Courting Trouble by Deeanne Gist

     

     The year is 1894 and Essie Spreckelmeyer is the epitome of a tomboy.  She loves to hunt, fish, catch snakes, and ride her bicycle.  The problem is that Essie is thirty years old with no prospects of a husband in sight.  Sure, everybody in the town of Corsicana, Texas loves Essie, but no man in his right mind would marry a woman who makes a spectacle of herself, wearing low cut skirts that show ankle and calf just so she can ride a bicycle.  Essie has prayed and prayed that the Lord bring her a husband, but she doesn’t have much more time to waste.  Before Essie resides herself to being the town spinster, she takes the matter into her own hands and makes a list of the available men in town, making note of their attributes and drawbacks.  Picking a name off of the list was the easy part; the hard part is going to be convincing the man that she is the right girl for him.

     It was so easy to love Essie and just get mesmerized in her story.  I was almost upset about the ending until I learned that there was a sequel.  I am excited to be able to keep following Essie on her journey.  Deanne Gist created characters in town that really make you wish you could transport though time to that setting.  I loved the way the Mrs. Gist tried to stay accurate with her timeline and the events that she wrote about in her book while keeping the story alive and interesting.

Three Key Elements of Spiritual Formation

In his book, "Living the Resurrection," Eugene H. Peterson provides three steps to help the Christian maintain a close relationship with Jesus Christ. The three steps, resurrection wonder, resurrection meals, and resurrection friends are shown by gospel examples to be essential, in fact, to be the core of our spiritual formation. The author illustrates resurrection wonder through the gospel accounts of how the first eye witnesses to Jesus' resurrection responded: with awe and wonder similar to how a young child views the world. The author then goes on to share the gospel accounts of the meals shared with Jesus Christ after his resurrection and the similarities that each of those meals shared. In his final chapter, the author illustrates, again using the gospels, that friends are an essential part of our spiritual formation. While we will never know all there is to know about God the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit, we each have something that we can teach one another. Spiritual formation cannot be done individually.
I think that the items that the author discussed in his book are very important in growing and maintaining a relationship with God. One major obstacle in reading this book, which surprised me, was getting passed the complex vocabulary that the author chose to write with. As the author of the Message, an easy to understand paraphrasing bible, I expected to see that same writing style used in this book. My advise is to keep a dictionary handy while reading this book because there are places it will take a little work to understand.
I received this book free from NavPress Publishers as part of their Blogger Review Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commision's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

Walk Like You Have Somewhere to Go

     In her book, “Walk Like You Have Somewhere to Go,” Lucille O’Neal, mother of Shaquille O’Neal, shares her journey through life.  She is very candid in her book sharing not only the good things that happened but also sharing the bad things that happened. 

     Her parents divorced when she was young and as a result Lucille, her father, brother, and sister all moved from Georgia to New Jersey into her paternal grandparents already overcrowded home.  She became pregnant when she was seventeen and was a single mother for two years before getting married.  Lucille had three more children with her husband who joined the Army as a way to provide for the growing family.  The Army allowed their family to travel to Georgia, Germany and Texas, but to make ends meet Lucille also had to work.  The draining demands of being an Army wife (which meant shifting into single parent mode when her husband left for training), being a mother of four and having to work left Lucille emotionally and mentally spent.  Lucille soon turned to drinking heavily on the weekends as a way to relax.

     Throughout her story, Lucille shares things that she learned.  Instead of blaming her parents for the way that she was raised she says, “My motto is, once you turn thirty-five years old, you need to forgive your parents for everything and let it go.”  As her children got older, Lucille yearned to become more than just a wife and mother.  She says, “As human beings, I really believe we all have a desire on some level to see what we’re made of.  We all have that yearning inside to prove to ourselves that we can get by using just the wits and skills we were born with.”  Lucille went to college where she earned a bachelor’s degree and then went on to earn her master’s degree.  She says, “I’m a living and breathing testament that life begins and flourishes at whatever age you become comfortable in your own skin and whenever it is that you fall in love with what you see when you look in the mirror each morning.

     I cannot give this book high enough praise.  Lucille’s story is truly inspirational to everyone in all walks of life.  Not only did she share her story adding all of the not so pretty details but at the end of the book she also shares forty scriptures from the bible and what she has learned from them.  This book was a great read and if she chooses to write more books I will read those too.

The Shunning by Beverly Lewis

     Katie Lapp has always felt like she was different from everyone in her family.  Hadn’t her Mammi said as much when she caught Katie humming a tune, “Lord have mercy-you’re like no little girl I ever knowed!”  Plus, she was the only person in her whole Amish community who had red hair.

     A week before Katie is to get married, an English woman in a black limousine, with the same red hair as Katie’s is seen by some of the Amish folk.  The woman, desperate to find her daughter, leaves a letter with the Wise Woman of Hickory Hollow.  The letter confirms Katie’s worst fears and greatest dreams all in one day.

     In an effort to gain some form of her true identity, Katie calls off the wedding and is shunned by her Amish community in the process.  Katie has six weeks to come to her senses and perform a kneeling confession or risk loosing her Amish family and friends forever.

     This book had some unexpected twists and turns that kept me reading.  I didn’t want to put the book down.  Even the ending made me want to pick up the second book in this three book series to find out what happens next.

The Immortal by Angela Hunt

Claudia Fischer is a jury consultant, more affectionately known as a people reader, from New York. Claudia prides herself on her ability to read a person by observing everything about their outward appearance and demeanor. After the verdict is read on her latest case, an organization based in Rome called Global Union hires Claudia to go to Rome and help screen and hire new employees.
Asher Genzano has applied for the position of interpreter and translator. During his interview with Claudia, Asher is read as being truthful in his answers and confident in his abilities. Even so, Claudia feels there is something not quite right because his answers to her questions should make him an old man and yet he looks to be in his thirties. Despite how she feels, Claudia has no concrete evidence against hiring him, so she gives Asher her recommendation.
After he is hired, Claudia’s feelings about Asher are confirmed when he tells her that he is two thousand years old, born the same year as Jesus Christ. Try as she may, through many hours of research in a Roman library, Claudia can’t prove him wrong, but it will take an act of faith to believe him.
I really enjoyed reading this book. While I don’t feel the story is a believable one, I do feel like the author did an amazing job creating realistic characters. Angela has a gift for bringing history to life. She wrote about it in a way that made it possible for you to put yourself there.

Beautiful Things Happen When a Woman Trusts God by Sheila Walsh

      

Sheila is very open with her life in this book.  She masterfully draws parallels between the lives of biblical characters and her life illustrating that we can do the same and hear a fresh word from God in the process.  Her biblical illustrations included stories from the lives of Gideon, Abraham, Samson, Anna, Paul, and others.  In each chapter of her book, Sheila writes more of her story and then parallels it to the story of a biblical character and then explains what she learned from that character while at the same time asking the reader a few thought provoking questions to help them glean something from the story as well.  At the end of each chapter, she writes a sentence or two to transition into the next chapter.  Sheila covers subjects such us “The Beauty of Waiting and Being Present,” in chapter four, “The Beauty of Quiet Trust,” in chapter seven and “The Beauty of Forgiving” in chapter nine.

     I am torn on how I feel about this book.  On the one hand, it has some very good lessons that are worth learning if you want to have a deeper relationship with God.  I loved reading her book in one hand while I had my bible in my other hand so that I could freshen my memory of the bible story she was talking about.  On the other hand, I felt that by the time I was in the middle of the book the layout of the book was very predictable, which kind of made it boring.  I think this book would be good if it was read as a group because the meetings would stay predictable and flow easily throughout each chapter and I wonder if that was her intention because at the end of the book is a bible study.  I don’t think it works well as a book read individually.

The Victory Club by Robin Lee Hatcher

    

     Set in Idaho in 1943, in the middle of World War II, four women with four very different stories commit to be there for one another.  Margo and Dottie King, mother and daughter, Lucy Anderson, and Penny Maxfield create the Victory Club to help other families whose loved ones are also fighting in the war.  The women ride the same bus together to their jobs at Gowen Fields, their local military base.  They meet for lunch every weekday and then ride the same bus to their perspective homes.

     Margo and Dottie live together in a small house.  Margo’s husband divorced her and left her to raise two young children by herself.  Margo, determined that her children will not make the same mistakes she did when she was young, has raised her son and daughter in a godly home and made sure that they have followed all of God’s laws.  Dottie, not yet twenty, has a deep relationship with God, which shows even at a distance.  Dottie’s boyfriend, Greg, shares the same kind of relationship with God that Dottie has.  They planned to get married right after high school but waited at the insistence of Dottie’s mother, Margo.  Before they could get married, Pearl Harbor was bombed and Greg signed up for the military, but not before they succumbed to one night of passion.

     Lucy was orphaned at eighteen with no other family to turn to.  Like Dottie, Lucy shares a deep relationship with God, visible to all.  Lucy met her husband, Richard in her late twenties.  They were married two years after their first date and shared one night as husband and wife before Pearl Harbor was bombed.  Lucy hasn’t seen her husband in over a year and constantly combats the loneliness of her apartment when she goes home.

     Penny doesn’t feel like she has that much in common with the other women.  Her husband is at home, not fighting in the war like all of the other men his age.  A week before Pearl Harbor was bombed, Stuart Maxfield fell off of the ladder and now lives with constant back pain, or so the doctor tells her.  Penny also doesn’t have a relationship with God like the other women.  She thinks her husband is lying about his back to get out of serving in the war.  Not only does she have to work, to keep food on the table and the medical bills paid, but she also has to go home and be a wife and a mother to two young children.  This is not what she thought she would be doing at the young age of twenty-five, she is too young to be tied down.

     This book was such a great story, I wish the author had written more and continued the story.  A former military wife myself, I felt like I could really relate with the characters and the feelings they dealt with.  This story was a great illustration of what it means to trust God.  It is easy to trust God when things are going your way but when things are unpredictable especially the lives of your loved ones, it becomes harder to trust that God is in control.  I would recommend this book to everybody.