Category Archives: Books

Book Review: Mere Christianity

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Mere ChristianityI first read Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis some seven or so years ago and tried to write a review, but ended up mainly just listing quotes, which is not a review. It wasn’t hard to read or to follow — for the most part Lewis’s thinking was actually pretty easy to track, and he writes in a logical, almost conversational style rather than like a theology textbook. It was more a matter of there being too much to take in and process and too many goods things to share to reduce it to anything like a review. I read a quote by Elisabeth Elliot (which I neglected to keep track of) something to the effect that she could understand Lewis by reading him through the first time, but needed to read him again to be able reconstruct his arguments. I feel the same way. I’m thankful The Cloud of Witnesses Challenge sponsored by Becky at Operation Actually Read Bible spurred me to pick this up again. I feel I got much more from it this time, maybe just because of a second reading, maybe because of several years of (hopefully) maturing in the meantime, maybe because our church has been talking about “Coffee Shop Apologetics” on Wednesday nights using some of Lewis’s material here and there.

It is interesting to read how Lewis came from an atheistic background and what the Lord used to convince him that Christianity was the truth. Although this book is not his “testimony” per se, he does touch on his own personal journey to faith.

The book is divided into four sections: “Right and Wrong as a Clue to Meaning in the Universe,” in which he argues for Christianity and why it is the best solution to universal moral and logical dilemmas, then “What Christians Believe,” “Christian Behavior,” and “Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity.” Originally the various segments were radio talks in the 1940s which were then tweaked to better fit written form.

I have many more places marked than I can possibly share here. Goodreads has a list of several quotes from the book, some you’ll recognize as classic Lewis. One of my favorite quotes about love comes from this book. Here are a few others hat stood out to me:

From the chapter “We Have Cause to Be Uneasy”:

For the trouble is that one part of you is on His side and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behaviour, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we must need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger -according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way.

From the chapter “The Practical Conclusion”:

[The Christian] does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us.

From the chapter “Social Morality”:

I may repeat “Do as you would be done by” till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself until I learn to love God.

From the chapter “Sexual Morality”:

We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity-like perfect charity-will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God’s help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.

From the chapter “The Great Sin”:

Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says, “Well done,” are all pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, “I have pleased him; all is well,” to thinking, “What a fine person I must be to have done it.”

That was immensely helpful to me. I don’t know if anyone else experiences this, but sometimes when you receive a compliment, then you feel a rush of pleasure, that feel guilty for that pleasure and feel you need to redirect the attention to the Lord, and in trying to do so sound awkward and overly pious. For that reason, when someone, say, sings a solo in church that I enjoyed, I try to tell them it blessed my heart rather than just “I enjoyed your song this morning.” Though I mean the same thing by both sentences, the second one makes people feel awkward and self-conscious. This thought did help me to understand it’s not wrong to feel pleasure in pleasing someone else or accepting a compliment.

From the same chapter:

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call “humble” nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is a nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who tool a real interest in what you said to him….He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

From the chapter “Charity”:

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act to-day is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or, anger to-day is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

From the same chapter:

Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.

From the chapter “Hope”:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.

From the chapter “Faith”:

But supposing a man’s reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for [Christianity]. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments when a mere mood rises up against it.

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off,’ you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

From a second chapter titles “Faith”:

And, in yet another sense, handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you (emphasis mine).

From the chapter “Nice People or New Men”:

But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world – and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man…

If what you want is an argument against Christianity (and I well remember how eagerly I looked for such arguments when I began to be afraid it was true) you can easily find some stupid and unsatisfactory Christian and say, ‘So there’s your boasted new man I Give me the old kind.’ But if once you have begun to see that Christianity is on other grounds probable, you will know in your heart that this is only evading the issue. What can you ever really know of other people’s souls-of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books. What will all that chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anaesthetic fog which we call ‘nature’ or `the real world’ fades away and the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?

