Book Review: Grace For the Good Girl

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Barbara Harper

The premise of Grace for the Good Girl: Letting Go of the Try-Hard Life by Emily P. Freeman is that “Somewhere along the way I got the message that salvation is by faith alone but anything after that is faith plus my hard work and sweet disposition” (p. 14). Even though those of us who have embraced the gospel know better (or should), deep down somewhere we feel like we need to put up a good front of having it all together spiritually, and so we hide behind masks that Emily discusses in depth: good performance, good reputation, a “fake ‘fine,'” acts of service, spiritual disciplines, strength and responsibility, our comfort zones. Some of these are fine in themselves, but they are not meant to be masks. Spiritual disciplines, for instance, should be a part of our communication with Christ, not something we do for appearance’s sake.

I’ve marked multitudes of quotes that really hit home. Here are a few:

I constantly worried that my imperfect status would be discovered. I often experienced guilt but didn’t know why. I felt the heavy weight of impossible expectations and had the insatiable desire to explain every mistake (p. 13)

Instead of recognizing my own inadequacy as an opportunity to trust God, I hid those parts and adopted a bootstrap religion. I focused on the things I could handle, the things I excelled in, my disciplined life, and my unshakeable good mood (p. 13).

I taught the people around me I had no needs and was secretly angry with them for believing me (p. 13).

I have the expectation of myself to be a good girl, a good Christian, a good wife, and a good mom. Not such bad things, until you understand my own personal, twisted definition of “good.” Good means I never mess up. Good means I weigh the perfect amount. Good means I can handle everything. I don’t look like a fool, and I never lose my patience. Good means my husband will never be disappointed in me, my kids will always obey, and everyone basically likes me…If I fail to live up to my own standard of good, I label myself a failure (p. 25).

Feeling scared meant I needed more faith. Feeling anger meant I needed more control. Feeling confused meant I needed to get it together and figure things out. In theory, I knew I was supposed to cast my fear, anger, and confusion on the Lord. But after “trusting” him with my circumstances, I thought it was my responsibility to change the emotions and keep myself from experiencing them again (p. 55).

Since when does the awesomeness of my testimony depend on the extremity of my rebellion? (p. 100).

Where are you? God asks, not because he doesn’t know, but because he knows I have to come out of hiding in order to be found (p. 114).

Having a quiet time sometimes left me feeling as if I had accomplished something rather than related with a person. I equate it to working out: I don’t do it very often, but when I do I feel better about myself and slightly superior to those who may not have done the same that day (p. 151).

The mask-wearing good girl is all about herself. In her most secret place, she wants the glory. But it is only in him that we have been made complete (p. 157).

Part of the solution is:

It isn’t me doing work for God, but it is me trusting God to do the work in me (p. 63).

The story of redemption and healing is that Jesus came to exchange my not-good-enough with his better-than-I-could-ever-imagine (p. 137).

He still asks for our obedience, but it is no longer obedience to the law. Now we are called as believers to be obedient to the truth…This obedience to the truth doesn’t come naturally or automatically. There is laboring. There is striving. But this striving has the potential to be new and light and joyful (p. 135).

The work is not according to the mask we wear; it is according to his power that works within us. It isn’t an external attempt, to live up to the law; it occurs on the spirit level where we are united to Christ (p. 135).

These last two quotes, to me, set apart this book from a lot of what I hear and read about grace these days. Some take it so far as to deny that there is any kind of obedience or striving, and that makes me wary of any grace-based or grace-emphasized talk (not wary of the basis of grace, but how some apply it). But I think Emily struck the perfect balance.

I was also a little wary because I can’t endorse some of the people she quotes, but I think I pretty much agree with just about everything she said herself.

It’s so easy to fall into doing (or not doing) things because good Christian girls do (or don’t) rather then letting what we do or don’t do flow from love for Christ and His power that works in us. We need frequent reminders. In all honesty, I still struggle at times with what’s God’s part and what’s my part in dealing with certain besetting sins: I know I can’t defeat them on my own, yet He doesn’t just come in and remove them all at once: there is a process of growth and there has to be a measure of obedience, yet even that comes from His strength and not my own. I “know” these things in my head, yet I’m still working them out in daily life.

