Prone to Love, by Jason Clark

Remember that line from the hymn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"? "Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love."  Jason Clark, inspired by his grandmother, prefers to sing, "Prone to Love you, Lord I feel it, Prone to serve the God I love."  In Prone to Love, Clark develops this sentiment, admonishing readers to see ourselves as God sees us.

How does God see us?  He loves us.  Simple as that.  A passage in which Clark recounts a conversation with his son just about brought me to tears.  His son asks, "Dad, how do you know when God is speaking to you; how do you know his presence?" Clark answers, "Bud, our heavenly Father's presence is always with us and He is always speaking to us.  And He is always saying one thing: 'I love you.'"  He continues, "Son, if you want to become more aware of His presence, it starts with believing that He loves you."  What a powerful, simple message.

Clark reminds us that not only does God love us, no matter what, but he also has transformed us, implanting his nature in us.  Now that we are new creations, we are prone to love, not prone to wander.   We live in God's grace, which "releases us to see ourselves from His perspective and empowers us to live in agreement with how He sees us, as saints of the Highest one."  Like the woman caught in adultery, we are to "go and sin no more."  Grace is not a "license to sin," but an expectation that we are being transformed, becoming more like Jesus.

I love Clark's emphasis on grace and on seeing ourselves as God sees us.  However, although he addresses the question of ongoing temptation and sin, I didn't feel like he adequately addresses the eternal question of sin in the lives of saints.  I want to see myself as God sees me--a saint, prone to love--yet my life often looks like a sinner, prone to wander.  I'm challenged to change my perspective by getting to know God.  Clark writes, "If you know Love, you become love.  If you become love, you don't have to try to love, you just love."  How?  Keeping my eyes on God and His perfect love.  Spending time "in God's presence, in worship, prayer, and His Word."  Simple and profound.  Easy and hard.



Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!

2016 Reading Challenge: A book that has a fruit of the Spirit in the title
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Legacies, by F. Paul Wilson

Following the success of his 1984 bestseller The Tomb, F. Paul Wilson brought back the star of that novel, Repairman Jack, in a 1998 follow up, Legacies.  Jack is an intriguing character, worth bringing back.  In fact, Legacies is the second of at least fifteen Repairman Jack novels.

Legacies starts out with Jack's friend/lover Gia calling on him recover some Christmas gifts that have been stolen from the AIDS clinic where she volunteers.  Of course he recovers them in dramatic yet anonymous fashion.  Dr. Clayton, who runs the clinic, is impressed with his work and enlists him to help with a problem on her own.  She has inherited her father's house, but she wants nothing more than to destroy it.  She certainly doesn't want her good-for-nothing half brother to get his hands on it.

The house holds terrible and wonderful secrets, but nothing but horrible memories for Dr. Clayton.  Along with Dr. Clayton's brother, a group of Arabs and a mysterious Japanese man have their eyes on the house.  Jack ends up at odds with all of them.  It won't surprise readers familiar with Jack that all of them die.  Jack is too hard to kill.

I expected that the house would have some kind of supernatural significance, like a portal to the underworld ready to unleash the creatures from The Tomb onto the streets of New York.  Legacies does not go that route.  Wilson does explore evils of real life, which are even worse: pediatric AIDS, the ravages of drug addiction, and child pornography.

Jack is the kind of hero who is more clever than his adversaries, just enough to make things interesting, but not so much that he doesn't get in plenty of scrapes of his own.  I do find it hard to conceive of his living "off the grid" in the middle of Manhattan, with no SSN, no bank account, not trace of his existence.  That adds to the mystery and intrigue of Jack's legend.  Legacies is a fun, dark thriller, with enough Jack to make readers want to come back for more.



2016 Reading Challenge: A book written in the twentieth century
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A Family Well-Ordered, by Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather, a pastor in Boston in the late 1600s to early 1700s, is one of the best known Puritans of the American founding era.  He was a prolific writer, champion of education, man of science, and, most unfortunately for his legacy (not to mention for a number of victims), a key figure in the Salem witch trials.

Among his many writings, we find this little gem: A Family Well-Ordered, or An Essay to Render Parents and Children Happy in One Another.  Long before James Dobson got us to focus on our families, Mather communicated guidelines for the family drawn from scripture.