There were a very few places I disagreed with him. In “The Perfect Penitent” he thinks the theory “about our being let off because Christ had volunteered to bear a punishment instead of us” is a silly one and says he doesn’t understand the point of punishing an innocent person for a guilty one, though he says he can understand it better in terms of paying a debt. I’m not sure how he could have missed the teaching that God’s just letting us off the hook would be a violation of His justice and righteousness, and Christ’s innocent death satisfied that justice (Romans 3:24-26). In “The Practical Conclusion” he says “a Christian can lose the Christ-life which has been put into him, and he has to make efforts to keep it,” which I would disagree with very much. When we’re saved we are born again: we don’t get unborn. Our spiritual life may get weak and sickly with neglect, and we do need to nurture that life and mature in it, but we don’t lose it. Then in “Counting the Cost” he says that God said in the Bible that we are “gods” and “He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creature…which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness)”. I’m not quite sure how to take him there. Both Psalm 82:6-7 and John 10:34-36 have the term “You are gods,” and, frankly, I am not quite sure what is meant in those cases, either. The Bible talks about us becoming one with the Father and Son and becoming partakers of the divine nature, but we don’t become Deity like Christ is. I don’t think Lewis is saying that we do – I am just not sure what he is saying. If you’ve read his Space Trilogy, you know he portrays the mythical gods and goddesses as some kind of created being more powerful than humans but not like angels, either. Perhaps all he is talking about it what we’ll be like in glory: perfected yet still less than God the Father and Jesus Christ. And in “The Practical Conclusion,” he says that three things that spread the “Christ-life” to us are baptism, belief, and communion (the Lord’s Supper). I would say only faith does: the others are matters of obedience and blessing, but they are symbolic and not life-giving in themselves (see the outline for “Why We Know Baptism Does Not Save.”)

Much more could be discussed, on these points or others in the book. Despite those few caveats mentioned, I feel this is a valuable book and one of those Christian classics that everyone should read at least once, probably several times over.

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

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.)

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.)

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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Book Review: The Little White Horse

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LWHWhen I saw The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge listed as Carrie’s  Reading to Know Classics Book Club selection for March. I wanted to give it a try because I had seen Goudge highly recommended. This is one of her children’s books, but she has written for adults as well.

This story begins with recently orphaned Maria Merryweather and her governess, Miss Heliotrope, traveling to Moonacre Manor to live with Maria’s uncle. The first few chapters are a series of discoveries as Maria gets to know her new guardian, house, room, village, church, etc., and along the way she learns that she and Mrs. H. are the first females to set foot in the house in 20 years, that there are a group of wicked Men of the Dark Woods doing wicked things like poaching animals and blocking the way to Merryweather Bay. When she finds that there was a quarrel caused by her own ancestors that set off these bad men , she feels it is her duty and destiny to set things right. In the course of her quest, she also has to learn patience and self-control over her own anger and tendency to hasty words, the lack of which traits contributed to the original disagreement in the first place.

The story has the flavor of a fairy tale, with animals who seem to know what to do and help Maria along the way (including a cat who writes messages in hieroglyphics in the ashes of the fireplace), the appearance of the little white horse, who is actually a unicorn, at key points in the story, and the discovery that her “imaginary friend” in London actually is a real boy who had been visiting her in his dreams (which I thought odd on many levels. Wouldn’t he have visited her in her dreams?)

It took a while for me to get into the story. All the discoveries of her new place and descriptions were fine, but had me thinking, “OK, when are we going to get into the plot?” When we finally did, my interest picked up a little. I like “quest” stories, particularly when the main character has to conquer something in him- or herself along the way, so I liked that aspect, as well as the aspect that the first step in setting things right was to give Paradise Hill, formerly run by monks, back to God (I don’t know what Goudge’s religious views were, but there are mentions of Biblical principles sprinkled here and there.)

But somehow the book just didn’t grab me, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. I can’t say I strongly disliked it, but I just didn’t love it like I thought it would. As Bekah mentioned in her review, you have to suspend a lot of disbelief to enjoy the story, even knowing that it is a fantasy. I liked Goudge’s descriptions and characterizations for the most part, and I liked the general storyline ok. I liked her planting of little clues, like Maria’s regal bearing at the beginning, before she even knew she was descended from a Moon Princess, and Miss Heliotrope’s pointing out of the “house of her dreams,” before she has any clue that she will marry its owner in the end. I wasn’t really enthralled with Maria, but I liked her well enough. All of the elements were there to make for a charming story, but to me charm was the exact thing it was missing. It took me a long time to get through it just because I wasn’t motivated to pick it up. But that may just be me (and Carrie. 🙂 ) A quick scan of other reviews show that many people love it, and it did win a Carnegie Medal.

