Be moved.

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Forgotten Girls: Stories of Hope and Courage is worth reading and remembering, but this post is more than just a book review.

In other words, if you're one of my friends who skips my reviews (I know some of you do. and I'm okay with that and love you all whether you love book or not), this one is only review-ish. There's much more to be had, including random Shannon-esque musings, a semi-related movie clip, and talk of a sweet Guatemalan girl named Joselin.

So read on, book lovers and others! Moving on...

As I think about this book right now, I also think about the blog posts by my friends Lindsey and Ann and Amanda and Shaun on their recent Compassion trip to Guatemala. (Okay, okay, it may be a stretch to call them friends. I have exchanged a few emails with Lindsey, and we're Facebook buds, but I just like to read Ann's and Amanda's and Shaun's blogs and pretend we're friends. Don't shatter my illusion by pointing out that they don't know who I am. Thanks.) The pictures and stories were hard to consider. I wanted to close the Firefox window and move on to lighter fare from the interwebz. I wanted to walk away from their blog until the Compassion stuff was over and I could get back to their typical posts, ones that do challenge me but that don't regularly make me consider harsh realities. (Well, except for Shaun, because it's his job to post Compassion stuff regularly.)

I'm glad I didn't walk away from or ignore their posts. And I'm glad I didn't put down this book without letting it affect me.

I loved the stories in this book. And hated the realities that they showed me. I know women around the world face the harshness of starvation, displacement, illiteracy, sexual exploitation, and abuse to a greater degree than men do. Knowing that and reading stories of it are two different things. Knowledge doesn't always move me much; that knowledge with skin on in a story does.

At the end of each section, authors Kay Marshall Strom and Michele Rickett include a list of action steps that could make a difference. Some are simple, including specific prayer needs and ideas for blog posts. Some are more elaborate. It's nice to have difference-making ideas after reading about awful circumstances.

One moving passage:
"Do our brothers and sister in the West know what's happening to us? Do they know we are being forced from our villages? That we are being raped and killed?"
Yes, we say, they know. The plight of the Sudanese is reported in newspapers and shown on television, and it saddens and horrifies us.
"If everyone knows," they say, "where are God's people who have freedom? Why don't they help us?"
That's why Sudan is the hardest place. Yet we go anyway, because the more God's people know, the more they care.
That made me think of a line from one of my favorite movies, Hotel Rwanda, about what the reaction will be of Westerners to footage of African genocide:



I didn't mean for this to be such a heavy post, but I'm not apologizing for it. This is reality. This is humanity, women and children created lovingly in God's image just as you and me and our children were. These are the least of these, who Christ compares to Himself in Matthew 25.

When you're faced with these realities, does it change you? Or do you, in the words of Joaquin Phoenix in the clip above, "say, 'Oh, my God, that's horrible.' And then they'll go on eating their dinners" or go on doing whatever it is you do? (As Lindsey wrote on her blog following the Compassion trip to Guatemala, do you let experiences that should be lifechanging truly change you?)

I'm not saying you shouldn't eat your dinner. And I'm not saying you need to open your wallet or take off to another country. Being moved by these realities could be something as simple, yet also as powerful, as being moved to prayer. That's all I'm saying.

(By the way, we're now sponsoring a little girl from Guatemala through Compassion. I had recognized atrocities and then gone back to my dinner too many times, and I couldn't do that again as I considered the needs. A seven-year-old girl bearing the same name as our daughter - albeit spelled Joselin - is benefiting from our $38 per month for her basic needs, like education, health care, and opportunities to know Christ and grow in faith. While there are a variety of child sponsorship organizations, we chose Compassion because they don't ignore the needs created by poverty, like hunger and illiteracy and violence, but they also don't ignore the need for the Gospel as they work to meet those other needs.)

I support Compassion's Christian child charity. You can too. Sponsor a child today.

Many thanks to InterVarsity Press for providing this book for my review. They didn't ask for a positive review, just an honest one.

Princess theology gone wrong

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A couple weeks ago I defended one princess-inspired children’s book. Today I’m telling you not to bother with another, My Princess Bible by Andy Holmes and illustrated by Sergey Eliseev.

The difference?

My Princess BibleMy previous review was of a book that is princess-oriented but Christ-focused and Gospel-saturated. My Princess Bible is princess-focused, with Christ as a secondary character to the princesses and sin nowhere to be found. I suppose that’s good because – in a Bible with no Savior – sin would be mighty depressing, though I would prefer one with this truth: that there is ugly sin in this world and in our hearts but – praise God! – there’s also a beautiful Savior!

This would have been more aptly titled something like The Stories of God’s Princesses because that’s really what it is. Each gal from God’s Word has a rhyming description, an illustration, references for the verses associated with the story, and a takeaway for girls. In the description on Amazon, it states,
Each story ends with two lines that remind the reader of valuable character traits of a princess; the little princesses are even encouraged to recite the learning of the biblical princess using her name in the blank instead: “________ is God’s special princess; ________ is sad when she does something bad” (the takeaway from the story of Eve).
I don’t know if that’s from the pre-print version or what, but the one in my lap says “__________ is God’s special princess. ____________ takes care of God’s world.” as the Eve takeaway, because her story ends before the fall. As I said before, sin doesn’t exist in this “Bible.”

