Author Archives: Barbara Harper

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About Barbara Harper

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Friday’s Fave Five

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 It’s Friday, time to look back over the blessings of the week with Susanne at Living to Tell the Story and other friends.

After all the busy-ness of the last couple of weeks, this one has been refreshingly relaxing, at least since Sunday. Here are five favorite parts of it.

1. Jesse’s graduation party. We enjoyed visiting with a few friends and then munching on leftover goodies for the next few days. 🙂 Plus after the flurry of housecleaning in preparation for it, it was nice not to have to think about all of that for a few days.

2. Chinese take-out. After the party my son and daughter-in-law offered to pick up Chinese take out for dinner. It was lovely to just crash and relax afterwards.

3. Timothy (baby grandson in the NICU) is at 5 lbs. now! They’ve said going home is “on the horizon.” I think they’re primarily just waiting for his heart-rate drops to stabilize: he’ll have to go 5 days without one before he will be able to go home.

4. Catching up on sleep. Much needed, much appreciated.

5. Catching up on my Feedly account of the blogs I try to keep up with – though I am behind again now. 🙂 But I should be able to catch up again over the weekend.

Hope you have a great Memorial Day weekend!

Book Review: Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal

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Wednesdays-Were-Pretty-NormalWhen Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal by Michael Kelley showed up on a list of Kindle books on sale at the time, the sub-title caught my eye: A Boy, Cancer, and God. Although I’ve wrestled with the truth of God’s allowing suffering many times and come to some kind of peace with it, I still have to go through those truths some times, especially concerning the suffering of a child. Even though I knew this book would be heart-rending and gut-wrenching, I wanted to hear the story and hear how the author dealt with it. I think I am so often drawn to books like this because I know the truths the author has learned are not going to be just armchair theology: they’ve been tested in the extremities of real life, life that isn’t going the way one would have expected or hoped.

The story begins with a visit to the doctor to treat a rash on two and a half year old Joshua, the author’s son. A blood test showed that Joshua had leukemia, with 82% of his blood cells affected. Immediately questions flooded Michael’s stunned mind: the physical (Are you sure? He looks fine! How do we treat this? Is Joshua going to die?) as well as the spiritual (Why, God? Did we do something wrong?).

Michael then tells about Joshua’s three year chemotherapy regimen, the effects of not only the chemotherapy but also the massive amounts of steroids, time in the hospital, the strain of not being able to play with other kids or even go on a fast food playground due his immune system, hair loss, etc. The title comes from the fact that Wednesdays were the day before Joshua’s regular cancer treatments, so he was feeling his best and those days were more normal than the rest.

But most of the book is spent on how the author dealt with his son’s illness and its effects spiritually. Having grown up with his basic needs being met and without any really major problems, he “realized faith had never been hard. It had never been work. But it surely was now.”

“This was a moment when we couldn’t just have faith; we had to choose faith. It had to be as conscious as any other decision….If my family was really going to choose faith, then we would have to come to grips with the fact that there are parts of God and His plan that at best we don’t understand; at worst we don’t even like. We could no longer pick and choose certain parts of our belief system; we had to embrace it all.”

“There is nothing quite like pain to force long-held ideals and beliefs from the comfort of intellectualism into the discomfort of reality and trying to square with them there.”

“Coming to the knowledge that you thought you knew something inside and out and then figuring out you really don’t know it at all is a strange feeling.”

There are some ramifications of cancer in the family that you would expect: pain, financial considerations, hospital time, weariness of working long days and spending long nights with a child who is not feeling well, etc. But the author deals with some that I probably would not have thought of otherwise. One was his own loss of identity. He’d left his job as a pastor to fulfill a dream of writing and speaking while his wife worked full time, but when this happened, she needed to stay with Joshua, so Michael has to find a regular 9-5 office job that he disliked. “I missed my old life. Everything that had made me feel important and significant was gone, and I was facing a crisis of self-identification. I felt poor, not just in the wallet but in my sense of self. Poor is more than a description of a financial state. It’s a state of being. And according to Jesus, being poor is being blessed.” He found comfort in the story of the rich young ruler. “People defined him the same way we define him today – as rich, as young, and as a ruler. Jesus wanted more for him. He wanted to get to this man’s core, to his real self. Selling his possessions would strip this man of his marks of identity. Only by stripping those things away, in that moment of crisis, could he define himself the way Jesus wanted – by his faith.”

