The Pilgrim’s Inn

Posted on October 27, 2026 by Barbara Harper

The Pilgrim’s Inn is the second book in the Elliot family trilogy. For some reason, the British version has a different title, The Herb of Grace.

In the first book, The Bird in the Tree, family matriarch Lucilla Elliot fought hard to reunite her son, George, with his estranged wife, Nadine. When Nadine fell in love with Lucilla’s grandson, David, reconciliation looked impossible. (It sounds weird that a woman would fall in love with her husband’s nephew, but apparently she was much younger than her husband and a little older than David.) This is a spoiler alert if you haven’t read that book, but eventually David and Nadine broke up and Nadine went back to her husband.

As The Pilgrim’s Inn opens, seven years have passed. George and Nadine had a set of twins in addition to the three children they had before. David had gone off to war (WW2) and came back a broken man in need of quiet and rest.

Though David and Nadine did the right thing, their hearts aren’t all the way in the right place yet. They’re not doing anything inappropriate. Lucilla feels George and Nadine would have a better chance in the country rather than London (where Nadine wants to live). Lucilla manipulates circumstances to get George and the children to view an old inn that’s for sale, the Herb of Grace. An older lady had run it, but it was getting beyond her capabilities now. George and the children fall in love with the place, as Lucilla knew they would. Nadine ends up agreeing.

Their oldest son, Ben, who is a pre-teen or young teenager, discovers the house was a “pilgrim’s inn”–a hostel run by the monks of a local abbey. The family lives there and restores the place, thinking at a later point they’ll open it to guests. But then a man and woman who live in a boat and say they are father and daughter come along and help with the repairs while taking their meals at the inn. Nadine is drawn to the young woman, Annie-Laurie, in a maternal way that she hasn’t felt with her own children. “She was not an unloving mother, but she was not naturally a lover of children, and she was so desperately tired” (p. 35, Kindle version). Everyone feels there’s something a little off with Annie-Laurie and her “father,” but their story doesn’t come out til later.

Meanwhile, David runs into a young woman named Sally Adair at a London party. Sally’s father is an artist, and she recognizes David from one of her father’s paintings. She is drawn to David but senses that his heart isn’t free. Plus, he is a famous actor, and she feels herself too plain and ordinary.

Sally maligned herself when she said that she had no intellect. It was true that at school she had never passed any examination by anything except the skin of her teeth, but when it came to the business of living she was a clever woman. She liked everyone she met, and she enjoyed everything she did so intensely that her relationships and her activities were touched with that spark of light that men call genius. She was not an artist in the accepted sense of the word, but when she cooked a meal or tidied a room she was yet unmistakably her father’s daughter. A room arranged by Sally, a meal she had cooked, were as unforgettable as her father’s pictures. Imaginative, deft touches here and there were like the glimmer of light on water that without it would have been opaque and dull (p. 8).

When Sally’s father books them at an inn called the Herb of Grace for a few weeks, she’s surprised to learn that the children are the same ones she saw regularly at the grocer’s in London, and that David is staying with his grandmother nearby.

The inn, as well as Lucllla’s house, Damrosehay, are almost characters in themselves. Much is made of the fact that people feel safe and welcomed there, not just from the residents, but from the houses.

There’s a lot that takes place in the woods as well as several mentions of The Wind in the Willows.

This is the second book of Goudge’s I have read which had child characters who were unruly and self-willed, yet somehow supposedly adorable. It doesn’t usually work like that in real life.

Though I felt Lucilla came across as manipulative in this book (even though meaning well and having everyone’s good in mind), and a couple of characters were way more intuitive than anyone I’ve known in real life, I loved this story.

All of Elizabeth’s books seem to have a theme. This one appeared to be the importance of home, especially in the aftermath of WW2, still dealing with shortages and healing from the war and what it did to individuals and families :

It was homemaking that mattered. Every home was a brick in the great wall of decent living that men erected over and over again as a bulwark against the perpetual flooding in of evil. But women made the bricks, and the durableness of each civilization depended upon their quality, and it was no good weakening oneself for the brick-making by thinking too much about the flood (p. 58).

A few other quotes that stood out to me:

Funny thing, memory . . . Like a storeroom full of cupboards. Something makes one of the doors fly open, and out falls a lot of stuff you didn’t even know you had (p. 254).

