Article by one Jana Duggar on Journey website.

[valsa]

In less than a year, all but three of the boys will be in their teens or twenties, and presumably much better able to tend to their own basic needs without sisterly assistance (and one hopes Jackson doesn't need his butt wiped by them anymore either). With no new infants arriving and Joy turning 15 this year, I doubt they'll will need all four of the older daughters around for too much longer. If they do all stay home until most of the boys are gone, I think it will be for some other reason.

Yes, that's why I said they won't give up all the older girls until the majority of the howlers are gone.

[JenniferJuniper]

Yes, that's why I said they won't give up all the older girls until the majority of the howlers are gone.

Sorry, I was focused on your comment that they might not be able to let the oldest daughter get married because of her duties. I do disagree with that; the duties of all of the adult daughters are lessening with each year that passes with no new baby, and last season we saw that Joy is being groomed for the mess hall which will be the main duty needed with so many teenaged boys in the house.

[Sprocket]

It is interesting that Jimbob was basically a rebound guy.

Who wants to place bets that this "wise, Christian counselor" was... da da dum..... Grandma Mary Duggar???!!!! Wasn't Michelle working for her in a yogurt shop and didn't JB have a crush on her? Sounds like Grandma Duggar was saying, "hey, break up with the guy you like and then "God" will bring "someone" in." Cue Jim Bob.

[debrand]

Who wants to place bets that this "wise, Christian counselor" was... da da dum..... Grandma Mary Duggar???!!!! Wasn't Michelle working for her in a yogurt shop and didn't JB have a crush on her? Sounds like Grandma Duggar was saying, "hey, break up with the guy you like and then "God" will bring "someone" in." Cue Jim Bob.

Michelle was very cute when she was young. I wonder if JimBob saw her as out of his liege?

[Sprocket]

Michelle was very cute when she was young. I wonder if JimBob saw her as out of his liege?

The nerdy looking doofus falling for the popular cheerleader. I can safely say that Michelle was not in the same social bracket as Jim Bob. If Michelle hadn't gotten a heavy dose of Christianity she probably wouldn't have looked twice at JB.

[marmalade]

I'm willing to guess that this wasn't necessarily Jana's best writing. She may not have even intended it for any publication. The "subject" on that page is "Memorization Challenge." From what I've gathered from the Journey to the Heart pages, this is a daily structured drill kind of thing with a prescribed format. Jana was more than likely doing a kind of fill in the blank required daily drill and since Gothard more than likely retains the rights to everything produced at the seminars or in relations to them in follow up and someone in his group put it up on the website.

But wasn't that article published in January? They don't do Journeys until late March/early April; she attended that event. Gothard knows well the word "liability." That whole place is based around a lake. Imagine if your kid fell through a thin patch of ice and didn't make it.

[samithemage]

I think the problem is that they may not be able to let Jana get married. The four oldest girls do all the childcare duties and almost all of the household chores as well. JB and Michelle are no longer able to care for their household themselves (and probably haven't been able to since Michelle's breakdown) They need the 4 eldest girls to keep the house running smoothly, but that puts them between a rock and a hard place. The house can't be taken care of by the younger girls until there's much less work to do but the way normal families would lessen the workload (having the older kids leave the home) isn't available to the Duggars, precisely because 4 of the oldest are the ones handling everything right now.

But isn't Jana already out of the house at that ATI center volunteering/husband hunting. If the house isn't falling apart with her gone right now, then it probably isn't going to fall apart with out her around permanently. I think the biggest issue for JimBoob is finding a husband for Jana who will agree to move to NW Arkansas and be a part of their dog and pony show. Though a Very Duggar Daughter wedding season might be made especially dramatic if they drug out the whole "Jana will have to move away to her husband's home and make a whole new life all alone. She's so brave and yet she's so sad to leave everyone." It might make a good final season, with the wedding/moving away being a tear jerking finale.

[Tator Tot Tubby]

I think of all Duggar kids,Jana is one of the ones most in need of saving. She's at a point where she's either going to be married off to a guy like her brother or be stuck working for her parents forever. She's obviously suffering from depression and too timid to get herself out. I just want to give her a hug and a way out.

[lilith]

But the current teachers were poorly "educated" by Mullet. They are not capable of effectively teaching anyone. If this is an example of the best that Jana can do, she has no business homeschooling. Any of her siblings that operate at the same level are similarly disqualified (or should be). It doesn't matter that they're trying their best. Their best sucks.

