Category: Books

This Beautiful Mess, by Rick McKinley, made me uncomfortable. I feel pretty comfortable in my nice house with my nice husband who has a nice job and provides me with lots of nice things. McKinley’s book challenged me to consider my life’s agenda and priorities. As I read, I wondered if I cling to my stuff too tightly, if I love the underprivileged too little, if I value my health and wealth too much.

“When I became a Christ follower, the sad truth is that I transferred Christ into my kingdom, into the context of my life. My kingdom consisted of my desires and aspirations – the future I hoped for, an agenda that allowed me to reign as I chose….I was simply trying to get God to endorse my agenda.”

In writing this book I don’t think he intended that we should all be flinging our possessions out the window or giving away all our money. That’s not really the point he is trying to make. Yes, he challenges us in the areas of money and time and possessions and other things, but what I took away was mostly a challenge to my heart and motives: do I live as if I experience the kingdom of God now? Or do I live more like a placeholder on Earth, waiting for the next train to heaven?

“I realized that most of Jesus’ followers lived pretty much like everyone else — except we hoped for heaven. The Christian life began to look like one long waiting game of Bible studies and boring parties. If I was lucky, a bus would hit me and I’d go straight to heaven.”

His call in every issue that he addresses is not a call to start a program. He calls us to engage in relationship. He calls us to love. He calls us to empathy. Here are some quotes from the book that struck me in particular:

If you set out right now to tell the story of your encounters with the King of heaven, I wonder what you would say. What foolish tantrums and ugly battles could you describe as you think about how you have tried to get God to serve your kingdom?

…we try so hard to be cool. We say we need to have relevant music, relevant programs, relevant parking….We become relevant when we are committed to being that signpost of heaven in some part of our world. When we study Scripture, we find that relevance happens naturally when we choose to be real people caring for other real people. Even the real people who are not like us. Even the real people who don’t hesitate to hate us. Authentic relationships make us relevant.

No doubt about it, money is a profound dilemma. How do I value money without being owned and corrupted by it? How do I steward everything I have for God while taking responsibility for putting bread on the table and a roof over our heads? When is my giving, no matter how generous, more about me than someone else?

Giving [money] in the context of relationship also steers us toward giving the kind of help the recipient actually needs – not the help we’re guessing they need or that is convenient for us to give.

I notice, though, that my freedoms shape my expectation, and my expectation is simple and powerful: that suffering is to be avoided at all costs.

I definitely recommend this book to read. To be honest, it starts out a little simple. And as someone who has been around the church awhile, I was a little like, duh. But I kept reading, knowing my attitude was likely arrogant. McKinley lays the foundation in the first two sections of the book, but the third section, “Practicing the presence of the kingdom,” is the section that was most convicting to me because he describes real life examples of people he knows – not theories or great ideas.

Tonight Bryan and I had the privilege of attending the book release party for our friend Jeffrey Overstreet’s first fantasy novel, Auralia’s Colors. It was exciting to see him speak as he shared the story of how Auralia’s Colors came to be. As these things go, it started with one comment, made by his then girlfriend, and grew into a wonder and an inkling and an idea and then finally, a compelling. I was particularly struck by the amount of patience he must have endured in seeing this project through, as I think he first began working on the novel in the late 90’s.

It is very inspiring to see a friend and fellow writer get published. We are very excited for him, and I can’t wait to dig into this book.

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The release of Auralia’s Colors, along with conversations I’ve had with Jeffrey, got me thinking about the fantasy genre. I’ve always held to the conviction that I dislike science fiction and fantasy in the same I way I dislike rap music – based solely on judgmental, preconceived notion that there was no substance or worth to it. I remember being in a book store as a kid, seeing these books about hobbits on the shelf, and thinking that was just weird. What the hell is a hobbit? And why would I waste my time reading about imaginary hobbits when I have the much more realistic and literary genius that is Sweet Valley High to read?

Yet, when I think about stories I’ve enjoyed like The Lord of the Rings series, the Narnia series, certain Orson Scott Card books, and even a Neil Gaimnan book – and even movies like Pan’s Labyrinth – I realize that I actually probably do like fantasy.