And if I can step away from the book for a moment, we need to have grace for other good girls as well (maybe that’s an idea for another book, Emily. 🙂 ) Often I’ve seen and experienced ways that Christians react when we show that we don’t have it all together that reinforces that performance-based lifestyle rather than coming alongside them in empathy and helping them regain Biblical perspective.

This is another difficult area because the Bible does tell us to provoke one another to love and to good works, to restore one another when we’ve sinned, to even rebuke each other when we’ve done wrong. But I don’t think that means that when one speaks of worrying over an issue, another says, “Well it’s a sin to worry, you know” or just pats them on the back and quotes Romans 8:28. Our pastor shared a perfect example of this recently. He said he was with someone when he received bad news, and at first there was a lot of what he called “spewing,” wondering what was going on, why had God let this happen, etc. As my pastor said, “It wasn’t a time for platitudes.” Later, when things calmed down, then he could help him gain perspective by reminding him of God’s presence and promises and power. And I think that should be our response as well.

Some years ago in a prayer meeting, someone said that so-and-so just found out he had cancer and his wife wasn’t handling the news very well. He didn’t elaborate, but I wondered what he meant by “not handling it well.” Fast forward several years to when I contracted transverse myelitis and was involved in an e-mail support group which contained many nonchristian people. I thought that to be a good Christian testimony I needed to always approach things in faith and victory with a smile. At some point a new lady came into the group who was also a Christian, but she had a different view: she felt it was more honest, more human, more empathetic to let people in on the struggles, to acknowledge when life hurt. And I think she’s right. How often I’ve been comforted by the Psalms because they show a range of emotion and even anguish, yet they almost always end with resting in God.

Perhaps I should have saved some of the above for another blog post. This book has provoked thoughts in a number of areas, but I’d probably better stop before I quote half the book or make this any longer. I’m still processing some of it, but overall I’d recommend it.

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

Book Review: Ivanhoe

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Barbara Harper

I listened to Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott via audiobook from Audible.com: I got it when they had a $4.97 sale on several of their audiobooks.

The setting is 12th century England just after the Third Crusade. Many knights were headed back to England, King Richard the Lion-Hearted was thought to be a prisoner of the Duke of Austria, England was ruled by Richard’s unscrupulous brother, Prince John. The Normans has conquered the Saxons some years earlier and there was still bad blood between them. Ivanhoe was a knight who had been off to fight the Third Crusade with Richard, and because of his alliance to the Norman Richard, his Saxon father disinherited him.

As the story opens, Ivanhoe is not thought to be back from the Crusades yet. His father, Cedric, wants his ward, Rowena, to marry his close friend, Aethelstane. Those two are the last of the Saxon noble lineage and the last best chance for uniting the Saxons’ power to resist the Norman rule, at least in Cedric’s mind. But Rowena loves Ivanhoe, and of course Cedric will not allow her to marry him.

At a tournament, a two disguised knights figure prominently. You might guess who the one called the Disinherited Knight was. My first guess about the other, the Black Knight (also called the Black Sluggard because he did not fight except to assist the first knight) was wrong, but my second guess was right. A yeoman named Locksley also distinguished himself and annoyed Prince John in the archery segment.

On the way home after the tournament, Cedric’s party, including Rowena, Aethelstane, and a Jew named Isaac and his daughter, Rebecca, were attacked and captured by a group of knights, one of whom was attracted to Rowena and somehow thought capturing her in this way would convince her of the depth of his passion for her. Of course, she refused him, and meanwhile friends of Cedric made plans to storm the castle, joined by Locksley, also known as Robin Hood, and his merry men.

The results of that battle, which lead to another capture and another climax, I’ll leave you to discover if you decide to read the book.

The book started out very slowly at first, but once the action picked up the story held my attention pretty well. There are the classic elements of this type of story: chivalry, quests, castles, knights, good vs. evil. etc. The evil isn’t embodied in any one person or group: the knights, the politicians, and even the priests all have corrupt segments.