Excessive shame was just as distorting to the judgment as excessive arrogance (p. 342).

I know of no better incentive for the building of a decent world than the possession of children who must live in the world you’ve built (p. 360).

I listened to the audiobook which was nicely read by Elisabeth Martin, except she had an annoying habit of pronouncing words that end with a “d” sound as if they ended with a “t.” You don’t realize how many words end with a “d” until someone does that. Plus, this is an English book, and she is American. Though she reads the narration in an American accent, she does a great job with the different voices of the characters. I also borrowed the ebook via LIbby to look up some quotations and read a few sections in more depth.

Unfortunately, the third book in the series, The Heart of the Family, doesn’t come out in audiobook form until next week. But I look forward to listening the last book of Goudge’s Eliot trilogy.

Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge

Posted on October 21, 2026 by Barbara Harper

I had not intended to go on an Elizabeth Goudge rabbit trail. But someone recommended her novel, The Dean’s Watch, to me. I enjoyed that and went on to read The Scent of Water, then the first of the Elliot family trilogy, The Bird in the Tree.

Though Elizabeth’s writings are definitely from a Christian worldview, there were some odd things in her writing I couldn’t quite place. I wanted to learn more about her and where she was coming from. Somehow I came across Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge by Christine Rawlins.

Rawlins’ title is a play on Elizabeth’s autobiography, The Joy of the Snow, which primarily is about happy times even though she experienced “loneliness, war, childlessness, mental illness, and breakdown.” Elizabeth considered herself “fortunate” and even “spoilt,” and a “determined optimism and thankfulness was a part of her Christian faith,” so she downplayed her troubles in life. But she did not downplay dark times in her novels. She felt “a vital part of the soul’s journey as she saw it was to counter the adversary by focusing on the light above.”

For whatever her life contained, whatever she had to cope with or to live without, she strove to find light in the darkness, and to create comfort and hope for others from her own despair: sharing her winter experiences with her readers, but always taking them beyond the snow, into a place of potential joy (p. 14).

For some reason, any biographical information I have found about Elizabeth begins with the houses and cities she lived in. That’s a bit frustrating when I want to know about her, not where she lived. Yet many of her books are set in the places where she used to live, and even the houses in some of her books are based on houses she lived in.

Elizabeth was born in 1900 in England. She was the daughter of an Anglican theologian who mainly taught. Her mother was injured in a bicycle accident while pregnant with Elizabeth and was something of an invalid most of her adult life. Elizabeth suffered a nervous breakdown after trying to fulfill the social obligations of her father’s position as well as take care of her mother. When her father died, she and her mother moved to a small home.

She had gone to an art college, which she enjoyed, but didn’t learn any means to support herself. She had developed a bad stutter as a girl, which she later outgrew; but it prevented her from teaching or nursing. Plus she wasn’t physically strong enough for nursing.

She wrote some plays which were performed, but a publisher she submitted them to told her to go write a novel. Her first book was not a success, but subsequent ones were. She eventually wrote eighteen novels, eight children’s books, four nonfiction books, and several magazine articles, as well as contributing to a number of anthologies. Her children’s book, The Little White Horse, earned her the Carnegie medal, and Green Dolphin Country was made into a movie titled Green Dolphin Street.

Many of her books have themes of suffering, sacrifice, and love, in the sense that love isn’t just a feeling but is often costly.

From the first, Elizabeth’s novels were always a rather curious mixture-of everyday modern life; happy endings; characters wrestling with problems; a strong sense of place; and often, a thread of history impacting on succeeding generations. Add to these, an awareness of other worlds; a dash of myth, magic and fairytale; and increasingly, a powerful thread of her Christian faith holding the whole thing together (p. 252).

She uses a lot of symbolism in her books as well. By modern standards of more subtle symbolism, she can sometimes seem a little heavy-handed with it.

She had some odd ideas about God as she grew up. Thankfully, she was able to discuss them with her father, who set her thinking back on the right course. But at some point she became enamored of Christian mysticism. I’m finding that’s a bigger subject than I’ve had time to look at in much depth, but it seems to have an emphasis on experiencing God rather than dogma and rules, and viewing Scripture symbolically. While we do need to go beyond dogma to know God personally, and while some Scripture is symbolic, I think this emphasis on the experiential can lend itself to not being theologically precise, which I think accounts for some of the oddness in Elizabeth’s work.