Are you saying that by the time Jennifer and Josie are teens that Michelle is going to suddenly take a renewed interest in their education? I find that idea laughable. She doesn't do anything with them now, even without a baby to distract her. If by some miracle the J'Slaves are all married off over the next couple years, there's no way Mullet will be able to step in and take over, even if she wanted to. The howlers and the lost girls have spent their entire lives ignoring her and ignoring any real learning. She won't have the ability to overcome that. I doubt she'd even try.

While the current teachers are the results of Michelle's distracted and erratic schooling, they have more one on one time teaching the younger kids than they were given, it may have taken them years longer than it should have to master the basics of reading, writing and simple maths, but now that they (presumably) have they can impart those skills upon their younger siblings more quickly and thoroughly, probably relearning a bit as they go. Then the kids move on to Switched on Schoolhouse and do most of their work online.

I'm in no way saying that that is a full and adequate education. Just that the younger kids are probably getting a better primary school education than the older kids did, simply because they have teachers with the time to teach them, to answer questions and notice when they need help. And they will be able to continue to focus on their schooling because they don't have to raise their siblings and their home will get progressively less chaotic as each year passes without a new baby. Also, even though computer based programs have their shortfalls, they are far better than nothing more than a distracted mother who is trying to teach 8 school grades at once around the dining room table while simultaneously caring for babies and toddlers.

My bets would be on the younger kids having a better educational grounding than the elder, although it is all probably of a lower standard than the average public school.

[Coconut Flan]

But wasn't that article published in January? They don't do Journeys until late March/early April

It was put on the internet in January, but we still don't know when Jana wrote it. They do some follow-on things to the Journey to the Heart program afterward I think. It's been too long since I read the description to be sure.

[Elle]

Oh boy, here we go. (sigh.) So if you are a good Christian you will never want for anything, never feel guilt or despair and never feel defeated. Ipso facto, if you are poor and needy or you do feel weighed down with despair-- you are not a good Christian. Terrific. That's just the worst sort of Missionary speak imaginable. Imagine if she visited where children are dieing from hunger-- "If you accept Jesus Christ as you Lord and Savior you will want for nothing."

The best Missionaries are the ones that roll up their sleeves and work and live as shining examples; the worst are the ones that believe that faith and prayer fix everything.

Still, she is young and naive, so I will try not to be so hard on her; she is simply parroting what she has learned at her father's knee. I hope Life teaches her some reality.

Princess Diana rolled up her sleeves and got out there to help people. Even from her position as a member of the royal family, she could see people in need and didn't cast them aside because they just weren't faithful enough.

There are millions, maybe tens of millions or hundreds of millions, of faithful followers of god who are starving to death. Who are dying from unmet medical needs. Who feel despair when their distended-bellied children cry from hunger before succumbing to death by starvation. People who still praise god for the time they had that child. Her own mother displayed weakness and despair when she miscarried Jubilee, and I'll bet she was wanting more than anything for there to have been a mistake and that baby to have still been alive.

Miss Jana needs to open her privileged eyes and quite assuming that faith and faith alone means your needs will be met. You can have all the faith in the world, but if you don't get off your ass and try to make a living, or have a lot of it handed to you, then, unless you resort to being one of the able-bodied leaches on welfare (like it or not, there are some people like that), then you're going to have unmet needs. I haven't seen god magicking food onto a starving person's table, or magicking the money to someone's bank account to get lifesaving medical care.

And to see what happens to the MOST faithful, see the Book of Job. If that's what the most faithful receive, then sign me up for a one-way ticket to hell when I die.

[Mela99]

There are millions, maybe tens of millions or hundreds of millions, of faithful followers of god who are starving to death. Who are dying from unmet medical needs. Who feel despair when their distended-bellied children cry from hunger before succumbing to death by starvation. People who still praise god for the time they had that child. Her own mother displayed weakness and despair when she miscarried Jubilee, and I'll bet she was wanting more than anything for there to have been a mistake and that baby to have still been alive.

That's what pisses me the hell off about fundie missionaries. STFU and DO something -- don't send bibles, don't send preachers to condemn their cultures, HELP THEM THROUGH THIS LIFE FIRST. It's like they think that they're already in deep enough so why not just make sure they've accepted Jesus before they die of starvation/dysentery/dehydration/preventable diseases.

