Salt, sheep, coin, son

After Luke 15

We must be salt,

salt with taste,

salt that’s used.

We must seek

the lost sheep, not

the 99 unlost. 

We must search

for the lost coin, not

the coin unlost.

We must celebrate

the lost son returning, not

the one who never left.

The measure is

different for men.

Once, we need to be salted.

Once, we were s sheep, lost.

Once, we were a coin, missing.

One, we were a son, prodigal.

Photograph by Andrew Neel via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Sacredness of the Ordinary

I’m reading Vintage Saints and Sinners: 25 Christians Who Transformed My Faith by Karen Wright Marsh, and I’m struck by how ordinary all these famous Christians actually were. I ponder the thought that perhaps it’s our celebrity culture than permeates my thinking about people known as heroes and heroines of the faith. 

Consider Christians like Mother Teresa, one of the most famous saints in our own lifetimes. She was a woman who dedicated her life to God, and then wondered why God had stopped speaking to her. For decades. She lived with constant doubt, because, as she often said, God doesn’t call us to success; He only calls us to faithfulness.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Saturday Good Reads

Our church in St. Louis has been closed since March 15, and my wife and I missed the March 8 service. It’s streaming the Sunday worship service, and even some of the Sunday School classes and prayer groups have been meeting online. And the church staff has been posting devotionals each night during the week. But as much as is being done, we would all say that it’s just not the same as being there in person, together. Christians, Jews. Muslims, and those of other faiths are all asking, when will our houses of worship reopen? Joe Carter at the Gospel Coalition has some insightful answers to that question. 

April 14 is a significant date in American history. On April 14, 1862, Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor was fired upon, officially starting the Civil War. On April 14, 1865, the American flag was once against raised at Fort Sumter. And that night, in Washington D.C., John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater. Historian Chris Mackowski at Emerging Civil War talks about two of those events – the lowering and raising of the American flag. 

Author Michael Crichton (1942-2008) was best known for two hugely popular books that became hugely popular movies – The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park – among many others. In 2002, he gave speech at the International Leadership Forum in La Jolla, California, entitled “Why Speculate?” His question was specifically addressed to the news media – what is there so much speculation that is officially called news? His answer: the media are given undeserved credibility. He pointed out that speculation is near-constant because the media are about entertainment, nobody knows the future, and talk is cheap. And his point is even more valid 18 years later.

More Good Reads

Life and Culture

The Best Place to Buy Used Books – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

5 Good Things That Can Come From 1 Bad Virus – Dan Reiland.

Remembering After Coronavirus – Brian Volck at Front Porch Republic.

Moral Realism, Public Health, and Truth-telling Amid COVID-19 – Andrew Walker at Mere Orthodoxy.

Copper’s Virus-Killing Powers Were Known Even to the Ancients – Jim Morrison at Smithsonian Magazine.

Poetry

The Lemons – Eugenio Montale at Literary Hub.

Alexander – Daniel Kemper at Society of Classical Poets.

Two sonnets for the road to Emmaus – Malcolm Guite.

The Automat – Nicholas Christopher at Literary Hub.

On the Burning of Notre Dame – David Russell Mosley at The Imaginative Conservative.

Faith

COVID-19: A Prolonged Sabbath in a Culture of Productivity – Laura Cerbus at Morning by Morning.

British Stuff

A medieval pharmacy: Apothecary – Toni Mount at English Historical Fiction Authors. 

Writing and Literature

Those Classic Detective Series You've Always Been Meaning to Read, Anyway - Olivia Rutigliano at CrimeReads.

Why Anxious Readers Under Quarantine Turn to "Mrs. Dalloway" – Evan Kindley at The New Yorker.

Seasons of Norway – A Time-Lapse Adventure

Painting:  Man Reading, oil on panel (1890) by Jean Edouard Vuillard. 

Grumbles

After Luke 15:1-7

What is this, this gathering

with convicts, with thieves,

with abusers, with traffickers,

with the dirty and smelling

and foul-mouthed, with the profane?

How does one avoid that stain?

Why embrace it so eagerly,

so calmly, not even washing

hands?

We jostle to be closer,

to hear what he says,

and he looks, not

at our faces but

at our hearts, as if

he reads our minds.

He gathers his arms 

around us, filthy rabble 

that we are. This is why,

he says.

Photograph by Nathan Dunlao via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"The Body in the Dales" by J.R. Ellis

Detective Sergeant Andrew Carter has just walked in the door of the Harrogate Division of the West Riding Police in Yorkshire. Newly transferred from London, Carter is looking forward to his first day on the job. But it turns out to be a completely unexpected first day.

He’s greeted by his new boss, Detective Chief Inspector Oldroyd, who promptly tells him there’s not time to fill out forms; they’re on their way to a murder scene. A body has been found in a cave system in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. The extensive limestone caverns are enormously popular with cavers, and it was a caving team that stumbled over the body.