Robin Hood was the stuff of folklore long before this, but this book is credited with describing him as we think of him these days.

There are wry comic elements and characters as well. One line about two priests “vituperating each other in bad Latin” cracked me up.

The one jarring element in the book is the extreme prejudice against the Jews. They are constantly called names (“Dog of a Jew!’ “Daughter of an accursed race!” Somehow they missed their description of them in the Bible as God’s chosen people.) One character, on thinking he was about to die along with a Jew in the storming of the castle, thought it would be better to kill the Jew than to die in his company and would have killed him if something else had not interfered. According to Wikipedia, “The book was written and published during a period of increasing struggle for emancipation of the Jews in England, and there are frequent references to injustice against them.” I’m not sure whether Scott was writing to highlight these injustices so as to call attention to them for the purpose of alleviating them, or if he just considered them normal, but they are very disturbing.

By the way, the Wikipedia article does tell pretty much most of the plot of the book, so if you’re wanting to read the book I wouldn’t advise looking there too much til afterward.

Every now and then I get a craving to read something medieval, and this certainly fit the bill. I hadn’t known much about this time period, but after finishing the book I was curious enough to spend some time looking up this era, the Crusades, the Knights Templar, etc.

The audiobook was read by a Michael Page, and he did a marvelous job giving different voices to a wide variety of different characters, from knights and nobles, to women, to snooty priests, to the amusing Robin Hood and Friar Tuck and Jester Wamba, to the old Jew Isaac and his daughter Rebecca.

Overall the time spent listening to Ivanhoe was a very enjoyable experience and made driving time enjoyable rather than boring. You can probably find a copy of the book in your library, and the text is online here and here.

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

Book Review: Everyday Battles: Knowing God Through Our Daily Conflicts

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Barbara Harper

Everyday Battles: Knowing God Through Our Daily Conflicts is the fourth and last of Bob Schultz’s books for boys and young men. I read it with my youngest son. The author passed away before this book was completed and his daughter got what he had ready for print and added an epilogue.

Bob covered a lot of ground in the book, from confrontations, chastisement, fightings within, refuge, and more. One chapter discussed why some OT battles came about when the temple of God was neglected or filled with abominations and what lessons that has for us. You would expect some discussion about the armor described in Ephesians 6, but only a couple of pieces are mentioned. I don’t know if he meant to get to the rest of it before he passed away. He discusses how a good, loving, wise and kind God allows battles.

His overall theme is that God has something to teach you during battles: something about yourself, but mainly something about Himself.

One quote I especially liked was in the context of boys wrestling. He discusses why he thinks it is okay to allow it, right and wrong times and places for it, and then he says:

If you find yourself frustrated because you’re losing, don’t lash out in anger. Discover why you’re getting beat. Let it motivate you to learn new skills or develop more strength. I wrestled a guy called Herfy for years and never won a match, yet I gained many tricks I’ve successfully used since (p. 15-16).

There is a lot of wisdom there that can be applied to many areas.

This quote bothered me a little at first:

The one thing I want to learn in life is to understand and practically experience abiding in Christ. I’m not looking for some Bible lesson to discuss or some theory to question. I want to live in harmony with the One who created the universe while I’m building houses, driving my truck, walking hand in hand with my wife or my daughters. I want to hear His voice, watch Him work, and follow Him in every adventure He wants to lead me through (p. 31).

At first reading it sounded to me like he was downplaying Bible reading and study in favor of seeking God through experience. But as I thumbed through several pages while preparing for this review, I was reminded that he referred to the Bible often, much more than I had remembered, and drew much of what he taught from the Bible. So I think perhaps what he is getting at here is that he doesn’t want his spiritual experience to be all academic, but rather he wanted it to carry through to the rest of his life.

I also expected to see some discussion on what we commonly hear of as the enemies of Christians and how to combat them: the world (I John 5:4-5), the flesh (Galatians 5:16-17), and the devil (James 4:7-8, Matthew 4:1-11, Ephesians 6:17). There was some mention of fighting the flesh, but not much. Again, I don’t know if that’s something he would have included if he had lived long enough to complete the book, but my son and I are discussing some of these passages in the aftermath of reading the book.

