My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers

Mar14

This book is not one to be read in a chunk, but rather a book of daily devotional thoughts written by Mr. Chambers, a Scots YMCA chaplain before and during World War I. Chambers died in 1917, and his wife compiled this book of daily devotional thoughts from Chambers’ writings.

However, the term “devotional thoughts” may give the wrong impression. These daily essays on how to understand and live the Christian life are not your typical little encouraging stories or aphorisms. Here’s an example, the selection for March 14th:

“His servants ye are to whom ye obey.” Romans 6:16

The first thing to do in examining the power that dominates me is to take hold of the unwelcome fact that I am responsible for being thus dominated. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame because at a point away back I yielded to myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so because I have yielded myself to Him.

Yield in childhood to selfishness, and you will find it the most enchaining tyranny on earth. There is no power in the human soul of itself to break the bondage of a disposition formed by yielding. Yield for one second to anything in the nature of lust (remember what lust is: “I must have it at once,” whether it be the lust of the flesh or the lust of the mind) – once yield and though you may hate yourself for having yielded, you are a bondslave to that thing. There is no release in human power at all but only in the Redemption. You must yield yourself in utter humiliation to the only One Who can break the dominating power viz., the Lord Jesus Christ – “He hath anointed me . . . to preach deliverance to all captives.”

You find this out in the most ridiculously small ways – “Oh, I can give that habit up when I like.” You cannot, you will find that the habit absolutely dominates you because you yielded to it willingly. It is easy to sing – “He will break every fetter” and at the same time be living a life of obvious slavery to yourself. Yielding to Jesus will break every form of slavery in any human life.

President George W. Bush used to read My Utmost for His Highest each morning when he was president, probably still does. According to Newsweek (2003), “George W. Bush rises ahead of the dawn most days, when the loudest sound outside the White House is the dull, distant roar of F-16s patrolling the skies. Even before he brings his wife, Laura, a morning cup of coffee, he goes off to a quiet place to read alone. His text isn’t news summaries or the overnight intelligence dispatches. Those are for later, downstairs, in the Oval Office. It’s not recreational reading (recently, a biography of Sandy Koufax). Instead, he’s told friends, it’s a book of evangelical mini-sermons, “My Utmost for His Highest.”

You can read these brief, but meaningful daily reflections here.
Wisdom in a Time of War:
What Oswald Chambers and C.S. Lewis teach us about living through the long battle with terrorism by JI Packer.

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

Mar13

40 Inspirational Classics

It’s a hot topic (see Universalism as a Lure? The Emerging Case of Rob Bell): universalism, or to put it as a question, will everybody get to heaven in the end? Rob Bell repeats the old mantra, “If the gospel isn’t good news for everybody, then it isn’t good news for anybody.”

C.S. Lewis answers this objection to divine judgement and heaven and hell as separate for the blessed and the damned in The Great Divorce.

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

“What some people say on Earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.”
“Ye see it does not.”
“I feel in a way that it ought to.”
“That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it.”
“What?”
“The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.”
“I don’t know what I want, Sir.”
“Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or you’ll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe.”

However, these two excerpts are only the pertinent quotations in regard to universalism and the complaint that it’s unfair for anyone to go to hell. The book itself is much more, a wonderful story about an excursion bus from hell to the outskirts of heaven. I learned more about heaven and God’s mercy from reading The Great Divorce than from many a sermon listened to in my youth.

Maybe I’m a better reader than listener. Or maybe I learn better through story. A little of both I think. Also C.S. Lewis is just a great writer and thinker. You’ll come across several of his books in this series of 40 Inspirational Classics that I’m recommending for Lent. Now go out and get The Great Divorce; it’s only 125 pages long, but there’s lots of truth in that small package.

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

Mar12

40 Inspirational Classics

I spent a couple of days re-reading G.K. Chesterton’s spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy and decided that I should read a bit of Chesterton every few months, if only to remind me that Christianity is a merry and somewhat eccentric philosophy of life. Chesterton says that the “frame” of Christianity, its conservatism and rules, enables us to be like children playing on a cliff with a fence to keep them from falling over. We can range far and wide, “fling [ourselves] into the every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries.”

Chesterton himself was a merry old soul. He weighed over 300 pounds, played the part of the absent-minded professor in his daily life, and enjoyed a beer, a debate, and a nap, but not all at the same time. Nicknamed “The Prince of Paradox,” his verbal gymnastics are sometimes exhausting, usually entertaining, but at the same time full of wisdom and insight into the fallacies of pagan and modern philosophy and into the satisfying rightness of Christian orthodoxy. Here a few assertions and witticisms that grabbed me as I read through Chesterton’s philosophical defense of orthodoxy:

“I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.”

