From the Blog Archives: A Commentary on "Big Baby", June 25, 2010

I saw Toy Story 3 tonight.

I, along with many of my friends, have been taking our children to see Toy Story movies since they first came out in 1995. My oldest son was immediately attached to Woody and Buzz, and we were "sell out" parents almost before we knew it, lugging "Bugs Biteyear" literally everywhere we went for years. Woody was easier, and fit better into carry-bags, but Buzz and Woody were a team, and had to go in tandem. We loved Buzz and Woody with our son, and eventually added a Bugs Biteyear sheet set and pillowcases, and a Bugs Biteyear sleeping bag. Pixar got us early, and Buzz and Woody became very literally the first big "give in" to mass media marketing for us. We never regretted it.

In true Toy Story form, Buzz lost pieces and parts of his famous spaceman suit, and Woody eventually wore out his voicebox and string, and became a much sought-after "groom" for our son's little sisters' doll weddings. Buzz and Woody still inhabit some crevice in our house, at the moment unknown to me, and probably always will be a part of our lives; as toys that the grandchildren will eventually share. But with the release of Toy Story 3, I find I am moved by an entirely new character. Big Baby.

Big Baby is a solitary character, as Toy Story 3 reveals. Once much loved, Big Baby is accidentally lost to her "mommy". Big Baby is left believing herself to be defenseless and subject to the authority figure, and more beloved lost toy, Lots-O'-Huggin' Bear (Lotso for short). Big Baby follows Lotso everywhere, and eventually, when Lotso's love for his child turns to hatred at his abandonment, Big Baby is turned into a hate-filled enforcer for Lotso's power and hate-filled schemes. Big Baby is cast into the role of a dumb, unfeeling goon, left with only doing the bidding of Lotso and his cronies.

Big Baby isn't a mutant figure as in the earlier Toy Story movies, where whole toys are disassembled by Sid, the child-next-door, and grotesquely reassembled. Big Baby is instead a once-beautiful, brilliantly blue-eyed baby doll, a whopping 18 inches tall, that once wore a beautiful dress and bonnet and a necklace proclaim her "parentage". By the time we catch back up with her, now presumably years after her loss, her once beloved vinyl and fabric body is naked, one eye is broken, and she has been permanently disfigured by the markers and paint of over-zealous child playmates. Her sweet baby mouth, now expressionless.

As you look at her promo picture, you see just how desolate her reality has become. At first she looks just like dolls we and our daughters have played with and lost the clothes for. Hundreds of naked babies just like her inhabit toyboxes and church nurseries everywhere. But pictured on a stark black background, black markered toenails, dirty, Big Baby is soon to become in our imaginations, too big, too unattractive, too dirty and too scary to be lovely or loveable anymore.

My immediate response to Big Baby was strong. She had been told she was ugly. She had been told she was unworthy and unwanted. She had been told she was not smart enough, and not important enough, and she was made to believe she didn't count. She was just a baby doll, a too-tall baby doll, and not a more valued "boy toy" or a Barbie. So, she turned to the only form of affection left for her...she found acceptance as a hater and enforcer with Lotso's "Boys". Big Baby became the biggest, creepiest "monster" of the movie.

There were other monsters in Toy Story 3, monsters that were made to be monsters and fuel childhood imaginations. But not Big Baby. She was meant as a toy for cuddling, loving, caring for, and nurturing. Without the good things she was created for, she became a tool for hatred and evil.

As I watched the movie, I was compelled immediately to want to go and save Big Baby. I wanted to rescue her and take her home and clean her up and make her a beautiful dress and name her and keep her forever. But most of all, I wanted to reprogram her dreadful self-concept. This baby doll was "real" for the moments of the screen filling my senses, and she was so damaged. It was for her, and not for the growing-up subjects of the movie, for which I cried.

