The Christian Atheist

Dan King over at Bible Dude had a major book giveaway going on a few weeks back, offering a whole host of different books. I entered for one of them and -- surprise! -- my name was picked as one of the winners. The book was Craig Groeschel's The Christian Atheist: Believing God but Living as if He Doesn't Exist. In due course, it arrived in the mail, and in due course, I read it.

Part of the deal was agreeing to write a review, and you can read what I wrote over at Bible Dude today. Take a look and let me (and Dan) know what you think.

C.S. Lakin's "The Map Across Time"

I’m continuing my new-found romance with fantasy novels.

Last week, I talked about C.S. Lakin’s The Wolf of Tebron, the first novel in “The Gates of Heaven” series. The second book in that series is The Map Across Time, to be published March 4 (I read the Advance Reader Copy provided by the publisher).

The two books are independent of one another, sharing only an approximate time and place. Tebron is a small town, where a blacksmith named Joran has to confront an extraordinary quest. In The Map Across Time, the setting is the city of Sherbourne, but a city experienced by the same characters in widely separated periods of time.

Adin and Aletha are the teenaged children of the king of Sherbourne, who’s increasingly in the grip of increasingly evil advisors. Their mother is dead. Adin, the heir to the throne, has a number of physical deformities, and not one whom anyone would expect to undertake a quest. Yet it falls to Adin to save his father and the kingdom, by finding the source of the original curse that lies upon the city and is destroying his father.

And he does that through a map, a special map, a map that takes him across time. Aletha follows, by following Adin's glittering path through the woods. They don’t arrive together; in fact, Adin won’t learn for some time that Aletha is even there.

Lakin tells a wonderful story, full of creativity and imagination and even more unexpected twists and turns than the first novel in the series. And it’s a riveting read, complicated by Aletha falling in love in the wrong period of time; special wizards and seers; evil disguised and exposed; a talking pig who’s absolutely delightful; and nothing being what it appears to be. Lakin controls this story, and does it well; it never flies out of control but keeps to a complete center.

The central figure is Adin, the bearer of infirmities and the bearer of the quest. He’s an unlikely candidate to be chosen to do what must be done, not to mention accomplish it, but he accepts the quest and changes his life and the lives of those he loves, and his kingdom. Lakin draws him well and true, because she draws his heart well and true.

It’s a fine story, an engaging story, one that I had a hard time putting down. It’s suitable for older children, young adults and adults, and even for reading to younger children.

The only drawback is that I have to wait until October to read the next novel in the series.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Marriage

My wife and I had a not typical dating relationship and romance. We met during my last semester at college, and within three weeks were talking about getting married. I had the “talk” with her father in Shreveport, but wisely waited until the evening’s televised baseball game was over. I proposed to her while we were driving from Shreveport back to Baton Rouge, and I believe were about 30 miles from the LSU campus, somewhere in the Atchafalaya River Basin, when I officially asker her (she said yes).

I graduated in May and left the next day for Beaumont, Texas, to start my job as a copy editor on the Beaumont Enterprise. She returned to Shreveport to do a summer internship at the Shreveport Times. We saw each other several times that summer (Shreveport was about a five-hour drive from Beaumont), and then got married in August at a church neither of us attended. Pre-marriage counseling might have been around at the time but it wasn’t common.

We were married on a Saturday, returned to Beaumont on Sunday, and then both of us went to work at the newspaper on Monday (a two-journalist family).

We were young (she was 21 and I turned 22 two weeks after we were married). We didn’t know any better. All we knew was that we loved each other.

All of us bring stuff into marriage – personal history, lots of “baggage,” lots of expectations, a bunch of advice, and two starry-eyed kids.

Most of the advice you ignore, and, to be honest about it, most of the advice is useless. Marriage is one of those things that you can’t really explain completely to someone considering it. Some things have to be experienced. Once you have children, you can (and will) be a model for marriage – and that’s all the good and bad stuff combined.

There is one thing I wish someone had told me about marriage, but I most likely would have nodded like I understood and went on about my business. That one thing, though, is something critical, something hinted at in the wedding vows but never explicitly stated.

That one thing is this: marriage is not about me.

It’s not about my desires and wants. It’s not about my needs being met. It’s not about my “happiness.” (It’s not about anyone’s “happiness.”) It’s not about “romance,” although romance can play a facilitating role.

Marriage is about two things, one practical and one spiritual.

The practical point of marriage is family – providing a structure (even if we manage to screw it up) for the creation and upbringing of children.

The spiritual point of marriage is that great mystery – the symbol for Christ and the church.

It’s about “us” – a new creation, a oneness. We have a earthly purpose – family – and a spiritual purpose – to be (however imperfectly) and to reflect Christ’s love for the church.

But it’s not about me.


To read more posts on “what I wish someone had told me about marriage,” please visit Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista.

Photograph: Cheers by Jeff Klisares via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ann Voskamp's "One Thousand Gifts"

A meditation. A devotional. A confession. A prayer. An explication of Scripture. A plaintive cry.

One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp is all of these things, and more. I’ve never read a book quite like this one. I’ve never been moved in quite this way by a book, either.

She begins with an accidental death – of her sister when they were young children. The death and its aftermath, an aftermath that never really ends, radiate outwardly. Embracing and engulfing the family, ricocheting and echoing through time, affecting and touching so many and so much.

