Archive | work

In which Bennah is a woman of valour (+ a giveaway with tukula)

May 20, 2013

meet bennah

As tukula‘s first artisan, Bennah has been the heartbeat of our group from the very beginning.

When we met Bennah she was living alone in a room the size of most people’s walk in closets. Every morning she would wake up, put her mattress against the wall and begin her day sewing. For months, we worked together on making a line of bags and accessories that we were proud of. During those months something rare happened – Bennah became a part of our family. We watched as she got married, we held her first child when he was just born, and we rejoiced as she moved into a 2 bedroom house. After working with tukula for a year and a half Bennah was able to provide for herself and save for her children.

But just when she thought she was moving forward, Bennah became ill and was physically unable to sit at her machine and sew. Tragically, Bennah’s husband didn’t want to help her or their child (Jacob) and he started abusing her. Even when she began to feel better, her husband would not allow her to go back to work yet he continued refusing to help pay for her and Jacob’s needs.

Bennah worked up the courage to reach out for help from her fellow tukula co-workers. After a period of time, Bennah was able to move into her own home with her tukula savings and started sewing again, allowing her, a newly single mother of two, to care for her son and new daughter, Deborah. She is bold and intelligent, and we can’t imagine tukula without her!

Abusive husbands, lack of money for medical needs, and caring for children alone are just some of the issues women in Uganda face on a daily basis. Tukula works to combat these issues by providing consistent income, quality health care, savings programs for their children, and encouraging work environment, and a loving community.

tukula

Tukula (meaning “we grow”) is an accessories line based in Jinja, Uganda. We hire young women who are trained as seamstresses but aren’t able to find consistent work. Along with a fair wage these women receive medical care, an encouraging work environment, and access to savings programs. In addition to our full time employees, we provide paid internships for women who are on the verge of dropping out of sewing school so that they can continue with their studies and receive a job immediatly after graduating. By relieving the pressure of school fees, medical fees, and daily expenses, these ladies are able to walk with confidence and joy.

For more information about tukula or to shop their lovely new spring line, click here.

giveaway

We’re giving away one Firefly Tote bag - made by Bennah – from tukula!

Leave a comment on this post with your favourite item from the tukula shop and you’ll be entered to win.

The winner will be selected randomly on Monday 27 May 2013.

US or Canadian mailing addresses only, please.

Continue Reading · giveaway, social justice, women, work · 86

In which I announce the International Women’s Day synchroblog

March 6, 2013

International Women’s Day is this Friday 8 March 2013. It is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future.

So to celebrate the occasion and raise awareness, I’m hosting a synchroblog right here on the topic of Spiritual Midwives and Patron Saints. I’d like to add to the official celebration of International Women’s Day the voices of the Jesus Feminists – men and women who are feminists precisely because we follow Jesus – and make some room to celebrate the spiritual achievements of women, past, present, and future who have mattered to us.

What do I mean by Patron Saint? or Spiritual Midwife?

I use the terms Patron Saints and Spiritual Midwives to explain how I feel about the women intrinsically linked to my spiritual journey.

It’s an imperfect metaphor, but in a way, Spiritual Midwives helped God give birth to some new part of me. These women were the midwives – by their lives, their faith, their obedience, their words, their prayers, their real-life example – for the work that God birthed in me, and through me (they are the women I know personally). I use the phrase Patron Saint to explain how I feel about the women, both past and present, who have shepherded me through their work and legacy, and whom I seek to emulate in some way (these are the women I don’t know personally).

Women profoundly shape our spirituality. So let’s talk about them.

My Own Patron Saints and Spiritual Midwives

In my personal life, I have my mother, of course (if you’ve read here any amount of time, you are already well acquainted with her), and my sister, my Auntie Donna, my grandmothers, even my great-grandmothers, my mother-in-law. I have had women in my faith communities like Janet, Ruthanne, Karen, Eloise, Lisa, Tracy, Steph, Bonnie, Natalie, so many. I have plenty of “little sisters” in the faith, there, too, young women that I “mentored” throughout the years that have wound up teaching me more than I taught them like Abbie, Natalie, Bianca, Kelsey, and so many others dear souls.