Perhaps it's a case of "you can grow a girl up, but you can't take the girl out of the woman" or some sort of normal nurturing instinct in this mother-of-three that made me fill with tears. But what really fills me with sorrow as I reflect on Toy Story 3, is how accurately it portrays the reality of so many of us, whether we're at the point of admitting it or not. Big Baby is a victim of the highest magnitude, and in Big Baby, I see all my worst fears for my children represented:

First, Big Baby is a victim of accident. She has been accidentally lost to her mommy, who loved her, valued her, played with her, and needed her. What parent does not fear most, the possibility of being unable to protect their child from injury or death? The most traumatic nightmares for mothers during pregnancy, when nightmares are common, often includes a child just out of her reach, unable to be protected and saved. That is Big Baby; a child whose mother could not save her, leaving her emotionally scarred and damaged.

Second, Big Baby is left to fend for herself, no longer a named being. She is forced into the role of a nobody, a role which completely redefines and transforms her. I have traveled this way myself, and as I face the future with my children who increasingly walk their own way, I fear they too will not have the friends and community around them at some point that helps them maintain their sense of positive value and self-worth. I lost my own personhood early in life, and have spent the adult years of my life trying to re-establish what I had stripped from me. It's been a long, terrible journey, and one that I would give my life to keep anyone else from ever experiencing. (That is why I am in the ministry...to try to help save people's lives from the dreadful hell of self-loss.) That is why tears filled my eyes for Big Baby.

Three, Big Baby is turned into a hater, by the only ones she believes she can depend on, and she subsequently is unable to be recognized for the truly loveable, sweet, innocent,capable, full-of-potential being that she is. Big Baby is what the Lotso Boys decided she is, a monster enforcer, without soul. A "thing", not a "being".

I think this matter stands for itself. How often are we redefined and our real personhood denied us by the forces around us? How often are our vulnerabilities exploited, and are we forced to take on false realities in order to survive? I have, with every fiber of my being, attempted to "immunize" my children from the forces of the world that would deny them their genuine God-graced personhood with the elaborate, unique and amazing personalities that God has given them. I actually grieved to see this same violence inflicted on Big Baby.

The main plots of the story...growing up, letting go, deciding on the future and how to reconcile it with the past, are all hard enough, and important. But they feel a little like emotional window-dressing to me by comparison to the truly important issues that I see in the character of Big Baby. Was I satisfied with the ending for Big Baby (which I will not reveal here if you haven't seen the movie yet)? Yes and no. She was still naked, still without a name, and still was not a "precious" toy as all of Andy's toys were. But, on a positive note, she was obviously aware of having had a different past than the one that she had been reprogrammed to believed by Lotso, she was cared for, and her needs as an individual recognized.

Have I read too much into this movie? Perhaps. Will I see the movie differently the next time I watch it having stated these thoughts electronically? Probably not. Maybe I'm just a case of a woman who once found true joy in the toys of her childhood, and over-sees in Big Baby a being that just wants to be loved. Maybe I'm over-identifying with metaphors about inanimate objects!!! I guess I leave that for you to decide. Whatever you think, I pray for you, your children, and all of our world's children, that there comes a time where not a person every has to be Big Baby

What Did You Dream When You Ate a Spider While Sleeping?

I dreamed that I could now sew all the disparate parts of me together and make a beautiful web, so that when the morning sun shone on the dew caught in my web, all would say, "Look! If God can create beauty of her, God can surely do that and much more for me."

Kicked Out: A Parable

A young couple came for pre-marital counseling with their pastor as was required. The pastor warmly welcomed the young people into her study and began to chat with them about the matters related to their upcoming wedding. The bride-to-be, who was a member of the church, shared from their dating history, shared her own ideas of what marriage would be and why it was the right choice for them from her perspective, how they had grown through ten years of dating, and of their decision to pay for the entire wedding themselves. The groom was coaxed into sharing his simple story of being a hard-working and fiercely dedicated small dairy farmer with 60 head of cattle, and new small business co-owner, (and apparently a committed reader of TIME magazine, as was offered by the prospective bride). As the conversation unfolded, the bride was comfortable, chatty and at ease, but the groom was morose and answered only in the most basic terms the questions put to him.

After an hour and a half of conversation and sharing, as the couple got ready to go after a departing prayer, the pastor suddenly realized, she had never asked the prospective groom about his religious affiliation. She corrected this error and received the response,"none." But then he paused and added. "I was kicked out of the church."