My feelings immediately after the book were disappointment at what he didn’t include what I would have, but then if you get any five people, even any five Christians to write a book on one topic, you’re probably going to end up with five very different books though they might cover some of the same ground. And as I went back over parts of the book for review, I was reminded of many good aspects of it and good things he did bring out. The book isn’t necessarily a manual for how to fight battles, though he discusses some of that: it’s mainly an encouragement to seek the heart of God and draw close to Him through the battles He allows.

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

Book Review: In Every Heartbeat, and thoughts about romance in Christian fiction

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Barbara Harper

In Every Heartbeat by Kim Vogel Sawyer is about three friends from the same orphanage awarded a scholarship to college just before WWI.

Libby wants to be a famous journalist. She’s not tomboyish exactly, but she gets along with boys better than girls and isn’t interested in the same things as her high-society roommate, Alice-Marie.

Pete is called to preach, and though he is the most spiritually mature of the three, he harbors resentment towards his parents because their sending him to work as a child resulted in an accident and the loss of his leg. His parents are the only ones living (as far as we know), and he thinks if he can just find them and get his feelings off his chest, he will relieve that burden from his mind.

Bennett is the most jovial of the three, always ready to jump into a good fight, and avidly searches for significance. He thinks he’ll find it by joining the most prestigious fraternity on campus, but makes an enemy on campus the first day who stands in his way.

As the back of the book says, “the friends’ differing aspirations and opinions begin to divide them.” I like the way the author detailed the flaws and problems of each character and wove them together. Each faces a crisis of some sort and learns and grows along the way.

One of the most important aspects of the book in my opinion comes up in Libby’s story. (Mild spoiler ahead.) She tries to find work at a newspaper but is told by one editor to come back later when she’s gotten through college and had some experience. She discovers in the meantime that she can write fiction for a women’s romance magazine to earn money and gain experience. From what I can tell it’s not lurid romance, but it does focus more on the physical. At the same time, Pete has to come up with a class project that involves “taking on” a problem of the day and finding a way to combat it and stand up for truth. When he sees some girls giggling over such a magazine as the one Libby writes for, he decides to take on that kind of titillating romance story and writes a letter to the editor in protest, unaware that his friend, Libby, is writing that kind of story.

In the course of the book, Libby has to come to terms with her writing (I’ll let you discover how in the book so as not to spill too much of the plot here 🙂 ), and the difference between a romance that titillates and a romance that reflects Christ’s love for his people is made pretty clear, in my opinion. Yet as I looked through some of the reviews on Amazon, I was very surprised that a number of reviewers there didn’t understand what the author was doing and made comments like, “Why is she criticizing romance novels when she’s writing one?” I wouldn’t classify this book as primarily a romance novel, though it has romance in it (that’s the type of book I prefer. I don’t usually go for books that are just “handsome boy meets beautiful girl and falls in love,” end of story.) But I have also seen good people sweep all romance novels, Christian or not, under the rug as portraying relationships in an unhealthy way. There certainly are those types of romances, even in Christian fiction, and we need to be careful that we’re not reading things that will either accent the physical or portray a hero and heroine and relationship so perfect and unreal that we can never be satisfied with real life. But a romance that portrays flawed characters who find each other and find grace to overcome obstacles and love each other despite their flaws as Christ loved the church, with a love that wants the best for the other even at the cost of sacrifice to oneself — that’s pretty realistic to me, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. In fact, I think that can encourage the right kind of romance. And I think that’s what Libby discovers, too.

As I got into this book, I began to think some of the characters sounded a little familiar, and I realized they were from another of Kim’s books, My Heart Remembers. I had read that a few months ago and thought I had reviewed it, but I hadn’t. In Every Heartbeat reads fine without having to go back and pick up My Heart Remembers, but if you’ve read the first book you’ll enjoy the second, and if you’ve read the second you might enjoy going back to see where some of the characters came from.

I enjoy books that I get more out of as I think about them even days after finishing them, and this book is one of those.

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

What’s On Your Nightstand: March 2012

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Barbara Harper

The 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.