Of course, I am reminded of the song, Creed, by Rich Mullens:

“Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. . . . That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship only Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within.”
The Jones part is probably what reminded me of Jim Jones who went from rejection of the God of the Bible, to worship of himself, to the insistence that his followers should also worship him as God. They certainly would have been better off worshipping cats.

Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.
If the world and its meaning begins and ends with me, I am of all creatures most tragically unhappy. I have a friend who believes that he will find any meaning that there is to be found in this world inside himself. I pity him.

“The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our Mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same Father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire but not to imitate. . . . To St. Francis, nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.”
What breathtakingly beautiful freedom there is in that order of things. We are not beholden to nor dominated by Nature; we are the stewards, the caretakers. God is still over all and through all, without Nature taking over His role as Creator and Sustainer.

“A characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
“It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For Solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
In this season of Lent, and certainly as we approach the celebration the Resurrection, take time to laugh. The Story is after all a comedy, and God wins in the end.

“[Modern Philosophy’s] despair is this, that it does not really believe that there is any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot hope to find any romance; its romances will have no plots. A man cannot expect any adventures in the land of anarchy. But a man can expect any number of adventures if he goes travelling in the land of authority.”
A world without meaning and without Christ at the center is either too terrible to explore or too boring to enjoy—or both. Hence, voodoo dolls and fetishes or Sartre’s existential hell play, No Exit.

Choose the adventure.

Links:
The ‘Ample’ Man Who Saved My Faith by Phillip Yancey at Christianity Today.
The American Chesterton Society
Semicolon thoughts on The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton.

Saturday Review of Books: March 12, 2011

Mar11

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life.”~W. Somerset Maugham

SatReviewbuttonIf you’re not familiar with and linking to and perusing the Saturday Review of Books here at Semicolon, you’re missing out. Here’s how it usually works. Find a review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week of a book you were reading or a book you’ve read. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can just write your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

1. Carol in Oregon (No Dark Valley)
2. Carol in Oregon (The Guynd)
3. europeanne (All Over but the Shoutin’)
4. Beth@Weavings (Otto of the Silver Hand)
5. Beth@Weavings (Forge)
6. Bonnie (Clutch of Constables)
7. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)
8. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (The Founding)
9. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (Ship Breaker)
10. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (picture books about George Washington)
11. Page Turner / Heather (The Railway Children)
12. Page Turner / Heather (The Reluctant Dragon)
13. Collateral Bloggage (The Christian Atheist)
14. Yvonne@fictionbooks (Love Letters)
15. Barbara H. (Book Lover’s Devotional)
16. Barbara H. (One Thousand Gifts)
17. Donovan @ Where Peen Meets Paper (Ecological Intelligence)
18. Diary of an Eccentric (You Can’t Scare Me!)
19. Diary of an Eccentric (Captain Wentworth’s Persuasion)
20. Diary of an Eccentric (The Linen Queen)
21. Judy @ Seize the Book Blog (Angel Sister)
22. Judy @ Seize the Book Blog (Meet Einstein)
23. Judy @ Seize the Book Blog (Letters From Home)
24. Judy @ Seize the Book Blog (Tandem)		 25. Janet (The Everlasting Man)
26. Charlie @ The Worm Hole (Deed So)
27. Upside Down B (Unbroken)
28. Alice@Supratentorial(The Lost Cyclist)
29. Sarah Reads Too Much (The Bluest Eye by Morrison)
30. Beckie@ByTheBook (Beneath The Night Tree)
31. Beckie@ByTheBook (Jane Austen Ruined My Life)
32. Dana (Norton Book of Friendship)
33. Born Under a Lucky Moon GIVEAWAY
34. Hope (The Battle of the Books by Swift)
35. Heather @ Books For Breakfast (The Clever Wife)
36. Nicola (Nura:Rise of the Yokai Clan, Vol. 1)
37. Nicola (The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White)
38. Zee @ Notes from the North (Treachery in Death)
39. Nicola (Daytripper by Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba)
40. Nicola (The Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth by Scott Hahn)
41. Nicola (The Chestnut King by N.D. Wilson)
42. Nicola (Silly Lilly in What Will I Be Today TOON Book)
43. S. Krishna (The Night Bookmobile)
44. S. Krishna (The Heroine’s Bookshelf)
45. S. Krishna (The Merlot Murders)
46. S. Krishna (Law of Attraction)
47. S. Krishna (Madame Tussaud)
48. S. Krishna (Where the Dog Star Never Glows)		 49. S. Krishna (Clinton St Baking Co Cookbook)
50. Megan @ Leafing Through Life (Home to Woefield)
51. Word Lily (The Mountains Bow Down)
52. Laughing (BattleHymn of the Tiger Mother (2) The Help)
53. 5 Min. for Books (The Paris Wife)
54. 5 Min. for Books (A Mountain of Crumbs)
55. 5 Min. for Books (Scaredy Squirrel has B-day Party)
56. 5 Min. for Books (Another Dawn)
57. 5 Min. for Books (Trouble with Chickens)
58. 5 Minutes for Mom (A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood)
59. Girl Detective (The Finkler Question)
60. Reading to Know (In Japan the Crickets Cry)
61. Reading to Know (Rabbit Hill)
62. Reading to Know (Tugg and Teeny)
63. Reading to Know (Marriage Under Fire)
64. Reading to Know (The Kitchen Boy)
65. Amber Stults (Tyger, Tyger)
66. BookBelle (A Dog Named Slugger)
67. Between the Stacks (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)
68. Kristin (The Sandalwood Tree)
69. Woman of the House (How Right You Are, Jeeves)
70. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (Ava’s Man by Rick Bragg)
71. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (picture books about Abraham Lincoln)
72. Woman of the House (The Blessings of Weekly Communion by Kenneth Wieting)

