A Million Little Ways by Emily Freeman

Initially I felt A Million Little Ways was redundant. Own Your Life by Clarkson, Best Yes by Terkeurst, the writings of Shauna Niequist, and a zillion other books have a similar message: Find what it is God created you to do. And DO it.

But Emily adds a fresh, sweet voice to the discussion. The subtitle is "Uncover the Art You were Made to Live" and Emily encourages her readers to use their talents for God's glory and their joy. Her emphasis on our being able to "make art" because we are made in God's image really resonated with me.

You know creating is more than paint and clay and lyrics. You know there is art alive within you... You are an image bearer and that is not about you becoming famous or important or promoted but about you becoming more fully yourself for the glory of God. (p. 210)

The reason the book touched me in ways the others did not was because Emily seemed to know how I struggle with my giftedness. She writes, the natural thing to do when hints of your own design scare you is to run. (p. 62) She talks about how God gives us certain abilities and then asks us to use them in audacious ways that scare us because of our deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy.

My favorite part of the book was the chapter on "Crazy Ideas." In recent years I feel that God has given me some crazy ideas: planting a church with my husband in a city where few people see their need for God, editing a devotional book in Portuguese, and hosting a ladies' retreat with a focus on prayer. All these ideas scare me to death, but make me wholly dependent on the Lord, which is a good thing.

Emily gently chastised me for my fears and urged me to "embrace my image-bearing identity" and to "offer myself alive to the world" because I am God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works. (Eph 2:10)

To summarize, Christ is in you and wants to reveal himself through you in a million little ways - through your strength, and also through your weakness...

This is a very worthwhile read if you know what your gifts are and yet suffer with self-doubt.

Brave New Family by G.K. Chesterton - Part 2

G.K. Chesterton is better understood in bite-sized chunks so I greatly appreciated the editor of Brave New Family compiling G.K’s wisdom on the subject into digestible paragraphs and chapters.

In my last post I quoted a few of his thoughts on marriage and this week I want to highlight his insights into motherhood, especially the idea that mothers should work and let someone else raise their children. (Although written 100 years ago, his words are quite contemporary.)

The State thinks think they can do a better job and leave the mother to do something more meaningful. The actual effect of this theory is that one harassed person has to look after a hundred children, instead of one normal person looking after a normal number of them. Normally that normal person is urged by a natural force, which costs nothing and does not require a salary, the force of natural affection for his young... If you cut off that natural force, and substitute a paid bureaucracy, you are like a lunatic who should carefully water his garden with a watering can, while holding an umbrella to keep off the rain. (p. 56)

A woman's function is laborious, because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the bigness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness. (p. 113)

And my favorite: Progressive people are perpetually telling us that the hope of the world is in education. Education is everything. Nothing is so important as training the rising generation. They tell us this over and over again, with slight variations of the same formula, and never seem to see what it involves. For if there be any word of truth in all this talk about the education of the child, then there is certainly nothing but nonsense in nine-tenths of the talk about the emancipation of women. If education is the highest function of the State, why should anybody want to be emancipated from the highest function of the State? If education is the largest thing in the world, what is the sense of talking about a woman being liberated from the largest thing in the world? (154)

Brave New Family by G.K. Chesterton - Part 1

I just finished reading the horribly depressing, The Flipside of Feminism by Venker. (My review on Goodreads is here.) Thank heavens I could balance it with Chesterton’s humorous and insightful Brave New Family. BNF is an anthology of his writings on marriage, sex, and motherhood. Chesterton cannot be improved upon so I without further ado, here are some of his choice quotes on marriage.

Of all human institutions marriage is the one which depends upon slow development, upon patience, upon long reaches of time, upon magnanimous compromise, upon kindly habit. (p. 23)

I have been requested to write something about Marriage and the Modern Mind. It would perhaps be more appropriate to write about Marriage and the Modern Absence of Mind. In much of their current conduct, those who call themselves "modern" seem to have abandoned the use of reason; (31)

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words: 'free love,' as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. (p. 51)

I was pleasantly surprised at Chesterton's frank discussion of sexuality (100 years ago!) and appreciated this quote:

The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant. (p. 187)

Stay tuned for more in my next post. . .

E-Books vs. Physical Books - Part 4

I hope this is the last post I write on this subject since I'm starting to sound like a broken record. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

The bottom line is that our brains function differently when we read physical books than when we are reading on a screen. We concentrate better and remember more of what we read when using physical books.

The source of many of the articles I've read on this subject has been Canadian pastor Tim Challies. So you can imagine my surprise when he recently declared he was going "all in" with digital books.

