Breathe: A Child's Guide to Ascension, Pentecost, and the Growing Time by Laura Alary

Breathe: A Child's Guide to Ascension, Pentecost, and the Growing Time, a new book for children written by Laura Alary and illustrated by Cathrin Peterslund is due out in April of this year.

Breathe retells the biblical account of the Ascension of Jesus and the Day of Pentecost in a lyrical and practical way for children. 

'The season after Pentecost lasts for a long time...

In church we call it Ordinary Time...

There are no big holidays during Ordinary Time,

But life in the Spirit is not ordinary.

Amazing things are happening.'

Breathe looks at the natural growing time of the Northern Hemisphere’s spring and summer that coincides with Ordinary Time in the church calendar and connects it with the movement of the Holy Spirit. Seeds that had been buried in the earth have come to life and flowers are blooming. Everything is growing and changing in the natural world which makes it a good time to reflect on what the Spirit is doing in our lives. 

'Am I growing the fruit of kindness?'

'I wonder what kind of fruit I will bring to the world?'

I like the practical aspects of this book. The author puts them alongside the retelling of the biblical account to show us how we may apply them to our lives. 

Breathe is a lovely book to be shared with a child and I think an adult who does this will be refreshed too. It’s always good to examine ourselves to see if we are growing the fruit of kindness and children help to give us a fresh perspective as they see things we often don’t.

If you are, like me, in the Southern Hemisphere, the book is still applicable but like the Christmas books we read that depict snow, we have to use our imaginations a little more.

Laura Alary also wrote two other children's books I've previously highlighted - Make Room: A Child's Guide to Lent and Easter and Look! A Child's Guide to Advent and Christmas. They have a similar format to Breathe but a different illustrator. I think Breathe is pitched a little more to a wider age range with more textual depth but they are all well done.

All three books are published by Paraclete Press.

Looking back on January 2021

 Flowering Eucalyptus in January

In the second week of January, Michelle at MyHomeschool ran some free online workshops which I  helped present. The regular Charlotte Mason workshops will be starting up next week so come along and say hi.

The Friday before last we had a sudden unexpected thunderstorm. It only lasted about five minutes, but in that time it split three power poles and brought down a couple of large branches which fell onto the power lines. We're on a cul-de-sac so our road was blocked as well as the access we have up a flight of stairs to the road above us. A friend of mine was visiting and thankfully her car wasn't hit but she was stuck at our place as her car was on our side of the fallen tree. Her husband came to pick her up and we had to walk her through the bush to the road below us to get to him. She managed to pick up a local leech on her way and I found one inside my shoe when I got back home - a very large engorged thing that must have surely have left me anaemic.

They weren't able to get their car until the power poles were replaced and the trees removed. We were only without power for about 30 hours - kudos to the SES for cleaning up the trees and Ausgrid, our electrical supplier, for digging holes for the new power poles, stringing up new power lines and restoring the electricity in that time. I was thinking how incredibly blessed we are to live in a country where services like this are dependable and efficient. The joys of civilisation!

And best of all that happened in January was the birth of our third grandchild, a little boy, three days ago. Our two year old grandson stayed with for three nights while his Mum & Dad were in the hospital. He couldn't visit due to COVID restrictions but he saw his Dad every day and face-timed with his Mum. He was very chirpy during the day but when he went to bed he cried and wanted Mummy cuddles. My husband and I are a little wrecked after some broken sleep. 😫 Here is the little fella...so precious & new.

Aunty and Uncle on duty - a rainy day so it's time for indoor cricket.

Hails has been drawing regularly during January. Here is some of her work - she posts fairly regularly on Instagram.

St Basil's Cathedral, Moscow

I've been enjoying using the Bible in One year App which is free for your phone or may be accessed using email. I like listening to the audio although it may be read as well. It's about 24 minutes of listening each day - Bible and some commentary by Nicky & Pippa Gumbel (the Alpha course pioneers) - great if you're out walking or in the car. There are a few different editions; I'm using the Classic version and it's been the easiest way for me to read through the Bible and not get bogged down due to the way they divide up the readings. It's good to have the option of listening to an audio presentation that is very well done and the commentary is just enough and helps to link the different readings. Highly recommended!!

What I'm Reading

In the Steps of the Master by H.V. Morton

The Return of the Prodigal by Henri J.M. Nouwen

Beholding and Becoming by Ruth Chou Simons

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

School Education by Charlotte Mason

'Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn't really matter.'