The minister curiously inquired how such a thing could be... teasing that HAD to be a good story, but when the young man opened up and shared his story, the teasing stopped. Three generations of his family had faithfully attended a small, main-line denomination congregation near their rural, mountain home. Since his Grandmother had been a little girl, she and her children and subsequently her grandchildren had all attended, been baptized, married in, and buried from that same little church. The life of a dairy farmer is not conducive to frequent worship attendance, and they were not regular in their participation, but did give readily whenever they could.

The congregation decided to hold a financial campaign for a new furnace in the church, soliciting the financial support of all of their member families. The groom-to-be's family gave what support they could afford as farmers, and Grandmother gave a bit more, a gift totaling $350; significant for them. The project was completed, and the furnace installed. Exactly three weeks after the unveiling of the new furnace, another letter came in the mail, this one informing the family that they had been "removed" from the rolls of the church.

The groom-to-be, suddenly animated, shared: "We were 'thrown out'. After giving that gift, we were removed from the church for not being in attendance often enough. And what's more, when the next capital funds campaign came around, the church sent us a letter for another donation." The grandmother subsequently died, without being reinstated in the church of her baptism, and was buried out of the local funeral home, instead of her beloved church.

An embarrassed silence descended on the pastor's study. Then the pastor said the only thing that seemed possible to say: "I'm sorry. On behalf of the [mainline denomination] church, I apologize for the treatment you received"

The level of tension in the groom's face and across his shoulders and in his muscular forearms gradually relaxed. The cross that this quiet dairy farmer's family faith had been hung on by the church they loved, had been lowered to the ground and offered back for possible resuscitation. The bride-to-be quietly thanked the pastor, and said, "That means a lot to [the groom]."

When the church of Jesus Christ stops seeing the names on its membership rolls as being individual people's lives on their own journeys of faith, and see them as numbers only... 2,000 worshiping; 3,300 in three services; over 12,000 members... we have chosen an accounting model of ministry, instead of the ministry of sharing of the promise of love in Jesus Christ. And we wonder why mainstream denominations are declining in attendance to near oblivion.

Who are "those people" who are calling you and your church to give them back their faith, small though it may be compared to yours? Who will look past their poor attendance? Who will look at their hearts and struggles at faithfulness in a world that fights them every step of the way to be anything but faithful to their love for Jesus? What crosses are we erecting that establish barriers between the Christian "extraordinaire" and the Christian "inadéquat"? I'll warn you they may not be the ones seminary and progressive education have taught us they are. The gift of love in Jesus Christ may have been denied to someone who looks and acts and sounds and lives a lot like you. Do you have any idea who they may be?

Faith is a fragile thing until it is given good ground in which to grow. Or in the case of this parable, new milk cows don't give birth to themselves. It takes a birth mother, a sleep-deprived farmer, and a whole lot of daily feeding, nursing, cleaning, pasturing, hay-mowing, field inspecting, animal doctoring, medication administering, and time, time, time to produce a calf that will become a milk-producing cow. I wonder what it takes to plant the seeds of faith in a Christian and prayerfully, patiently, with care, love, joy and anticipation bring forth a "Christian extraordinaire"? I wonder?

Ranting, Raving and Moralizing: For the Sake of Our Children

I live in a community of Amish and Old Order Mennonites. Probably the thing I admire most about them is they know how to raise children. Amish children play loudly, enthusiastically, sweatily, and laugh with happiness constantly ... without anyone telling them how to. They've been allowed to figure out how to be their own people. They know how to be kids. They know what the outdoors is for, and use it well, completely, and without fear. They are also polite, inquisitive, generous, loving and respectful. They know how to work hard, because they get the privilege of contributing to the work of the family as soon as they can toddle. They have the most peace-filled childhoods I've seen, which leads me to believe they must be children and therefore people of great hope. The Amish children I live near, along with my own children, give me hope. But I see a lot of very un-hope-filled and un-hopeful childhood situations. Tonight I am their Lorax. (Yes, I am the Lorax who speaks for the trees, which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please.)