Mather's style will put off many readers.  Not to elevate his writing to the place of scripture or classic literature, but if a reader is not comfortable reading the King James Bible or the plays of Shakespeare, he will probably not enjoy Mather's verbosity.  For example: "Let our authority effectually keep our children from all their unruly exorbitances and extravagancies."  In my opinion, it's good for the brain to read things that will demand a bit more from you and perhaps expand your vocabulary.

Mather writes about the parents' duty to their children, and the children's duty to the parent.  Above all else, he writes, parents must do all in their power to see that their children come to know the Lord.  This can be done through teaching, but more important is parental modeling: "Parents, be exemplary. Your example may do much towards the salvation of your children; your works will more work upon your children than your words; your patterns will do more than your precepts, your copies more than your counsels."

From the children, they should know that they risk the wrath of God if they don't honor their parents.  They should treat their parents with reverence, obedience, and recompense.  He even extends this to treatment of teachers, bosses, and, in a section that is revolting to modern readers, slaves' treatment of their masters.  This section especially dates A Family Well-Ordered, but the overall message is as contemporary and timeless as the countless scriptural reference Mather sprinkles throughout his exposition.  It may not be as easy to read as a James Dobson book, but A Family Well-Ordered is relevant and challenging.



2016 Reading Challenge: A book written by a Puritan
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Darth Vader and Son, by Jeffrey Brown

Star Wars fans take note: Jeffrey Brown's Darth Vader and Son is a must-read!  This is absolutely hilarious.  It's full of parenting humor starring Darth Vader and his son Luke, and full of inside jokes and movie references for Star Wars fans.

In an alternative Star Wars galaxy, Vader is raising Luke.  "Episode Three and a half: DARTH VADER AND SON.  Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, leads the Galactic Empire against the heroic Rebel Alliance.  Before he can take care of the Rebels, Lord Vader must first take care of his son--four-year-old Luke Skywalker. . . ."

The son and his black-clad father go on outings, go shopping, go on space-ship trips, hang out around the house, play together.  Luke is a typical four year old, and Vader is a typical harried parent of a four year old.  Brown cracked me up as he put his silly twist on Star Wars and Luke and Vader's strange relationship.  I do have to acknowledge that my teenage sons did not find this book as amusing as I did.  They are Star Wars fans to be sure; I suppose parents who are Star Wars fans will appreciate the book most.  Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Fast Fuel, by Renee McGregor

Renee McGregor, a nutritionist for leading athletes in the UK, wants to help you become a better runner.  Fast Fuel: Food for Running Success will give you information and recipes to fit your training plan, whatever your level of experience and whatever distance you are training for.  She covers more than diet.  She explores different types of meals and snacks eaten at different stages of a training week and during runs, discusses hydration, and emphasizes the importance of weight training and rest and recovery.

Besides absorbing the large amount of information McGregor provides (there were times when I got bogged down in the info, eyes glazing over, skimming to the bottom of the page), the great challenge of Fast Fuel is applying it to your own training.  I have always been an "eat what you want" runner.  Of course, I have always been a middle- or back-of-the-pack runner.  (OK, OK, I admit, more frequently at the back. . . .)  If a runner wants to take his or her sport seriously, paying more attention to what (and when) you eat is key.

Fast Fuel has examples of training/eating plans.  The best part is, she has dozens of recipes as suggestions to follow the plan.  She includes snacks, entrees, recover drinks, etc.  Some of them sound really good.  (I want to try the sweet potato brownies.)  American readers might wonder about some of the foods she talks about, like lolls, crisps, jelly babies, lemon squash, malt loaf, pork pie, or--this sounds really appealing--yeast-extract sandwich.  But for the most part the foods sounded familiar.

McGregor includes lots of charts and other text layout that didn't show up well on Kindle.  For this reason, and because of the recipes, you would probably want to get this in a paper version, not Kindle.  Fast Fuel is a good start for a motivated runner who is already good at planning his or her training and diet.  For a newbie, a casual runner, or a eat-whatever runner like me, Fast Fuel will be difficult to navigate in a useful way.  But it may very well be worth it.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!


2016 Reading Challenge: A book published by a UK-based publisher
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The Kingdom of Speech, by Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe, known for New Journalism, non-fiction like The Right Stuff, and great fiction like A Man in Full and Bonfire of the Vanities, long ago established himself as one of the great American writers.  A new book from Wolfe is cause for celebration.  In The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe puts on his intellectual historian/ academic journalist hat to take on intellectual icons and explore the origins of language.