Powered by… Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets.

Poetry Friday: Poetry of George Herbert

Mar11

40 Inspirational Classics for Lent

LOVE. (II)

IMMORTALL Heat, O let thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it : let those fires
Which shall consume the world, first make it tame,
And kindle in our hearts such true desires,

As may consume our lusts, and make thee way.
Then shall our hearts pant thee ; then shall our brain
All her invention on thine Altar lay,
And there in hymnes send back thy fire again :

Our eies shall see thee, which before saw dust ;
Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blinde :
Thou shalt recover all thy goods in kinde,
Who wert disseized by usurping lust :

All knees shall bow to thee ; all wits shall rise,
And praise him who did make and mend our eies.

I’ve posted poems by George Herbert, the seventeenth century Christian poet, on this blog numerous times. If one were to spend Lent and Eastertide just reading through the poems of Mr. Herbert, one a day, it would be devotional enough to last you through the season and to bring you to an awareness of poetry of faith.

Here are some of the posts from Semicolon about George Herbert’s poetry:
Love Bade Me Welcome
The Pulley
Christmas
The Dawning
The Sonne
A Wreath
Easter Wings

Other Links:
More poetry by George Herbert.
The God of Love My Shepherd Is by George Herbert at Rebecca Writes.

Hymns to Observe Lent

Mar10

One way to remember Christ and his death and resurrection during the forty days of Lent and into the Easter feast is to remember and sing the great hymns of the church. In 2009 I took a survey and posted about the 100 favorite hymns of my readers. You’re welcome to use my list or just grab a hymnal and make up your own. Here are few miscellaneous quotations I jotted down back when I was reading about hymns and hymn writers.

“There is no getting away from the centrality of death as a theme in Victorian hymnody.” ~Abide With Me by Ian C. Bradley.

Horatius Bonar to the editors of Hymns, Ancient and Modern, a famous and influential Anglican hymnal of the late 1800’s: “You are welcome to the use of my hymns. As to the charge, it seems to me of little moment, and you can do with it as you please.”

” . . . hymns and other devotional writings are –or ought to be–an exception to the laws of copyright and property. They are, I think, written pro bono Eccclesiae and ought to be considered as public church property.” ~Francis Pott

“Let me write the hymns of the church, and I care not who writes the theology.” ~R. W. Dale.

“A good hymn is the most difficult thing in the world to write. In a good hymn, you have to be both commonplace and poetical.” ~Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

1840 letter to the British Critic: “There cannot be a more miserable bondage than to be compelled to join in the so-called hymns which, rising and spreading from the conventicles, now infest our churches. They are full of passionate and exaggerated descriptions of moods of mind and unqualified descriptions of spiritual experience.”