She was also “interested in ESP and saw this as one of the many ways of God revealing himself” (p. 636). I can’t recall this coming out in the few books of her that I have read.

Rawlins doesn’t say how she became interested in Elizabeth’s work, but she’s extremely knowledgeable about it. She kind of synthesizes Elizabeth’s writing, sharing something about one of her houses from her autobiography and then the fictional account of the house in one of her novels, and then doing the same with themes, her often-used symbols, etc. Though I found some of this interesting when I was familiar with the books she mentioned, the stringing together of long quotes grew a little tedious at times. The paper copy of the book runs over 700 pages.

Rawlins also includes a lot of references to “thinkers” of Elizabeth’s day–perhaps to justify her thoughts, or couch them within the times. But I could have done without so much of that.

Though I would have preferred a more condensed version of Goudge’s life that was better put-together, I did learn more about her and her thinking. I wouldn’t take my theology from her writing. But I think she can be read with discernment with overarching Christian themes in view while setting aside the more mystical qualities.

Things We Cannot Keep: Review and Giveaway

Posted on October 15, 2026 by Barbara Harper

In the novel Things We Cannot Keep by Amanda Cox, Tess Holcomb fled from an abusive home environment and changed her name. She was taken in by a kind elderly brother and sister. The man, Amos, taught her how to repair watches. When Tess became an adult, she started her own business: Timeless, a shop that restores family heirlooms, from timepieces to art to furniture to dollhouses. She enjoys hearing the stories behind the pieces.

Tess has built her life in routine, anonymity, and her carefully curated group of coworkers. She tries to stay out of the public eye. But then a zealous office manager leaks a story about one of their pieces to the news.

The next things she knows, Tess receives a package at the shop but addressed to her old name, Teresa Baker. In it is an antique pocket watch, a heap of money, and a note asking her to clean and repair the watch and try to find its rightful owner.

Tess can do the cleaning and repairs, but she has no idea how to go about finding the owner with so little information to go on.

But then someone comes back into her life that she has been avoiding for eighteen years. He seems to want to make amends, but she doesn’t know if she can trust him. Yet he seems to be able to help with the mysterious watch.

Discovering the watch’s history will require Tess to step out of her comfortable routine, try many new things, and learn to trust again–all things she is not sure she can do. But the watch’s story may lead to her own healing.

There’s so much more I wish I could say about this book, but I don’t want to give away any more of the story. I’ll just say that I loves Tess’s journey. We can’t change our pasts, and some of the people who wronged us may or may not change. But we can change our perspective.

Some of the quotes that stood out to me:

Until this moment, she hadn’t fully appreciated just how generous her clients had been–to share your history was to offer up a piece of yourself. Even if she had something worth sharing, did she have the capacity to let people experience it alongside her? (p. 91).

It was a vulnerable thing, holding out a remorseful heart, waiting to see what the other party might do with it (p. 125).

When you can’t control your situation, you can control yourself (p. 137).

Maybe he realized that in the face of injustice, he had the power to push back. He didn’t have to be the victim in the story. He could be the hero. His life could be about more than himself (p. 166).

A story doesn’t need to be pain-free to be beautiful. Though her mind accepted the concept, her heart wasn’t so sure (p. 175).

People like to say forgiveness is for you, not the other person–that it sets you free from the hold they have on your life. They’re not wrong, I suppose. But so often those platitudes skip over how incredibly hard it can be. To see beyond the mistakes and offenses to view them as a whole person. And to see yourself as more than the wounds you carry. To let go of the pain and leave space for God to work, knowing he wants redemption and healing for all involved.

I accidentally pre-ordered two copies of this book. Unlike Amazon, the publisher doesn’t tell you that you previously ordered this item. They just assume you want another one. So I’d like to give one away. If you’d like to enter a drawing for a giveaway of a paperback copy of this book, just leave a comment on this post. I’ll count all comments as entries unless you tell me you are not interested in the giveaway. Unfortunately, due to shipping costs, I can only mail it to US addresses. A week from today, I’ll use the Random Number Generator to choose a winner.

(I often link up with some of these bloggers.)

Update: The giveaway is closed. The winner is Greenpumpkin!