For a couple of more positive reviews, see Amy‘s and Janet‘s. I do want to give Goudge another try though, perhaps with one of her adult books.

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

Book Review: The Seamstress

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SeamstressI don’t recall where I saw The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival by Sara Tuvel Bernstein recommended: I think it was probably through some of the What’s On Your Nightstand participants. But when I saw it on sale as an audiobook, I decided to try it. It was very wonderfully read by Wanda McCaddon.

Audiobooks don’t always include prefaces and introductions, but I am glad this one did as the co-author, Louise Loots Thornton, explained how the book came to be. Sara had attended a lecture on the Holocaust where the professor said that, although there were camps during WWII, the Jewish people embellished their experiences and made them sound worse than they were so people would “feel sorry for them and buy things in their stores.” Sara was so angry she decided she must write of her experiences. Louise had an MA in Creative Writing and Sara’s son had married into her family, so Sara asked her to help write her book.

The book begins with Sara’s birth (as Seren, which she is called throughout) and early childhood in Romania, where she was one of the youngest children of a Jewish mill owner. Persecution started early, as schoolchildren called her and her siblings “stinking Jews” or “dirty Jews” (after coming home from her first day of school, she smelled her clothes to see if they were indeed stinky. When her mother asked what she was doing and heard her answer, she waved it off with an “Oh that. Don’t even listen to it. It’s nothing.”) The priests presiding over the classroom and school would continually make disparaging remarks about Jews as “Christ-killers” and would respond negatively to the rabbi’s pleas for them to be let out for Jewish holidays. Periodically roving mobs would vandalize Jewish homes and businesses.

When Sara was in the fourth grade, she entered a contest where she was chosen to represent their school as a student in a more prestigious boarding school in another town. She was its first Jewish student. Things were not terribly different in this school, and when one teacher warned students to keep their distance from Jews during Passover because they used Gentile blood in their rituals, Sara threw an inkwell at him, marched to her room, packed up her things, and left.

She did not go home, however. She decided to try to apprentice as a dressmaking salon and found one salon owner who seemed to size up the situation and take her in. Sara did not tell her parents for a long while, as in the village she came from, young ladies did not work outside the home. When her father finally found out, he was furious: he had not wanted her to go to school there in the first place. But he finally came around.

When Sara completed her apprenticeship, she worked at the salon for many years and enjoyed outings with a group of friends. Many of them began sharing rumors they had heard about strange things happening to Jews in other areas, and then, suddenly, some of their number began disappearing one by one. As persecution escalated, Sara made it back home with the help of her supervisor’s son. There Jewish businesses were being closed down, and Sara and her father were arrested and accused of being spies. They were sent to a labor crew and then to prison. Sara was released, but her father was not. She then had to scramble to find work to support her mother and sisters. Eventually she moved to a different town with better prospects. Because she did not look like a Jew, with her blond hair and blue eyes, she got more work than she would have otherwise. Eventually two sisters  joined her. When she was out with one sister, they were picked up and forced to work with a labor crew for months. When it was discovered her sister was pregnant, she was shot. Sara was released and went back to her other sister, but eventually all the Jews were rounded up and sent to prison camps. Sara, her sister, and two friends were taken to Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women north of Berlin. I had not known that this camp was only for women and that not many survived: I did know that Corrie Ten Boom and her sister were there, but unfortunately there was not much chance of their meeting as the Jewish prisoners were kept in a separate barracks.

Sara tells of the beatings, starvation, and inhumanity of the camps. She and her sister and friends became a foursome who managed to stay together, although Sara was careful never to stand next to her sister in line-ups for counting (some of which lasted four hours long) so it would be less likely that anyone noticed their resemblance and used their relationship to torture either of them. Sara was the oldest and helped the others know what to do (like choosing a top bunk for the four of them, since the bottom bunks were by windows which caused some of those in them to freeze to death), sought for (and stole, sometimes) food for them.

As the war wound down and Germany was losing, they tried to evacuate the prisoners for seemingly endless days of being packed together in cars with little food and less water. I believe she said they started out with 10,000 women, but by the time they finally stopped they were down to a few hundred because so many died on the way. At every stop the soldiers removed all the corpses.