“Not allowed to sing that tune or this tune? Indeed! Secular music, do you say? Belongs to the devil, does it? Well, if it did I would plunder him of it. . . . Every note and every strain and every harmony is divine and belongs to us.” ~William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army.

“That settles it! Why should the devil have all the best tunes?” ~WIlliam Booth.

“The pronouns ‘I’ and ‘my’ are rarely found in any ancient hymns. But in modern hymns the individual often detaches himself from the body of the faithful and in a spirit of sentimental selfishness obtrudes his own feelings concerning himself.” ~Bishop Christopher Wordsworth

I’m praying that an excursion through the hymns of the church will turn your focus God-ward during this Lenten and Easter season. . .

Semicolon Top 100 Hymns Project, 2009.
Center for Church Music
Homeschool Hymn Studies
Hymnary.org
Hymn Time: The CyberHymnal
LifeSpring! Hymn Stories
Oremus Hymnal
Wordwise Hymns

Pensees by Blaise Pascal

Mar10

It’s Lent, and as a growing Christian you want to read something that will bring you closer and deeper in your relationship with Jesus. Or you’re not a Christian, but you think that this time leading up to the celebration of the resurrection of Christ would be a good time to explore the Christian faith and see for yourself what it’s all about.

I would suggest that first and foremost you read the Bible, but not just any old books of the Bible. If you’ve never read the Bible before I would suggest starting with one of the Gospels, the four books in the New Testament that tell about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Even if you’ve read the Bible several times from cover to cover, springtime and Lent and Easter are good times to review the story of Jesus and let God refresh you spiritually through His Word as it tells about the Greatest Love Story Ever Enacted.

Then, if you’re like me and still want some more reading to inspire and encourage you in your journey, try one or more of the recommended books in this series, 40 Inspirational Classics.

Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and philosopher. He was educated at home by his father and he grew up to be a talented scientist and mathematician. In 1654, Pascal had a mystical experience of the presence of God, a sort of “second conversion,” and he devoted himself to writing a book about the reasons for belief in God and in the Christian faith.

Pensees means “thoughts,” and these “thoughts” are really Pascal’s notes for a book of Christian apologetics that he planned to write, but never managed to finish. Pascal believed that to bring a person to faith in Christ it was necessary to make him want to believe.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

Make religion attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good.

The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which knows God, and not the reason. This, then, is absolute faith: God felt in the heart.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought.

…there are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know Him.

Pascal’s Wager: “You must wager; it is not optional. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.”

I found Peter Kreeft’s edition of and commentary on Pascal quite accessible; it’s called Christianity for Modern Pagans. I wrote some reflections on the chapters of Kreeft’s book in these posts a couple of years ago:
Order and Fear of Religion
Sinners Need Silence and Ultimately, A Saviour
Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me
Animal or Angel?
Vanity, Vanity, All Is Vanity
Every Day in Every Way: The Vanity of Justice.

Free Kindle edition of Pascal’s Pensees.

The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence

Mar9

40 Inspirational Classics for Lent

Brother Lawrence, born Nicolas Herman, was a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris during the seventeenth century. When he entered the monastery at the age of twenty-four, he took the religious name Lawrence of the Resurrection. He spent most of his religious life working in the monastery kitchen, cooking and washing dishes. Father Joseph de Beaufort, a priest who knew Brother Lawrence, compiled a booklet of Brother Lawrence’s letters and stories and maxims and published the book after Brother Lawrence’s death in 1691.

“The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.”

“We ought not to grow tired of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”

“There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God; those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it.”

You can read or print your own copy of this twenty page booklet by a 17th century French monk.
Text and audio available at Christian Ethereal Library.
Librivox’s audio version of The Practice of the Presence of God.

“In this small book, through letters and conversations, Brother Lawrence simply and beautifully explains how to continually walk with God – not from the head but from the heart.”

Edwardian, Turn of the Century and The Great War

Mar8

I’ve been spending a lot of my time in the years 1890-1920 for the past week or two, via fiction, nonfiction, a couple of British period TV series, and my history class. It’s a fascinating time period. I’ll tell you what I’ve been watching and reading, and then I’ll try to share some of what it all made me ponder and put together in my mind.