Novels About Books, Bookshops, and Libraries

Posted on October 13, 2026 by Barbara Harper

A couple of weeks ago, My writing critique group opened with an icebreaker question about favorite novels that dealt with books or were set in bookshops or libraries. Since reading is one of my favorite pastimes, I thought that might make for a fun blog post as well.

The first few are Christian fiction (titles link to my reviews).

Hope Between the Pages by Pepper Basham. This dual-time novel is set in one of my favorite places to visit, The Biltmore House in Asheville, NC, and in the library, my favorite room there. In 1915, Sadie, the resident library servant overhears a guest speaking about books. He seemed to love them as much as she does. Servants were to remain “invisible,” so she can’t speak to him directly. She leaves a few books she thinks he would like on one of the library tables. He thanks her by leaving a note for the “Library Fairy,” beginning a longtime correspondence.

In modern time, her granddaughter, Clara, owns a bookstore in Biltmore Village. The shop needs repairs and her uncle wants her to sell to a conglomerate. In searching for the missing deed, she finds a box of her grandmother’s with notes addressed to the “Library Fairy.” She learns things about her family that she never knew but has more questions, setting her on a journey of discovery.

The British Booksellers by Kristy Cambron. Amos Darby and Charlotte Terrington are secret childhood friends with a love for books. But she was an earl’s daughter and he was a tenant farmer’s son, so there was no hope for anything more between them. He goes to fight in WWI and comes back scarred. She is now widowed with a daughter. They open rival book shops near each other and have to work together to help each other and their neighbors survive what’s called the “Forgotten Blitz” or Coventry Blitz” of WWII.

The Island Bookshop by Roseanna M. White. Kennedy has a career she loves in D.C., but when her sister falls from a ladder in NC, Kennedy returns home to help her and run their grandmother’s bookshop. She knows she can’t avoid Wes–the man she used to love but who married her best friend, Britta. Britta has passed away but Kennedey feels she knows too many of their secrets to ever have a relationship with Wes beyond acquaintances. When Kennedy discovers a different name on the lease than their grandmother’s, she goes searching through records in the attic. She finds surprising news about her grandmother’s immigration from Croatia during WWII and the difficulties she encountered.

The Orchard House by Heidi Chiavaroli.This one is not a full-out Christian fiction, but there were references to forgiveness, faith, and yielding to God. The Orchard House was the name of one of Louisa May Alcott’s family homes and the one where she wrote Little Women. The bare bones of this plot are based on facts: a woman wrote to Louisa asking about information concerning her brother, whom Louisa had tended while working in a Civil War hospital. The author imagined their correspondence and relationship growing. In the modern day story, two girls find their letters and seek to learn more while dealing with their own problems.

Dear Mr. Knightley by Katherine Reay. Samantha (Sam) has been brought up in the foster care system. At one home, she discovered classic books and found them a refuge. She’s offered a grant to go to graduate school by an anonymous donor who goes by “Mr. Knightley” (a character in Jane Austen’s Emma). His only stipulation is that she write to him occasionally and tell him how she’s doing. Her letters become “one-sided soul purgings,” since she doesn’t think she’ll ever meet him in person. Plus they are full of literary references. Many of Katherine’s earliest books were, but the farther she went, the more elements she included that I didn’t like. So I don’t read her any more, but this book shines.

The Christmas Book Flood by Roseanna M. White. Jolabokaflod is an Icelandic tradition that translates to “Christmas Book Flood.” It began in 1944 near the end of WWII. Due to shortages, books were the main gifts. A tradition began Christmas night of people reading the books they had gotten for Christmas, often while enjoying hot chocolate. Sounds like a great idea to me!

Here are some secular choices:

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson is a fictional story about the actual Pack-Horse Librarians, who would take donated books by horse or mule to people in remote regions of the Appalachian mountains during the Depression era. Another aspect of this book is the “blue people” of Kentucky whose skin had a recessive gene which colored their skin. There were a few bad words and one scene I didn’t like, but overall it was an interesting story.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Germans captured the Channel Islands during WWII. When one group is accidentally caught out after curfew, they make up a literary society that they’d met for. But now they have to meet for real with a German chaperone, who eventually leaves them on their own. They find that books help pass the time, draw them together, and encourage each other. After the war, one of them writes to a newspaper columnist for information about a book, telling a little about their society. Curious, she wants to know more. So she travels over to get to know the people in their book society. Unfortunately, there is a smattering of bad words, including the Lord’s name taken in vain.But otherwise, this is a charming book. And the movie is good, too.