I agree with many of his reasons for preferring digital books (convenience, less clutter, etc.), but can't believe he's ignoring the negatives that he himself has pointed out to his readers. I say, let's keep a balance.

I'm glad Edie at Life In Grace wrote this post about the importance of physical books. I had heard the argument about having books around so that your children will be able to see what influences you (see Our Bare Shelves, Our Selves). But Edie's argument about book time being the perfect antidote to screen overdose is excellent.

What do you think? Am I a lone voice crying in the wilderness?

Lunacy and Letters by G.K. Chesterton

I grasp only half of what G.K. Chesterton writes. But what I do understand is so astonishingly clear and profound (and witty) that I keep coming back for more. My latest foray into Chesterton has been Lunacy and Letters, a book of essays published posthumously by his secretary Dorothy Collins.

I loved the undercurrent of humor - such as the time he defended himself against the accusation of wife-beating by calling it "a pastime for which I lack the adequate energy." (p.134)

Chesterton is the king of paradox. He describes the man who wants to leave his boring city to find adventure and excitement. He contends that the opposite is true. The man is afraid of the unpredictability of real life. The reason we fly from the city is not in reality that it is not poetical; it is that its poetry is too fierce, too fascinating and too practical in its demands. (p. 23) In a later essay he writes, Let no one flatter himself that he leaves his family life in search of art, or knowledge; he leaves it because he is fleeing from the baffling knowledge of humanity and from the impossible art of life. (p. 60)

He writes of the sanctity of sleep; The greatest act of faith that a man can perform is the act that we perform every night. We abandon our identity, we turn our soul and body into chaos and old night. We uncreate ourselves as if at the end of the world; for all practical purposes we become as dead men, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection...It is in vain for us to say that we think the ultimate power [is] evil when every twelve hours we give our soul and body back to God without security. (i.e. guarantee) p. 30

Lunacy and Letters was recommended to me for the essay "Good Stories Spoiled by Great Authors" (in which Chesterton writes a scathing review of Milton's Adam from Paradise Lost). But the essay that I most loved was the last one called "The Roots of the World" which describes how "the enemies of religion cannot leave it alone." In their fruitless attempts to destroy it, however, they end up smashing everything else. (p. 191)

In Lunacy and Letters, G.K. is insightful, funny and hard-hitting. And worth the effort.

Although several of these essays were perplexing, the ones I understood were pure delight.

Anna and Her Daughters

Does anyone out there use the e-book lending services offered by Booklending.com, Lendle, or your local library? I use Booklending because it allows me to access books from Brazil and it's a great way to save money.  Sadly most of the available books on that site are steamy romances, but I've gotten a few books that were on my wish list. Now that several D.E. Stevenson books are in digital format, I hope to read them there, without buying them.

Recently, I "borrowed" Stevenson's Anna and Her Daughters. Like all of her books, it is a cozy read with just enough real life situations to keep it from being sappy. Anna's husband dies suddenly and she and her three teenage daughters are forced to move from their fashionable London apartment to a cottage in Scotland to adjust to their new financial circumstances. It is written from the youngest daughter's (Jane) perspective and recounts the joys and sorrows of the four women. I particularly enjoyed seeing how the mother comes alive as she returns to her provincial roots.

There is a bit of melodrama when all three girls fall for the same fellow, but it is resolved in the end (maybe too predictably). This is not my favorite Stevenson title since it is a bit choppy, but I always enjoy her lovely writing and her ability to create engaging characters.

Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by Runcie

I was reading a mystery with mediocre writing and mildly interesting characters, wondering if I should bother to finish it, when I received a notice from the library that this book had come in. The first paragraph of Shadow of Death, with its flawless prose and engaging hero, left no question in my mind as to which book was more worthy of my time.

Sidney Chambers is an Anglican priest who has a talent for getting mixed up in murders. The events take place in the 1950s and the author does a wonderful job of inserting appropriate historical details. The characters are well drawn and the story lines are nicely varied.

I agreed with WORLD magazine's review of this title as a cozy mystery - until the last hundred pages. The last two stories are about a lascivious man and then a man who is murdered for his sexual orientation. The former was gruesome and the latter was too politically correct to be enjoyable.

In spite of these defects, I relished this novel for its intelligent dialogue, its positive view of a Christian pastor, and its intriguing cast of characters.

I look forward to reading the sequels.

Warning: the BBC series based on the Sidney Chambers character is quite different. Each short story from the book is extended to one hour and things that are implicit in the book are explicit on the DVDs. Several sexual situations are added. Every episode ends with a ridiculously shallow sermon excusing whatever sin was highlighted in that particular episode.