And as Bryan said to me tonight as we talked like grownups over a plate of Mexican food, I would enjoy reading a story in any genre, as long as it is a good story. And I suppose the same goes for movies and music as well.

So, it feels good to get that out there in the open, to come out of my closet, as it were. I am now an open and affirming book reader who discriminates against no book based on genre.

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Also, as I post this, I’m listening to this podcast from The Kindlings Muse on Christian Contributions to and Consumptions of fantasy and myth. It’s a very interesting discussion (with Jeffrey Overstreet and others) around the fear of fantasy in Christian circles, as well as the idea of embodying the gospel in our stories instead of merely telling a linear story. I highly recommend you listen, too – especially if you have ambivalence toward fantasy.

[Shameless plug: to listen to The Kindlings Muse podcasts I participated in, go here for the links].

Because I spent an entire day in bed this weekend, due to the bottom half of my body becoming separated from my top half, I read an entire book. It was probably too much information to really let sink in all at once – especially since I had just attended an all day seminar on Saturday that was also full of heavy information – so I would not recommend reading this in one sitting like I did.

Peter Scazzero spends the first section of the book laying out the total dysfunction of his own life and his work as pastor of New Life Fellowship in Queens, New York, prior to 1996. In this eight year period, he had married, had four children, and planted a new church that was (seemingly) thriving in one of the most richly diverse neighborhoods in America.

But in that year, 1996, his wife confessed to him that she was done with him and done with his church, and she wanted out. This led to an emergency two week leave while he and his wife received crisis marital counseling, which then led to a three month sabbatical from his pastorate at NLF, which then led to a ripple effect of change in the way NLF discipled its people.

His marriage was restored, and his ministry was redeemed.

Through his wife’s drastic measures, Scazzero began to realize he was putting his work before his family – and even before any real relationship with God – and was creating a working environment among the staff and volunteer leaders at NLF that led everyone to do the same. Leaders and members were burning out, becoming embittered, and leaving the church. People who were hurting or trapped in habitual sin were not receiving the prayer and attention they needed, because a shallow culture of simply going through the motions had been established from the top down.

Scazzero makes bold confessions in this book, and is brutally honest about the image of himself he projected during this time. A frequent speaker at church growth conferences, he admits to stretching the truth at times about the size and state of his church.

I read the entire first section of this book with my jaw gaping wide open. I wasn’t so much surprised at the way he was leading others and living his life – I’ve been around the block a few times to be shocked by that – but I was so encouraged that he daringly wrote a book that made him look sooo very bad. There weren’t many ironed edges to his account of the way things were, but he gives us a very frayed story of self image, power, and bad theology that affected hundreds of people in and around his church.

As I continued reading, I wept. Through telling his story, Scazzero gives testimony to the power of conviction, repentance, and submission. Through his own example, through his own drastic change in the way he lived his personal and professional life, lives were transformed and the model of ministry at NLF was radically changed. Staff were encouraged to work reasonable hours and take time off during the week, leaders were given thorough training and strongly encouraged to set clear boundaries in their ministries. People were actually being discipled, through love, tough words, and encouragement because their small group leaders were setting an example of confession and repentance.

The culture of ministry changed from leading out of strength and pride, to leading out of brokenness and humility.

Scazzero had made the near-fatal error of compartmentalizing his ‘spiritual’ life from his ‘practical’ life, thereby placing more importance on ‘doing the work of God’ over attending his children’s soccer games or getting to the heart of what people were struggling with. He had also become co-dependent with his work – dropping everything for whatever emergency came up during his family time. He had set no boundaries around himself or his family. He writes:

Jesus does call us to die to ourselves. ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mark 8:34). The problem was that we had died to the wrong things.

Structurally, one of the things I like about the book is the way each chapter in the section on Six Principles of an Emotionally Healthy Church begins with the statement, ‘In emotionally healthy churches, people…’ The paragraph proceeds to describe how members and leaders within a healthy church deal with conflict, or whatever that principle happens to be. From there it deconstructs our faulty thinking and faulty theology, and leads the reader through scripture into a healthier way.