Here is what I have completed since last time:

Saving Graces: the Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder edited by Stephen Hines, reviewed here.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, reviewed here. I think I am one of the last on the planet to read it, but I am very glad I did. Excellent.

His Ways, Your Walk, an as-yet unpublished book by my friend. Lou Ann Keiser, missionary in Spain. This was the first time I was honored to be asked to read someone’s manuscript. It’s mainly teaching from the few Scripture verses with direct instruction to women. I look forward to letting you know when it’s published!

Intervention by Terri Blackstock (audiobook). This and the next one are the first and last in the Invention series about a daughter’s drug addiction. Very good.

Downfall by Terri Blackstock (Kindle app).

The Big 5-Oh! by Sandra Bricker. Light, fun reading. Good.

The last three weren’t fully reviewed, but I bunched them up with a short review of each here.

Last time I had finished a couple of books but hadn’t reviewed them as of the Nightstand post. Those are The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure, reviewed here and Practical Happiness: A Young Man’s Guide to a Contented Life by Bob Schultz, with my youngest son, Jesse, not fully reviewed but discussed briefly here.

I am currently reading/listening to:

Everyday Battles: Knowing God Through Our Daily Conflicts by Bob Schultz, with my youngest son.

In Every Heartbeat by Kim Vogel Sawyer about three friends from the same orphanage awarded a scholarship to college just before WWI, the different routes they go, temptations they face, etc.

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, classic medieval knight’s tale (maybe the forerunner? I’m not sure — will have to check that out.) Was surprised to find Robin Hood making an appearance here. Evidently, from what I’ve read, though he was a subject of much folklore, but our modern conception of him began as he was depicted in Ivanhoe. I’m listening to this as an audiobook, and it was hard to keep my attention on it at first (a lot of description and background I’d have gleaned more from by reading), but now it is keeping me listening closely.

Next up:

It’s hard to choose which book from my spring reading plan list to read next, but I am leaning toward:

Infinitely More by Alex Krutov, nonfiction about an abandoned orphan in Russia whom God brought to Himself.

Grace for the Good Girl: Letting Go of the Try-Hard Life by Emily P. Freeman.

Loving by Karen Kingsbury, the last of the Bailey Flanigan series.

What’s on your nightstand?

Happy reading!

Quick reviews

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Barbara Harper

I finished a number of books over the last few weeks and haven’t had time or inclination to do a full review of them, but I thought I’d talk about them just briefly here.

Last month I reviewed Vicious Cycle by Terri Blackstock, which was the second in a trilogy, so I went back and listened to the first book, Intervention, from an audiobook and then read the newest and last in the series, Downfall, with my Kindle app for the Touchpad and iPhone.

In Intervention, Barbara Covington’s daughter, Emily, is an out of control addict, and after trying everything else she could, Barbara pays for a treatment center out of state which sends an interventionist to take Emily to the center. But the interventionist is killed in the airport parking lot and Emily is missing. Did she kill the woman, or is she in danger as well?

In Downfall, the Covington family has moved to Atlanta for a new start, but trouble seems to follow them with an attempt to bomb Emily’s car and two murders of people from the new treatment center where she works. Though she’s been clean, evidence begins point to her involvement. Has she relapsed, or is she being framed?

This series arose from a situation in Terri’s own family (addiction, not murders), and with Jim and I both having members of extended family who have had trouble with drugs, I found the struggles both Emily and her family faced to be very realistic. And if you like suspense, Terri’s your girl! Her characters are realistically flawed while seeking God’s will. I enjoyed both of these.

The Big 5-OH! by Sandra D. Bricker is the next birthday of Olivia Wallace, and Liv is convinced that something dreadful is going to happen because of her “birthday curse”: something has happened on every birthday she can remember, all the way from losing a boyfriend to blizzards to a cancer diagnosis. For a change of venue and outlook, her friend urges her to go to her mother’s (the friend’s mother’s) place in Florida while her mother visits her there in Ohio , so Liv takes her up on the offer. Besides taking care of a dog in a lampshade collar, finding an alligator in a pool, and having a flirty 80-year-old as a neighbor, Liv meets another neighbor with a “toothpaste commercial smile” and begins to wonder if this birthday will be the best yet. This book was light, cute, fun — a nice beach or vacation read or just a change of pace from “heavier” books. I had found it on a clearance table at the Christian bookstore, but Amazon and Christianbook.com both have e-version for free at the moment.