D.L. Moody

The Good, the Sad and the Beautiful of 2020

It's been raining here all week, the very opposite of this time last year. Last January we had 'unprecedented' bushfires in Australia which destroyed 3,094 homes, 2,439 of those were here in NSW. 33 people died, 9 of whom were firefighters. 6.7% of the state of NSW was burnt, the total area possibly the largest ever in a single recorded fire season for eastern Australia. 48% of the land on Kangaroo Island off the South Australian coast was burnt also. A large number of major fires burnt for months and air quality was terrible during this time. Estimates based on NSW and Victoria alone put the loss of mammals, birds and reptiles at over one billion, and that doesn't take into account those that died from injuries, lack of food or predators later on. This figure also doesn't include the loss of perhaps hundreds of billions of insects. *More details here.

While all this was going on, my five sisters and I had the 'unprecedented' loss of our mother at the end of January. Unprecedented, not because we weren't expecting her to die at some stage. She was eighty-one and had survived a couple of heart attacks in her fifties as well as the loss of her only son (one boy in the middle of six girls) from a brain haemorrhage. He was 46 and we didn't expect her to live through that devastation, but she did. Our Dad died a year before our brother so we weren't strangers to this sort of thing. In some respects I was closer to my brother and my Dad than I was to Mum and perhaps that was why her loss was so difficult. I grieved for all that had not been. 

I left home just before I turned seventeen and lived on the opposite side of the country to the rest of my family for years before most of them moved over this way. Before Mum died I visited her in hospital just after she had surgery to relieve her pain and she said to me, 'We haven't had much time together, have we, Carol?' During January she began to show signs of vascular dementia to the extent that one day she didn't recognise me. Unprecedented - I never expected to feel the extreme sense of loss that I did. And we certainly didn't expect her to die from an aggressive tumour when most of her life it was her heart that troubled her.

I started this post with the sad, now here's some good and beautiful. My daughter sent me this splendid bouquet on Christmas Eve for my birthday which is on Christmas Day - hence my name.

My husband had been working from home one day a week for about a year before the COVID situation and then in March work at home became fulltime. He has loved not commuting to work but he was doing his work at the kitchen table - conference calls etc. Very inconvenient for everyone else, but when one of our sons decided to move in with his brother who had left home about 18 months previously, we acquired a spare room. This was turned into a study and peace reigned once more.

In the early part of our COVID restrictions my husband and I got into the habit of going for bush walks regularly. We decided to support a local café to help keep them in business during lockdown so we'd go walking and get a coffee at the same time. Our regular activities such as swimming, orchestra, youth music practice and some other things, stopped for a few months so Hails and I decided to make a quilt for her brother. He turned 21 at the end of November and we hoped to have it finished by then. That didn't happen, partly because I needed some material for the backing and I wanted to be able to see the fabric for myself before I bought it, but it was finished by Christmas so he got it then.

Hails also had more time to spend on her art and I added her to my Instagram account so she could post what she was doing. This is her little spot.

She usually swims at least three times a week so in place of that we did a bit of walking and used some free Kathy Smith videos for some HIIT training. On her website you can sign-up for a series of posts which include links to videos, which is the easiest way to access them, unless you want to trawl through YouTube. One that's very helpful is her 15 minute total body stretch. The exercises are targeted to women over forty but anyone could do them. 

We've continued to have our two beautiful grandchildren at our home on Tuesdays and we have another grandchild we are looking forward to meeting in three weeks time.

Reading

My reading time increased significantly this year but my writing didn't keep pace. An area I focused on was nutrition and health, subjects I've had a long-term interest in. A friend of mine pointed me to Dr Michael Greger's website (thanks Betty!) and I found out he did podcasts so I listen to them fairly regularly. I also have enjoyed the podcasts from the Physician's Committee that discuss the benefits of  a plant based whole food diet and the latest news on medical issues. I'm interested from a health point of view because I don't have a great family history when it comes to heart disease and I am so frustrated by the conflicting advice on diet - eggs are bad, no, now they are good, etc. Low Fat, Keto, Low Carb. There is much misinformation, especially on the Internet, where anybody with a high profile and good physique can promote their own version of healthy nutrition.