Sazzero also references many respected authors and books, such as C.S. Lewis, Richard Foster’s The Celebration of Discipline, Henry Cloud and John Townsend, and Dan Allender’s, The Cry of the Soul. Also, themes in this book remind me of themes I’ve read in Larry Crabb’s Soul Talk, and in Timothy Lane and Paul Tripp’s How People Change and Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands.

I am – perhaps freakishly – passionate about these issues of leadership and church burnout. In the last fifteen years I have burned out of three churches, and have seen countless people leave these congregations because they have been ignored, bullied, over worked, and under nourished. I personally have submitted myself to the (false) idea that working on church fliers at Kinko’s until 1am and attending daily prayer meetings at 6am is an excellent way for me to serve God.

I have since learned to set boundaries. I don’t feel pressured to jump in and serve, but seek where I am uniquely gifted to serve. Jesus is at the center of all things, not me, or the pastor, or any particular created vision.

I highly recommend this book to leaders and members of churches, especially those who are feeling tired and burned out and without focus. I pray it will open your eyes, and lift a weight off your shoulders.

I finished Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker last week for my book club. The story takes place over a year and a half during the early forties when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Ellen is a young woman with an American father and a Russian mother who met when her mother nursed her father through an injury in the first world war. They live on a dry land wheat ranch in Montana, which means they use no irrigation, relying instead on the weather for a successful crop.

The story opens in the summer after the wheat has been harvested and stored, and Ellen’s father is listening to the various market prices on the radio to determine when he should sell. A good price for his wheat will mean Ellen can go to college in the fall, and he is determined to make this happen. Ellen is full of optimism and excited anticipation. And then word comes that she will, indeed, attend college in the fall.

I haven’t written any reviews for fiction books before, so I’m not sure how much of the story to tell here, and I certainly don’t want to give away any spoilers. I suppose I could give my opinion: I liked the book. It is a slow moving story, which one gal in our book club pointed out was probably intentional as a reflection of the slow moving simplicity of ranch life in the forties. She felt it was a more suitable read for the winter, while cozied up next to a fire.

There was much description of life on the ranch – the plowing, the sowing, the waiting, the sweating, and the toil. Ellen used the hard labor to work out her anger, and grief, and confusion over things that pressed her. I appreciated this aspect of her story – the sweating out of frustration, the release of tension after a hard day’s work. I envied the simplicity of ranch life – the work she persevered through was difficult, but when it was done, she rested.

We talked about this in our book group – the nature of our lives today as being so busy and filled with noise. I feel as if the work I do will never be done, that there will always something undone. But on a wheat ranch you harvest, you plant, and then your work is done and you wait for the wheat to grow. When you are out in the field, you are working hard. Then you eat dinner, get a good night’s sleep, and do it all again the next day.

As I read, the simplicity of this way of life appealed to me.

Another focus of the book is Ellen’s observation of her parents’ relationship. Their marriage is complicated already because of her mother being a foreigner, but it is made even more complicated in Ellen’s eyes as she learns more information about how they came to be together. It is particularly interesting to see how she vacillates back and forth between the two, at times identifying with her father’s frustrations, and at times her mother’s. It opened my eyes to the pitfalls of children attempting to make sense of complicated and much more mature relationships, and gave me compassion toward Ruthie for all the times she looked worried as Bryan and I exchanged sharp words.

It is also an interesting commentary on the culture of love and marriage in the forties. I kept getting frustrated with Ellen as she clung to the idea of a relationship that seemed shallow, wondering why she didn’t just let go and move on to someone else. But in the context of the early forties, it was not customary to give your love away so easily. Today, we women shave off pieces of our heart to many different men over the course of our lives. We love, we lose, and we move on to new loves. But during the forties, this kind of behavior was reserves for ‘loose’ women – respectable women were courted and married, and the process was all very practical. This, too, has it’s downfalls, but the point I’m making is that Ellen represents the quintessential forties woman who panics a little at the thought of having no man in her future.

If you’re in the mood for a story that takes it’s time, I recommend Winter Wheat. It may be slower than the average Steven King thriller, but it is sweet and simple and something to be savored.

