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The Heart of Texas, the Movie

May11

Wow! I just checked out this documentary movie from the library the other day, and I put it in my computer and watched it tonight. I had no idea that I would be watching such a powerful story of suffering, redemption, and forgiveness. The events chronicled in the movie happened in 2000; the movie came out a couple of years ago in 2009. The tragedy/miracle happened not far from where I live, in a little town called Simonton and nearby Wallis, Texas. I hadn’t heard of the movie, nor had I heard the story of Grover and Jill Norwood and their neighbors, Ulice and Carrie Parker.

I don’t want to say much more, except that I highly recommend that you find or buy a copy of the movie and watch it. You may find yourself in tears, and then on your knees before the Lord.

Links During Lent

Apr8

I was feeding my fascinations, even during my Lenten blogging break.

Book Lists:
Top 50 Books for Children by Lorna Bradbury at The Telegraph (British).

The 50 Best Books for Kids by Elizabeth Bird.

World Literature That High School Students Actually Want to Read at The Reading Zone.

John C. Wright: 50 Essential Authors of Science Fiction. I’ve read only a handful of these authors, and I don’t really feel a need to read all of them, since some sub-genres of sci-fi (cyberpunk, military sci-fi) are not to my taste. The ones I have read and can recommend on some level are Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1984 by Orwell, Brave New World by Huxley, Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky or Stranger in a Strange Land,, C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, Perelandra in particular, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, and Dune by Frank Herbert.

Historical fiction set in Russia from Sarah Johnson at Reading the Past.

Language:
An Indigenous Language With Unique Staying Power by Simon Romero. Mr. Romero writes about Guarani, the native language of Paraguay, which is enshrined in the Paraguayan constitution as one of two official languages along with Spanish.

Why bilinguals are smarter. I knew my Spanish was an advantage in more ways than just being able to understand what they’re saying when they think I don’t know.

Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs
Thanks go to The Headmistress and Zookeeper at The Common Room for the link to this site, Psalms in Metre, which allows one to match metrical psalm paraphrases with their tunes in a sort of mix-and-match sort of template. I love to sing psalms, and I’d like to teach my children to sing them, too.

Straight Talk:
Every single teenage girl who is considering “hooking-up” should read this post by a Catholic mom who has more courage to speak out than I have. And sometimes I’m rather blunt, but I’d have to pray for the presence of mind and courage to say what she said, even though it’s true.

Bookish and Wordie Humor:
For straight talk with a quirky and humorous bent, try this blog post about advertising roof tiles in Zambia. I can’t imagine how this advertising campaign would go over in the U.S., but it seems to be working in Zambia.

President Obama’s Young Adult Novel Economic Plan. This plan, on the other hand, could definitely work, folks.

The Devil in Pew Number Seven by Rebecca Nichols Alonzo

Feb10

I am in a quandary. I don’t want to discourage anyone form reading this memoir, a true story that carries a wonderful message about the necessity of forgiveness, even in the direst of circumstances.

However, to be honest, the book could have been edited down to about half or three-fourths of its almost 300 pages and not have lost a thing. If you’re a good skimmer, you’ll really appreciate this story of a pastor and his family terrorized and very nearly destroyed by a man who acts like the devil incarnate. In 1969, Robert Nichols moved with his family to Sellerstown, North Carolina to serve as pastor of the Free Welcome Holiness Church. As the name of the church indicated, the Nichols family was welcomed by the community, except for one man, Mr. Horry James Watts, who lived across the street from the parsonage and occupied pew number seven in the Free Welcome Church every Sunday morning. The violence and harrassment began with threatening phone calls and escalated until . . . No spoilers here.

The amazing thing about the story is the ending. Could you forgive a man who threatened to make you family leave the community where you lived “crawling or walking, dead or alive?” The sction near the end of the book on forgiveness is worth the price of the book because the author speaks from hard-earned experience.