After the war Sara ended up in a hospital for several months, where she weighed 44 lbs. on arrival, and later found work in Germany. Even at that time, if Jews boarded a bus, the Gentiles would vacate the bus: if Sara stood in line at different stores for provisions, the butcher or grocer would just happen to run out as she finally got to the counter.

Sara married, and eventually she and her husband received permission to emigrate to Canada, and later on to the US. Her daughter fills in details from the rest of her life in the epilogue.

I found this account riveting. Man’s inhumanity to man just astounds me, but Sara faced all of the events in her life with pluck, courage, and wit. She had an independent spirit early on which stood her in good stead through her trials.

Though she was a Jew in ethnicity, unfortunately she was not in her faith. Her daughter shares in the epilogue that her mother continued with many of the Jewish rituals because they were comfortable and familiar, but she didn’t understand why her friend through the horrors of labor camp became devoutly religious. She couldn’t believe in a God who let such things happen, and she felt that if there was a hell, it couldn’t be worse than what she had already experienced. She would be sadly mistaken on that point, and I can only hope she found that out before it was too late. That’s the down side of an independent spirit: one doesn’t recognize or acknowledge that God sends His rain on the just and the unjust, that He was the one who led her to food in unexpected places or to a coat with money sewn in the hem or gave her the will and drive to survive and to help her friends as well. Unfortunately, her experiences with so-called Christians early on caused her to see “the cross was used as a backdrop for persecution of the Jews.” I hope somewhere along the way someone was able to share its true meaning with her.

I’ve skimmed through a number of reviews, and some of them mention that she describes some of the horrors as well as the deaths of friends and family seemingly unemotionally. I didn’t get that impression, perhaps due to the narrator’s sympathetic inflections, but I would guess that was perhaps the only way she could write about such gruesome, wrenching details was to distance herself from them a bit in the telling. It is also possible she would not have wanted to seem as if she was embellishing the facts or pulling on readers’ heartstrings with her own emotions: she wanted to details to speak for themselves.

This will probably be one of my top ten books of the year.

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

What’s On Your Nightstand: April 2014

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What's On Your NightstandThe folks at 5 Minutes For Books host What’s On Your Nightstand? the fourth Tuesday of each month in which we can share about the books we have been reading and/or plan to read.

Oh wow – I was totally caught off guard for the Nightstand post this month. That’s more likely in months like this when there are five Thursdays, but I think I have an especially good excuse for being distracted since the premature birth of my little grandson. 🙂 Anyway – here is the super-quick version:

Since last time I have completed:

Crowded to Christ by L. E. Maxwell, reviewed here.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens via audiobook, reviewed here.

Made to Crave Action Plan Participant’s Guide by Lysa TerKeurst and Ski Chilton, reviewed here.

My Man Jeeves by P. D. Wodehouse for Carrie’s Reading to Know Classics Book Club April selection, review coming soon.

The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival by Sara Tuvel Bernstein via audiobook, reviewed coming soon here.

I’m currently reading:

The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge for Carrie’s  Reading to Know Classics Book Club for March. Yes, March. 😳 I just haven’t been inclined to pick this one up very much, but I am almost done.

Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal: A Boy, Cancer, and God by Michael Kelley

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, a reread that I enjoyed it the first time but am getting much more from now.

Courageous by Randy Alcorn (audiobook).

Next up:

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

The Book of Three by Alexander Lloyd, first book in the Prydain Chronicles.

I think I am going to skip the May and June selections from Carrie’s  Reading to Know Classics Book Club, just because I have so many other books to get to, but I may get an early start on July’s choice of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I have a feeling that one will take a good while. 🙂

Happy Reading!

Book Review: Made to Crave Action Plan Participant’s Guide

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A few weeks ago I went through Made to Crave (linked to my review) by Lisa TerKeurst during an online study with the Proverbs 31 Ministries. After completing that book, they MadetoCraveActionPlanPGdecided to go through the Made to Crave Action Plan video series and workbook, so I signed up for that as well. The videos were only online for a week at a time (the rest of their posts on the series are here). This is a different series from one made to go along with the original book: this one was co-authored by a Dr. Ski Chilton.

Each video had an introduction by Lysa, a clip of her speaking about a couple of spiritual principles, a brief time of discussion with Dr. Chilton, closing remarks by Lysa, and then a testimony from someone who had benefited from the Made to Crave book.