The China Study by .T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D and Thomas M. Campbell, Ph.D - I have to say I didn't really engage with this book although parts of it were interesting. I didn't like the defensive tone of the writing and there were a lot of statistics that weren't really helpful to the average layperson. As with some of the other books I've read on the Whole Food, Plant Based way of eating, it looks at the health issues that occur when people move away from their traditional diets and start eating a Western diet.

How Not to Diet by Dr Michael Greger - I like this author's writing. It is engaging, humorous and full of puns. I wanted to read another of his books, How not to Die, but I found this book at the library and read it first. I plan on reading How Not to Die this year. How Not to Diet looks at the latest medical and nutritional research regarding health, disease, weight loss and premature death. He explains how nutrition and lifestyle changes can prevent certain diseases or reverse them and how some foods may be more efficacious than medication. This isn't some lifestyle guru dispensing his own ideas. 176 pages of reference notes, an introduction that outlines the inspiration behind his decision to study medicine and the long and winding road that brought him to where he is now. Excellent book.

Paul: A Biography by N.T. Wright - I listened to this via an audiobook over about 6 months after my eldest son recommended it. I've listened to the author on the Ask NT Wright Anything (podbean.com) podcast and respect his intellectual prowess coupled with his humility. This biography of the Apostle Paul was inspiring and presents him in a way that brings him and his times to life for the modern reader. There is a very good review of the book here.

I'm starting the year with a book a friend gave me for Christmas, Beholding and Becoming, the Art of Everyday Worship by Ruth Chou Simons. It is an exquisitely lovely book illustrated by the author.

In the Steps of the Master by H.V. Morton is a book I thought I'd schedule for Hails this year either as a devotional and/or for geography. I have enjoyed it so much and am about halfway through its 375 pages. It is set in Palestine, written in 1934, and is so wonderfully evocative of Biblical times. It's a great book for an older teen and a good companion while reading through the Gospels.

'It was the habit in ancient times to treat any stranger as if he might be a wandering Christ, and this beautiful courtesy still exists in out-of-the-way parts of the earth. We have lost it, and with it something fine and beautiful has gone from our lives.'

 

Announcing the '2019 Christian Greats Challenge: Past & Present'

The Purpose of the Challenge


There are a few reasons I decided to run this challenge:

* I enjoy the community aspect of blogging about books & thought it would be fun to host a challenge with a link-up & get to visit & comment on other blogs.

* I have a number of books by Christian authors on my shelves.  I'd like to read these & a challenge will help to spur me on.

* I've been surprised by the sheer number of classic authors whose writings contain dominant Christian themes. Many of these authors were not professing Christians but they had imbibed a Christian ethos that is evident in their writing.

* As I was reading 'Surprised by Joy' by C.S. Lewis this year he spoke of his 'chronological snobbery' before he became a Christian. He defined this as, ‘the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.’

Studying/reading history whether it be world history in general or Church history specifically, helps to counter this snobbery. 

* And lastly...

'A child is born in an obscure village. He is brought up in another obscure village. He works in a carpenter shop until he is thirty, and then for three brief years is an itinerant preacher, proclaiming a message and living a life. He never writes a book. He never holds an office. He never raises an army. He never has a family of his own. He never owns a home. He never goes to college. He never travels two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He gathers a little group of friends about him and teaches them his way of life. While still a young man, the tide of popular feeling turns against him. One denies him; another betrays him. He is turned over to his enemies. He goes through the mockery of a trial; he is nailed to a cross between two thieves, and when dead is laid in a borrowed grave by the kindness of a friend.
Those are the facts of his human life. He rises from the dead. Today we look back across nineteen hundred years and ask, What kind of trail has he left across the centuries? When we try to sum up his influence, all the armies that ever marched, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned are absolutely picayune in their influence on mankind compared with that of this one solitary life…'

Dr James Allan Francis, 1926

Categories

1)  A Book on Early Church History (up to about 500 A.D) or a book written by a key figure who lived during that time, or a biography about that person. Examples:

The New Testament Book of Acts
Eusebius
Athanasius
Augustine of Hippo
Selected chapters from a book on Church History: e.g. 'Christianity Through the Centuries' by Earle E. Cairns.
A well-written children's book is also acceptable e.g. Simonetta Carr's biographies.


2)  A Book About a Prominent Christian Who Was Born Between 500 A.D & 1900 

Francis of Assisi
Joan of Arc
John Wycliffe
Martin Luther
William Wilberforce
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A good children's adaption may be used.