I wish I could remember the name of the article, but I read a hell of an infuriating one where villagers were promised medicine, food, clothes for their kids -- but first had to sit through days of preaching and baptizing and let their families/homes go while they attended. People begged just for help, but all they got was bible thumpin'. One set of parents had a dying baby girl -- she died while they sat through the stinkin' freakshow, all the while her parents cried for help. Help they could have given. But no... Jesus first.

[alba]

It's hard to believe she is around my age from the article. I'm pretty sure my thirteen year old sister could write better than that. Not saying this to be snotty but to point out the fail that is SODRT.

That was my thinking. Excessive use of exclamation marks, generally poor grammar, and stilted writing aside, she writes in a similar style to a lot of other fundies. I suppose that's all she's been allowed to read, beside the bible. In terms of content, it's very shallow and doesn't really provide any original thought. There's no discussion, just a summary of "facts". It's like she sat half-listening to a sermon and posted what she paid enough attention to to write down.

I also get the impression that she is feeling a degree of despair about the future that awaits her, and is trying to convince herself as much as anyone else that if only she trusts in God everything will be OK.

I find this rather sad, really. One of her sisters said in one episode that when Jana discovers something she wants to try she jumps in enthusiastically and works hard at it. If she'd gone to a proper school and university, I can imagine she would have done well and come out relatively well-educated with strong (or at least competent) critical thinking and writing skills, and a degree of independence about her future.

[nutella addict]

You know, I read that and I was just pleased to see that she didn't have homeskool speling. I agree it's probably not her best writing, but even so she clearly missed out on a decent writing education.

If any of them do write a tell-all book, God help their editor. I hope they find a good one - I can't be the only person on this planet who can't get through a book that has substandard writing because I'm too busy cringing and throwing the offensive object away from me. (Confession: I did actually do this with a Twilight book, the one time I thought I ought to try to read something I was judging before I continued to judge it - I couldn't make it through a single paragraph before throwing the book onto the shelf like it was infected with the plague and fleeing.)

My other thought, trying to read this piece, was how freakishly similar it sounded to things we heard repeatedly at Campus for Christ. Of course, to be fair, obviously Campus for Christ was not exploding with fundamentalism, there were slight nuances separating what she wrote to what I was told, like that bad things do happen to good people (ie, clarifying that while God will give his followers peace and take care of them, that doesn't necessarily mean that we get to live trial-free lives).

(Just for background, Campus for Christ slowly grew more conservative through my four years at University, and about halfway through fourth year my friend and I became the naughty pair who learned to laugh silently and communicate through facial expressions, and merrily discussed how we were both liberal and Christian, and how the Bible doesn't forbid kissing, and how we felt true Christians should love (and tolerate and accept) everyone and help (regardless of beliefs) anyone in need...)

[alba]

If any of them do write a tell-all book, God help their editor. I hope they find a good one - I can't be the only person on this planet who can't get through a book that has substandard writing because I'm too busy cringing and throwing the offensive object away from me. (Confession: I did actually do this with a Twilight book, the one time I thought I ought to try to read something I was judging before I continued to judge it - I couldn't make it through a single paragraph before throwing the book onto the shelf like it was infected with the plague and fleeing.)

I'd do it. I'm usually one of those cringers, but I'd make an exception in order to inform others on the harms of fundamentalism and to help someone with a poor education improve her writing skills.

[Handmaiden of Dog]

You know, I read that and I was just pleased to see that she didn't have homeskool speling

I'd be willing to bet they have spellcheck installed. I do because I am a terrible speller. I wasn't homeschooled I just never memorized how to spell things (like words that end -ance versus -ence.) It is one of the few areas that my husband excels at over me and I'm always amazed at how he knows how to spell everything. I don't read words, I read phrases, and so even though I've read thousands of books I spell like a middle-schooler. Of course this means I could never earn my living as an editor because my eye just glides right over misspelled words.

[Swamptribe]

Do they realize, following their own reasoning; Jubilee died because Michelle and JimBob weren't good enough Christians?

[Conuly]

Do they realize, following their own reasoning; Jubilee died because Michelle and JimBob weren't good enough Christians?

If they do, it probably eats them up. We all think it's nonsense (because it is....) but they really believe it.

Of course, like most people I bet they're really *great* at compartmentalizing stuff.