I'm full up to the brim with "children-as-trophy" parenting and "new-relationship-new-chidren" parenting, and "here, they-are-disturbing-me" parenting. Children are people, precious and deserving of our whole being, not just playthings for the days we feel we can spare them some time. They are not made to be quiet, or orderly or thoughtful or patient or still. They were made to be loud, disorderly, jump up and down and run around, squeal, scream, laugh and cry with abandon. They don't break that easily, they are made of resilient stuff, but they need to be cared for with love that never breaks, ever. They wash, and the things that get damaged as they make their way through experiments, adventures, conquests and imagination weren't really that important anyway. They are!

Here's a few rants that boiled up inside of me today. You can add your own to the list too. Christ has a better reality in mind for our children! It's time to be better than we've been... for the sake of our children...


We have lost track what childhood should be, and tried to make it "better". We have succeeded for ourselves and failed our children.

Church, we are in the world AND OF IT, when we program children instead of allowing them to encounter the world/God/each other for themselves.

Church, what if we started daycares for people to come and play with their children? We probably will have to show the parents how to play!

Have you smiled at your children today? Do they know you think their are amazing and worthy of the best of you?

Tears, disappointments, bruises from playing and hearing "no" doesn't hurt children. Being too busy for them does.

We are filling the world with children who don't know what their parent's faces look like, only the back of their heads.

If you don't have time to enjoy your kids, you aren't living right. God does not bless us based on your productivity. No A's for overachievement.

Are we producing children to fulfill some quota/expectation/personal goal, or giving birth to children for God to bless the world through?

Children thrive with average parents, laughter and unconditional love. Super-parenting, "I'm serious!" and overplanning are the enemies of a happy childhood.

We will never run out of ways to love; we will never lack for occasions to love; we will never come up short of people to love as long as the world has kids.

To learn if you are touching anyone with your life, look into the eyes of your kids.

So sad for kids. What happened to fun and being cared for and love? What happened to imagination and playing? What happened to just being a kid?

I predict if we brought back recess and art to schools, we'd see test grades increase and disruptions in classrooms decrease.

Adults stop ruining kids lives by organizing, planning, overthinking, overspending and overgoal-setting for them. Let them be kids, let them skip and jump and run.

This mom believes children should play with toys, stuffed animals, imagine, create, run barefoot, get dirty & NOT need organized to do it.

Slow down, watch the sun set, read books, turn off the electronics, hold hands, talk and tell jokes. Do it for you. Do it for your kids.

Thank God for parents and grandparents and adults everywhere who really care about helping children become exactly who God made them to be.

No More Howling at the Moon: A Lament for What Will Not Be of Me

I didn't know I was having a midlife crisis until somewhere in the middle of trying to survive a triple infection...bronchitis, sinus and ear...I discovered that my misery far outreached my physical symptoms. "What in the world is wrong with me?" I wondered. Surely a nap, a Tylenol and another afternoon to rest and it will all be better. But this isn't an illness in the "take two asprin and call me in the morning" sense. This is a midlife crisis, wrapped around me like a blanket, making the misery of my feverish brow nearly pleasant by comparison.

Since when do women have midlife crises?

I thought that only the guys got these, and with them came some sporty new vehicle model and a sporty new female model as well. Nothing new in my life, though. Same old salt-colored, french fry smelling, four-door. It IS red, but it also has a cargo rack and fold-down backseats for accommodating the groceries. Same old husband of 21 years, a bit grayer, a bit softer around the middle, but much more than a great companion to an old and soft-around-the-middle wife. Besides, he's tons cuter than any of the newer models I've seen posing on the tabloids at the checkout counter at my favorite WalMart.

So how did I figure out I was having a midlife crisis? I went back to a place of origins in my life, and discovered there was no longer any future there. My place of origins and I had failed to succeed at fulfilling our dreams.

I have been realizing for about six months now, that as a little girl, coming of age in the era of the Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX (1972,) and modern Girl Scouting, that I swallowed completely the concept, "You can be anything you want to be!" as a girl. I grew up thinking, like my classmates, that it was nothing short of normal to aspire to be a female president, a female doctor, a female airline pilot, a female engineer. I could think of nothing to stop me, and never questioned even once, that if I wanted to become it, and was willing to work hard, I could be anything. I never dreamed of the common things. I never aspired to being a clerk at a store, a librarian, a secretary, or any of the things that women did when I was young. I could be a teacher or a nurse of course, but why settle for those? I could be so much more! I was free to be me! I was free to be whoever I wanted to be!