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. This one is not fiction. It’s based on real letters between an American author and a British bookseller from 1949-1969. It was fun to watch their different personalities come out through their writing and their relationship develop over the years.

I know I have probably read more bookish stories, but these are the ones that are coming to mind right now.

How about you? Do you like books set in bookstores or libraries or books with a lot of literary references? What’s your favorite?

(I often link up with some of these bloggers.)

Anna and Her Daughters

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Barbara Harper

Anna and Her Daughters by D. E. Stevenson was written in 1958, but has something of an old-fashioned feel to it.

Anna and her three daughters live in London, and their father has just passed away. Anna’s cousin and solicitor, Andrew, has to tell them that their money is gone. They’re not penniless, but they’ll need to economize. The girls will need to get jobs.

Anna decides instead that they’ll move back to her native Scotland.

The oldest, Helen, is beautiful but self-absorbed. She can’t stand the thought of leaving London and her friends and parties.

Rosalie is quiet and has always lived in Helen’s shadow, “pretty, but not as pretty as Helen.”

Jane is the brainy one who was headed to Oxford but can’t go now.

Everyone adjusts to life in Scotland and things like preparing their own food, except Helen. She goes to live with relatives in Edinburgh. Rosalie flourishes without Helen around. Rosalie and Jane get different but interesting jobs that they like.

Then Jane meets a young scientist named Ronnie but is too shy and awkward to even ask his name. Rosalie brings him home for dinner, basking in his attention–until he sees Helen.

The story is told through Jane’s point of view as each girl goes through trials and growth experiences.

The book ended up where I thought it would, but took a different route than I thought. I was a bit disappointed at first, but the situation is also found in Jane Austen’s books and even the Bible.

Stevenson’s writing reminds me a little of Louisa May Alcott. Not the language–they’re several decades apart. And Stevenson doesn’t drop in moral or instructive observations in a didactic way. But they both have a homey feel and an emphasis on family.

The audiobook is superbly narrated by Candida Gubbins.

How People Change

Posted on October 1, 2026 by Barbara Harper

In How People Change, Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp say that many Christians experience a “gospel gap.” They believe that Jesus saved them from past sin and promises a future hope of heaven, but they “do not have a gospel perspective on who they are.” They don’t know how to apply the gospel to everyday life in the present; consequently, they flounder in their relationships and don’t experience much victory in their lives over sin. “Their Christianity seemed more an ideology than a worship-driven relationship, and God’s practical call on their lives was more a duty to be performed than a joy to be pursued.”

People tend to fill this gap with other things, like legalism (lists of do’s and don’ts), mysticism (seeking emotional experiences), activism (championing a cause), and others.

The authors want to point people back to Christ. “Christianity’s change process does not revolve around a system of redemption but around a person who redeems.” They want to emphasize heart change, not just outward change.

If a Christian is going to make progress in the Christian life, she must be convinced of this powerful new reality. We are personally united to Christ through the Holy Spirit. We have new resources and potential because God has moved in. The basic spiritual DNA of every believer has been radically altered, and we are part of a new story of redemption that includes the entire creation!

The Word and Spirit work together, enabling us to see Christ in all his power and mercy. This leads to heart change at the level of what we worship and cherish at any given moment.

While the authors had many good things to say, and I especially appreciated the focus on Christ, I’m afraid I got lost in some of the verbiage. This is the first book of Tripp’s that I have read (Lane’s either. I am not sure how they divided up the writing). Tripp is a popular teacher and best-selling author, and I’m not, so what do I know? But for me, as a reader, it was hard to distill the main message from all that was said. Sometimes six or eight examples were used when one or two would have done.

In one chapter which was supposed to put everything together, we’re told to read Philippians (a short book, but still four chapters), then to glance back at chapters 7 and 8 of this book, then review a section of chapter 9, and then another section of chapter 10, and then look again at chapters 11 and 12. So instead of helping the reader by summarizing what was said earlier, we’re basically told to reread all or parts of six earlier chapters.

Their “x-ray” questions of self-assessment for where we might need to repent number thirty-four.

Looking at the reviews, some people loved this book and others felt as I did–that it was so wordy that it was hard to get the message sometimes.