Voskamp asks this question: “How do I fully live when life is full of hurt? How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?”

And then she answers it, by taking us on a journey that is rather unexpected – the journey of the daily, the small things, those little things that comprise a day, a moment, a life. She begins to see what she calls the eucharisteo, a combination of grace, thanksgiving and joy. It’s there. It’s there for her and for all of us. But this journey happens in fits and starts, advances and setbacks, something we all recognize as life.

She starts keeping a list of gifts she already has, the gifts she purposely begins to notice, like the “cry of blue jay from high in the spruce.” The list eventually reaches and passes one thousand gifts.

Along this journey, we find time, grace, aching hurt, disbelief, emptiness and intimacy. And we find God, always God, for that’s to whom this book is really addressed.

An honest, raw and bleeding, loving epistle to God.

It’s remarkable.

And I've started a list, too.

1. Snow lingering like cake frosting in our north-facing backyard.
6. Two little boys standing outside the grocery store, collecting food for the hungry.
9. The church choir bursting forth with "All Creatures of Our God and King," and singing a leavening of Alleluias.

She's right. It's eucharisteo.

Ann Voskamp blogs at A Holy Experience.

The Song of the Phoenix

The clanging stills,
the distraction settles,
the heart hears
the song calling, and
then sings, resurrecting
the phoenix.
But I'm not too sure
of where I go
after the phoenix rises
and the phoenix soars
to the sun's new song
but I hear its rays
as they grasp my heart,
smoldering.

This poem is submitted for One Shot Wednesday, sponsored by One Stop Poetry. To see other poems, please visit the site. The links will be live at 4 p.m. Central time.

Photograph: Phoenix by Vojko Kalan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Blessing's in the Small Things

It's one of those stories that could only happen on the internet.

Lesley Moon, aka @moondustwriter on Twitter, introduced a few of her mutual friends to each other. One of those friends is Jason Bourne, who blogs at Jason's Spinal Bifida Journey. Jason works in the Public Information Office of the city of Marietta, Georgia, as a writer and photographer, and he's got a lot of special things to talk and write about.

I'm guest posting over at Jason's place, talking about the blessing being in the small things. Take a look and let me (and Jason) know what you think.

Renewal/Revival

My wife and I were married at a Baptist church in Shreveport, La. – Mildred Crowe Baptist Church, to be exact. The church building is still there on North Market Street but the name and denomination have changed.

Our wedding was at 5:30 p.m., followed by the reception in the church hall. The church was crowded – all my wife’s family lived in the Shreveport/northwestern Louisiana area, as did and my father’s side of my family .

The wedding ceremony took less time than the bridesmaids and bride took to walk up the aisle. I mean, it was fast. And there was a reason for the speed.

A revival service was scheduled at 7:30, and while we could stay in the church hall, the cars had to be gone from the parking lot.

So I always associate our wedding with revival, or renewal. Revivals are an opportunity for churches and the people in the communities surrounding them to take stock, renew vows, and rededicate themselves. It’s both a corporate thing (for the church) and an individual thing (for the people).

I’ve attended a few revivals (almost always at Baptist churches) and one Billy Graham Crusade, which was a kind of “mega-revival.” (The Billy Graham Crusade was a date – the girl wanted to attend it.) The speakers are usually outstanding (a good speaker not necessarily meaning a fire-and-brimstone speaker); there’s a lot of singing, and then someone leads the congregation in singing “Just As I Am” while people make their way to the front.

The New Testament model for revivals is found in the gospels – John the Baptist preaching the need to repent and preparing the way for Jesus. Jesus didn’t so much preach and teach revival as much as he did something entirely new – the gospel among us. In the Old Testament, there are numerous examples of Israel turning from its ways and turning back to God.

The revival/renewal that always creates a sense of wonder (and some foreboding) for me is the story told in 2 Kings 22-24. The King of Judah, Josiah, is 26, and in the 18th year of his reign. He is trying to do what is right. He sends his secretary to the temple to have the high priest get the funds together that have been collected to repair the temple. The secretary goes to see the high priest, named Hilkiah. And Hilkiah – the high priest! – says something that is startling.

“I have found the Book of the Law in the temple of the Lord.”

Things had gotten so bad that the high priest didn’t know where the Book of the Law was, and then found it somewhere in the temple. That’s the equivalent of a church minister announcing the congregation that he has found the Bible, hidden away in a closet, that no one's seen for a few generations.

The secretary returns to the King Josiah, tells him what’s been discovered, and proceeds to read from it “in the presence of the king.”

And a revival starts. Josiah tears his clothes, consults a prophetess (who has good news for the king but bad news for Judah), renews the covenant at the temple, and cleans house. He throws out the pagan priests appointed by previous kings, takes the Asherah pole from the temple and burns it, tears down the temple quarters for the male prostitutes, destroys all of the pagan altars, shrines and high places throughout the country, and then eliminates the mediums, spiritists, household gods and idols in Judah and Jerusalem. And then he orders the Passover to be celebrated – the first time since the days of the judges almost 400 years earlier.

It didn’t last, of course. Josiah was followed by a line of evil kings and then the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. And it never lasts, human nature being what it is.

That’s why the final revival, the last renewal, began when a young teenaged girl in Nazareth was told she was going to bear a child. The child.


To see other posts on renewal, please visit the One Word Blog Carnival sponsored by Peter Pollock.