I’m back in the saddle again with another book club. After two previous book clubs I was part of, including one through my previous church and one through my friend, Maryam, I have been recruited. A good friend asked me to participate with a small group of six women who would each take turns picking a book and leading the discussion, and our first selection for discussion in June is The Alchemist.

I read for an hour this morning and am already hooked.

We have decided to keep our group small, and apparently we were all picked because of our likelihood of actually reading the book. I may not have been prepared for that in the past, but I have recently reclaimed reading as a priority, and wake up at 6am each morning just so I can read before the kids get up.

We left each book selection up to the host/discussion leader for the month. In Maryam’s book club we all submitted book title options and drew from a jar each month.

How does your book club choose titles to read? Or if you’re not part of a book club, how do you choose titles to read on your own?

For other posts on this book, click here.

After taking the ‘test’ in chapter three to rate Ruthie in the spectrum of nine different personality traits, it came out just as I had suspected: she’s spirited.

But just barely, as it turns out. She’s at the low end of the Spirited range.

Her intensity is not spread evenly among the nine traits, but rests heavily in three: Intensity, Persistence, and Mood. For all the other traits she scored the minimum, with the exception of Sensitivity (middle of the road), which surprised me. But because this was not a scientific or exhaustive test, I may be confusing ‘symptoms’ – when Ruthie needs to have her blankets JUST RIGHT while she is sleeping, or her towel wrapped around her in a very specific way after a bath, it may not be an issue of her Sensitivity but a reflection of her Persistent traits when things don’t go as planned.

The following chapter asks you to rate yourself in these personality traits, keeping in mind that a grown-up’s personality traits can be masked by learned behavior. Again, I was not surprised. I scored off the charts in the same three areas as Ruthie, and scored low in all the other traits.

We are two bulls in a china shop, getting tangled up in each others’ horns.

I knew long before I read this book that Ruthie exasperated me the most because she is exactly like me. Not only are my own raw traits staring me down on a daily basis, but our mutual intensities set each other off like a spark in a fireworks display. At times it’s difficult to tell which one of us is the parent, since I am just as skilled at throwing tantrums as Ruthie, and Ruthie has been known to say to me quite sternly, ‘you need to tell me you’re sorry for screaming.’

What I have been thinking about the most in the last few weeks is how my Intensity, Persistence, and Mood have shaped who I am. How have I learned to use these things to build my character and accomplish goals, and how have they been my achilles heel? How can I mentor Ruthie in the things I’ve learned to manage, and help redirect her in the ways I have not mastered?

And most of all, how can we get through her childhood and teen years with a still-intact relationship?

I’d like to think that my humility will soften her heart toward me, and continue to change my heart and my actions. We are getting there, but it is slow going. Some days I have a superhuman dose of patience and glide through even the worst defiance. Other days it’s the littlest things that set me off on a tirade.

We are both unpredictable, but we are also both learning.

It’s about time I did some catching up around here – I finished this book simply AGES ago and haven’t even mentioned it. But it’s an older book anyway, so I didn’t think anyone was waiting on pins and needles for my opinion. Not that anyone would be waiting on pins and needles for my opinion regardless.

But anyway….

This was another instance of Bryan asking me to read it, my never getting around to it because it sounded boring, then deciding to pick it up because a girlfriend said she liked it. I know, I KNOW, but listening to my husband can be a real blind spot sometimes.

I liked this book for the same reason I like watching CSI – it is rational, and logical, and sticks to the facts. It teaches me to think critically and apart from my emotional flavor of the moment. While it is a book of economical studies and statistics and trends, the authors don’t bog you down with all the details of statistical analysis.

Rather, they tell a story using the numbers, and their stories are captivating.

Especially the story of the researcher who spent years studying Chicago gangs, became a trusted insider, and happened to inherit one drug dealer’s detailed financial records, neatly and meticulously charted in lined notebooks. And the story about how Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned abortion in his country and was subsequently overthrown, years later, by the generation who lived because of the ban.