One of the concepts that spoke the most to me was the idea of being “between.” When Joshua went into remission, the chemotherapy and everything involved still had to continue, and his father felt like his life was paused, stuck between “the good old days” when everything was normal and the future when everything would hopefully be normal again. A couple of instances in the Bible of God’s ministering to people similarly “stuck” in a “between” time helped, like Paul’s thorn in the flesh and God’s promised grace in II Corinthians 12:9-10 and Jeremiah’s prophesy to Israelites who were going to have to remain in captivity for a number of years (Jeremiah 29, especially verse 11).

“The good parts of living “in between” are many. Such a life makes you realize more and more that this earth is not your home, and you consequently begin to long for heaven. A life between develops perseverance and character that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. And a life between forces you to a dependence on Jesus that you might not have chosen except for the pain.”

“This was going to be a long journey. A journey of years. There was to be no immediate relief for the pain, but as Paul discovered, that didn’t mean the Lord was absent.”

“The days when we were at the end of our rope were also the days when the sustaining grace and strength of God were to be most visible. He did not promise us that the pain would go away; but he did promise that in the midst of it, His grace would be all that we needed. We were left with the hard choice of believing that to be true. We had to choose to trust not in our own ability to be patient with a child on steroids, or even to get out of bed in the morning, but in the One who promised He would be strong in our stead. But the great news of the gospel is that the power to sustain us comes from Jesus, who knows even better than we do what it is like to have one foot in heaven and one foot on earth. Sustaining grace for life between comes from One who knows both the glory and the pain.”

“[Jesus] was more than capable of eradicating cancer from my little boy’s body. But He didn’t. And maybe that’s because, in His wisdom, He knew that doing so immediately and publicly would be, in some way, short-changing the ultimate healing He wanted to accomplish. Living in the meantime has brought to light diseases I didn’t know I had. It’s brought to light my shallowness…my idealistic view of faith…my dependence on circumstances [and more]. Had Jesus chosen to heal Joshua immediately and pluck us from the grip of the meantime, these diseases would have remained firmly implanted in my heart and soul…From that perspective, Jesus’ refusal to heal immediately is really His commitment to longer, better, more complete healing.”

“Hope is the confidence that even during the meantime God is still busy.”

“It’s not that I thought God was using my son as some sort of object lesson to me: that wasn’t it at all. It was more the sense that, whether we knew it or not, the Lord was using cancer to break up unplowed ground in my heart.”

“I didn’t have the luxury of a passive faith any more…Real faith is active. And it’s hard. Faith is something you have to fight for. It’s something you have to choose. And you have to fight and choose in the face of evidence rather than with the evidence on your side.”

I have a multitude more quotes marked, but I probably should not reprint that much of the book. 🙂

There were a couple of places I didn’t quite agree with the author’s interpretation of a passage, but I don’t feel the need to delineate those here.

I didn’t realize, when I chose this as one of my books for the TBR challenge, or when I started reading it some time back, that I’d be smack in the middle of it when my son and daughter-in-law’s child arrived 11 weeks early. Though the health situations for a preemie and a cancer patient are very different, parts of the book especially ministered to me at this time, especially the sections about life being “on hold” in a “between” phase of a long medical situation.

Overall I would highly recommend this book not only to those with children who are ill in some way, but to anyone who wrestles with why God allows suffering.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Book Review: Courageous

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CourageousCourageous is a novelization by Randy Alcorn of a movie by the same name written by  Alex and Stephen Kendrick and produced by the same church that produced Facing the Giants and Fireproof. I’ve never seen the film, but when the audiobook was on sale I decided to check it out.

The basic theme of the book is encouraging fathers to be men of integrity and to take the responsibility to raise their children in a godly manner as well as mentoring other young men. The story follows four men who are policemen and a fifth who is not on the force but becomes a good friend. Law enforcement has to be one of the toughest jobs on families, so I can see why the authors chose that profession for their characters.

A couple of the fathers are on the right track but need guidance and wisdom and maybe a little course correction, at least for one of them, before major trouble hits. One means well but is alienating his son with his lack of involvement and interest. Another fathered a child in a former relationship but hasn’t seen mother or child in years. When a tragedy strikes one of them, it sends repercussions throughout their whole group.

A subplot involves a gang that is wreaking havoc in the town of Albany, Georgia, their various encounters with the police force, and one fatherless wannabe gang member in particular.

Though the premise of the story is a good one, the writing is driven more by the points the author wants to make than by the plot or the characters, an accusation often aimed at Christian fiction. Nevertheless, the points are good ones, and if you think of it more as an extended parable or sermon illustration than a novel it’s a little easier to take.