The first Made to Crave book was primarily about “want to,” motivation to control impulses and get healthy, primarily spiritual motivation: this book purported to discuss more of the “how to.” They did not discuss a specific diet plan, but rather principles like drinking water, eating more fiber, exercising, taking Omega 3 and polyphenols, increasing fish, fruit, and vegetable consumption.

To me the biggest value in this book is the section of action plans in each chapter: readers were encouraged to look through various activities, choose one or two, and then work through them by the following week. Some focused on the spiritual principles, some on the physical. there are also a number of valuable charts and worksheets.

I didn’t know, until this book, that not all fish is good for you or what Omega 3s and polyphenols were all about.

Some of the quotes or principles I found especially helpful are:

“Temptation is Satan’s invitation to get our needs met his way rather than God’s way” (p. 63).

“Hidden behind a temptation is often a legitimate human need. The challenge comes in how we choose to meet that need…How do you imagine God might want to meet the legitimate need behind the temptation?” (p. 67).

Commenting on James 1:2-4 (Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing): “We have to consider it because we won’t always feel it. When we consider something, we take time to think about it carefully. We concentrate on the issue and weigh the possibilities before taking any course of action” (p. 129).

““Between any trial and the blessing that comes from that trial, there is a pathway we must walk — that pathway is perseverance. Perseverance means having an urgency, firmness, resolve, and consistency.”

There were a few places, however, where I disagreed. One is where Dr. Chilton speaks about how the food industry and lifestyles have changed over the years and how that makes it harder to make wise nutritional choices: he then says, “It’s not your fault. You are not bad, horrible, and lazy.” Actually, making wrong food choices is our fault, and we have to take the responsibility to make better choices even though it might be harder.

In another, Lysa told her pastor she was afraid of of “letting God down” by failing in her journey toward better health. her pastor replied, “You can’t let God down. You weren’t holding Him up in the first place.” She thought that was great, but I thought it was flippant and unhelpful. I wrote more about this here, but in the same place I think I would have appreciated reassurances that God knows we’re going to fail, but He wants us to seek His grace for forgiveness and getting up again, etc.

In another, Lysa read a letter from someone talking about having trouble exercising regularly because she was lazy. Lysa spoke a great deal about lazy being a label the devil puts on us to discourage us and tells the writer that we’re not lazy, we’re courageous. I thought this missed the mark as well: the writer was probably speaking from past experience, and, again, if I were in her place and said that, I probably would have been looking for help to overcome that inertia to get moving and then to stay with it. Maybe thinking of laziness as a label helps other people. To me it doesn’t help to discuss it as a label when I know it is a reality (for myself.)

To me these were more a matter of being a bit off base rather than major doctrinal flaws. Overall I thought the book and videos were very helpful. I probably would not have bought the series, but since the videos were available for a while for this study, I’m glad I had the opportunity to go through them.

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

Book Review: Crowded to Christ

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Crowded to ChristThe first I remembering hearing of Crowded to Christ was in an online sermon from a former pastor that I think I listened to while home sick one Sunday. He must have mentioned it before, but this time he recommended finding a copy and reading it. It was first published in 1950 and is apparently out of print now, but I found an inexpensive used copy online.

Its author, L. E. Maxwell, was a co-founder, principal, and eventually president of Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta, Canada, which I don’t know much about except that Elisabeth Elliot attended there for a time and Don Richardson (author of Peace Child and other books) graduated from there.

Maxwell’s main theme is that God uses a variety of measures – the law of God as well as pain, pressure, and other means – to draw or to “crowd” people to Christ in the sense of realizing He is the only answer.