The authors address many myths regarding statistics and cause/effect relationships. They challenge ‘conventional wisdom.’ They hypothesize what REALLY caused crime rates to drop in the nineties. They shatter your beliefs about what which factors affect your child’s educational experience. And they tells us how to spot cheaters and stop them. My favorite part is when they point out all the times ‘experts’ ‘bend’ the facts to suit their own purposes. I love that. Justice is glorious when it’s happening to someone else.

Let me give you a quick example of why I need to read books like this more often. A couple weeks ago after picking Ruthie up from preschool on a Thursday, we came home to eat lunch with Bryan. On Thursdays my kids don’t take a nap because I attend my Recovery group in the afternoon, but often I send them to their rooms for an hour of quiet time so I can regroup and recharge before leaving.

That particular Thursday was beautiful, warm, and sunny, and Bryan asked if there was time to take the kids outside to play. I looked at the clock in the kitchen, and felt I should tell him there was no time, but I ignored the mental hip-check I was getting and convinced myself that there was indeed time to play outside.

What happened after that I cannot explain – other than maybe I got caught up in the lunch/nap routine – because at 1pm I ushered the kids upstairs for their naps, relieved to have some down time before my group. I took a fifteen minute cat nap, I read a chapter of my book, I checked my email, I marveled at how relaxed I was feeling for a Thursday afternoon.

Then I went up to get the kids from their quiet time like I always do, but this time when I looked at the clock in Ruthie’s room something seemed funny about it. The clock read 2:30, but that couldn’t be right because I just KNEW it was 1:30, because every Thursday I leave my house at 1:30 for group, and look at me doing just that right now: proof that it was 1:30 and not 2:30.

I shook off that funny feeling and loaded the kids into the car. I called Bryan from the road to tell him I had left, and he seemed confused. I thought you left a long time ago, he said. Whatever, I thought. He obviously doesn’t pay attention.

I looked at the clock in the car, and it read 2:45. That’s strange, I thought. This clock is wrong, too! How could both clocks be wrong when it is actually 1:45? What?! Even my WATCH says it’s 2:45! WTF?

At this point I called the house where my group meets and asked the babysitter WHAT THE HELL TIME IT WAS, and apologized for being late when I realized that it was, indeed, nearly 3:00. I was a full hour late.

After four years of apprenticeship under Gil Grissom I STILL do not trust the facts over my own emotions. HE WOULD BE SO ASHAMED OF ME! I believed so strongly that I knew what time it was, that FOUR CLOCKS reading the actual time did not convince me I was wrong.

In hindsight, the whole thing felt like a dream in which nothing made sense, yet everything made PERFECT sense – like when you dream you are sitting on the couch at home, but nothing around you looks or feels familiar. You know for some reason that you belong there, but you have no idea where ‘there’ is.

That is how I felt that Thursday afternoon, and that is how I navigate through much of my life. I appreciated the cold hard facts in Freakonomics, and I appreciated the lesson in asking the right questions. The book is statistics done right, and it is stories well told, and it is written for the common (wo)man who isn’t normally attracted to such nerdy things as charts and graphs and spreadsheets.

It is an easy, quick read, and I highly recommend it – even if you think you’ll hate it. Trust me, you won’t.

Most of us find ourselves facing an array of labels spoken and unspoken that affect how we think, feel, and act toward our spirited children. If we are going to build a healthy relationship with them, we must lay the labels out on the table, dissect them, and then redesign those that make us and our kids feel lousy – the ones that cloud our vision and hide the potential within.

I like how Kurcinka begins the book, in chapter two, with a deconstruction of how things currently are. She asks the reader to consider how we think about and talk about our children, and how that might affect our relationship. Negative labels can perpetuate dread, can discourage, and can send the wrong message to other adults in the child’s life, such as a teacher. But as she says in chapter one, sometimes our spirited child’s personality traits are actually strengths when understood and well guided.

It seems difficult to comprehend in the moment of an explosive episode, but ‘redesigning’ our labels to reflect a more positive quality can help us as a parent relate differently, and it can help our child think of themselves differently. So I sat down and thought of the labels I use for Ruthie. All but two would be considered negative, but that didn’t surprise me. The most difficult part of the exercise was coming up with a corresponding positive trait, because I’m just not sure I could catch the vision for some of these. To be honest, I had to use a thesaurus.