I read Practical Happiness: A Young Man’s Guide to a Contented Life by Bob Schultz with my youngest son, Jesse, after having read two other books by that author, Boyhood and Beyond: Practical Wisdom for Becoming a Man and Created For Work. Though this has a lot of good points to ponder, I didn’t like it quite as well as the first two. It just seemed a little wordy and not as focused. He spends several chapters on knowing God’s voice and hearing Him speak, and I disagreed with him on some points there (I am always instantly suspicious when people say, “God told me…” anything), but it provided a good foundation for a discussion with my son on different views of that. But overall the book has more good points on the topic of happiness, contentment, and their enemies than it has problems.

So…I think that about catches me up. 🙂

Have you read any good books lately?

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

Book Review: The Mysterious Benedict Society

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Barbara Harper

In The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, a number of children answer an ad for “gifted children looking for special opportunities” and take a series of tests. Four children ultimately pass all the tests and are asked to help a Mr. Benedict, who designed the tests, on a special mission. The four children also happen to be orphans except for one who ran away from home. The children are:

Reynard (Reynie) Muldoon, who has a special knack for logic, solving puzzles, figuring out “trick” questions, thinking “outside the box.”

George (“Sticky”) Washington, who remembers everything he reads and is generally very nervous.

Kate Wetherall, the most physical of the group (having spent most of her life with the circus), an one-woman (or girl) MacGyver with an ever-present bucket of useful items, including a spyglass disguised as a kaleidoscope.

Constance Contraire, who is very…contrary, small, sleeps a lot, and argues even more. The reason for her contrariness isn’t revealed until the last chapter, and it’s hilarious. It makes her behavior all through the book make sense.

The children are asked to go on a dangerous but important mission to thwart an evil Ledroptha Curtain, a mission that only children could successfully accomplish (all manner of government officials have not seen the danger despite Mr. Benedict’s numerous attempts to inform them), and in the process learn about themselves, about how to work as a team, about how to face fears and extend themselves. I can’t tell you much more than that without giving too much away, and this book is best unfolded at its own pace (for that reason, I’d advise not reading the Wikipedia entry on it til you’re done — it has way too many spoilers).

I have to admit it took me a while to get into the book. I had heard it lauded so much I think I was expecting to be wowed within moments, but it took a while for it to grow on me. It’s not until 80 or so pages in that I began to get some inkling what was going on, and I thought the remaining 400+ pages were going to go by slowly. But the kids are in the same boat as the reader, so it takes a while first for the clues to fall into place and then to figure out what to do about them, and it does reach “hard to put down” status after a while. I have to admit I almost rolled my eyes a little at the “world domination through thought control” idea (which made me think of Pinky and the Brain), but that’s the stuff of many a children’s book and superhero story.

But these children are not superheroes. I love that they are very real. They are gifted in different ways, but they each have their own struggles, strengths, weaknesses, doubts. They have to learn to lean on each other, to seek guidance yet to think for themselves. I love when books bring a character beyond what they think they can do, like Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Rings or Abbie in Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie (one of my favorite children’s books).

Though the book is not written from a Christian viewpoint, there are several underlying truths in it (someone once said “All truth is God’s truth”). Carrie saw some parallels to spiritual warfare and to differently-gifted people working together as a cohesive whole in the church, and I can see that. There is also an underlying love of truth throughout the book and a resistance to evil. It disturbed me when the children had to both cheat and lie at a couple of points, but it was justified as something which one would do in warfare that one wouldn’t normally do, and I can see that as well.

The word “clever” kept coming to mind as I read this, both in the wordplay and in the writing. I had wondered, with the idea of thought control coming through television and radios, whether the book was some kind of allegory concerning technology or wasting brains with media, but Carrie’s research indicated the author wrote in “all in good fun” with the main message being “Kids are people, too.”