Only problem was, there's a pretty big gap between the dreaming and the coming true.

Oh, I had big enough dreams of changing the world, of making it a better place, of feeding the hungry, curing the sick, wiping away the tears of the world and finding the answer to world peace, but Engineering didn't pan out. Chemistry was the source of a degree, but didn't offer much of an opportunity to do anything beyond verifying what we wanted in the finished product at our plant was actually there. I needed a career. I needed a job start to "being anything I wanted to be" with! I needed to get on with fixing the world.

Then I found it. The church, the final frontier for women. And HERE, I not only had an interest, AND a passion, but I had a calling as well. I was going to change the world through the love of Jesus Christ for the world!

Things started well enough. Slowly, but well. This was it! This was what I was good at, and I could use all of my God-given gifts, abilities, talents and skills, all of them, in this one calling to help people find their lives in Jesus Christ. It was the best of the best of the best of dreams come true, and there seemed to be no limit to where my dreams for God's Kingdom would allow me to go.

But here I am, looking 50 years old in the face, and realizing that not only is God not going to use me to set the world on fire, but there are days and weeks, where my chances at keeping my job and a roof over my head are not that clear. The dream to change the world isn't going to come about after all, not by sacrifice, not by hard work, not by prayer, not by selflessness, not by anything I can do at all. I'm not the one, I'm the wrong gender. I was wrong.

I've been following a dream.
I've been howling at the moon.

It's a hard, hard thing to face that your dreams are not going to be fulfilled, that others are going to get to be the ones who reach your dream, not you. I'm struggling with that right now. I lament that I am not the one that God chose. I'm not the one, no matter how willing I was to be used, that God needs. I'm grieved that I can't be who or what the church thinks it needs. I'm sorry that I spent so much time taking time and my best energy away from my family to focus on something I thought I was supposed to do. I'm discouraged, but I'm not destroyed. There is plenty of work to be done in the church for former big-dreamers.

Why am I putting this very personal story of disappointment on a blog in front of the whole world to see my failing? I have only one reason and it is this. We need to validate those who do not turn out having the ability or the chance to save the world, just as much as those who actually do. It's nice to follow the tweets of the important and read the blogs of the wise and revered. It's great to attend conferences led by the movers and the shakers, read the works of the brightest and the best, and hope that someday you might be able to contribute even a small percentage as much. But that isn't reality, and shaking the hands of the ones who set the course of the rivers doesn't mean their greatness will rub off. Most of us are not destined to do anything more than make a ripple in a small pool.

What was it Edison said about failure? "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that will not work." I have a new thought arising in me and it is this: it may take the efforts of 10,000 of us to bring about the success of one. It may require 10,000 average Monas to make one truly amazing "Mona Lisa". How many Sister Sarah's were there to bring about one Mother Teresa? How many sister's of John and Charles Wesley were there that failed to succeed personally, while John and Charles brought an entire Christian revival to life?...Emily, Sukey, Anne, Hetty, Patty, Molly, and Kezzy. How many of us have dreams and for reasons we have no control over, will never be able to fulfill them?

I don't suggest that we should cease to hold the possibility of dreaming up before our daughters or our sons. I encourage my children every day to stretch themselves and go beyond what they've done before. But I think that we need to also help them to see that there are many factors that they will not be able to control along the way, and that not everyone will write the great American novel. Not everyone will find the cure to cancer. Not everyone will find a solution to the problems of fossil fuel consumption. We are good and worthy and valid human beings for the dreaming and for the trying, not only for the succeeding.

That's what I'm trying to convince myself right now. It's time for me to stop howling at the moon, and maybe, with a little luck, learn to appreciate what it is, just to look into it's beautiful light.

Courtney Martin: Reinventing feminism | Video on TED.com

Courtney Martin: Reinventing feminism | Video on TED.com

Named by Love

I had a very odd dream the other night. Maybe it was because we were laughing after church about the occasional rumors that have gone around during my ministry that I was pregnant…which would have put me up at around 10 children by now. (NO, I’m not pregnant.) But for whatever reason, I had an odd dream that I went to a hospital and a baby girl was presented to me that looked like me, blue eyes and dark hair, and that she was “mine.” I was to take her home, even though I was totally unprepared to do so, and even more pressingly, I was to give her a name. I froze. I didn’t know this baby’s name.