The victim is one Dave Atkins, himself an experienced caver. The problem is that he’s wearing no cave equipment and his body is two hours from the nearest entrances. Not only do the police have to find a murderer; they have to figure out how a body got to where it simply couldn’t get to.

J.R. Ellis

The police also have to deal with an overabundance of suspects. Atkins liked to seduce married women, and from all accounts, he was highly successful. He also was involved in several questionable investment deals, and the investors always seem to lose their money. As Oldroyd, Carter, and their team investigate, they discover plenty of motives. But whose motive was strong enough to kill? And then another caver calls Oldroyd, saying he has information about who the murderer might be. Unfortunately, he, too, is killed before he can disclose what he knows.

The Body in the Dales by J.R. Ellis is the story of the investigation. It’s also a dip into Yorkshire history (an antiquarian book will be a key role in unraveling the puzzle) and an introduction to the cave system associated with the Yorkshire Dales.

Ellis is a retired teacher with a lifelong interest in all things Yorkshire. The Body in the Dales is the first of five in the Yorkshire Murder Mystery series; the others are The Quartet Murder, The Murder at Redmire Hall, The Royal Baths Murder, and The Nidderdale Murders. He also writes poetry, ghost stories, and biography, and has completed a screenplay about the poet Edward Thomas and is working on a memoir about growing up in Yorkshire.

The Body in the Dales is an engrossing story of tangled relationships and murderous motives, played out against the backdrop of cave exploration.

Romancing the Billionaire, Part 2

When it comes to romance stories involving billionaires, you shouldn’t be surprised to find credulity stretched. The trick is to accept the story at face, assume the improbable can and does happen, and go with the story flow. 

In The Executive’s Secret by Kimberley Monpetit, Caleb Davenport has become a self-made billionaire at 28 years old. He and a group of friends from high school have created a shopping app that has a worldwide audience. He’s got just about everything he could wish for, except love. He’s still morning the one that didn’t exactly get away; he was one of the “computer nerds” in high school and had a huge crush on Kira Bancroft, a girl who didn’t even know he existed. He had found her necklace at a piano recital she had given, and he kept it with him, hoping one day to find her and give it back.

Caleb returns from a sales and marketing trip to Asia and meets his friends at a well-known restaurant in Denver. And their server turns out to be none other than Kira, who gave up her education at Julliard and returned home to care for her parents, after her father was paralyzed in a trucking accident. Her mother’s showing signs of dementia, and Kira can barely keep their lives together.

Kira doesn’t remember Caleb from high school; they never met, and he never had the courage to introduce himself. But Caleb remembers Kira, and he’s still madly with her. But Caleb is harboring a secret, once he doesn’t want to admit to Kira.

Monpetit has written five novels in A Secret Billionaire Romance series, six in the Snow Valley Series, three in the Paris & Pastry Romance Series, and other romance stories. She also writes middle-grade novels for Scholastic and Young Adult novels for HarperCollins under the name Kimberley Griffiths Little. She lives in Texas.

The Executive’s Secret is an engaging story of two people, broken in different ways, reaching towards each other.

In 28 Days with a Billionaire by Kimberly Krey, Camilla Lopez is an executive chef, catering and cooking for wealthy people in California. An accident involving quail eggs smashed on a guest’s jacket leads to Camilla and her business being smeared on social media. She’s now having trouble finding work, until she happens into a job on the other side of the country. She has been hired to cook for a billionaire for a month.

James Benton has forgotten how eggs were smashed on his jacket, but he’s having trouble dealing with the death of a brother. After a blowup on a reality TV show, he goes off to spend a month at an estate, and he soon discovers that the chef whose eggs landed on his jacket has been hired to cook for him. She makes great food. She also doesn’t kowtow to anyone, no matter how much or little they’re worth. James and Camilla find themselves deeply attracted to each other, but both have baggage that could destroy any hope for the long term.

Krey is the author of numerous romance novels and is known as the “queen of clean steam.” Her series include the Benton Brothers Romance novels, the Unlikely Cowgirl stories, Cobble Creek Small Town Romance, Sweet Montana Bride, Second Chance, and several others – more than 25 novels in all.

28 Days with a Billionaire is a story of improbable romance becoming improbable love.  And a lot about food.

Related:

Romancing the Billionaire, Part 1.

Top photograph by Danilo Capece via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Nigel Kent and "Saudade"

I read the new poetry collection by U.K. poet Nigel Kent, and I learned a new word: saudade. I read the poems before I looked up the definition, wondering if I might be able to define it simply by reading the poems. I sensed it had to do with love, longing, and loss, like losing something or someone you deeply loved. Even if found what you had lost or regained the lost relationship, you somehow knew it would never be the same. 

As it turns out, I nailed it. Or, actually, Kent’s poems nailed it. “Saudade” is from the Spanish or Portuguese, and some consider it untranslatable as an English word or short phrase. A story from NPR explains it this way: “The concept has many definitions, including a melancholy nostalgia for something that perhaps has not even happened. It often carries an assurance that this thing you feel nostalgic for will never happen again.” 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.