Target #1: Charles Darwin.  Darwin's ideas about evolution were not wholly original.  He became the figurehead of a new movement due to his social status, his connections among the intellectual and cultural elite, and the support of activist atheists who saw evolution as a linchpin for their movement.  Wolfe recounts the tawdry details of the scheme to get Darwin publishing priority over Alfred Russel Wallace, essentially robbing Wallace of the acclaim due him.

Further, Wolfe asserts that Darwin's theories lack scientific support or evidence.  His origin story, starting with a few cells in muck, has as much scientific support as ancient creation stories involving dung beetles, praying mantises, or spiders.  Later, Darwin tried to explain the origin of speech, suggesting that early man imitated bird sounds, or attributed the fact that men have very little hair compared to apes to sexual preference.  Wolfe says Darwin's ideas had no more evidence than Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.

Target #2: Noam Chomsky.  Chomsky's linguistic origin theories, in which he talks about a language organ which all people possess, came to monopolize the field of linguistics.  Wolfe describes Chomsky's rise to prominence, comparing him to other young, charismatic leaders who start cults of dedicated followers.  That's right: to Wolfe, Chomsky is a cult leader who spent decades bullying detractors to the point that he and his followers dominated the field.  When an anthropologist in the field, Daniel L. Everett, studied a very primitive language in the Amazonian jungle, his work discredited Chomsky's whole body of work.  Wolfe describes Chomsky's elaborate efforts to adjust his terminology and discredit Everett. 

Wolfe's point in all of this is to argue that language did not evolve.  Language is not something that comes from a specific organ located inside the brain.  Language is an artifact, a tool that people groups develop over time.  This development and use of language is what separates humans from the animals.  Besides the animal kingdom, vegetable kingdom, and mineral kingdom, Wolfe wants to recognize "the kingdom of speech, inhabited solely by Homo loquax."

I am not an academic or scholar in the fields of biology or linguistics.  But I have spent enough time in the world of the academy to be frustrated by the controlling nature of the dominant theories that hold certain fields in their grip, treating alternative views like heresy and shunning dissenters as harshly as the Spanish inquisition.  Wolfe isn't worried about the shots he might take for his view.  I appreciate his uniquely iconoclastic, witty style.  The Kingdom of Speech won't go down as one of Wolfe's more popular books, but it may be one of his most substantial and important.


2016 Reading Challenge: A book about language
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More Than Enough, by Lee Hull Moses

Like many Western Christians, North Carolina pastor Lee Hull Moses struggles with the contrast between the abundance in which she lives and the needs of the world around her.  In More Than Enough: Living Abundantly in a Culture of Excess, she pokes and prods the question.  In a world marked by genocide, hunger, low wages, and unsafe working conditions (this list could go on, of course), "how do we live . . . in a way that honors God and shows gratitude for the good life we are living." 

I have read a number of books on this general theme.  I was pleased the she made no reference to sharing a lawnmower with your neighbors or to checking out books from the library instead of buying them.  Her goal isn't really to give practical tips for simple living, but to reflect on living in these United States of Abundance.

She does address the simple living perspective to which I referred.  She points out that "there's something significantly different between choosinga simple life and having one forced upon you. . . .  The choice to live simply is, in many ways, another by-product of privilege."  What a great point.  While Americans may choose ways to live more simply, doing so while surrounded by abundance, without a larger purpose, can become the opposite of simple.

Moses makes some great points about short-term missions.  She is a friend and fan of missionaries and their work, and writes with fondness about visiting her missionary friends in Nicaragua.  But she warns that short-term mission trips often "serve to reinforce stereotypes, increase dependency on foreign assistance, and serve as a sort of 'poverty tourism' for the travelers."  Churches interested in missions should not be satisfied to "fly in for a week and paint a house and come back with pictures to share at the church supper on Wednesday night."  Ideally, churches won't "stop at for but move toward with."

Moses also makes some great points about hunger.  "We've somehow created a system in which we know how ot produce more than enough food for everyone, but still there are hungry people in the world."  "In a country where we have the resources and the technology and the know-how to grow more food than we can possibly eat, how come there are hungry people in the first place?"  She points out that government agricultural subsidies lean heavily toward crops used for making processed foods, resulting in relatively higher prices for fresh produce and other non-processed foods.

Moses doesn't offer much in the way of solutions.  Her forte is reflection.  Her reflections are personal, in some cases reprinted from blog entries, giving the book the feel of a loosely-related collection of essays around a broad theme.  Personal though they are, her reflections easily translate to the rest of us. 


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!