“If I allow myself to go down the pathway of rage and retaliation, several things happen, and none of them are good. Here are my top four:
My sins will not be forgiven by God if I refuse to forgive those who have sinned against me.
I miss an opportunity to show God’s love to an unforgiving world.
I’m the one who remains in jail when I withhold God’s grace by failing to forgive.
If I have trouble forgiving, it might be because I’m actually angry at God, not at the person who wronged me.”

So, I’m recommending this book with the caveat that you’re not to expect deathless prose, just a riveting and inspiring story of nitty-gritty forgiveness and even joy in very difficult circumstances.

What Captured My Attention This Week

Jan28

This article about a ballet star who experienced burn-out, at age 21: “Dance is a real calling . . . because you not only have to be an athlete, of course there’s also the artistry that’s involved. There’s no such thing as perfection. You have to let it devour you.”

This short Academy award nominated movie definitely worth watching: The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore.

Washington Times: Values voters with big families favor Santorum. I favor Santorum. We’ll see how it all goes.

This rumination on awkwardness and its ramifications: “There can be no community without passage through awkwardness, and real community is always worth it.” ~Kirk Bozeman

The Oxford Chronicles by Sarah Clarkson at the Rabbit Room. Color me green with envy.

“I greet you tonight from that Rabbit Room, the one in the Eagle & Child Pub, right in the heart of Oxford. The room where C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and a small host of thinkers like them tossed thoughts and growing tales back and forth amidst many pints and much laughter. The room in which the stories that shaped us all had at least a little of their making.”

The Hardest Thing To Do by Penelope Wilcock

Jul24

I was re-reading The Peacemaker by Ken Sande of Peacemaker Ministries when I received Penelope Wilcock’s new book, The Hardest Thing To Do, in the mail. What a lovely (and convicting) serendipity! Ms. Wilcock’s new installment in the saga of the monks of St. Alcuin’s Abbey is a long time in coming. The original trilogy of books about St. Alcuin’s and Father Peregrine its abbot began with The Hawk and the Dove and continued in The Wounds of God and The Long Fall. These three books were published by Crossway in the early 1990’s.

Now we have a fourth book in the series, twenty years later, and it lives up to the fine standard set by the other three. In The Hardest Thing To Do, St. Alcuin’s has a new abbott, Father John, but the brothers are still serving each other and the same Lord, still living quiet, peaceable lives, still striving to practice the rule of St. Benedict in a fallen world. And of course, as is the way of this world, the brothers have a new challenge when they must decide what to do with a human “wolf” who has come into the sheepfold and who threatens to spoil both their peace and their way of life.

In The Hardest Thing To Do, Ms. Wilcock has dropped the framing story that she used in at least the first book of The Hawk and the Dove trilogy. In that first book, a mother was telling stories about the abbey of St. Alcuin’s to her daughters who were experiencing some of the same growing pains as the monks. The part of the novels that is most memorable, however, is the story of the monks themselves, so it was a good move to drop the frame and concentrate on the abbey.

I was concerned that this sequel, twenty years later, might not live up to the quality and depth of the first three books in the series, but I needn’t have worried. Ms. Wilcock, a Methodist minister, has a fine grasp of human foibles and sin and peace-making and the cost of following Christ in our interpersonal relationships. The book is about radical, costly forgiveness, and it doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulties of such a choice to forgive our enemies. Forgiveness and reconciliation in the face of real hurt truly are the hardest things to do.

Asking for forgiveness:

I am filled with terror lest you turn me away. I long for the beautiful Gospel that has always puzzled me, but that I know has a beacon in the life of this house. For the forgiveness and gentleness I have found, I should like the chance to show my gratitude. For the hurt and anger I have caused, I should like time to try and make amends. And I have glimpsed the face of Christ here. Before that glimpse dims and is smutched and bleared by the sordid life of the world, I should like to try if I might to touch for myself the vision of that fair loveliness. . . compassion . . . faith . . . peace.