Every Given Day

Posted on September 29, 2026 by Barbara Harper

Every Given Day by Cathy Gohlke is set in New York City, 1918, and is inspired by true events.

Gwen Armstrong had taken care of her little sister, Marion, after her mother died of consumption (tuberculosis). When the time came that Marion would take care of their father so Gwen could pursue her dreams, instead, Marion married the man Gwen thought she’d had an understanding with. The sisters had little contact for twelve years.

In the meantime, their father died and Gwen took a job as a teacher. Then Gwen receives a letter from Marion. She has tuberculosis and wants Gwen to come and tutor her two children.

Gwen feels she can’t tell Marion no in her hour of need. Plus this gives her a chance to get out of the small town she has been tied to for years.

When Gwen arrives in NYC, Marion has already been sent to the sanatorium. Spanish flu is raging through the city, and the house has been put under quarantine. No visitors are allowed, because if any of them caught the flu, it could have fatal consequences for Marion.

Gwen settles into a new routine with the children, Alistair and Clara, with help from the housekeeper, Mrs. Barrie. Russell, Marion’s husband, is away most of the time on business. There are strange cars and trucks that come in the middle of the night every few weeks, but Russell says they are for his business and not to worry about them. He buys and sells antiquities from archeological digs in Egypt, Cairo, and other places.

Despite the family’s best efforts, however, the Spanish flu hits them, leaving devastating losses.

And the Alastair develops juvenile diabetes. The number of cases increases in the wake of the Spanish flu epidemic. Also known as the “wasting disease,” juvenile diabetes is a death sentence at that time.

One doctor has developed a diet for children with diabetes, but it is nicknamed the starvation diet and very controversial. It’s not a cure, but it holds out hope to keep children alive until help can be found. There is promising research with a recently-discovered hormone called insulin. But it’s so far from being available. It’s in an unpurified form and needs testing and processing for distribution. Will it come in time to save Alistair?

The author was inspired to write this story because her own granddaughter developed Type 1, or juvenile diabetes, after a bout of Covid. In fact, there was a higher outbreak of Type 1 diabetes cases after Covid just like there was after the Spanish flu.

Thankfully, the audiobook (nicely read by Aimee Lily) did include the author’s notes this time and shared how she wove the real facts about insulin discovery and usage into this story. One of her interviews here tells a little about this miraculous discovery and the rough road to its availability.

The first part of the novel, dealing with the Spanish flu, sounded eerily like our Covid epidemic, with masks being required in public and disagreements about whether isolation was helpful or harmful.

Interest in Egypt was at an all-time high in this era, too. And there was a fun cross-pollination of reading interests when this book told of Howard Carter’s and Lord Carnarvon’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Lord Carnarvon owned Highclere Castle, home of the fictional Downton Abbey. I had read of this historic find a couple of years ago in Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle, written by the current Countess of Carnarvon.

There’s an undercurrent of a faith element as Gwen has only a passing belief in God, fights for control in Alistair’s treatment, and ultimately has to surrender him to God.

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Russel is a jerk from the beginning. I couldn’t understand Gwen’s being taken in by his “charm.” And I felt the story dragged just a little about three-fourths of the way through, going through the same arguments over Alastair’s treatment and Russell’s demands of Gwen.

But overall, I enjoyed this story very much. Juvenile diabetes is still no picnic, but I am thankful for God’s gift of insulin.

A Small Book for the Anxious Heart

Posted on September 22, 2026 by Barbara Harper

It seems some battles in the Christian life are fought and won all at once. I’ve heard testimonies of people who were almost instantly delivered from alcoholism or addiction or something else when they first become Christians.

For others, dealing with those temptations or others is a continual battle. Take selfishness, for instance. I can’t say, “I will never be selfish again!” Well, I could say it. But I would likely fail before the day is out.

Anxiety is like that for me. I’ve done Bible studies on it, read books about it, listened to sermons about it, and gotten victory for a while–until a new round of “what ifs” come up. Then I have to remind myself of all the truths I’ve learned before.

I read Ed Welch’s Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest several years ago in the weeks leading up to a surgery, and it was a big help. So when I saw A Small Book for the Anxious Heart: Meditations on Fear, Worry and Trust by the same author, I got it, too.

