Month: December 2010

  • Lift Up Your Hearts

     

     


    Let our sons in their youth be as grown-up plants,

    and our daughters as corner pillars fashioned as for a palace.

    Let our garners be full, furnishing every kind of produce.

    And our flocks bring forth thousands and ten-thousands in our fields.

    Let our cattle bear, without mishap and without loss.

    Let there be no outcry in our streets.

    How blessed are the people who are so situated.

    How blessed are the people whose God is the Lord!

    Psalm 144:12-15

     

     

     

    The holiday season is upon us.

    And along with our many celebrations comes a higher concentration of human beings in limited spaces. Homes that usually house one family, will receive extra visitors.

    Grandparents will join their children and grandchildren for meals and games. Uncles and aunts and cousins will arrive from far-away places.

    Bedrooms will swell with overnight guests. Showers will require more hot water than is available.

    Dishes will pile up.

    Toilets will plug.

    Diapers will stink.

    Toddlers will make watching a good movie almost impossible.

    Glasses will break.

    Toys will become tug-of-war victims.

    Along with all the laughter, memories, jokes, conversations, and good food, offenses will come.

    Patience will run short.

    Fatigue will settle in.

    Someone will most likely get sick. Loud crying will echo throughout the house.

    There will be spankings and rumors of spankings.

    And then the end will come.

    We tend to anticipate the joys of Thanksgiving and Christmas, without remembering the tensions that accompany sinners wherever we go.

    Our celebrations always bring with them difficulties, because we by nature are difficult to get along with.

    So, how shall we then live, given our own weaknesses and failures?

     
     

    By faith.

    By faith we must trust that our mixed-bag celebrations are the context God is using to grow strong sons and grandsons.

    By faith we must trust that these sorts of tensions are fashioning our daughters and granddaughters into beautiful palatial pillars.

    By faith we must believe God is re-making us into his own image through our flawed efforts to please him.

    And that is exactly what we are endeavoring to do here this morning.

    We are trusting he will change us as we seek to please him.

    How blessed are the people whose God is the Lord.

    Let us therefore worship the Triune God.

    guest post from my husband,  Curt Bakker

  • Winner of Island of the World

    …is Cindy, Janie’s friend.  Janie already had a copy of the book, but put her friend’s name in. 

    For the rest of you, please!, click here to read the first chapter free.  Look for the button on the right under Kindle.

  • Finding Friends in Unlikely Places

    One of the best stories I heard this year was from my girlfriend reunion in September.  It’s not my story to tell in specifics. The gist of it is that my girlfriend’s mom was talking to a tour guide in England, challenging the English interpretation of events between England and Scotland.  Pleased to engage with someone knowledgeable and articulate in British history, the guide allowed their conversation to develop, extending the time one would usually take with a tourist. At some point my friend’s mom realized she was speaking with a member of the royal family.

    A similar frisson of recognition delights me when I come across a literary reference that connects.  I am oblivious to so many references, hopscotching right over them.  But when I am familiar with a work, or writer or quote the author mentions, the thrill of discovery goes right through me. 

    Here are two recent catches:

    As one who must always be acting a part, he had dressed up very carefully as a river-man; ‘the Jerome K. Jerome touch’, he had explained, ‘is what impresses the lock-keepers.’   ~ the quote is from The Footsteps at the Lock by Ronald Knox. The reference is to Jerome K. Jerome’s book Three Men In A Boat (To Say Nothing Of The Dog…) which is a very funny (in the dry British sense) book

    Here was one of Miss Barbara Pym’s excellent women, a dying breed no doubt, even in country parishes, but once as much a part of the Church of England as sung evensong…; Sunday School superintendent, arranger of flowers, polisher of brass, scourge of choirboys and comforter of favorite curates.  ~ the quote is from P.D. James’ A Certain Justice (Adam Dalgliesh Mystery Series). The reference is to Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, a comic novel about unmarried women that is at times too close to the truth to be funny (says a single friend of mine).  I didn’t know until this minute that it has been issued in a Penguin classics.  I collect Penguins. 

    This happens in minor ways all the time. One learns a new word, a new work, a new author…and suddenly that new thing jumps out from the shadows. In January I wrote about the same thrill. 

    ~ happy sigh ~  People imagine that we readers are dull and boring, but really, the reading life is a thrilling life!

  • Why PD James is my favorite mystery writer

      

    I just finished another Adam Dalgliesh book, A Certain Justice.  Adam Dalgliesh is the main character of fourteen mystery novels. I like mysteries more than science fiction, westerns, horror and thrillers—but less than memoirs, travel, histories and humor.  I prefer spacing mysteries out, inserting them between heavier reading.  And my “go to” mystery writer is P.D. James. 

    The mystery part of the book is always secondary for me.  I love the culture, the commentary, the specificity behind James’ writing. One of her characters doesn’t turn on classical music while he drives; he listens to Elgar’s Serenade for Strings. 

    James is conversant in the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer.  If you know your Books, you will recognize phrases and allusions.  Adam Dalgliesh is the son of an Anglican rector, who embraces the trappings of his childhood but does not hold to the faith of his father.  Theological and philosophical questions are naturally raised. Death is present in every book (she is, after all, a murder mystery writer); reckoning with mortality tends to get one beyond the mundane.  

    And she is British.  (happy sigh)   

    Here is a sampler from A Certain Justice.

    Do you want a cup of tea?  A cup of tea.  That English remedy for grief, shock and human mortality.

    The affair now was beginning to have some of the longueurs of marriage, but with none of marriage’s reassuring safety and comfort.

    But there was in his bearing the innate dignity of a man who is at ease with his work, does it well and knows that he is valued.

    What I wrote when I first discovered P.D. James