I would pray that all of us could be enabled to do the hard work of forgiving and asking and receiving forgiveness because it’s the only way to true heart peace.

Armchair BEA : What We’re Reading

May24

I forgot to sign up for an interview at Armchair BEA, so I decided to do some “what are you reading?” interviews via text message, Facebook, and in person with the people I met on Monday. These are the results:

What are you reading today?
Family:
Eldest Daughter: Augustine and the Trinity by Lewis Ayres.
Semicolon Mom says: ED is always reading something that makes the rest of us sound trivial, but we love her anyway.

Musician/Computer Guru Son: Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Drama Daughter: Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music by Marisa Meltzer.
Semicolon Mom says: I do not get it, but DD has a newly found enjoyment of and appreciation for nineties grunge music. Each to her own . . .

Brown Bear Daughter: What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen.

Karate Kid: Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
Semicolon Mom says: Uh-oh! I think my older son took younger son’s book and is reading it. Maybe we’re about to have a family book fight?

Betsy-Bee: The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.
Semicolon Mom says: I’m so excited that my 12 year baby is starting to read my favorite epic fantasy novel of all time. I think she’ll enjoy it.

Z-Baby: Geronimo Stilton (one of the 47 titles in this series)

Friends and extended family:
Jane: Crazy Love by Francis Chan.
Semicolon says: I read this one a month or two ago, and it frustrated me.

Susi: The Seventeen Second Miracle by Jason R. Wright. So far, pretty good. I’m also reading Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova. I’m halfway through it, and it’s interesting I guess, but doesn’t seem to be going anywhere particular . . .
Semicolon says: I never read Kostova’s other immensely popular book, The Historian. Should I?

Celeste: One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp and Family Driven Faith by Voddie Baucham.
Semicolon says: Those both sound like books worth reading. Can I borrow?

Jen: Russian WInter: A Novel by Daphne Kolotay.
Semicolon says: I took look at this one on Amazon, and I’m looking forward to reading Jen’s review at 5 Minutes for Books or at Snapshot.

Oh, and I’m reading The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon and The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers. Something old, something new, both borrowed from the library, and neither of them blue. I guess I’m already thinking about all the weddings that are scheduled for June.

What Good Is God? by Philip Yancey

Apr30

In his Bible study curriculum Experiencing God, and book of the same name, Henry Blackaby advised Christians to “go where you see God at work” and join Him in what He is doing. In this book by prolific Christian author and journalist Philip Yancey, Mr. Yancey does just that. He attempts to find the places where and people among whom God is working and introduce readers to what God is doing in the world.

Some of the people and places are: a convention of former prostitutes, Muslim background (Christian) believers in the Middle East, Virginia Tech after the shooting that claimed 32 lives in 200?, Chinese Christians in underground churches, South Africa where Christians work to overcome centuries of mistrust and racism, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, a Memphis health center, and even a Bible College in the Southern U.S. where some can feel left out and left behind. In each of these disparate places, Mr. Yancey finds God at work and joins Him by speaking to the felt and unfelt needs of the group before him. I found these chapters to be inspiring, comforting, and challenging all at the same time.

I was inspired by Christian believers in difficult situations where following Christ is not a decision to be made lightly. I was reminded that Jesus said to take up my cross daily and follow Him, and that daily obedience requires sacrifice no matter where you live.

I was comforted to know that many Christians, former prostitutes and alcoholics and racists, realize that they live in daily dependence on God. So do I. I don’t have it all together, but God does. He will choose to use me, even to save me, in His sovereign will. I I just have to trust and obey, as best I can. He’s in control.

I was challenged to see that many people face much worse circumstances, both personal and political, than I do. Yet they remain faithful. I can surely follow Him daily in my little corner of Major Suburbia.