For instance, “In his determination to be humble, to love His enemies,… to be more than conqueror – in other words, to be like Christ –  the Christian may come sooner or later to a sense of crushing failure and defeat.” He realizes he can’t possibly do this on his own. Some go on half-heartedly, thinking full victory will just never be possible, while others, “not having made Paul’s deep discovery, ‘I know in me (that is, in my flesh), dwelleth no good thing,’ they redouble their efforts…They think that if they are only more watchful, more prayerful, more diligent, they will yet be able to attain. They strive and struggle; they fight and fast; they yearn and pray.” He quotes Hudson Taylor as saying, “I felt I was a child of God: His Spirit in my heart would cry: ‘Abba, Father’; but to rise to my privileges as a child I was utterly powerless.” Maxwell continues, “Not until they had come to an end of all self-righteousness and satisfaction in themselves, not until all their peace and joy and strength of will and resolution and purpose had been ‘slain by the law,’ could faith stretch forth her hands for victory. Only when they sensed the tragedy, the futility, the folly and failure of every human attempt to overcome the law of sin and death, were they shut up to Him who not only ‘justifies the ungodly’ but also ‘quickens the dead'” (pp 17-18).

He describes how God sometimes puts us in extenuating circumstances that result in a crisis of faith that drive us to Him as our only way through, like Jacob on his way home finding out Esau was coming to meet him, or Israel’s being caught between Pharaoh’s army and the Red Sea, or Israel when called to enter into Canaan but looked at the obstacles instead of God and failed.

I have far too many quotes marked to share, but here are a few that stood out to me:

“Have you ever had God lay hold of you in the wee hours and reduce you until you had ‘Nothing left to do but fling/Care aside and simply cling?'” (p. 29).

“God must secure our confidence, and…He tries us in order to make us trust where we cannot trace. Without faith it is impossible to please Him. ‘Thy way is in the sea.’ While, therefore, He has no pleasure in our agony and perplexity, He knows that it is in the trackless and traceless sea of trouble that we come to trust” (p. 38).

“To be self-centered is to be self-destroyed…The preservation of self is the surest path to self-destruction” (p. 128).

“When the Lord Jesus dealt with souls, His method was adapted to the need of the individual. However, it is remarkable that almost invariably He brought souls face to face with some one thing which in their own strength they could not do, and there demanded an act of obedience…In order to create a sense of sin and a need of divine strength Jesus gave command just where men were inclined to wander or argue or excuse themselves” (p. 150).

“If only the Saviour had asked me to do something else! But that something else would not have reached your heart. You could have done that other thing without faith and without grace; yes, without even being right with God. So, in asking you to do the one impossible thing, Christ crosses your will through your withered limb” (p. 178).

“Grace is no mere favour conferred upon the ungodly, but it is to be experienced as a ruling force and sufficiency, reigning in our hearts as the new, living ‘law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,’ and enabling us to prove the no-more dominion of sin. Grace abounding is to lead at once to grace reigning” (p. 219).

In ways simple and inscrutable and fiery God must drain away the dregs of self-confidence. He must let the flesh fail…when all those remaining are convinced that God alone is their rescue and remedy…” (p. 256).

The New Testament is enfolded in the Old, and the Old Testament is unfolded in the New” (p. 272).

“Love and righteousness are not contrary principles” (p. 299).

He spends a good deal of space in the book talking about the law of God. Though Christ has fulfilled the law and we never could, and in this day of grace are not required to, still, God has uses for the law, which the Bible describes as “good” and “spiritual.” “By the law is the knowledge of sin.” His appendices on “The Old and New Testaments Compared” and “The Purpose of the Law” are some of the best parts of the book, especially on this point.

Overall I enjoyed, benefited from, and saw myself in the pages of this book. I wasn’t quite so interested in arguments about dispensationalism and ultra-dispensationalism or Calvinism vs. Armenianism: those seemed to make the book drag a bit, but I understand their necessity, especially with Maxwell coming from an academic background where students have debated these things back and forth for ages.

I think the only places where I disagreed with him were some such as when he described a man who did not want to go into a grove and pray as the folks in that place and time did when they wanted to meet with God after a service. He acknowledged that there is nothing in the Bible about doing such a thing and that one can get right with God without that action, but this man had no peace until he finally did so. I guess perhaps I could see that if it was just a matter of pride or something, but I’d still have trouble saying he should have done that when it is not a Biblical issue.

This book often brought to mind a quote from Hudson Taylor, though the quote itself is not in the book: “It doesn’t really matter how great the pressure is. What matters is where the pressure lies, whether it comes between me and God or whether it presses me nearer His heart.” As Maxwell says in the second quote listed above, God takes “no pleasure in our agony and perplexity.” He is not dreaming up ways to torture us, but He knows best what we most need in our inmost hearts to grow in our faith and relationship with Him.

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