The 14th Day of Community: Janet Oberholtzer

Five years ago, Janet Oberholtzer was on vacation with her family. She was sleeping as they drove, and then she woke up – in the hospital, after a 10-day coma. And her life had irrevocably changed. She learned that she had almost died, and that she night never walk again. Her legs and hips were a mass of fractures and wounds, and she had fractured three vertebrae. Two have healed well; the third is out of line.

And Janet had been a runner, and participated in races.

The August after her accident, months later, Janet walked. Today, Janet runs again. (She has three posts on her blog about the accident, coming to terms with her injuries, and how she starting running again -- see them beneath her profile on the right. The third one includes a link at the bottom to a TV report from last March, when she was interviewed prior to participating in a four-person relay for a marathon.)

And Janet writes. In December, Janet learned she had been accepted into the Dream Year program, directed by Ben Arment. Ben will be her coach for a year. Janet’s dream: to finish and publish her memoir and then become a speaker – around the world.

I should also say that at Christmas, Janet posted photographs of her family – and it was only then that I realized that she was a mother of three boys – and not their sister (and not from the photographs – but from the text accompanying them.)

So check out Janet’s blog. Follow her on Twitter. And watch her dream unfold and come true.


(Last month, a number of us participating in the “Twelve Days of Community” - see the button at the top right - sponsored by The High Calling Blogs. The purpose was to highlight the blog or web site of someone other than ourselves during the season of Advent and Christmas. I liked the idea so much that I’m going to continue to do that -- highlight a blog or web site of a person whose thoughts and writing have had an impact on me and others.)

The 13th Day of Community: Monica Sharman

Last month, a number of us participating in the “Twelve Days of Community” (see the button at the top right) sponsored by The High Calling Blogs. The purpose was to highlight the blog or web site of someone other than ourselves during the season of Advent and Christmas. I made a point in each post about this was something we should be doing throughout the year, and now I’m putting my money where my mouth was.

Each week this year, I will highlight a blog or web site of a person whose thoughts and writing have had an impact on me and others. And today is the first one for 2010 – Monica Sharman.

Monica and her husband Charles have three boys. Charles is the author of Through the Bible with My Child, a plan for studying the Bible with young children in four years. (All proceeds from the book go to support a ministry in India.) And she is a former engineer.

Monica explains on her blog, Know-Love-Obey God, that she has three purposes, which came as a result of a study she did in March 2008 of Paul’s epistle to the Philippians: the advancement of the gospel, the edification of His Church, and the glory of His name.

Those three purposes play out across her writing. And what wonderful writing it is, saturated by her love for God.

In December, she did a guest post at Ann Voskamp’s blog, A Holy Experience. She used the metaphors of coins to describe her “gratitude list,” and you have to read it to experience just how good it is. (Item No. 6 under “husband:” Crow’s feet lines in husband’s smiling eyes.)

Or consider her reflections upon reading Stone Crossings by L.L. Barkat: “Besides the state of my home and emotions, I read Stone Crossings in the same way I curled up with Ramona the Brave and Because of Winn-Dixie and The Great Gilly Hopkins—tears on the brink, heart in my throat, brows raised in anticipation over eager, unblinking eyes.”

And then there’s her poetry. She writes a lot of poetry, and it’s poetry that reaches down deep into the heart and soul. An excerpt from her poem “White:”

White is the Lamb
perfect white Lamb
taking His cup
drinking
for us
thorns piercing
blood flowing
blood from the Son of God
amazing, this blood
thick with love
though red
it washes white

Read and follow her blog. Follow her on Twitter. She has the sweetest, most discerning spirit. And you will learn, and you will immeasurably benefit yourself.

The Twelfth Day of Christmas: Community

In one way, celebrating the 12 days of community with the High Calling Blogs has been difficult. There are too many people to celebrate.

Here are the links to my 11 previous posts:

The First Day of Christmas: Athol Dickson
The Second Day of Christmas: Laura Boggess
The Third Day of Christmas: Two from Bellingham (Jim Schmotzer and Fred Sprinkle)
The Fourth Day of Christmas: Maureen Doallas
The Fifth Day of Christmas: Nancy Rosback
The Sixth Day of Christmas: Marcus Goodyear
The Seventh Day of Christmas: New Friends (Doug Spurling, Susan Etole, Randall David Tipton, Phoenix Karenee, Claire Burge)
The Eighth Day of Christmas: Farm Life (Ann Vosberg and Jennifer Dukes Lee)
The Ninth Day of Christmas: A Book (L.L. Barkat’s InsideOut: Poems)
The Tenth Day of Christmas: Suspense (Mike Dellosso, Travis Thrasher, Adam Blumer, Sam Batterman)
The Eleventh Day of Christmas: A Shrunken Camel (Bradley Moore)

All of these are people I’ve come to know, to a greater or lesser extent, through the internet: Twitter, Facebook, blogs, blog comments and email. I’ve talked to one of them on the telephone one time. Truly a “virtual community.”