Mr. Yancey proposes to answer the titular question, “What good is God?” He does so by telling stories of God at work in the world, stories of humble people serving God as best they can, sometimes in difficult life conditions. This anecdotal evidence and reply format leaves the book feeling somewhat disorganized and disjointed, but ultimately such a question is best answered by the changes in people’s lives rather than a formal and systematic apologetic.

Faith ‘n Fiction Roundtable:
Linus’s Blanket
My Friend Amy
Book Addiction
Carrie’s Books and Movies
Book Journey
Ignorant Historian
My Random Thoughts
The 3R’s Blog: Reading, ‘Riting and Randomness
Word Lily
Tina’s Book Reviews

Bitter Melon by Cara Chow

Mar20

Nominated for 2011 Cybil Awards, Young Adult Fiction category. Nominated by Lisa Jenn Bigelow.

“Frances, a Chinese-American student at an academically competitive school in San Francisco, has always had it drilled into her to be obedient to her mother and to be a straight-A student so that she can get into Berkeley to become a doctor. It has never even occurred to Frances to question her own feelings and desires until she accidentally winds up in speech class and finds herself with a hidden talent.”

Bitter Melon was pitched to me as sort of the “anti-Tiger Mother novel,” the Rest of the Story from the pressured child’s point of view. I would have thought about Ms. Chua’s recent controversial child-rearing memoir as I read Bitter Melon even if the association between the two books hadn’t been brought to my attention. Amy Chua apparently believes (I haven’t actually read her book, Battle Cry of the Tiger Mother) that children should be raised in a very strict, competitive, and pressured environment so that they will learn to achieve their best and be proud of themselves. In her Wall Street Journal article, Chua talks about giving praise and encouragement along with (or after) the initial response to substandard grades or performance which is to ” excoriate, punish and shame the child,” but it looks as if the positive reinforcement and simple love get short shrift in the Tiger Mother model for raising kids. Such methods may work to produce highly competent pianists or doctors, but I would argue that there’s a dark side to to this parenting technique that borders on the abusive, if it doesn’t actually cross over into child abuse.

Not all cultural traditions are equally moral, virtuous, and yes, Christ-like. The Chinese and other Asian cultures may have many things to teach the West about principled behavior, honoring parents, and even teaching children to excel, but shaming children and beating them and controlling their actions by force and by emotional manipulation even into young adulthood are not right ways of treating the children that God has placed into our families, no matter how brilliantly it makes them perform. Love is not, or should not be, based on performance, and our children should never wonder whether we will continue to love them if they fail.

Sadly enough, Frances in the book Bitter Melon sees herself making a choice between pleasing family (her mother’s expectations) and speaking her own truth. She writes, “Then the question of whether to choose one’s family at the expense of oneself or oneself at the expense of one’s family has no easy answer. It is like choosing whether to cut off one’s right hand or one’s left hand.” There is a third way: we can teach our children that they are ultimately responsible before God to praise, enjoy, and glorify Him forever. It’s not all about me. Nor is it all about family and making my parents happy. Life is about accepting the love of the One who created me, loving Him with all my heart, mind and strength, and glorifying Him with my talents and abilities, serving others as if they were the Lord Jesus Christ, and honoring my parents even if I must defy their expectations. It’s still not an easy answer, but it is right, and God’s way of living transcends culture, both East and West.

Bitter Melon is a good novel, and a good antidote to the poisonous temptation of making human excellence and/or filial devotion one’s god.

Vote Early, Vote Often

Nov2

Ha! Not really. You just get to vote once, but please do vote today if you haven’t already done so.