I enjoyed a phone interview with Alcorn at the end of the audiobook in which he discussed the ramifications of expanding a two-hour screen play into a full length novel, when usually the process goes the opposite direction. I appreciated, too, the point he made that a film will reach many people, but when people read a book, they’re spending 10 or more hours with it and thus the principles involved have a longer time to affect the reader’s thinking.

One little quibble I had with the story involved the resolution that the fathers all eventually sign. One father came up with it after studying out what the Bible had to say about being a godly father, and when he told the others about it, they wanted to sign it, and eventually word of it and promotion for it went out to the whole church. The resolution sounds like a good thing in itself, but like so many of these kinds of things, the emphasis shifts to it rather than the principles behind it. After the resolution, instead of a character saying, “I can’t do this…” or “I must do this…” because of Biblical instruction or principle, they say I can’t or I must do such and such “because I signed the resolution.” When I was composing this post in my head before sitting down to write, my mind went to various scenarios where we tend to shift our focus to the tool rather than the reason for it: starting a Bible study program to aid in reading and understanding the Bible, and then getting caught up in the tenets of the program rather then delving deeper into the Bible, or having an accountability group to encourage one another in a certain area, and then experiencing a subtle change in our thinking to want to look good in the eyes of the members rather than growing in holiness before God. Small groups are not my favorite thing, but I do acknowledge they can be beneficial, and I acknowledge that they work best if everyone in the group participates, yet that participation doesn’t mean that every member must say something every meeting. I tend to say something if I have something to say, but sometimes I’m processing, sometimes I’m still on the point made ten minutes ago when the rest of the group has moved on, etc. Once when I hadn’t said anything in a couple of meetings, our group leader spoke to my husband and wondered if he should call on me during the meetings – perhaps he thought I was shy and needed the encouragement to speak out (though calling on a shy person in public would NOT be an encouragement to them!) My husband, thankfully, said that would probably not be the thing to do. Then a few days later, our leader’s wife called to ask me to do something for an upcoming activity, in what seemed a subtle attempt to “get Barbara involved,” when I was involved and participating all along, even if I wasn’t saying anything. That kind of thing puts pressure on a person to feels she has to dream up something to say every week so people don’t think she’s unspiritual, which is totally fake and, again, turns the focus on the tool (getting everyone to participate by making everyone speak in small group) rather than on the reason the group is meeting in the first place.

Please forgive the rabbit trail. 🙂 I don’t have a problem with the resolution itself (or any of these other tools), but with this tendency to focus on the tool rather than using the tool to help us focus on the Lord. I did also appreciate a point Alcorn made in the phone interview, that this book and film are not “the” tools, but just some tools that churches or groups could use. Most churches who preach and teach anything about godly fatherhood would incorporate the principles in the book, but it helps some to have a vehicle like this in which to do so, and that’s primarily what the authors wanted to do: to provide a film and book that would be food for thought and and encouragement to people in their walk with God.

I finished the book a week or two ago but had wanted to see the film before writing this review. However, there is no telling when I might get time for that, so I wanted to go ahead and get this review up. I thought the audiobook narrator, Roger Mueller, did a wonderful job reading the book, but I could have done without the dramatic music between chapters.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Friday’s Fave Five

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 It’s Friday, time to look back over the blessings of the week with Susanne at Living to Tell the Story and other friends.

Wow, it’s been another whirlwind week. Hopefully next week will be a “normal” one. But overall it has been a good week, and here are five favorite parts of it:

1. More progress for Timothy. I decided to go ahead and share my grandson’s name, since his dad has on his blog (he has some helpful posts there about dealing with life in the NICU). He turned one month old this week! The first part of the week was rough, with more heart-rate drops than I think he’d had in a day to date, but as of yesterday he was having only 1 or 2 a day and he is in a crib now instead of an incubator.

2. Jesse’s graduation from Community College with an Associate’s degree.

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Plus, we’ve been planning a graduation party for him this coming weekend, so we didn’t have any kind of celebration planned for graduation night, but Jason and Mittu brought over a cake and balloon and made some goodies. It was just the right touch to celebrate on his actual graduation night.

3. Mother’s Day. My family always makes it a special day, especially my husband. Grilled steaks, baked potatoes, corn on the cob, and some sweet and thoughtful gifts, as well as having the family all together (my son in RI was there via Face Time), made for a great day.