Except.

Except: I’ve shared prayer requests with many of these people. I’ve prayed for them and they’ve prayed for me. I’ve prayed together with some online via email. (You should try that – a prayer exchange via email or Twitter direct message.)

Except: we’ve gone well out of our ways to encourage each other – possibly because encouragement seems to be in such short supply. Fifteen minutes of fame, 15 minutes of adulation – these we have in abundance. But too little encouragement.

Except: to one degree or another, we’re all writers. And we share that curious combination of courage and fear, audacity and intimidation, that seems to be the trademark of most writers.

Except: the community doesn’t stop here. You can’t cover an online community in 12 days of posts. There are many, many others I could have highlighted. And I think I will. So don’t be surprised to find the “27th Day of Christmas” or “44th Day of Christmas” except I’ll substitute “community” for “Christmas” in keeping with what the original High Calling Blogs idea. (Yes, L.L., I changed it.) (Deliberately.)

Except: we are of a faith. This is the most important “except,” the reason why all the rest even happen. We share a common faith, a faith with an earthly set of origins in Bethlehem but a heavenly set of origins whose beginning cannot be measured or defined or even understood, ultimately. But even with our human understanding falling short, we are forever grateful.

And I’m grateful for this community of faith that we’ve been celebrating at the High Calling Blogs.

The Eleventh Day of Christmas: A Shrunken Camel

He’s a business executive, a senior business executive with a VP title. He works for a diversified company in the Northeast; I’m not sure which one exactly but he knows a lot about my company which tells me that some of that diversification relates to agriculture. He’s written for the Conference Board Magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, Sales Gravy and a lot of other publications. He’s been a management consultant. He likes being in the executive suite, and, as he’s written in a formative essay, he likes making money.

He also wrestles with issues of faith in the workplace, and he’s one of the most thoughtful and articulate writers on the subject out there.

His name is Bradley Moore. His blog is Shrinking the Camel. He’s also an editor at the High Calling Blogs, and he’s one of the key organizers for conference held at Princeton University on transforming the workplace. His writings are also regularly featured at InsideWork. An example is his essay on leadership and power. And he makes no apology for business and work – there’s no inherent contradiction between business and faith. Read the linked essay at the end of the “What is Shrinking the Camel all about?” on his blog.

His writing is brash, enthusiastic and irreverent, and he doesn’t hesitate to take on sacred cows. He’s also unfailingly positive (it’s a good antidote for me who leans to a slightly – not much but slightly – more negative view of organizations and management).

Read Bradley’s blog. Follow him on Twitter. Check out his links (he reads more journals and publications than just about anyone I’ve run across). You’ll learn a lot about faith, the workplace, business and organizational life.

And you’ll get to meet a pretty cool guy – who’s proving that a camel can shrink enough to fit through the eye of the needle.


(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)

The Tenth Day of Christmas: Suspense

I’ve loved reading mysteries and suspense since I was six or seven years old. The first one I can remember reading was Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion. I can also remember ordering ever mystery offered by Scholastic Book Service at school, inhaling all of the Hardy Boys (with a slight detour into the Tom Swift science fiction stories), and then going on to mysteries with murders and general mayhem. Even today, I usually can’t resist the newest mystery novel by Elizabeth George, P.D. James, Ian Rankin or the Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte (English translation).

Christian fiction has its own sub-genre of mystery and suspense, and a growing category of horror. And there’s a lot of controversy within the ranks, so to speak; not everyone likes it or believes it to be “edifying.” But I’ve found four novelists are who tell great stories, and I will read anything by them.

Earlier this year, not too long before I started blogging, I discovered Mike Dellosso and his novel The Hunted, shortly before he published his latest novel, Scream. Set in Pennsylvania where Mike lives, these are stories more influenced by Stephen King than P.D. James. There’s mystery, to be sure, but there’s also horror, and sometimes the supernatural. He writes about life in a small-town, but it’s life like you’ve never run across before. I got hooked. His next novel, Darlington Woods, is due out in May 2010.

Then I saw a recommendation for Isolation by a Chicago-based novelist named Travis Thrasher. He’s a full-time writer, and has written 12 novels, including a love story and a lot of mysteries and suspense. His novel Sky Blue is a personal favorite, and I’ve also read Admission and Ghostwriter. Some are mysteries, all are suspenseful and a few fall into the horror category (As I read Isolation, I had to occasionally put it down, go walk around and calm myself, and then come back – the tension that Thrasher creates is something else). He’s under contract for a series of Young Adult novels, and has just self-published Every Breath You Take because it was something he wanted to do. (Yes, I’ve ordered it.)