As the title says, this is a small book, a little over 4×6 inches. It’s made up of fifty short meditations. So it’s not a full treatise on anxiety. Some people would not be able to take in a larger book, so this one has purposefully been broken down into bite-sized pieces.

Some of the meditations deal with anxiety and fear generally. Some discuss particular fears; others particular passages of Scripture. Each meditation ends with a couple of discussion questions.

You often hear that you can’t experience fear and faith at the same time. Welch disagrees. He says:

Faith in Jesus will not replace your fears. Instead your faith will coexist with your fears and begin to quiet them. You will learn, by faith, to see your life from Jesus’ perspective and to trust that he is your ever-present help in trouble (Psalm 46:1) (p. 64).

Welch says that dealing with anxieties is not a matter of trying different treatments to find one that works, but of learning skills to deal with them. Change takes time:

A skill improves with practice, and some days you are better at it that others . . . It is not the disappearance of our anxieties that make us most fully human; it is that we call out to the Lord on good days and bad days. Change is measured by how we turn to Jesus in our fears. Fears and anxieties will come, so you can’t measure growth by whether they exist or not (pp. 94-95).

Here are some of the other quotes that most resonated with me:

When you put your faith in him, then Jesus is your shepherd. You need a shepherd; he is pleased to be your full-time, night-and-day shepherd. As you let go of self-trust and personal strategies for self-protection, you put your trust in him instead (p. 15).

You do not know the entire story. The end remains to be written, and the end determines the meaning of everything before it (p. 24).

There are good reasons to worry. The dilemma is that worries tell you to take matters into your own hands, but that message needs to be altered to say, “What a perfect opportunity to trust the God who is strong, loving, and faithful (p. 29).

Fear and worry can be the misuse of a fine imagination. Imagine instead an angel army surrounding you and yours [like in 2 Kings 6: 15-17]. How might that change your internal conversation about your worries? (p. 90).

[Re God giving needed grace each day like He gave the Israelites manna] When you try to think about tomorrow without having yet received power for tomorrow, you will be anxious (p. 98).

Fear . . . will not lose its power unless it is examined (p. 145).

I believe Running Scared was a bigger help to me than this book, but then, it was meant to be a little more comprehensive than this one. This book did encourage me by reminding of truths I’d read before but also sharing some new thoughts.

(I often link up with some of these bloggers.)

The Vicar of Wakefield

Posted on September 16, 2026 by Barbara Harper

The Vicar of Wakefield is the only novel and best-known writing by Oliver Goldsmith. His other work includes poems, essays, and plays.

The title character is a Dr. Charles Primrose, a vicar in an English country village, married with four sons and two daughters. He’s fairly well-to-do and generous in giving his money to the poor.

Just as the vicar’s oldest son, George, is about to be married, the vicar learns the person he invested a large sum of money with has lost his money and left town. George’s fiance’s father calls off the wedding.

Thus begins a series of catastrophes for the Primrose family. They have to move to a smaller parish only to find their landlord, Squire Thornhill, is a womanizer who preys on one of the vicar’s daughter. Their house burns down, the vicar is thrown into prison by Thornhill, and that’s maybe about a third of the family’s troubles.

Primrose is not faultless–he’s too trusting and somewhat pigheaded about certain beliefs that no one else agrees with. But he maintains his faith and integrity throughout and is ultimately rewarded.

Some of the quotes that stood out to me:

No situation, however wretched it seems, but has some sort of comfort attending it.

I armed her against the censures of the world, shewed her that books were sweet unreproaching companions to the miserable, and that if they could not bring us to enjoy life, they would at least teach us to endure it.

We are not to judge the feelings of others by what we might feel in their place.

The heart that is buried in a dungeon is as precious as that seated upon a throne.

I’ve seen this called a “sentimental” novel but also a satire of the upper classes as compared to the Primrose family’s more simple lifestyle. I’ve also seen it called a satire of a sentimental novel.

This book has been mentioned in several other classics, according to Wikipedia: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Jane Austen’s Emma, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, to name a few.