4. Projects done. For some time now I’ve been wanting to make a DVD for Jim’s mom of a slide show of photos set to music, something I’d never done before (either the slide show to music or the DVD), and I decided to try to do it for Mother’s Day. I thought seeing the photos bigger on the TV screen would be helpful to her. Somehow (thank God for His help and direction!) I was able to figure out the film part, and Jim was able to burn it to a DVD. Then I had wanted to make a scrapbook of Jesse’s school portraits and class photos for his high school graduation two years ago, but wasn’t able to, so I decided to try to do that for a graduation party we’re having for him tomorrow. Got it mostly done last night (now just to clean house and make food for it!).

5. Found gift cards. Jim had given me a couple of gift cards for Michael’s at Christmas, but I haven’t been able to find them. I just came across them this week.

I apologize for not being around much this week, either here or on your blogs. Between regular life, caring for Jim’s mom, hospital visits to see Timothy, graduation, Mother’s Day, and these projects, as well as preparing for Jesse’s party tomorrow, my time at the computer has only come in small bits lately. But after tomorrow there are no extra events on the calendar for a while, and no new projects to do (at least that I know of right now), so hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with you then.

Happy Friday!

Laudable Linkage

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Here are a few interesting reads discovered in the last couple of weeks:

The Cheerleader. If something can be heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time, it is this testimony of a mom injured in the tornadoes that took her home and children.

“God’s Not Dead” and the Angry Atheist Professor: That Was Not My Experience, HT to Challies. I’ve not seen the movie, but Ann has a review of it here. She says as well that the atheists in the movie tended to be typecast as stereotypical meanies, and the film has some issues, but overall it has a good message.

Before We Die and After, Too. Things we want to accomplish before we go may not be the typical “bucket list” experiences.

How Can Moms Deal With the Distractions of Social Media?

What to Do in Those “I Can’t Handle It” Moments.

The Church and the LGBT Community: Is There a Way Forward?

Happy Saturday!

Fridays Fave Five

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 It’s Friday, time to look back over the blessings of the week with Susanne at Living to Tell the Story and other friends.

It’s been a whirlwind week. Here are five favorite parts of it:

1. Progress for my little grandson in the NICU. I’m going to have to come up with a nickname for him! I hope you don’t mind hearing about him every week, because that’s likely to continue. 🙂 He is still having episodes of his heart rate dropping and forgetting to breathe, but not as many as last week. They’ve been lowering his oxygen and yesterday removed his nasal cannula completely. They’ve been lowering the temperature in his incubator to see if he can regulate his own body temperature. His weight has been up and down but he has gained 8 ounces since birth 3 weeks ago. He can wear clothes now! And they may start trying to feed him a little by mouth next week to see how he does. Plus he gets cuter every day, in my unbiased opinion. 🙂 It’s really cute to see him smiling in his sleep and sometimes even when he is awake. We know that’s probably just a reflex right now, but we’ll take it as a sign that he is happy. Please do keep praying – they say the journey with preemies is one of ups and downs rather than steady progress. Thanks so much for your care and concern and prayers so far!

2. Baby gifts. Our church usually does a baby shower for expectant moms, but my grandson came the week before his. Since his mom was still recovering and going to the hospital to be with him as much as possible, what the church decided to do was go ahead and gather presents for him, in case they needed them soon, and then some time in the future they’ll have a brunch and maybe a diaper shower or something. We brought home some of the presents that had accumulated so far and my son and daughter-in-law came over one evening and opened them here. It was fun to see them, and we so appreciate people’s thoughtfulness.

3. BBQ burgers. I love grilling season. 🙂 My husband tried the sous vide for them this time so he could do some thicker burgers than he could with just the grill.

4. A new hose. Sometimes it’s the little things. 🙂 With planting flower beds and pots a few weeks ago, we’re watering more, and rediscovered that one garden hose was in bad shape, spraying from several places besides the opening. I kept forgetting about it completely when I was at stores where they sold such things, and finally got one this week, along with a nozzle that I can change from a shower for the plants to a stronger stream when rinsing pollen and dust off the porch.

5. Dusting. Not one of my favorite activities per se, but I do like the results. It had really piled up with all the busy-ness of the last few weeks, to the point where I was embarrassed. When the house is unkempt, I feel unkempt, and it was a good feeling to tackle that this week.

Just yesterday I didn’t think I’d have five “faves” to share today, until I started jotting some down last night. That’s one blessing of doing this weekly: what we think of as an average, “not much happening” kind of week turns out to be a very blessed one when we stop to think about it, and that in turn reminds us to thank the Lord for those blessings.