Fiction:
She Walks in Beauty by Siri Mitchell. I’m not sure exactly when this novel is set, about 1890 or the turn of the century. I read this one because it won the INSPY award for historical fiction this last year. It’s about New York City debutante, Clara Carter, who becomes the leading belle of the season with a little help from her overbearing aunt and her rich, social climber father. Unfortunately, Clara wasn’t really the “spunky, defiant heroine” that we all love and tend to expect in these sorts of historical romances. She’s a seventeen year old girl who’s been indoctrinated to believe that her only worth lies in her ability to attract a rich husband and restore her family’s honor. As Clara makes her way through the balls, dinner parties, and social visits of her coming out season, she changes very little and allows cultural expectations to mold her and pressure her to become what she actually hates. Only a family tragedy forces her to come to her senses and begin to make decisions that will give her a chance to live a real, authentic life. (The Kindle edition of this one is showing as free right now. Definitely worth your time if you like historical romance.)
After the Dancing Days by Margaret Rostkowski. We read this YA novel for my English/History class at homeschool co-op. Annie is a thirteen year old girl living in a small town in Kansas at the end of World War I. As she begins to visit the returning soldiers at the veterans’ hospital where her father works as a doctor, Annie is at first repulsed and frightened by the severely injured men. However, she comes to be friends with them, one in particular, even though her mother is opposed to Annie’s hospital visits and wants her to forget about the war and its consequences.

Nonfiction:
Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America by Linda Lawrence Hunt. Semicolon review here. In this true story of a mother and daughter in 1896 who accepted a wager that saw them walk across the entire continent of North America, I found a couple of women who not afraid to strike out and do something unexpected and unacceptable to many of those in their community. Unfortunately for the two women, the book also tells how they paid a steep price in betrayal and social ostracism for their daring.
The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age by Juliet Nicolson. This book of social history covers the years 1918-1920 and tells lots of little stories, vignettes really, about people in Britain both great and small and their experiences in the aftermath of World War I. The book featured lots of fascinating people that I wish I had time to find out more about:
plastic surgeon Harold GIllies who repaired and reconstructed the faces of thousands of wounded WW I soldiers,
Joseph Enniver, inventor of Pelmanism, a secular program for strengthening of the mind and character,
nurse Edith Cavell, who helped two hundred allied soldiers escape to freedom in Belgium during the war before she was captured and executed by the Germans,
Coco Chanel, the greatest couturier of all time,
Nancy Astor, the American lady who became England’s first woman Member of Parliament, and many more. Look for a post of quotable stories from this book in the near future.

Television:
Lark Rise to Candleford. This series from the BBC is set in rural England just before the turn of the century, c.1895. The story is taken from a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels by author Flora Thimpson. In the novels Ms. Thompson tells about her experience as a young girl getting a job in a post office and seeing the changes that were coming to England as a result of industrialization and the new modes of transportation and communication that were coming into use during the time period. Laura Timmins, the character through whose eyes we see the stories of village life and cultural transformation, is a village girl and as such, much more adaptable than some of the upper class young women in these stories. She’s able to become independent and see the world as one in which she can rise above her circumstances and become an intelligent voice while retaining her femininity and her place in the community.

Downton Abbey. While I was waiting for the DVD’s of the several episodes of Lark RIse to Candleford to get here in the mail, I began watching Downton Abbey, another period piece set in the years just before WW I, from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 to the announcement that England was at war with Germany (1914). Downton Abbey is amazing in its deft characterization of both the upper classes and the their servants, and even the burgeoning middle class gets a nod in the appearance of Lord Grantham’s new heir, Matthew Crawley, a distant cousin who becomes the new heir after the death of a couple of closer relatives in the Titanic tragedy. Lord Grantham has only daughters, three of them, who are of marriageable age, but with very little inheritance to hook a husband since almost all the money in the family is tied up in the estate. The servants in this grand old English family are all intimately involved in family matters as well as in the working out of their own lives and relationships. Downton Abbey is something of a soap opera, but it just manages to transcend that genre because the problems and the issues that make up the plot are very real and identifiable and intriguing, leading to both reflection and a feeling of connection. The characters are appealing, sometimes frustrating, and the dialog is spot on and funny. I loved this series, and I was only sorry to see it end.

I’ll have to leave the pondering and putting together for another post. However, I would recommend any or all of the above for your viewing or reading pleasure.

And The Word . . . Dwelt Among Us

Mar7

The Kimyal people of Papua, Indonesia receive the Bible in their own language:

What a celebration. Do we even begin to know what precious truth God has entrusted to us? “To whom much is given, of him much shall be required.” We in the West are abundantly blessed. God forgive us for the misuse and waste we have perpetrated with the blessing He has given us.

And won’t heaven be grand as we all worship the Lamb together, from every nation and tribe?