3)  A Christian Allegory

Pilgrim's Progress or The Holy War by John Bunyan
One (or more!) of The Chronicles of Narnia or The Space Trilogy C.S. Lewis
Books by George MacDonald


4)  A Book on Apologetics 

e.g. Authors such as Ravi Zacharias, Francis Schaeffer, Josh McDowell, G.K. Chesterton


5)  A Philosophical Book by a Christian Author

This could be on Education, Virtue, Morals, Worldview or Ethics. Some ideas: books by Anthony Esolen, Charlotte Mason, Stratford Caldecott, David Hicks, Vigen Guroian.


6)   A Missionary Biography or A Biography of a Prominent Christian who lived any time between 1500 A.D to 1950 A.D


7)  A Seasonal Book 

Pick a time of the year such as Lent, Easter, Christmas, Advent, a Saint's Day, an Anniversary/event  in the Church Calendar, and read a book for yourself or choose a book to read to a child. Paraclete Press have some good selections. 


8)  A Novel with a Christian Theme

E.g. forgiveness, redemption, self-sacrifice, grace. It doesn't have to be written by a Christian but the theme needs to play a prominent part in the story e.g. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, The Scarlet & the Black by J.P. Gallagher, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

9) A Good Old Detective or Mystery Novel...Why??

This is what J.I. Packer said:

'...these are stories of a kind that would never have existed without the Christian gospel. Culturally, they are Christian fairy tales, with savior heroes and plots that end in what Tolkien called a eucatastrophe—whereby things come right after seeming to go irrevocably wrong. Villains are foiled, people in jeopardy are freed, justice is done, and the ending is happy. The protagonists—detectives, Secret Service agents, noble cowboys and sheriffs, or whatever—are classic Robin Hood figures, champions of the needy, bringers of merited judgment and merciful salvation. The gospel of Christ is the archetype of all such stories. Paganism unleavened by Christianity, on the other hand, was and always will be pessimistic at heart.'

Some worthy authors: Josephine Tey, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton, Rex Stout, John Buchan.


10)  A Substitute - choose a book by any of the authors below in place of one of the above categories:

Timothy Keller
A.W. Tozer
Patricia St. John
Jan Karon
Wendell Berry
C.S. Lewis
Edith Schaeffer
Elizabeth Goudge

OR

Choose a second book from a category you like


Guidelines

Write a blog post with a list of books you think you might get to read for each category and link it below. (Update: link here)
When you finish a book, write a review and link it here with the name of the book in brackets. Use hashtag #christiangreats if posting on social media.

The aim is to enjoy the books and stretch yourself by reading outside your normal parameters or by introducing yourself to a new author. It's not to make you feel pressured so you're welcome to join in even if you only read from one or two categories.
Feel free to copy the image for your blog.

Christian Classics: By Searching by Isobel Kuhn (1901-1957)

“To every man there openeth
A way, and ways, and a way,
And the high soul climbs the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low,
And in between, on the misty flats,
To rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth
A high way, and a low.
And every man decideth
The way his soul shall go.” 

John Oxenham

Isobel Kuhn and her husband, John spent twenty years working amongst the Lisu tribe, a minority people group, in South-West China. The Communist occupation of China forced them to leave China in 1950 and to enter Thailand to work with the Lisu people there.
Isobel wrote about her experiences with the Lisu people and the Communist take over in some of her other books: Ascent to the Tribes, Nests Above the Abyss, and In the Arena. By Searching is the story of her girlhood and the years before her marriage up until she sailed for China in 1928.

Isobel was brought up in an ‘earnest Presbyterian home,’ and had been carefully prepared by her parents to refute modernism before she was allowed to enter university. However, she had a crisis of faith after a highly regarded university professor told his students that the only reason they believed in God, Heaven and Hell, was because their parents brought them up that way.

‘Our twentieth century believed only when there was a test and a proof. We were scientific in our investigations; we did not swallow the superstitions of our ancestors just because 

they were handed to us.’