I think my children would have liked this book when they were younger. I think my oldest in particular would have liked it during his Encyclopedia Brown days. I think they’d like it now, actually. Like Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, and the Little House books, it has great appeal to adults as well.

So…real, clever, interesting, fun, dramatic at points, all upon a bedrock of truth…I’d say those are components of a great book.

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

Thoughts about Amish fiction

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Barbara Harper

The first Amish fiction I ever read was Beverly Lewis‘s The Shunning some years ago. I don’t think I had heard of Beverly before that, and I am not sure what drew me to the book except for maybe curiosity about the Amish shunning. I enjoyed the book and have read everything of Beverly’s ever since (except for her books for younger people).

There is much about the Amish to admire: their gentleness, their work ethic and industriousness, their sense of family, their willingness to forgive evidenced some years ago after a tragic shooting.

I suppose all of those elements plus a curiosity about them and their ways has driven burgeoning market for Amish fiction in recent years.

At first I thought all these people were just copying Beverly, and out of loyalty to her I didn’t read any others. But I don’t think she would want people to feel that way, and I’m sure she’s not the only one who is knowledgeable about the Amish. I do tend to trust her perspective because of her grandmother’s having been Amish.

I especially appreciate that Beverly makes a distinction between Amish who are believers and those who aren’t. In some of her books, the characters are caught in the system, so to speak, even though it doesn’t satisfy them or meet their needs, and they eventually see the light and come to faith in Christ, and sometimes that costs them. Some leave the Amish for the Mennonites. Other characters have quietly become believers and stay, speaking when and however they can about Christ. And others are in an Amish community that is made of of true believers.

And this is what concerns me about the bulk of Amish fiction. The one Amish-based book I read that wasn’t written by Beverly wasn’t clear on this point: an Englisher with a variety of problems escaped the pressures of modern life to live with the Amish for a while, struggled with faith issues, was told, basically, “Live like us and you’ll catch on eventually.” I don’t know how other authors portray it, but I think we have to be careful not to think of the Amish as just another branch of Christianity. Tim Challies reviewed a book called Growing Up Amish a while back. I’ve not read the book, but I can identify with what was excerpted there. We need to remember that by and large their trust is in their system, their church membership, rather than in Christ, and even for those who are believers, their ideas of what is “worldly” is often determined by the bishop and may be far removed from Scriptural principles. Their communities are shot through with extreme legalism and extreme punishment for stepping outside “the rules.”

I am concerned about the over-romanticizing of our thinking in regard to them. I have a Christian friend who jokes about “running off to join the Amish” when life gets too hectic and pressured. I always want to say, “Are you kidding?” The amount of sheer hard work would do many of us in very quickly, but beyond that, I don’t think actually living among them would be what we think it would be. I think we can still read Amish fiction and I think we can still admire the good characteristics of them, but we need to exercise discernment.

Book Review: Saving Graces: The Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Barbara Harper

I got Saving Graces: the Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Stephen Hines, some years back because I was interested in this aspect of her life. I began it for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge, but didn’t get it finished til a few days ago. Well….in one sense I didn’t, but in another sense I had already read it, because these were taken from Laura’s magazine columns collected in a previous book of Mr. Hines’, Little House in the Ozarks: the Rediscovered Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder. In addition he added Scripture verses pertaining to the topics she wrote about and hymns that she would likely have been familiar with. So that was a bit disappointing, that it was a reprint in effect, and I only skimmed the columns I remembered fairly well but then reread others.

This title originally caught my attention because on a previous reading of the Little House series, I began to wonder if the Ingalls family was what we call God-fearing, but maybe not necessarily what we would understand as born again. Part of that wondering came from their reaction to an evangelist who came through town when Laura was in her teens. I can’t remember much about the scenario, and I didn’t get to that book in my most recent reading, but it seems the family was somewhat wary and not fully supportive of the evangelist. But in the intervening years since I read that, we’ve had encounters with evangelists that I would be wary and unsupportive of, too, so that’s not necessarily an indication of one’s faith. That is one section I am really looking forward to reading again in the future.

