone down the academia while retaining the scholarship in a conversational, reader friendly tone. I didn’t think it would be so hard! But I will keep trying. I think what I have to say is very important and needs to get out there, so I will continue to learn and write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite…. I may need to re-read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

I have been thinking a lot about nurturing recently. Part of it has to due with the clinical depression, but not all of it. Earlier this year I went through The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Every week it was stressed how important it was, not only to take care of ourselves, but to nurture ourselves–especially our inner artist. The child in us who loves to draw, color, paint, write and not be told what to do. It is also because of the command to love our neighbors as ourselves. We cannot love anyone else if we do not love ourselves. Sally’s Friday Five, Extravagant Unbusyness also brought this up. How do we take care ourselves? How do we treat ourselves?

Several of you wanted me to write poetry and post it this week. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t write any poetry (but it’s still a goal). But I did do two things on my list:: I took a long hot bath, and I started reading The Golden Compass. In fact, I got a good ways into The Golden Compass last night. The characters are great. I also like Pullman’s writing. He’s a wonderful storyteller. I think Wicked was the last novel I read, and that has to be at least three months ago. I need to take the time to read fiction. I love it. I get so caught up in the books I’m reading for my writing projects and launching the church, that I’m not reading something just to read it and have fun. I enjoy what I read for work, but it’s that: work. All reading cannot be for work. The same with writing poetry. Not all writing can be for work. Some of it has to be fun and just because. So yes, I intend to keep that one way of nurturing myself: writing a poem, just because.

My wonderings (and wanderings) about nurturing myself have clicked with the observance of the Sabbath. This idea that we need a day off to rest, to worship, and to recoup. A day where it’s okay to stop and take care of ourselves. I wonder if we kept a Sabbath, if taking care of ourselves and nurturing ourselves would be so hard. Because it would be ingrained in us to stop, to worship, to rest, to relax, and to have fun one day a week instead of being on a merry-go-round of always having to do something. And I’m not talking about a strict do nothing observance of days past where one did nothing except go to church and then sit for the rest of the day.

In her book, Keeping the Sabbath Wholly, Marva Dawn says that not all activity has to cease. Just work: what we do to feel productive, make money, pretend to give meaning to our lives. The work we cease from doing is the work we do to live. The Sabbath is a day to trust God: to trust God to take care of our needs without us doing anything. The activities we can do on the Sabbath are those we enjoy doing and may be don’t do because we see them as frivolous: taking a walk through the park, playing in the park, gardening, sewing, crocheting, taking a nap and getting some well-deserved rest, or may be writing poems and reading a novel. It’s doing things that free us from the mentality that we are what we do and how much we produce.

It’s also a time to leave behind the world’s way of relating to each other in using people for what we can get or for what they can do for us. It’s a time to receive God’s unconditional love, knowing there is nothing we can do to earn it. It is a time of learning to give and receive that unconditional love from each other. It is a time of love and give as God loves and gives. It’s a day of feasting and celebration. It’s a day of worshiping God together and being the people of God without worrying about anything apart from communion with God and communion with one another.

The Sabbath makes it okay to stop. To stop and take care of ourselves. To stop and love and rejoice with other people. To stop and focus on God and his love. I think if we took the Sabbath seriously, we would not have such a hard time taking care of ourselves and nurturing ourselves. I think if we practiced the Sabbath we would not feel guilty of nurturing ourselves because God himself rested after creation on the Sabbath. Right after he created human beings in his image, he rested. We are made in God’s image, and we are made to rest on the Sabbath. Part of being made in the image of God is a day of rest, worship, nurture, and feasting and fun.

I’m beginning to think about this as I will begin to pastor and “work” on Sunday again. Marva published a book last year that I need to read: The Sense of the Call: A Sabbath Way of Life for Those Who Serve God, the Church, and the World. I need to get it because it is so hard to observe a Sabbath when you’re a pastor. I remember that. It’s doubly hard when you’re bivocational. I remember the burnout from that. I’m hoping I get a sense of how to keep the Sabbath while pastoring from Marva’s new book.

The picture is “The Risen Lord” by He Qi.