Although she understood the conflicting claims of modernity and fundamentalism, Isobel was unprepared to explain why she believed what she did. She came to the conclusion that she would accept no theories of life which she had not proved personally:

And, quite ignorant of where that attitude would lead me, I had unconsciously stepped off the High Way where man walks with his face lifted Godward and the pure, piney scents of the Heights call him upward, on to ‘the misty flats.’ The in-between level place of easy-going; nothing very good attempted, yet nothing bad either; where men walk in the mist telling each other that no one can see these things clearly. The misty flats where the in-between drift to and fro; life has no end but amusement and no purpose; where the herd drift with the strongest pull and there is no reason for opposing anything. Therefore they had a kind of peace and a mutual link which they call tolerance.

This is a great book for Christian young people as the author is honest and transparent about her life during her time on the ‘misty flats.'  By rejecting the foundation laid in her life as a child, she had no objective standard for truth and no basis for making the right choices. She describes her struggles with relationships, including a broken engagement with a young man who has no intention of remaining faithful once they were married. Her weaknesses, financial difficulties, and her search for a purpose to her life are winsomely described, as is her quest to find God by seeking Him with all her heart. Her abandonment of her childhood faith was especially painful for her father. To those parents who are going through this with their own child, Isobel's journey would be an encouragement that a parent's prayers are not only important, but effective.

One of the memorable incidents in the book occurred when the author was twenty years of age. She had just broken up with her fiancée, had trouble sleeping and her father was concerned for her. One night he knelt by her bed and prayed to God to help her but it just irritated her:

“Thanks, Dad,” I said wearily, “I know you mean well, but it doesn’t go beyond the ceiling, you know,” and I never forgot the groan with which he turned from my agnosticism and left the room.

One night, not long after this episode, she describes how ‘the Tempter came’ and convinced her that life had no purpose and she might as well slip out of it. She was on her way to the bathroom to ingest a poison when she heard her Dad moan in his sleep and she was startled into remembering how much he loved her and how devastated he’d be if she committed suicide:

In agony I turned and sat down on the edge of my bed and faced the darkest moment of my life. I didn’t want to live and I couldn’t die!

Interestingly, the professor who had ‘first pushed her off the High Way' had given his students an essay to study which included quotations of poetry from the classics. One of these was from Dante which was written in Latin. Isobel had studied Latin and translated it as ‘In His will is our peace.’

Now that sentence wrote itself across the dark of my bedroom. Dante believed in God. What if there were a God, after all? If so, I certainly had not been in His will. Maybe that was why I had no peace?

And so her search for God began.

I read this book as a fairly new Christian and I was very impressed with the author’s candid way of writing. Simply told but profound in many ways, it hasn’t lost its relevance in the sixty years since it was written. I’d recommend it for about age 14/15 years and up. I'm using it in Term 2 of Ambleside Online Year 8. Update: I decided to leave it until Year 10, which is this year (2020) and it's been a good fit for my 15 yr old daughter.
A true Christian classic.

Reading, Thinking, & Domesticity #4

Making Room for Contemplation

I’ve noticed more recently that I’ve become increasingly distracted and my attention span hasn’t been as good as it was. I put it down partly to getting a new iPhone (my old one didn't do much and was often unreliable). When you're using your phone for texting, emails, appointments, reminders, timers etc., it's too easy to be distracted and one thing leads to another if you're not careful.

We're also in the throes of bathroom renovations that have dragged on for over 7 weeks (update that to 9 weeks!) & that’s made life a little chaotic, too...burst waterpipes, cement dust, tradesmen not turning up when they said they would or arriving when you aren't expecting them, pluming supplier sending the wrong parts...blah, blah, blah. Besides that, my morning walks have come to a halt because of these renovations, which is a sure recipe for a scattered brain for me.

I haven't listened to any podcasts lately but then I came across this one on the Circe Institute website - an interview with author Alan Noble. I haven’t read the book they mention but the podcast discusses making room for contemplation in the context of living in a distracted world. It’s well worth listening to. I’ve been thinking about ways I can cultivate this space - technology can be a great tool and I know I won't be getting rid of my phone so I need to work around it. Distractions aren’t going to disappear even when our renovations are done - something else will jump in, I'm sure, but I'm considering how I can allow space for contemplation regardless.

My older girls read these books by Elizabeth George when they were in their teens. Moozle has read one and is most of the way through the second. She reads a chapter a few times a week as a sort of devotional, apart from her 'official' lessons, and has been enjoying them. The author covers relationships in general and content-wise, they are just right for girls aged about 12/13 years and up. The author also has a book for younger girls (ages 8 to 12 years). I've read a few of her books myself and thought they were very good.
Her husband, Jim George, has written a few books for boys on similar topics. I like the fact that they don't venture into the 'too much information' side of things and leave it up to the parents to decide when to introduce these topics.