Book Review: The Great Divorce

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the-great-divorceI first picked up The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis some years ago when I found it on sale in a bookstore. I wasn’t sure what kind of divorce the title was talking about, and the description on the front about a bus ride from hell to heaven seemed really weird, but it was Lewis and it was on sale, so I got it. But it sat around for all these years unopened. The TBR challenge of reading things that have been unread on our shelves spurred me to work this book in this year.

Lewis explains in the preface that the title and concept came in response to William Blake’s book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Lewis explains that there can be no such marriage.

“We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks in two, and each of those into two again, and at each road you must make a decision. Even on a biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but also from other good.”

“Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it.”

To illustrate some of those fork-in-the-road choices as well as the opposite directions of heaven and hell, Lewis developed this fantasy of a group of people on a bus ride from hell to visit heaven. When they arrive, they are surprised to find that they are transparent and that contact with solid objects is painful (“It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.”) They are called ghosts, whereas the inhabitants who come to meet them are called Solid People or Spirits. Most of the people decide not to stay for various reasons, despite the Spirits encouraging them to put away whatever is holding them back and enter into joy.

The cleric who does not believe in absolutes refuses to believe in them still: “For me there is no such thing as a final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow through the mind, must it not? ‘Prove all things’…to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.” The Spirit speaking with him, a friend he knew in life, responds, “If that were true…how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for.” The artist prefers his painting to reality. “Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to the love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.” The overbearing wife wants to continue “managing” her husband. The mother who has developed motherly love into idolatry would rather take her son from heaven back to hell with her than lessen her focus from him to love God. “Mother love…is the highest and holiest feeling in human nature,” she says, and is told, “No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.” The man who lives for manipulating people with his self-pity is told, “Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenseless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed?”

But a few are willing to have their besetting sins taken and killed, and they grow more “solid.”

“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. ”

“Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.”

Lewis, or the narrator, finds George MacDonald, someone he has greatly looked up to and learned from, who then becomes a guide and teacher for him, similar to Dante and Virgil in The Divine Comedy.

Lewis assures in the preface that he is not writing to propose anything about what heaven might be like: he is simply using this scenario as a vehicle to discuss truths.

There are a few similar themes as are found in The Last Battle, the last book in the Narnia series written about 10-11 years later: the idea of moving “further up and further in” and the effusive joy of heaven.

I don’t know if Lewis believed in a purgatory or if he was just using the idea of the dead getting “second chances” to illustrate that many of them would not take it. The Bible says in Hebrews 9:27 that “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment,” so I would have a problem with this book promoting the idea of purgatory, but I think the whole second chance scenario is just part of the plot device.

One character in the book says, “Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”  Again, I don’t know if the idea of hell being just a state of mind was part of Lewis’s own philosophy or if it was just the nature of it in this as a fantasy, but the Bible does speak of hell with literal terminology.

Overall this was quite a fascinating and thought-provoking read.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Friday’s Fave Five

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 It’s Friday, time to look back over the blessings of the week with Susanne at Living to Tell the Story and other friends. Here are five favorite parts of the last week:

1. Stability. My little grandson in the NICU was having a lot of trouble earlier this week with apnea and bradycardia (episodes of breathing rate and heart rate slowing down). They put him on a CPAP machine, and the episodes are infrequent now. They have no way to predict how long he’ll be on it: they say some preemie babies have these episodes almost until their original due date, while others don’t. Otherwise he is doing well.

2. A finished internship. My youngest had to complete an internship for his associate’s degree this semester. He had to get a certain number of hours in, and I was concerned because he did not find an internship until a few weeks into the semester. But he got it finished and turned in all the paperwork yesterday. That is such a relief!

3. Lesser storms than predicted. Much of the country has experienced severe weather this week. We had thunderstorms one night with predictions of hail and a tornado warning, but thankfully none materialized in our area. My heart goes out to many who lost loved ones or property.

4. Ibuprofen and Icy Hot patches. I did something to my lower back earlier this week – I am not sure what. But those two products made it bearable and enabled me to function. It’s almost completely back to normal now.

5. Good food. Two favorites: Jim made teriyaki chicken on Sunday, and yesterday I made one of my favorite things for lunch, a grilled cheese sandwich with leftover meat loaf. Yum!

Hope you’ve had a great week as well!