	NEGATIVE LABEL		REDESIGNED LABEL
	stubborn		persistent
	strong willed		confident, assertive
	obstinate		tenacious, steadfast
	explosive		intense
	dramatic		dramatic
	independent		independent
	impatient		keen, restless
	demanding		ambitious

I felt the exercise was helpful in reminding me that Ruthie needs time and direction to grow into these traits, and that as an adult these traits will actually be an asset.

You don’t need to list your labels if you don’t want to, but I’m curious what others thought of this chapter?

I’m excited that so many people are on board for discussing this latest book I’m reading: Raising Your Spirited Child. I always get more out of books like this when I can be inspired by the things others are seeing that don’t jump out at me, so thank you for your willingness to come along on this journey with me.

When I get a chance, I will be posting next on chapter 2, which discusses the labels we give our children.

Spirited kids are the Super Ball in a room full of rubber balls. Other kids bounce three feet off the ground. Every bounce for a spirited child hits the ceiling.

I started this book today. The subtitle is ‘a guide for parents whose child is *more* intense, sensitive, perceptive, persistent, and energetic.’ Sounded like the book for me, and from page 1 I have found great comfort and validation from someone who gets what it’s like to be me.

The author, Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, chooses to use the term spirited because difficult, strong-willed, and stubborn have negative connotations. A spirited child is lively, for sure, and creative and full of energy. But spirited children possess personality traits that can actually be strengths when understood and well guided. This is the basic premise of the book.

She seems to understand the randomness and intensity of the transition between good moments and bad moments, and the unpredictability of what will set a child off, and the persistence to scream for forty five minutes over toast cut the wrong way. She talks of the fear that we parents feel that we may have done something wrong in our parenting to create such behavior.

On the bad days, being the parent of a spirited child is confusing, frustrating, taxing, challenging, and guilt-inducing. You may wonder if you are the only parent with a kid like this, scared of what is to come in the teen years if you don’t figure out what to do now in the early years.

This book feels like a breath of fresh air, like a little piece of sanity. She even includes a chapter to give parents tools in keeping their cool on the bad days. Also, her definition of ‘spirited’ includes more than stubborn or explosive kids. She also includes kids who are more sensitive, more intensely inward, and more fearful and clingy than other kids – the kind of kids who are not content until the blankets on their beds are just right, or the tags on their clothing are folded down, or the bumps on their socks are smoothed out.

This book is for parents with kids who are more.

Rather than reading the entire book, then writing a review at the end, I may journal online as I go. If anyone would like to pick up a copy and read along, it would be nice to do a virtual book club through comments!

I’m halfway through the book, Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time. It was an impulse purchase made as we stood in the check out line at Powell’s this weekend. We already had scads of books in our basket, but given that Bryan and I had just had a conversation in the car about the book I’m writing and whether he thought it was stupid for me to write about the impact of music in my life, we just HAD to check it out.

And it has turned out to be a gem.

Rob Sheffield, who now writes for Rolling Stone, is a lover of music and master at making mix tapes. In fact, when he was thirteen he ran for student counsel JUST so he could be on the Event Planning committee JUST so he could be put in charge of making mix tapes for the school dance.

“I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history,” he writes. “You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new. You go through an artist’s entire career, zero in on that one moment that makes you want to jump and dance and smoke bats and bite the heads off drugs. And then you play that one moment over and over. A mix tape steals these moments from all over the musical cosmos, and splices them into a whole new groove.”

After giving a brief run down of mix tapes in general – the party tape, the i-want-you tape, the make-out tape, the friendship tape, and the road trip tape, among others – he uses the songs from fifteen different mix tapes he’s made or been given to tell the story of his time with Renee, a woman he loved and lost.

This memoir is funny, and beautiful, and tragic, and so easy to identify with, both musically and on a personal level.

The question I had asked Bryan in the car was whether he thought it was possible to write about the soundtrack of my life without being cheesy. His answer was – as it typically is – It could be a really great idea, or it could really suck. When he read the inside jacket of this book he said, This is a really cool way to write about music.

If you are a freak about making mix tapes as I am, you will eat this book up. I highly recommend it.