Adam Blumer's novel Fatal Illusions was published in the late spring, and I don’t think I will ever look at magicians the same way again. Adam is a freelance editor who lives in Michigan’s U.P., and this is his first novel – and it’s a corker of a story about a family trying to take a healing sabbatical, and instead finding themselves being stalked but not one but two different people for two different reasons. Don’t read this novel before turning the lights out for the night; I made that mistake and lay in bed wide-eyed for some time. Adam is also working on his next novel.

Sam Batterman also published his first novel this year, called Wayback. It leans more in the direction of science fiction than the other three novelists, and it’s more like Michael Crichton than Stephen King. It’s got a fascinating premise – that scientists are able to prove the Biblical flood, and travel back in time to do just that. The descriptions of the landscape – and of the cataclysm of the flood itself – are incredible. Batterman is working on a sequel to WayBack.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)

The Ninth Day of Christmas: A Book

So I veer off a bit from what we’ve been doing at High Calling Blogs to celebrate Christmas – celebrating 12 days of community by pointing to favorite writers, bloggers, tweeters – “others” besides ourselves.

For this ninth day, I want to talk about a book. And not just any book, but one for which I can’t really give a dispassionate review. Several of us were “there at the creation” of one part of this book – we actually saw it unfold online. We were there when the first news of the book-to-come was eked out in barely contained excitement via Twitter and email. (To be truthful, there was no “barely contained excitement” about it – it was more like squeals of euphoria, and we joined in.)

I had the privilege to read a partially completed manuscript (Word) version of the book. The author asked, hesitantly, what parts I liked best. I said it was easier to say what parts I didn’t like – because they weren’t any. And then to see the first reports of “it’s arrived on my doorstep,” followed by “it’s up on Amazon,” well, that was excitement of the first order.

The book is InsideOut: Poems. The author is the friend I’ve never met but talked on the phone with once, L.L. Barkat. The book's web site is here.

I first met L.L. through her memoir Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places, published in 2008 by IVP. I’ve told the story here about how I read it straight through one night, actually one morning in the wee hours, while I was in the hospital for broken ribs and a partially collapsed lung. And I told the story again here as well, with a little more information about what happened when I read it. Books can have big impacts, and some books can have profound impacts, and Stone Crossings had a profound impact on me.

And now the poems.

The one several of us saw being created was “In Your Dream,” because it happened during one of Twitter poetry jams (plug here for TweetSpeak Poetry, our online journal for the poems created on Twitter). Here’s one of the poem’s stanzas:

I was the story
in the burning book,
leading you beyond
frost and fields
lapped by time
towards a clearing.

The poems of InsideOut are about life and death, about family and brokenness, about color and lushness, about children and art and love. They’re arranged in seasons bit they transcend that arrangement. Just when you think you understand one, your eye catches a word or phrase you missed the first two times and the meaning changes again.

I’ve read the volume twice in its bound form, three times if you count the manuscript stage. I’ve gone back to read portions again. And I will do that again, and then give it another full reading. It’s that good.

InsideOut is published by the International Arts Movement, an organization that does some pretty cool stuff.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)

The Sixth Day of Christmas: Marcus Goodyear

An editor, a poet and a philosopher/thinker about the workplace. That’s a lot, but even collectively it doesn’t quite do Marcus Goodyear justice.

Marcus is senior editor for The High Calling, the High Calling Blogs and Faith in the Workplace. I connected to him in blogs and blog comments via L.L. Barkat, a managing editor at the High Calling Blogs (and author of Stone Crossings and the recently published book of poems InsideOut).

He takes editing seriously. Here’s what he says on his web site: “When I agree to edit a work, I take such a commitment very seriously. I am a tough editor. I will not hesitate to change verbs, cut sentences and paragraphs, and work on issues of style like pacing. I do not attempt to usurp a writer’s style, but too often writers are simply avoiding the work of revision and editing under the guise of defending their stylistic integrity.”

Marcus was my editor for an article I wrote for High Calling. Marcus takes editing seriously. Trust me.

He writes poetry, including one we republished at TweetSpeak Poetry called “Sometimes I Cannot Always Be There,” which he called a poem for All Saints Day. He’s written poems about Eve’s garden, the risen Christ, zombies, mowing dead grass after church on Sunday, and the Large Hadon Collider (he may be the only person in the history of the planet who’s written a poem about the Large Hadon Collider, not to mention the fact that it was about motherhood and the Large Hadon Collider).

And his writing about work, well, you have to read it for yourself: an interview with Michael Card on freedom and slavery; the work and faith movement; and “why I don’t go to church.” He actually does go to church but the title certainly pulls you into the article.

Marcus is a husband and a father, too.

