The Way to the Hill

My feet stumble along a road

cobblestoned in quarried granite

and recycled marble; I trip over

the back of a god, former. Drops

of sweat, blood, sweaty blood

fall, soon matted into dust, a

dried remembrance of things past,

things lost but brilliant for a time

flashes of color amid

a gray somberness, a silence

of growing dread, a silence

of condemnation.

The way to the hill is paved

with hot granite, melting marble,

stones burning as they cry out.

Photograph: Mercantour by Michel Bousquet via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Saturday Good Reads

Reminiscing about a movie (it’s one of my favorites, too); stopping to listen to an unknown soldier; why God isn’t fair (and it’s good); remembrance under a sycamore, and a hidden pond.  Good stuff.

Prose

“A Thousand Goodbyes” by Ann Kroeker.

“Behold the Birth of the Unorganized Hancock” by Greg Sullivan at Sippican Cottage.

“One Woman: The Unknown Soldier” by Charity Singleton at Wide Open Spaces.

“Everything made fair” by Billy Coffey at What I Learned Today.

“To Run and Not Grow Weary – Part One” and “Part Two” by Jeff Overstreet for Image Journal.

“God Is Not Fait (Why That’s Good)” by Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact.

“How the Solution to a Stalled, Overheated Bus is the Secret to Many Other Things in Life” by Shawn Smucker.

Poetry

“Under the Sycamore: A Place of Grateful Remembrance” and “And God Created Metaphors for Children – and Adults Can Tag Along” by Jerry Barrett at Gerald the Writer.

“Alan Paton” by D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

“Let Rain” by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

“Pollen” and “Like a Rock” by Chris Galford at The Waking Den.

“Story” by Nancy Rosback at A Little Somethin’.

Paintings and Photographs

“Prairie Smoke” and “Wonders of Wander” by Tim Good at Good Photography.

“New Leaves,” watermedia on Yupo by Randall David Tipton at Painter’s Process.

“The Song Within” and “Wishes” by Susan Etole at Just…A Moment.

“Hidden Pond” by Steve Gravano at Take a Look Around.

Photograph: Whitby Abbey by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Pete Wilson's "Empty Promises"

When I started college, I set a number of fairly ambitious goals that I wanted to achieve during the next four years, and as each year went by, I kept adding to them. Join a fraternity. Become a fraternity officer. Join the student newspaper. Be one of the key editors. Be named to the leadership fraternity and Who’s Who.

By the middle of my senior year, I had achieved every goal I had set. I had run out of goals, and it still wasn’t enough. And I crashed.

We chase after everything and anything that promises fulfillment and significance – achievement, power, money, beauty, approval – the list can get lengthy. Yet even when we achieve them, they’re never enough. We always crave more.

The reason is that we’re chasing after all the wrong things. And Pete Wilson, pastor of Crosspoint Church in Nashville, Tennessee, explains why – in detail – in Empty Promises: the Truth About You, Your Desires, and the Lies You’re Believing.

Reading this book can be like looking in the mirror.

Chapter by chapter, Wilson considers many of the key things we look to – and devote our lives and energies to – for meaning and significance. Achievement. Approval. Power. Money. Religion (yes, religion). Beauty. Personal dreams. Because we are a people wired to worship, he says, the question isn’t “Do we worship” but instead “Who of what do we worship.”

Chapter by chapter, Wilson’s message is convicting. He uses a combination of Biblical teaching and personal examples to make his points. And his points are piercing.

Had he stopped with defining the problem, his message would have been satisfactory but not helpful. But he goes on, in simple, straightforward language, to discuss what is the only real object of our desires for fulfillment – and how to live a life of worship.

Even for those of us who know better, or should know better, Empty Promises is an important reminder of how easy it is to get caught up in seeking the wrong things, even with the best of intentions.

And in my case, when I finally understood the futility of what I had been chasing after, I gave it up, and turned to faith in God. It made all the difference.

C.S. Lakin’s “The Unraveling of Wentwater”

A child is born in the village of Wentwater, which seems soaked in superstition and old wives tales. At her naming ceremony, the local witch predicts the child will be the ruin of the village – and the women gathered together immediately drive the mother of the child away, set the house afire with the baby inside, and calmly go on about their day.

