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I’ve been reflecting lately on my conversion experience as a child. I’m not so sure that what I was converted to is superior to what I was converted from. Sometimes it seems like I’ve spent most of my life trying to get back to my pre-conversion faith. As far back as I can remember, I loved [...] The Hiding Place is the story of Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch woman best known as a participant in the Dutch underground during the second world war whose home had a hidden room to shelter those fleeing Hitler’s regime. Or so I’ve always had her classified in my mind. This book makes it clear that [...] It’s Read Aloud Thursday at Hope is the Word, and I wanted to mention this little book by Charlotte Zolotow: If You Listen. Both daughters liked it. It’s about a little girl whose father is far away for some reason — perhaps in the armed services, perhaps in a profession that involves traveling — and [...] When I reviewed Charles Williams’s Descent Into Hell, I mentioned one of the themes of the story that intrigued me: substitution. Apparently, C.S. Lewis was moved very much by Williams’s ideas on this score as well, as I read today in Alan Jacobs’s The Narnian. I quote it here because Jacobs explains it so clearly: I [...] Notice God’s unutterable waste of saints, according to the judgment of the world. God plants His saints in the most useless places. We say — God intends me here because I am so useful. Jesus never estimated His life along the line of the greatest use. God puts His saints where they will glorify Him, [...] This week as I’ve been reading The Narnian, I’ve been thinking about joy. Lewis’ own biography was titled Surprised by Joy, and his life shows nothing if not God’s way of leading us along through the longings and inexplicable joys he plants in our hearts. What are yours? I’ve been realizing that one of mine [...] This is from this morning’s Diary of Private Prayer by John Baillie: O Thou who art the Source and Ground of all truth, Thou Light of lights, who hast opened the minds of men to discern the things that are, guide me today, I beseech Thee, in my hours of reading. Give [...] I picked up Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith at the Friends of the Library Book Sale a few weeks ago. It sounded familiar, though I’m not sure where I’d heard of the title, or the author, before. It’s a spiritual autobiography of sorts, a series of impressions that, pieced together, give us [...] We’re on our second try planting beans in the garden. It’s so nice that the girls are old enough to want to help, and to be able to! My eldest did all the hoeing and planting on this round. She got them all planted, then our neighbor came over and mentioned that his friend has [...] Dallas Willard’s Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God is less a how-to book than a renovation of our commonly accepted ideas about prayer. Quietly but assuredly, it confronts the skepticism that God would speak regularly and understandably to his children. It meditates on the qualities of God’s voice and emphasizes the disciplines that [...] |
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