Book Review: My Man Jeeves

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JeevesBertie Wooster is an amiable but not terribly bright English gentleman (as he says, “I’m a bit short on brain myself; the old bean would appear to have been constructed more for ornament than for use, don’t you know”). His “man,” Jeeves, is the quintessential unobtrusive English valet with not only “genius for preserving a trouser-crease,” but also a penchant for solving the various problems of Bertie and his friends.

My Man Jeeves by P. D. Wodehouse is 1919 a collection of short stories involving the fictional pair, but there are a few stories in the middle about Reggie Pepper, who doesn’t seem to have any connection with either of them. The plot lines are similar in all the stories, though: someone has some kind of problem (often another English gentleman whose source of financial support is threatening to cut him off if he doesn’t jump through certain hoops that he doesn’t want to, but some of the stories involve romantic troubles as well), appeals for help, and then Jeeves or Reggie comes up with some kind of scheme that usually involves some kind of deception that usually backfires in some comic way.

The Jeeves and Wooster books are good for a light-hearted read, especially if you like English comedy, one reason I decided to pick this up when Carrie listed it as her Reading to Know Classics Book Club selection for April. Unfortunately, the first few stories sounded very familiar, and I found that some of them were rewritten from Carry On, Jeeves (linked to my review), the only other Jeeves book I’ve read. That was irritating, but there was enough new material and enough I’d forgotten from the previous book that it wasn’t a total wash.

I have to admit that the plots got tiresome after a while, but Wodehouse’s writing is delightful. I enjoyed the narrative quite a lot and had fun picking up on certain expressions and idioms (I don’t know if the British still use these, but apparently being “in the soup” in a bad thing while being “full of beans” is good). Here are some examples:

“I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare — or, if not, it’s some equally brainy lad — who says that it’s always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.”

Of an awkward gathering: “And so the merry party began. It was one of those jolly, happy, bread-crumbling parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all.”

“That’s always the way in this world. The chappies you’d like to lend money to won’t let you, whereas the chappies you don’t want to lend it to will do everything except actually stand you on your head and lift the specie out of your pockets.”

“Absent treatment seemed the touch. I gave it to him in waves.”

“I wasn’t particularly surprised to meet Bobbie at the club next day looking about as merry and bright as a lonely gum-drop at an Eskimo tea-party.”

The full text of this book is available online here. I listened to the audiobook, read very nicely by Simon Prebble.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

This also completes one of my requirements for the  Back to the Classics Challenge hosted by Karen at Books and Chocolate.

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Laudable Linkage

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It has been a while since I’ve been able to share some of the interesting reading I have come across recently. Hope some of this is of interest to you!

A neat study on True Woman about the “I am” statements referring to God and those referring to us.

Smilingly Leading You to Hell. Sadly, some of the most appealing speakers don’t always have the best messages.

The Assumption We Cannot Afford on the need to teach the Bible and encourage others to study it for themselves. Excellent.

Missing the Forest for the Trees. “The Bible is not just a spiritual search engine.”

In the Heat of the Moment, dealing with rampant emotions.

Anger: Giving In to the Enemy.

Let’s Stop Forgiving Those Who Don’t Want Forgiveness. This has long been my stance on this.

Help! My Kids Are Looking at Porn! Advice for how to handle that.

Authentic worship, hands down. “Authentic worship means to me exactly what it means to you: the freedom to worship as the Lord leads. I have traveled the length of the denominational spectrum….It was a long trip through myriad worship styles, and participation was not always optional. My hands are at my sides for the same reason yours are thrown in the air: because I am free – free from the expectations of any of my fellow worshippers, free to worship in whatever posture the Spirit leads.  The truth is, I do occasionally raise my hands, but never when told to by a worship leader or a lyric. Because of my history, nothing could be more inauthentic, nothing less free.” This spoke to me on many levels. The churches I have attended are not usually physically demonstrative, but worship is sometimes “commanded” in other ways (“Turn to your neighbor and say…” or “Pray this right now” or any number of others things dictated from the pulpit). There is a difference between leading worship and manipulating worship.

How Mothers Can Worship In the Midst of Inconvenience.

 What Winter Trees Know About Singing. Lovely, lovely post about handling children’s questions without squashing their innocence and wonder.

Ten Lessons From a Hospital Bed.

Always Apologize First, HT to nikkipolani. “Apologizing first is the bucket of water which douses the flames threatening to burn bridges between wife and husband or father and children.”

100 Ways to Thank a Teacher. Neat ideas for end of the year teacher gifts – or any time you want to express appreciation to a teacher.

Happy Saturday!