The only references to Jesus are to the baby born to Mary (with Mary as the focal point in the story), the child prayer for by Anna (once again, focus on Anna), the man who acknowledged a poor woman’s offering of meager coins, the man whose feet were washed with perfume, the man who looked into the heart of the woman at the well, the man who healed Jairus’s daughter, and the One to whom Lydia could pray.

He’s a Jesus who is no different from the one that is presented by religions other than Christianity: a skilled teacher, a healer, an all-around good guy, someone who inspired others. A savior, though? The Sovereign Lord? The Prince who makes the royalty of the princess possible? None of those things are emphasized.

The cross? Not here. (Of course, it’s unnecessary if there’s no fall or sin.)
The resurrection? No. (Once again, why does Jesus need to rise from the dead if our sin never gave Him reason to die?)
The Gospel? Absent. Sadly, sadly absent.

In the absence of sin and a Savior, this is all about the behavior of princesses rather than their hearts. Girls will learn two things: that “I am God’s special princess” (without any explanation of how one enters the kingdom, which makes that a false promise for many children who will read it because they don’t yet know or treasure the King) and that princesses behave (for example, a princess “is happy to be a good helper,” “asks for help when she needs it,” is good to her family and friends,” “obeys God and sings him a song,” and so on). It’s all about the princess with little emphasis on the King. It gives no hope to cling to when the princess doesn’t behave. How very sad and lacking.

I may be extreme and a bit crazy, but – because Jocelyn already likes the book and because I don’t mind the stories (not great, but not bad either, especially because she knows the story of the fall already) – I defaced, er, altered the cover.


There. That’s a little better.

My sincere thanks goes to Tyndale House for providing this book for my review. They asked for nothing but an honest review.

education matters.

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Click {here} for all our education related posts. Read below for an introduction to those posts.

I love education. I love the difference it makes for those in poverty. I love the difference it has made in my own life. I love seeing it spark interest in my children. 

In high school, I was the kid who wrote the newspaper articles about school board meetings, but I think I would have watched them even if I didn't have to. I entered college with credits from advanced classes in high school, and then I took all the classes that interested me...which meant I ended up graduating a year early by accident, because I fulfilled my degree requirement early without intending to do so. After college, I taught special education - mostly writing - and worked with Teach For America to support their teachers. In December 2010, I earned my Master's of Arts in Education (Special Education: Learning Disabilities & Autism). And now I do some work with homeschooled students, not because we need the money but because I love it.

And, speaking of homeschooling, that's what we're doing for now. Lee and I are prayerfully deciding year by year, so I'm not sure what we'll do next year. But we're doing some formal preschool homeschooling now, and it works well for our family.

All that to say this: education matters. And it's one of my passions. I write a bit about everything from homeschooling to ed policy, from grad school to grade school, and more - read 'em {here}.

a haven of comfort

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Click {here} for all our home-related posts. Read below for an introduction to those posts. 

(And, if you clicked here expecting to go to the main site rather than a sub-site about a home, go {here} for the "home" you were looking for or click "main" above.)

In Titus 2:5, young women are directed to be "busy at home" - and I love to heed that. When I was growing up, we rarely had friends or family in our house. That wasn't a bad thing; we were all so busy with commitments in our community that we were seldom home other than to sleep.

Now I want my home to be a haven of comfort, both for those who live here and those who pass through. As we do projects around the house - big and small - we post them {here}, in hopes that they will encourage you to make your house into a home.







knowing that healing will come, not knowing when

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Click {here} for all our health-related posts. Read below for an introduction to those posts... 

While they don't define me, my health struggles are part of who I am. I once prided myself in being healthy, playing water polo in college and lettering in swimming and golf in high school. If I was a dude, I would have fit the bill to be carried off to Babylon in Daniel's day.

No longer. Now my list o' conditions includes:
Of the three, RA is the one that is the hardest to manage and live with and the one that sends me to my knees regularly (well, not really to my knees, 'cause kneeling hurts. but you get my meaning - it spurs me to prayer). Here's a description of RA from the Mayo Clinic link above: "An autoimmune disorder, rheumatoid arthritis occurs when your immune system mistakenly attacks your own body's tissues. In addition to causing joint problems, rheumatoid arthritis can also affect your whole body with fevers and fatigue."

In other words, my immune system treats the lining of my joints as if they are germs to fight. As that lining - called synovium - swells, my bone wear away. I was diagnosed just after I turned 26, and because of the amount of bone erosion I experienced in the first few months of the disease, doctors have described my RA as "severe" and "aggressive."

In simple terms, when my RA is acting up, I stay as still as I can in the morning when I wake up because I know that's the only pain-free moment of the day. Once I move, I feel that all my joints are stiff and sore for more than an hour in the morning. And I hurt. A lot. I have to ask strangers to unbuckle my kids from their carseats or to unscrew the cap on my gas tank because I can't do it by myself. I do hit the gym, but each workout is planned around that day's limitations. It's not the life I planned.

There is hope here, though. And I'm not just talking about the hope of finding the right combination of treatments, which I do think will happen in the next few years. The hope I cling to is that I know healing will come. God promises it. I just don't know if it'll come on this side of heaven. Until it comes, we're asking God to teach us through this.

And He is teaching us. And I love that. So I wouldn't erase the pain and IVs and blood tests and MRIs of the past few years, because through them I have gained sweet intimacy with my God. Praise Him for bringing beauty from ashes!

All of my health related posts (including some about your normal childhood viruses) can be found here, but you might want to start with these: