Category Archives: books

Two Good Stories

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1. This is a book recommendation for the next time you’re at the library: The Soloist, by Steve Lopez, a journalist for the LA Times. It’s about the redemption and power in friendship and music. It’s a true story, and happened in LA.  You can watch the movie, and it’s good, but the book is really worth your time and thought. It was born out of Mr. Lopez’s search for a story for his column, and how he bumped into Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless musical genius. There’s more than one unlikely hero in the story, and maybe that’s part of why I like it.

2. I live in a flat that has 4,000 English books on its walls. This is in a town where the average adult doesn’t speak English, so this flat is exceptionally exceptional. About once a year our landlord hires a lady to dust all the books. This morning she came, a pleasant, patient lady.  We chatted a little bit now and then. My Polish is slow and childish, but functional. She said this is a happy place, and I agreed and said I feel like a princess in it.

At one point in her work, she peered into the room to ask me what the date is today. I glanced at the calendar to make sure and said it’s the 95th. The cleaning lady, God bless her, never flinched or smirked. Then I heard what I’d said, and quickly cancelled it and stumbled out the correct number and explained that numbers are so hard for me. (Never mind that I learned them in the first week of Polish classes three years ago; I still stutter out most numbers higher than 11.) The most amazing part of this story is how graceful the woman was, and how she listened calmly and patiently til I finished what I wanted to say. I guess if you have the patience to carefully dust 4,000 books, you can also wait for the foreign girl to sputter out and self-correct her Polish mistakes.

Fight with Light

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One strength of novels is that we recognize ourselves in the characters. We see how they fight their Appolyons and win or lose, how they make decisions with good or bad results, how they aspire or despair.

August Boatwright is a character who shows me what a wise mentor is like. She’s the kind of person I’d like to be: diligent, forward-thinking, patient.

More often, though, I see myself in May, August’s sister. She’s a sensitive woman, happy and delighting in simple things–until she hears or sees something that’s sad or broken, and then she starts humming “Oh Suzanna” as if her life depends on it. (No, I don’t do that.)  What endeared me to her was when she put socks on the cold feet of the old-fashioned bathtub because she worried about anything that is distressed.

May’s sensitivity was tragic when she eventually killed herself. And no, I don’t see myself doing that. But some days it feels that the aches of the world are going to crush  me. Anything can set it off: a broken flower, a staggering drunk, a mother shouting at her son in the parking lot, a friend’s mother filing for divorce, an old man rifling through a dumpster. This morning it was a traumatizing picture I hadn’t chosen to see on a headline connected to the Gosnell trial. I want to vomit. I want to find a dark closet and curl into a ball and not come out until the sun shines again. It’s too big for me.  I don’t have the emotional elastic for it. I have to run away.

May’s sisters, August and June, helped her by devising a plan patterned after the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. When May felt one of her spells coming on, she’d keep humming “Oh Susanna,” grab a scrap of paper, and write the trouble on it. They would lead her out to the stone wall behind their house, and she’d wedge the paper between the rocks and leave it there. Periodically, May would haul up more rocks from the river to use as she needed them, and the wall kept growing even after ten years, sporting little bits of paper sticking out all over.

I think writing helps process things and get it out of our system. More than that, I’m learning that I when I have no answers and am whimpering, overwhelmed in the blackness, I can only fight with light. Light is the only antidote to the dark that smothers me.

Like May, I tend to absorb the pain I see around me and carry it with me. But Jesus did that already–carried on His shoulders the cares and aches and intolerable agony of every life. What He wants me to do, I think, is invite Him, the Light of the world, into every terrible, twisted darkness that threatens me and those I love.

Curling into a ball or shouting in rage at the wrongness–neither is redemptive or finally helpful. Today I choose to fight with light, not denying the dark of midnight, but resting all the weight of my heavy heart on the sureness that morning will come and the darkness will run away.

The sun will come.

Meanwhile, singing and writing help.

This Week’s Reads

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Because of always having several books on the go simultaneously, I finished 3 this week and they’re phenomenal enough to recommend them here.

The Dean’s Watch by Elisabeth Goudge is stuffy and passionate and achingly beautiful. I’d read it a long time ago, and it felt especially fitting to be re-reading it this week, since its setting is Advent. The characters are vivid and alive, even if sad and scruffy. They’re real. I’ve heard that it’s to be an allegory, but I haven’t seen through it all yet. There’s something in this quote though, that means more than the words say:

“It does not matter, Job,” said the Dean at last.  “I mean it does not matter that the clock was broken. What matters is that the clock was made.”

For years, I shied away from Henri Nouwen’s The Wounded Healer because I thought it was too deep and wordy. But when I actually opened it I found it very readable and accessible. The depth and wisdom was amazing. The thoughtfulness and careful words are to be read slowly and digested. He talks alot about loneliness and how it’s not something to run away from, but can become a source of life for others.

This is the announcement of the wounded healer: ‘The master is coming–not tomorrow, but today, not next year, but this year, not after all our misery is passed, but in the middle of it, not in another place but right here where we are standing.’

This morning over coffee, I finished The Shack, the book that took the evangelical world by storm some years back. I’d read it before, after an operation when I was in a daze of painkillers, so not everything registered very well, but my impression then was the same as this time: that its message is valuable and powerful, but the writing style was very distracting. I wanted to mark out all the fluffy adverbs. Even so, I really like the picture of the fellowship and love among the Trinity, and the way they shower love and are ‘especially fond’ of people. The story was both convicting and comforting.

Mack, if anything matters then everything matters. Because you are important, everything changes; every time you reach out and touch a heart or a life, the world changes; with every kindness and service, seen or unseen, my purposes are accomplished and nothing will ever be the same again.

I never wanted an e-reader before, but today I do. Next week I plan to go to the US for 2 months. I’m teaching a Bible school class for girls for 3 wks, and have  no room to take any books for resources. Living with one checked-in bag for 2 months means only essentials go. In theory and in practice, I like travelling light. But I hate to be book-less. I don’t know yet how my ideal will match my practice.

Related post: Heavy Books

We Have a Winner and Advent

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The random number generator chose #16 which means that Twila Burkholder won the giveaway for Tea and Trouble Brewing. Thanks to everyone who entered the drawing. It was way more fun than I was expecting, and it’s making me think about doing a giveaway for my own book, so stay tuned!

Until then, if/when it happens, you can order my book, Life is for Living (Not for Waiting Around) from the helpful people at CLR:

Christian Learning Resource
28500 Guys Mills Rd.
Guys Mills, PA 16327

Phone:  FREE 814-789-4769
Order line:  877-222-GROW (4769)

And for a sneak preview of the book, you can go to my blog and read the first page of each chapter. They’re listed on the sidebar, so have a look.

In other news, this morning I heard myself say “It’s snowing, I’m listening to Christmas music, eating a donut and drinking tea. Life is good!”

It’s true.

Advent is a beautiful season, waiting and focusing, expecting the light that will erase darkness. This is my favorite Advent hymn, though I wish I’d know and understand its original German lines.

Comfort, comfort ye my people, speak ye peace, thus saith our God;

Comfort those who sit in darkness, mourning ‘neath their sorrows’ load.

Speak ye to Jerusalem of the peace that waits for them;

Tell her that her sins I cover, and her warfare now is over.

Make ye straight what long was crooked, make the rougher places plain;

Let your hearts be true and humble as befits His humble reign.

For the glory of the Lord now on earth is shed abroad,

And all flesh shall see the token that His word is never broken. –Johann Olearius

Book Giveaway: Tea and Trouble Brewing

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Writers live these strange double lives. They want to write honestly, but they can’t always say things exactly as they are about themselves and the people they love, because it might be uncouth, or an invasion of privacy, or Too Much Information. Then people think the writer is a paragon of perfection, and stand around waiting to tell her that they feel like they know her when they actually don’t know her, and she can’t tell them that they have really inaccurate ideas about her.

But Dorcas is an author whose writing is as authentic as it is possible to be without being inappropriate. She is as witty as but not as sarcastic as Erma Bombeck, and she is gentle, without being spineless. Dorcas is one of those special people with whom I corresponded long before I actually met her. She advised me to self-publish my book instead of waiting longer for a publisher. It was the push I needed, and I’ve never regretted it. Then when she visited here in Poland and we drank tea together with her girls at her sister-in-law’s table, I saw how gentle and wise she is in real life. Happily, we still correspond now and then, (nearly always about writing) and I always feel safe and understood with her.

Now I get to promote her newest book, Tea and Trouble Brewing.

The whimsical cover illustration looks like the proverbial tempest in a teapot. I was charmed when I opened the cover and saw the table of contents, and that the five sections each had their own tea name. Oolong. Mint. Roiboos. This is going to be tasty! And it was, of course.

The way I can tell if it’s a good book or story is if it makes me laugh or cry. This book did both to me. To you I admit that I cried when Dorcas cried when their dog died. But I laughed aloud when she apologized tearfully to the fish dangling on the end of her fishing pole.

Dorcas graciously agreed to an interview with me. So here we go:

1. How did you decide on those 5 kinds of tea for the book sections?

Actually, I don’t recall.  I went for variety, and some of my favorite flavors.  And I love the sound of “oolong.”  I considered including Kericho Gold Black Kenyan Tea but that’s not really a “kind” of tea in the same sense as green or rooibos.

Weren’t you tempted to include Lady Grey, Spiced Chai, and English Breakfast?

Well, yes.  But you know, one has to stop somewhere.

2. Do you drink coffee at all, or is it always tea?

I do drink coffee on occasion.  If I go out for breakfast, at church potlucks, now and then with my coffee-living children.  I love iced coffee on a hot day.

3. Do you write in quietness in the middle of the night, or in the hubub of your family life?

I wish very very much that I could write in the midst of noise and action.  It would make my life much easier.  So my best times are early morning, late at night, and when everyone is out of the house.  With my youngest being 13 years old, you’d think I’d be home alone all day.  Somehow that doesn’t happen very often.  And when it does, the phone rings all day.  So this is an ongoing struggle for me, to find time to think and write.

4 Your stories aren’t stuffy, but full of depth. Your life experiences and your wise responses to them have given you have a lot to offer your world, but you don’t pour it out indiscriminately.  What do you know now that you wish you’d have known when you were 21? (This is your chance to give free advice!)

If I could, I would go back and tell my 21-year-old self: Quit obsessing about everything, especially yourself.  Most people mean well.  God actually loves you.  We are all sinners, so don’t let people intimidate you.  You’re going to be fine.  You’re as cute as you’re going to get, so enjoy it.

5. What’s the best piece of writing advice that you’ve ever received?

A tossup: Elisabeth Elliot’s “Make every word do its work,” (paraphrased) which means, cut out every unnecessary word.  And “You have to write bad before you can write good,” which frees me from the paralysis of fear of beginning.  I don’t know who said it.  Oh, and Elizabeth Engstrom said that you don’t need to write with an agenda.  Who you are and what you believe will come out inadvertently, whether you write novels or essays or advertising copy.  That was freeing.

6. You  have a gifted way of describing places like the Willemette Valley or Lake Victoria with crisp, simple words that help your readers see the scene. Have you ever considered travel writing?

Ooooohhh, have I considered travel writing.  If I could come back and live another life, I’d be a travel writer.  I love seeing a new place from the inside out, and telling about it.  Going to a women’s party in Yemen and watching all those black robes get shed and those gaudily clad women come alive and party, and then writing about it, was a highlight of my writing career.

7. If time and money were no issue, where would you travel?

Australia.  An island off Puget Sound.  South Africa and Botswana.  Eastern Europe.  Ireland.  Prince Edward Island.  The Civil War battlefields.  Jamaica.  Somewhere in South America–maybe Paraguay.

8. Your dedication to Amy is beautifully worded. How many more dedications/books to your children are you aiming for? Does this look like hard work or pleasure to you?

You may note the progression of dedications: Paul.  My parents.  Matt.  Amy.  I told the children I plan to keep going and dedicate one to each of them.  That looks like both pleasure and work.  Getting Tea and Trouble Brewing published after numerous delays seemed to uncork something in my head, and now I have freely-flowing ideas for three or four more books.

Thanks, Dorcas, for sharing your world and words with us!

Now it’s your chance to win a free copy of Tea and Trouble Brewing! Leave a comment below to enter the drawing. Or if you can’t log in for a comment, email me at anitayoder-at-gmail-dot-com. The give-away is open for 7 days, and on Dec. 1 I’ll draw a number and send the book to the winner.  All the way from Poland!

To buy your own copy , go to Amazon to pay by credit card.  To pay by check, send $15 to Dorcas Smucker, 31148 Substation Drive, Harrisburg, OR 97446. . Dorcas is doing a promotion and is selling her 4 books for $40, shipping included.

Quotes from “Reluctant Pilgrim”

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Recently I found Reluctant Pilgrim, a book that I really enjoyed.  I chose it because I liked its graphics and subtitle: “A Moody, Somewhat Self-Indulgent Introvert’s Search for Spiritual Community.”

Enuma Okoro took me in on one of the first pages when I read, “It’s hard to want to engage someone when it’s clear right off the bat that they are going to see what they want to see about you and rarely anything more–usually because it would be too much work, as mutual life-giving relationships have a habit of being.”

The last part of that sentence told me that she knows something about relationships and words, and the rest of the book confirmed that hunch.

She talks about how people can call each other to be useful in the Kingdom of God, and also about how we communicate with God, and what prayer is, and who He is.

 “Learning to pray and communicate from the present seat of your emotions is part of learning to be awake and aware of life around you and within you. You are a very intelligent woman, Enuma, but sometimes we can get addicted to our minds just like an alcoholic becomes addicted to the bottle to cope. Sometimes we can over-analyze God’s presence in our lives, always looking for signs to interpret. Sometimes the most faithful prayers are the questions we bring to God.”

Come to think of it, it’s kind of awesome that we serve a God who wants us to articulate our thoughts, to argue, to be persistent, to not give up easily, to go ahead and make our mistakes and learn from them. That’s good parenting, isn’t it?

The book is full of a woman’s pathos, her fears, wilderness, and joy in her search for meaning and love which, she discovered, is not found in seeing yourself as the center of the world, but in the Gospel’s unattractive ideas of sacrifice, humility, generosity, cross. But she makes those words seem more inviting and beautiful than before–as something that is beautiful and something to aspire to.

Usually God’s story will come into conflict with who I already think I am and what I already assume I should be doing with my life. Because other endless loud and extremely convincing narratives about consumption, feeling good, personal identity, and nurturing self easily draw me in but have little to do with community, radical hospitality, obedience, discipline, worship, and the kingdom of God. Perhaps the bonus gift is that I am also learning that Christ-like community takes shape within regular old relationships.

She is refreshing and honest, which means she’s vulnerable, serious, and funny enough to make me laugh aloud sometimes. Which is  my definition of a good book.

So Complete

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Thanks to a sister who recommends good books to me, I read Stargirl last week, by Jerry Spinelli. In my typical broad generalizations, I’m thinking that every girl and woman should read this book. At least, anyone who is thinking about living outside the box, and who is weary of homogenized life.

The following paragraph, in the context of the school dance, was probably one of the most exciting to me, and one that I’d like to live like. Especially here in a country where I get stared at disconcerting ways.

She is no one’s child. She is the girl they have heard about. As she passes by she makes no attempt to avoid their eyes. On the contrary, she looks directly at them, turning to one side, then the other, looking into their eyes and smiling as if she knows them, as if they have shared grand and special things. Some turn aside, uneasy in a way they cannot account for; others feel suddenly empty when her eyes leave theirs. So distracting, so complete is she that she is gone before many realize that she had no escort, she was alone, a parade of one.

How Many Hours in a Mile?

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Last week, for no reason except that it was in front of me,  I picked up Lewis’ A Grief Observed. Douglas Gresham’s introduction took me in and it wasn’t long before I’d read all four chapters of the short book.

But not without being profoundly shaken. It’s a raw, intimate book, like reading someone’s journal, as Lewis walks  through debilitating grief after his wife’s death. Reading it is like watching the writhing of a man in agony. I barely had the emotional fortification to take it in. Parts of it made me cry, and drew me back to re-read them, as a kind of catharsis and soothing.

Living in a broken, groaning world, even without feeling the deep grief of death, I ask God lots of questions. It calms me somehow to know that He hears and understands and cares, and that’s enough, even though the questions don’t have answers.

Am I just sidling back to God because I know that if there’s any road to H. it runs through Him? But then of course I know perfectly well that He can’t be used as a road. If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as the means,  you’re not really approaching Him at all.

Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her again or not?

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of  “No answer.” It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, “Peace, child; you don’t understand.”

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask–half our great theological and metaphysical problems–are like that.

Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.

Comments on “The Jesus I Never Knew”

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I’ve been reading Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew and have only several pages left to read. Like always at the end of a good book, I’m sorry to see the end coming.  Yancey’s calm, thorough, careful writing soothed and fed me when I felt restless and hungry for rich words and truth.

He writes about Jesus’ world, what it must have been like to breathe that air, to walk those roads. In many ways, I’m not sure that it was so different from today’s gritty, tentative, restless towns. More than ever to me, Jesus is the hero to follow, the leader to believe in. And the audacity hits me sometimes, that I say I try to live like He did, because of my colossal failures in loving and serving like He did/does.

The best parts of the book are the last two chapters: “Kingdom: Wheat Among Weeds” and “The Difference He Makes.” The words and ideas are full of triumph and purpose, not heady and empty ideas, but solid and real–truer than our present physical surroundings.

I recommend this book, not just because of the easy-to-digest writing style, but because of the content that can lead to the source of Life.

And as an aside: Someone wrote me recently to ask why I’m reading Yancey, because she heard that he left the faith. I sighed, not because of the question, but because of the rumor. Someone has not been doing their homework, and jumped on a victim and spread a lie without reading to the end of the story.  So Yancey did leave the faith in his youth, but the fruit of his life now shows his allegiance to Christ. Who hasn’t done stupid things when they were young?

Please do yourself a favor and when you hear negative things about an author, don’t write him/her off as poison. Ask good questions of people you trust, don’t believe everything you hear or read on the internet, read books with discernment. ALL books are going to be flawed because their authors are flawed. But we can be students and ask good questions and learn the good that people have to teach us and at the same time be honest about the things that aren’t truth.

(The aside turns into a rant so the speaker steps off her soapbox.)

Joy Like Swords

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I read these assorted words this week, on a theme I keep bumping into:

The Lord our God is One and in Him, all the fragments of life are woven into one piece. In Christ, we’re aren’t ever torn. In Him, all brokenness is made whole, all moments are made holy, all pieces are made one.   —Ann Voskamp

Why must we always insist that the destination is the most important measure of success? We put so many worry hours into our future only to discover that it keeps changing.

My years pursuing and practicing the job of sign language interpreting were not wasted. They brought with them necessary gifts for my life: the gift of listening for the purpose of understanding, the gift of learning how to do the work, the gift of becoming comfortable in my own skin.

That season prepared me for this one. But at the time, I was sure that season was all there would ever be. I was sure I would be a sign language interpreter for the rest of my life.

What you are doing now may not be what you’ll be doing this time next year. Those things you care so deeply for now may seem small a month from now. Might I boldly suggest that the season you are in carries hints of what you’ll be doing next? This season is a kind companion, escorting you to the next one. And then the next. We would be wise to sit back a bit and enjoy today’s adventure, whatever gifts and sufferings they may hold.

Neither the accolades nor the critiques are worth anything. Don’t force something as valuable and sacred as the definition of your life to fit onto the small, flat, earthly paper of a degree or a certificate. They will come and they will go and they are important. But they do not get the final say. For in HIM we live and move and have our being. —Emily Freeman

“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! Is everything sad going to become untrue?”

And the minstrel sang to them… until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.  — Tolkien, The Return of the King