Explore his blog, goodwordediting.com. Follow him on Twitter. Enjoy his writing and his poetry – and in the process you’ll learn that he edits himself harder than he edits anyone else.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)

The Fifth Day of Christmas: nAncY Rosback

A short conversation on Twitter started with wishing a happy birthday to a son, when it was actually a daughter. And then this:

@poemsandprayers: thanks glynn...cj ....um...is a girl :-) jane is her middle name...on my grandmothers' side was a baby taken in that was left…on church doorstep in kentucky, they named her america jane, so we used jane as a middle name for her. america jane was one of my ancestors that was from ky. and ended up in so. illinois.

So meet nAncY Rosback.

Descended from America Jane

a baby, a foundling
left in the hands of God on
the doorstep of a church.
they named her not Jane but
America Jane, because this was
frontier-like and that’s what you did
frontier-like and everyone understood.
and she grew, and grew up, and had
babies of her own whom she loved and
treasured and didn’t leave on a doorstep of
a church because she knew God had left them
in her arms instead.

And a baby had a baby had a baby,
and a baby found herself growing up in the
prairies not too far from where Lincoln lived.
and she grew up playing in corn field and a ditch
and she learned to ride a bike that moved her all over
town, because it was okay to do that unafraid in the 1960s.
she grew up and got married and lived in Oregon where
she grew a family and some grapes for wine named Sineann.
now she takes these beautiful photos and she writes poems,
about a voyage, and youth, and relationships, and community
and all the other things in life that matter, like God. to find her
you have to just say the word, or tweet.


(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)

The Fourth Day of Christmas: Maureen Doallas

I think of Maureen Doallas as the Renaissance lady.

I met Maureen like many are met on the web – via blogs, comments and web sites. She operates a business called Transformational Threads, which licenses images of original fine art for rendering into embroidery “paintings,” also known as thread or needle paintings. She officially retired in 2007 from a job as writer and editor, but you wouldn’t know it from the sheer energy she exhibits when it comes to the arts and poetry.

She’s into all things art. She loves art, and you can see and experience her passion by reading her posts at her blog, Writing Without Paper. She’s introduced me and a lot of others to artists all over the United States. She keeps tracks of what’s going on with exhibitions, gallery openings, theatre, dance performances, concerts and movies, mostly in but not limited to the Washington, D.C., area, and she shares them on her blog in what she calls “All-Art Fridays.”

How she finds all the art-related videos on YouTube is beyond me, but when she posts one, it’s always worth watching.

And then there’s her poetry. Maureen has been writing poetry for a long time, has published some, and regularly posts her poems on her blog. She’s also a faithful contributor to our poetry jams on Twitter, which we publish at TweetSpeak Poetry. She writes beautiful words and lines – raising the bar for the rest of us. Take a look at the one she wrote for the One-Word-At-A-Time Blog Carnival on grief, or her three-part Christmas poem. Moving, simple, elegant.

She also does occasional interviews of people. And speaking from experience, she’s the most intelligent interviewer I’ve ever run across (and I’ve been interviewed by 2,000+ people in the course of my career). Likely reflecting her background as a researcher and writer, she spends an enormous amount of time researching her interview subjects, and then developing insightful, meaningful questions. I was blown away.

Maureen’s happily married (except, apparently, when it comes to fighting for space on bookshelves) and the mother of a son. She has four sisters and two brothers, and family is important to her – that comes through in all of her writings.

So read Maureen’s blog. Follow her on Twitter. She may have officially retired, but as she says on her blog site, “I’m not done yet, as you can see.” And you’ll be glad for it, too.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)

The First Day of Christmas: Athol Dickson

Athol Dickson’s Lost Mission is one of the best books I’ve read this year. And there’s a story behind its publication, as in, the publisher screwed up and forgot to do the things publishers are supposed to do. Okay, it happens. But it’s worse than a shame it happened to as fine a novel as Lost Mission.

I reviewed the book in October; you can read the review here. I had no idea what had happened to the book until I read Dickson’s blog post on the Advent season, “Peace During Advent.” There’s more information about the book and the author at Dickson’s web site.

If you’re not familiar with Athol Dickson, you should be. He’s writing really fine fiction. My first experience with his writing was The Cure, about what happens to a town in Maine when people here there’s a cure for alcoholism there. Then I read Winter Haven, about a young woman who travels to an island off the coast of Maine to identify the body of her long-missing brother, a body, almost perfectly preserved for years, that washes up on the shore. And there’s River Rising, a novel about the 1927 Mississippi River flood that’s of special interest to me, who grew up about a mile from that river in New Orleans and who currently lives about 13 miles due west of it in St. Louis.

For me, discovering Athol Dickson was like opening up a whole new world of fiction – Christian fiction unlike any I had ever read. And Dickson led me to other writers (and you should let him lead you to them as well).

Read Athol Dickson. Read him. He’s better than good.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should be doing the other 353 days of the year as well.)