There are biblical mothers like Junia and Phoebe, Huldah and Tabitha, Lydia, Mary Mother of God, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha of Bethany, Abigail, Esther, Vashti, and Priscilla. There are the women of church history like Florence Nightingale, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Amy Semple McPherson, Corrie Ten Boom, St. Therese de Lisieux, the Salvation Army’s Evangeline Booth, and Gladys Aylward, on and on. Then there’s the writers and thinkers that mother me: Luci Shaw, Madeline L’Engle, Kathleen Norris, Anne Lamott, Lauren Winner, Jennie Allen, Ann Voskamp, Jen Hatmaker, Rachel Held Evans, Amber Haines, Emily Wierenga, Nish Weiseth, Megan Tietz, Phyllis Tickle, Mary Oliver, L.M. Montgomery, and so many more. There is my secret behind-the-scenes sister tribe, the SheLoves Magazine and Deeper Story families, and my real-life friends, a beautiful collection of souls, as well as my very own girls. And then there are the thousands of unnamed, unnoticed, uncelebrated women in our lineage of faith and our own stories, the ones famous only in Heaven, and I want to honour them, too.

All of them are with me, here, as I write and work and mother and love and live into the mission of God in my right-now life. These women are with you, too, I know. Writers, preachers, pastors, mamas, missionaries, teachers, labourers , aunties, biblical characters, neighbours, engineers -whatever.

Tell us about the women who have mattered to your spiritual formation. Who are your own Spiritual Midwives? And who are your Patron Saints?

Here’s how to participate:

Write your own post on your own blog, telling us about your own Patron Saint and Spiritual Midwife. Write it quick, don’t overthink it, just spill it all out. Include pictures, tell a story, tell us about a moment, a conversation, a turning point. If you’ve already written one along these lines, feel free to link that up, too.
Include a link in your own post back to this post here, so your readers can find other bloggers writing on the same topic. Feel free to steal my graphic up there, it’s all yours.
Enter the link to your post (the actual post link, not just your blog link) into the Linky tool there below. (Email subscribers and RSS readers, you’ll likely need to click through to my actual blog to see the link-up.)
Tell a few people about it – maybe through your Facebook or Twitter or by talking about it with your sister on the phone while the tinies holler in the background (ahem).
Click around and visit a few of the other posts linked up, leave comments for each other, and encourage one another.

Continue Reading · faith, Jesus Feminist, women, work · 63

In which I unveil my scientific writing process

October 28, 2012

Right Now: I’m always writing or thinking about writing or sick of writing or longing to write or happy I finally wrote or wishing I had more time to write or feeling terrible at writing.

I made Crispy Chicken Tacos from the Pioneer Woman’s newest cookbook last week (okay, and again today after church). The day before that, I made the garlic lemon shrimp, and soaked up bits of butter with crusty bread. The night before that? Chicken Parmigiano. (I won’t even tell you about the three dozen cookies that were baked…Okay, I will. Canadian classic: The Best of Bridge, “Mona’s Mother’s Mother’s Best Friend’s Favourite Cookies” world without end, amen.)

When four-year-old Joseph sat down to eat, he declared, “My am wearing my turkey pants!” and yanked the elastic waistband out, copying his Dad’s Thanksgiving proclamations: My am here to eat, let’s do this thing.

Henceforth, let’s just all agree to refer to elastic waist band pants as Turkey Pants.

My creative process is very scientific. Let me tell you about it:

First, I avoid it. I do laundry, school drop off and pick up, preschool crafts, procrastinate, clean something, dither around, check Facebook, write a blog post to prime the word-pump (check!), bath the tinies, make lots of yummy food, read books out loud, avoid the washroom-cleaning, clip 80 finger-and-toe-nails, procrastinate a bit more, I hide in coffee shops on two-mornings a week (or my parents’ dining room), I make a writing playlist of Jane Austen movie soundtrack music, turn on Little Bear for the tinies, clean the house, sweep the stairs, fold a mountain of laundry, think about writing, don’t think about writing, go for a walk, download Anti-Social app to block all social media, read, and then I sit down, every now and then, on the edges, to bang out a thousands words (give or take a few zeroes).

One of my favourite clear-my-mind walking spots.

It’s a delicate and precise science, clearly.

Watching me (sometimes not) write a book is stressful for my husband.

We’ve established a good rule: if it’s going well, I’ll tell him so. If it’s not, I won’t bring it up. And, darling, please don’t ask me again to estimate by percentage how much remains to be written.

I am a full-time stay at home mother with very small tinies still, and I write on the edges of my life, and I like to eat, and read a lot, and I hate talking on the phone, and my laundry is never finished, likely never will be, I’m sure.