There I was, in this crazy dream, with a brand new baby, thought to be mine, to name and raise. What a conundrum I was in! I remember trying to wildly run through names and remember the pros and cons of them like we had when we named our own children. But I was panicked. What if I gave this brand new person the wrong name? Thank goodness I woke up shortly thereafter. But the dream has continued to haunt me. Who was that baby? Who did she belong to? Was she mine, or, even more perplexing, was she me? Am I to interpret this metaphorically as an image of my own personal resurrection in some way? What did that dream mean? What was her name?

I believe with great enthusiasm that all of our lives are full of little resurrections. We are not people with faith, but we are people on a journey of faith. We are constantly turning our lives over to Jesus Christ; deepening our dependence on him, learning what he wants us to do with our lives, and claiming our experience of him as the way forward towards our goal of perfect relationship with him. We are never done with this task. It will be a journey from cradle to grave for every one of us, and in the midst of this, there are moments of newness and clarity that are astounding. They are like births when we are named again.

In my life, it seems those moments of newness and clarity have often been around times of struggle with my faith. I remember, for instance, in 1986, when in virtual faithlessness, I somehow managed to reconnect my life weakly back to Jesus Christ by visiting a church. It was not a church I had ever attended before, nor do I remember anything about it now, except that I was virtually faithless, and God used that tiny step I made towards him, to jumpstart a new beginning in my life. It was not yet a time of renaming, but the moment wasn't far away.

As I began from that time to worship more regularly in a nearby congregation, it seemed that things were changing in me. Old anxieties were abating and new questions were arising faster than I could answer them. I found myself wondering who this God was really? For reasons that made no sense at the time, I went to a public library, took out a book and read for myself for the first time the graphic details of Jesus' scourging, suffering and death at the hands of the Romans, and wondered why a man of such wisdom and integrity would submit to such a thing without defending himself or protesting? For the first time in my life I sensed both the hope and dismay that was symbolized by his cross. Why did he do it? Could it have anything actually to do with me? Would believing in this man who suffered so in dying, and was somehow still strangely alive in this church where I was worshiping, be a direction for my life that I should trust? What if I did believe in him as worthy of my commitment? What if I did not?

Questions followed questions, until finally Christ whispered softly enough for me to hear him through all my frantic questioning, and said, “Stop worrying so much, just trust in me! I'll take care of the worrying, in fact, I'll take care of you. I can give you an role to play in the most amazing story you've ever known, and I'll even tell you your real name; 'Jennifer, Beloved of God'.” It was the most joyous moment of my life, the moment I learned my "real" name, the moment I started to belong to Jesus Christ.

That is what my dream reminds me of, all the literally newborn and the no-longer-newborn human beings walking around not knowing who they are, or where they can find peace and joy for their lives. They are angry, they are hopeless, they are lonely, they are full of anxieties and fears with no way to make them go away. You know these people. They may even be you.

Lent is a time for all wanderers and all questioners to find their way home in order to be given their true name. As in baptism we speak the child's name and affirm that they are "child of God," I am aware that every time we gather for Sunday worship we need to reaffirm the name of each person who is present; 'Beloved of God'. Especially in this season of Lent as we approach Easter, we need to rehearse again and again our name. Who are we this day? 'Beloved of God'. What does Christ long for us to claim? That we are 'Beloved of God'. Who might I encounter this day who needs to know they are 'Beloved of God'?

I guess I'm still asking a lot of questions even now that I know my name really well. And as I said, on this fierce journey I am living, I sometimes stumble over my questions of faith again, and have to be refamiliarized with my name and reality in Jesus' amazing, on-going story. But more often than not, I ask the questions now not for my sake, but for the sake of all the other nameless babies, who are being handed to me metaphorically, who need to be named...who need to know 'You are, Beloved of God' means them.

I suspect the interpretation of my dream falls pretty nearly right about here.