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Badge - 2008 election

Encouragement from some of my friends:

“Remember everyone, today is the day to vote! Don’t let a little rain get in your way! Vote make a difference, your voice does count!” ~Suzanne

“Lots of people have already voted. If you haven’t, please do. In reading Romans 13 some time ago, I realized that “being in subjection to the governing authorities” in our nation at least partially involves voting since that’s the way our system is run.” ~Marge

“Vote! May God’s grace be with us today and may he guide each hand that votes. Pray before you go!” ~Joanne

“Put not your trust in princes, nor in mortal man, in whom there is no help. His spirit departs, he returns to the earth; in that very day his thoughts perish. Happy is he whose hope is in the Lord his God which made heaven and earth, which keepeth truth forever, which executes justice for the oppressed.” – Excerpts from Psalm 146:3-7 ~Hannah

Let the Christians Vote as Though They Were Not Voting. ~John Piper

8th Grade Super Zero by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich

Oct18

Wow! Talk about Christian faith-driven, faith-drenched young adult fiction, this book is full of God-talk and Biblical references and church and kids trying to work out their beliefs and suit their actions to those beliefs. And it’s published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic. Go Scholastic!

Faith and Christianity and church shouldn’t be the last taboo subjects in young adult literature. More than half of all Americans, including teenagers, are members of a religious body, mostly Christian churches of some kind, and about forty percent of all Americans say they attend religious services regularly. Why should this fact not be regularly portrayed and discussed in young adult fiction and nonfiction? 8th Grade Super Zero, with its African-American protagonist who goes to church and struggles with the application of his faith to daily life, should not be the exception to the rule, but it is. I can name the YA books from mainstream publishers that I’ve read this year that discuss or at least mention faith, and especially those that portray such faith in God sympathetically:

Saving Maddie by Varian Johnson.
Somebody to Listen To by Suzanne Supplee. Semicolon review here.
Finding My Place by Traci L. Jones. Semicolon review here.
Hush by Eishes Chayill. Semicolon review here.
Bamboo People by Mitali Perkins. Semicolon review here.
The Long Way Home by Andrew Klavan. Semicolon review here
The Last Summer of the Death Warriors by Francisco X. Stork. Semicolon review here.
This Gorgeous Game by Donna Freitas.

That’s about a third of the YA novels I’ve read this year, and as a percentage of YA novels that discuss faith respectfully it’s probably way high since I tend to seek out and review these types of novels. So, 8th Grade Super Zero is a welcome addition to the corpus of faith-driven literature for young adults published by mainstream publishers.

Reggie McKnight sees himself as a loser. His nickname is Pukey because he embarrassed himself on the first day of eighth grade by, well, puking on stage in front of the entire student body at Clarke Junior School. Clarke Junior is a “smart kids’ school that supposed to have high standards.” As the year progresses, Reggie’s youth group at church becomes involved in ministry at a homeless shelter in their neighborhood, and Reggie finds himself “accidentally” running for class president. The story is about getting past the cliches of community service and Christian living to find a way to really help the homeless people in the shelter and really lead his Reggie’s peers to make a difference in the community and in the way they treat each other at school.

In the Acknowledgements section at the back of the book, Ms. Rhuday-Perkovich names several people who helped her write this book. Among others, she thanks “my dear friend, Pauls, whose boundless love and generosity of spirit is everlasting, and Madeleine for the perfect writing advice.” That would be Paula Danziger and Madeleine L’Engle, two writers with whom Ms. Rhuday-Perkovich “studied writing as an adult.” I am green with envy, and I’m not even a (novel) writer, so what would I have studied if I had had a chance to meet Madeleine L’Engle before she died? Anyway, now I know one reason Reggie’s faith in God is treated so respectfully and is so thoroughly explored.

Not that Reggie has it all figured out. In fact, he’s not sure why God allows suffering and war and homelessness, and he’s not sure how to trust a God who does allow those things to happen. And he says he has “questions all the time.” Reggie’s youth group leader, Dave encourages him to continue to ask questions and act on the things he does understand and do what he can to help make the world better in small ways. Good advice for all of us, and it doesn’t come across in the book as preachy or patronizing. In fact, the entire book is full of faith lessons that don’t read like lessons. The story just reads like life.

And that’s a pretty good compliment to a well written story.

8th Grade Super Zero has been nominated for the 2010 Cybils Awards in the Young Adult Fiction category.