Right now, book writing feels as if I am in the middle of my first marathon, and I’m really regretting that I didn’t train in a more useful fashion. Or at least take up jogging. Instead, I’m cooking with a lot of butter.

“Jesus Feminist“ (that title is still tentative, by the way) is due for first round edits early in January. Yeah. Just a few weeks away.

It feels like a monstrous undertaking, impossible, and I’m in way over my head, and it’s awful, and beautiful, and I love every single second of it (when I’m not busy hating it).

I’m wishing for one of those “Writing Retreats” that real authors apparently do to write books. Right now “holed up in my own basement for an hour after supper while chaos reigns overhead and Brian hollers at everyone to BE QUIET MUM IS TRYING TO WORK” counts as a retreat.

My small Evelynn has been quite sick (she’s on the mend), and that’s meant a week-without-much-creativity for my befuddled and tired brain.

Today, I’m in the Quiet Room at the library, and I may commit an act of violence on the knuckle-cracker in here.

Later tonight, I’ll leave the supper dishes to the rest of the family, open my laptop at my old oak desk downstairs, light a few candles. I’ll open the windows to the forest, and pour a glass of chardonnay, everyone will be too loud, so I’ll turn on my little writing playlist to drown them all out.

Chaos is my muse, chaos is my muse, chaos is my muse.

But first, always, never not this:

Jesus, be near. I love you, I long for you, breathe here, please please please. Abba, I love you, help me love you better through this, help me love others better through this. Holy Spirit, sweep into my fuddled and worn out mama-brain, and stir the waters, I need you here.

God, may you be glorified, I’m weak, and I feel my inadequacies so strongly, so look here, I’m moving out of the way, would you increase here? My hands are open, my heart is yours.

Thank you for this, thank you for this, thank you for every single wonderful beautiful second of getting to do this with You.

And then I just write.

Continue Reading · blogging, faith, work, writing · 60

In which I can’t Create if I’m always busy Reacting

October 24, 2012

Yesterday, I quit the Internet. Today, I took the Internet to Starbucks and toasted it with a venti Americano: we made up.

Internet, I could never stay mad at you.

Sometimes, I’m just so tired of All the Reacting. Every one is always reacting to every one else’s work, and right now, in these weeks of writing, I want to create. I want to create my own work, not react to or critique someone else’s work. I’m rather over reacting or evangelistic commenting or convincing or weighing in or defending or add my two-cents-ing. Besides, haven’t we hit capacity on constantly being outraged and offended?

I would rather Create than React.

I need to tell a better story, a beautiful story, a truthful one. I’m not a preacher or a teacher, and I’m realising that I am not a good “reactor” either - wait a tick, is that even a word? I don’t think it is, unless the word “nuclear” is in front of it, which may be apropos for the tone of some rhetoric these days.

Instead of big arguments and point-by-point apologetics, instead of reacting to slights, imagined or legitimate, political or religious or relational, I long to get on with my Father’s business.

I’d rather be a Prophet than a Professor, a Lover than an Apologist.

I long to Love, I long to offer grace, particularly to those struggling under their own new Laws, I long to worship, I’d rather write a better story than a point-by-point defense, and I long to really see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

It’s a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks at it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them. ~ Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

I can’t live a better story – let alone write one down (by January! *faint*) – if I’m being swept up in a million comments and expectations and frustrations and whirlwinds of offense.

I can’t Create, if I’m busy Reacting. Some of my best work - on-screen and off – comes when I’m listening more than I’m talking, when I’m decreasing and God is increasing, when my heart is undivided and whole.

This idea is guiding a lot of my life right now (and, yes, of course, I’m talking about way more than just writing a book):

Am I creating something beautiful and true? Or am I merely reacting?

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt

And I can’t be Fearless, if I’m afraid of The Critic, now can I? For me, It’s better to forget about the Critics for just a little while, in this sweet stage of creating, and simply get on it. There will be plenty of time to have my work picked apart later. I don’t mean to excuse a lack of critical thinking, not at all, there’s a good place for it – in creativity, in writing, in social justice, in community, in marriages, in parenting, all of it – but in all of those arenas, I hope I’m marred by dust and sweat and blood, I hope I dare greatly.

Right now, I’ll try, in my own small way, to dare a little more greatly, and take a few risks, by remembering to create, instead of react.

Photo by Scott Wade