I did notice in the first two books in the series I just read for the LIW challenge, Little House in the Big Woods and Little House in the Prairie, there was mention of God, of keeping the Sabbath, of Scriptural principles for daily life. They didn’t go to church in those books, but then, there was not one on the prairie and probably not in the Big Woods, either. Laura’s parents were founders of a Congregational Church in later years. I wasn’t familiar with that denomination, but a brief skimming of the Wikipedia entry for them seems to indicate that they started out very similar to reformed, nonconformist churches but then over the years veered into “Unitarianism, Deism, and transcendentalism.” So I am not sure where the denomination as a whole was in Laura’s time and what she or her parents particularly believed.

In those first two books as well, I don’t remember much mention of prayer, any mention of Jesus in particular or salvation in general. Again, that doesn’t mean they didn’t believe in those things. We have to be careful that we don’t take anyone’s passing mention of God as an evidence of salvation on one hand, but on the other, we have to be careful that we don’t dismiss someone’s testimony because we don’t hear certain “code words.” By that estimation some would discount the salvation of the thief on the cross beside Jesus because his statement of faith didn’t sound like what we read in the “sinner’s prayer” on the back of tracts. 🙂

So, I am not trying to pick apart or dissect their faith but I am trying to look at it objectively. In Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life, she ran into a number of Christians who loved Laura, and she felt perhaps they were reading their faith into the books. She says:

I know there are a lot of folks who can easily see Christian messages in the books, lessons about trusting and accepting the will of God in times of hardship and relying on the bedrock of one’s faith to get through. There’s plenty of stuff in the books that can help illustrate these things, I guess. But the Ingalls family of the books didn’t appear to be much the praying types, unless the occasional hymn on Pa’s fiddle counts. Mary becomes a little godly by the later books, but as for the rest of the family, their reasons for attending church seems to have more to do with partaking in civilized town life than with religious devotion (The Wilder Life, p. 163).

She goes on to say that she may see it that way because that was how her own family attended church. Since she looks at everything through decidedly secular eyes, and Christians look at the series through the eyes of their own faith, it’s hard to know which of us is reading things into the books.

That brings me back full circle to Saving Graces. Laura’s own words didn’t shed much more light on the issue. She did believe in Scriptural principles and in a “beneficent Providence.” I didn’t get the idea that church was just a social outlet for her. Hines describes her conversion experience as a time when she was deeply burdened for a situation her family was in and knelt to pray and she was “filled with an overwhelming feeling, undoubtedly the presence of the Almighty, and she thought to herself, This is what men call God” (p. 2). Again, I wouldn’t necessarily argue with that, though conversion is more than just a feeling. But Hines says later that public expressions of faith “may have shocked her.” He quotes her as saying, “Of course you loved God, but you also loved your mother, and somehow it didn’t seem right to go around bragging about it” (p. 3). It doesn’t make sense to me that a public expression of faith would be considered bragging, but evidently she considered faith to be intensely personal.

On the other hand, she writes in one of her columns, “Here and there one sees a criticism of Christianity because of the things that have happened [during WWI]….’Christianity has not prevented these things, therefore it is a failure’ some say. But this is a calling of things by the wrong names. It is rather the lack of Christianity that has brought us where we are. Not a lack of churches or religious forms but of the real thing in our hearts” (p. 113).

In these columns she covers success, justice, thankfulness, the benefits of work, the importance and blessing of the home, wise stewardship, remembering the Sabbath, friendship, gossip, “redeeming the time, “the preaching farmer,” and others. One of the quotes I marked had to do with taking the Lord’s name in vain: “I wonder how things came to be so reversed from the right order that it should be thought daring and smart to swear instead of being regarded as utterly foolish and a sign of weakness, betraying a lack of self control. If people could only realize how ridiculous they appear when they call down the wrath of the Creator and Ruler of the universe just because they have jammed their thumbs, I feel sure they would never feel guilty of swearing again” (p. 124). I don’t know if they would, but I agree that it is a sign of weakness and a lack of self-control.

So, even though I was disappointed that this book was taken from the Little House in the Ozarks book, it was nice to have her faith-based columns all in one place for those of us who want to explore her thoughts in this realm in particular.