I can’t say I enjoyed the book as much as I thought I would. It was written in the 1760s, about a hundred years before many other classics I’ve read. I don’t know if it was the language (one political diatribe was six-page long paragraph, and one chapter title is “Happiness and misery rather the result of prudence than of virtue in this life. Temporal evils or felicities being regarded by heaven as things merely in themselves trifling and unworthy its care in the distribution”). Or perhaps the audiobook narration I listened to dulled the story for me. Librivox offers free audiobooks in the public domain. Some of the recordings are great, some not so much. The narrator of this one had a pleasant voice, but he didn’t do different voices for the different characters, and he had the same cadence to most of his sentences. I read some of the Kindle version and enjoyed it more. If I ever read it again, I’ll either try a different narrator or just read the print book.

Nevertheless, I am glad to have read the book and made acquaintance with the Vicar.

The Bird in the Tree

Posted on September 10, 2026 by Barbara Harper

The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge is the first in a trilogy of novels about the fictional Elliot family in England between the two world wars.

Lucilla is the widowed matriarch of the family. She lives with her daughter, Margaret, and long-time maid, Ellen. Currently three of her young grandchildren are staying with her as well. Their parents, her son and daughter-in-law George and Nadine, have been divorced. George is out of the country and Nadine is establishing her own life. Lucilla hopes they will restore their marriage.

Her favorite grandson, David, lived with her from the time he was a boy after his parents died. He’s grown now, an actor, and is coming for a visit. However, when he arrives, she senses something is wrong. It’s not until the next day that he tells her he is in love with Nadine and they plan to marry. They’ve not told anyone else yet.

If it sounds strange that he’s in love with his aunt–she’s several years younger than her husband (his biological uncle) and a few years older than David.

Lucilla is distressed, as David knew she would be. She asks that Nadine come for a visit so she can talk with both of them. She shares why she doesn’t think they should marry: their union would be a blow to family unity, would make it impossible for Nadine and George to reconcile, and would destroy David’s special relationship with Nadine’s children, who loved and missed their father and would have difficulty if David tried to step into that role. Lucilla doesn’t press the issue after that, though she worries and prays.

Then the question becomes whether David and Nadine will follow their passions or do what’s right.

Parts of the book sound like it could have been written today:

His love for Nadine was the most shatteringly real thing that had ever happened to him. It was the truth, and it must be served…

Truth. He would have to try to make Lucilla understand how he felt about it, how it was to him the lamp that lit all life. It would be difficult, for her generation and his felt so differently about this truth. Her generation had built from without inwards, had put the reality of law and tradition above the reality of personal feeling, but his built from within outwards, the truth of personal feeling must come first; when there was no longer reality in a union, smash the union; never mind what laws were broken or what lives were crippled; live the truth.

The young people think that Lucilla, wrapped in “law and tradition,” can’t possibly understand their “truth.” But as we learn more about Lucilla’s past, we see she had her own long struggle between desire and duty.

The family home, Danrosehay, is almost a character of its own in the story. I liked how Lucilla wanted the home to always be a refuge from the storms of life for her present and future family.

There’s an interesting backstory of a historic storm and a sea captain who crashed into the marshes and lived in the area afterward. The story is told near the beginning as just village lore, but it turns out to have great significance for the family later on.

A few other quotes that stood out to me.:

She tried very hard to teach her grandchildren how to extract the last drop of beauty out of all the small things of life, words and scents and sounds.

In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried. The meeting with remembered and well-loved passages is like the continual greeting of old friends; nothing is so warming and companionable.

I realize now that there is such a mixture of good and evil in all we think and are that everything, every instinct and thought, needs to be tested by the teachings of Christ.

All bereavement, whether fate inflicts it on you or whether the relinquishment is your own, changes you . . . Don’t people say that nature abhors a vacuum? Something lost in the present means something new flowing from the future; often a new and stronger faith.

This was his first big trouble and she hardly knew how to bear it; when she had been young she had borne her own troubles, now she was old she bore her children’s and grandchildren’s and found them far worse to put up with than her own had been.

There is mention of a blackbird singing in an ilex tree about twelve times. With that, and the bird in the title, I felt it had to have some significance. I searched online for a while but didn’t turn up much opinion on that front, though some sources said the ilex tree (mentioned 28 times in the book), a type of holly, was thought to be representative of Christ’s sacrifice. I felt the last line of the book finally gave some insight; but, of course, I can’t share that without spoiling the story.

This book started out with tons of description, of the main characters, the house, the village, and its history. But, once again, once it got into the story, I loved it. The characters are so well drawn that they seem real and relatable. And, though some of the language and situations are a little old-fashioned, the underlying truths are eternal.