But the child doesn’t die; she is secretly rescued and taken to a place of safety, eventually landing in the arms of a childless couple in the Heights, the city in the mountains above Wentwater, where knowledge and reason rule. Years pass, the child comes of age, and is allowed to make a visit to Wentwater for the village festival. She meets a young man whom she falls in love with, and she meets the long forgotten prophecy.

And the prophecy still holds. The unraveling begins, and the young woman – named Teralyn – is at the center of it.

Welcome to the world of C.S. Lakin. Welcome to The Unraveling of Wentwater.

This is the fourth in the series entitled “The Gates of Heaven,” and there are three more to go. I should mention that this is the series of books that introduced and converted me to the fantasy genre. And this one is every bit as good as its predecessors.

Lakin has created a multi-faceted, extraordinarily detailed world. The reader gets the sense of life in medieval times, but this is a world where witches live in castles in swampy marshes and spirits occupy the lakes.

The novel has elements of familiar fairy tales – Sleeping Beauty, perhaps a dash of Snow White (sans dwarves) and Rapunzel (there’s even a short tower scene), to name two. But Lakin moves the story beyond the traditional fairy tale, and explores the contrast between knowledge and superstition, pitting village against town – and ultimately finding that both come up short. It is also a love story, and the story of what one is willing to sacrifice to save loved ones.

It’s a ripping good story.

The Unraveling of Wentwater will be officially published in July; I was provided an advance reading copy by the publisher.

My reviews of C.S. Lakin’s books:

Gates of Heaven Series:

The Wolf of Tebron

The Map Across Time

The Land of Darkness

Other Novels:

Conundrum and Innocent Little Crimes

Someone to Blame

A Meditation in the Mud

Last summer, Grace Church in Arvada, Colorado, had a 10-week sermon series entitled “Storytellers.” The series focused on “life issues in our relationships, living our faith and studying the steps of Jesus.” The sermons were drawn from stories Jesus told as recorded in the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John. What made this sermon series unusual was the accompanying work done by artist Nicole Brown and poet Joel Jacobson.

Jacobson wrote a poem illustrating the core story or message for each of the sermons. He’s assembled them in a small book, Water the Mud.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The Master’s Artist.

Would I? Do I?

On the journey of faith, the questions don’t get easier.

On Monday I wrote about a young man who died from complications after surgery. He was 31. On Tuesday, I heard about a St. Louis reporter who died from pancreatic cancer; I had known him and worked with him since 1984. He was 63.

We are blessed to live in a society with some of the best medical care in the world. Death is something we tend to associate with old age, although we’ve all known young people and children who have died. But still, life expectancies in the United States have been increasing for more than a century, and it is largely due to advances in health care treatment and prevention.

Then there’s a country like Uganda. Life expectancies are not long. Disease is common. Preventable disease is common. The death of a child is not an uncommon thing.

It’s a place where we might all question God about what exactly is going on here.

A mother brings her four-pound, four-month old daughter to Katie Davis for help. Four pounds. They rush to the hospital, and it turns out the little girl has a hole in her heart. Her mother can’t afford the corrective surgery.

The little girl is named Happy. Happy dies. Katie mourns.

Friends and supporters of Katie in the United States decide to adopt Josephine, a little girl that Katie is caring for. Katie’s ecstatic. Everything is going well until it’s discovered that Josephine is HIV-positive. Plans are turned upside down. The adoption may not proceed.

The friends end up adopting Josephine anyway.

I ask myself, would I have that kind of courage? Would I have that kind of faith?

In the midst of all this, 20-something Katie says something that strikes me as very wise. And wise beyond her years. “We aren’t really called to save the world, not even to save one person; Jesus does that. We are just called to love with abandon. We are called to enter into our neighbors’ sufferings and love them right there.”

I ask myself again, do I have that kind of courage? Do I have that kind of faith?

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption by Katie Davis and Beth Clark. To see more posts on this chapter, “He Sets the Solitary in Families,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

One more circle

They grow like a fungus attaching

themselves with hooked tentacles

into work, productivity, creation,

innovation, value; toxins pouring

into the lifeblood. Dante created

nine circles of hell and perdition:

limbo lust gluttony greed anger

heresy violence fraud treachery

but he forgot one more circle,

the tenth circle, the lowest pit

of all: for those who call

meetings.

This poem is submitted for the One-Word-At-A-Time blog carnival (the word is “more”) hosted by Peter Pollock, and for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets (where the links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today).

Illustration: Dante’s Inferno by Gustave Dore.