The Green Years by A.J. Cronin - this is the second book I've read by this Scottish author and I do like his writing very much. The Keys of the Kingdom was the other book and while The Green Years was not quite as good, it was, nevertheless very enjoyable. The setting is Scotland, in the same area I came from, so that was a great attraction for me. Cronin often substitutes a fictional place name for the one he's writing about but I recognised some of the places from his evocative descriptions.

I've started to read the books above in preparation for a Women's Retreat in mid-September. I'm speaking on The Friendships of Women & I want to look at this from a couple of different angles.

Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer - a classic by the German theologian who was martyred by the Nazis. I read Eric Metaxas' biography of Bonhoeffer  two years ago so it will be good to hear from the man himself. It's only a short book (my copy is 96 pages) & was published in 1954. From what I've read so far, it's very good and fairly easy to read.

The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield. I first heard about this book via Brandy @ Afterthoughts and have since read a couple of articles about the author and was intrigued by the impact made upon her life when a couple drew her into their lives by an act of hospitality. I bought my copy at Koorong (an Aussie Christian bookshop). I usually buy new books via BookDepository but they only had the audio book in stock when I tried to order it. Koorong has a 20% off sale a few times a year so it's worth waiting for one if you want to get a few things.

The Gospel Comes With a House Key by Rosaria Butterfield - here the author looks at 'radical hospitality' using her own life as a backdrop and shows us how to enact this in our own homes.


The Barefoot Investor by Scott Page - financial planning, money management in general, investments...a hands-on approach that walks you through the process. Page is an Aussie author and some of what he covers would have to be adapted if you're not living in Australia, but it is a worthwhile book and would be helpful for anyone. My husband read it earlier this year as did our married son and it was passed on to another son who shares a house with three other young fellows and they're all reading it, and actually putting it into practice. There's some Aussie slang and corny humour in places, and of course, the situation here is different in regards to superannuation, loans, health funds etc, but his general financial strategies may be used anywhere.
This would be a great book for an older high school student or any young adult, or those struggling with debt to help them manage their finances and plan for the future.
The book below has been updated for the 2017-2018 financial year.

Christian Classics: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (1942)

The Screwtape Letters is a satirical work of fiction that gives the reader a window into the spiritual world using the vantage point of a demon named Screwtape. In a series of letters to his young nephew, Wormwood, Screwtape instructs him in how to bring about the downfall of the young man he has been assigned to plague.
There are so many memorable passages and wise insights in this book. Often when we look at something from an opposing stance we are forced to see things we would not have seen from a position of agreement. This is the device C. S. Lewis uses in The Screwtape Letters and he does it exceptionally well.
He warns us that there are two equal and opposite errors we believe about devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence and the other is to believe and have an unhealthy and excessive interest in them. He reminds us that the devil is a liar and that Screwtape is not always seeing things truly, himself.
Lewis said of this book that he’d never written anything more easily or with less enjoyment; that it was easy to twist his mind into a diabolical attitude but it was spiritually stifling. The world he had to enter ‘was all dust, grit, thirst and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness and geniality had to be excluded.’

Some highlights of this book:

Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all of the Enemy’s party, prepared. How much better for us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and, even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition!

Wormwood's 'patient' is a young unmarried man and the setting is at the start of WW2. Screwtape encourages him to turn the man's gaze on himself. He also advises him on ways to inculcate pride, selfishness, lust and fear in his patient and to exploit him during his dry spells:

Now it may surprise you to learn that in His effort to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else...
He cannot ravish. He can only woo...
He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs - to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than through the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best...He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks around upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

Whatever their bodies do affect their souls. Whenever there is prayer, there is the danger of His own immediate action.

In the last generation we promoted the construction of...'a historical Jesus' on liberal and humanitarian lines; now we are putting forward a new 'historical Jesus' on Marxian, catastrophic, and revolutionary lines.

Martin Luther said that 'the best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.' Lewis uses his sharp wit and inspired imagination to open our eyes to the true nature of the spiritual world & to help us understand that there are spiritual beings whose purpose is to undermine our faith and prevent the formation of virtues.

I've used this book with students around the age of about 14 or 15 years and up.




Linking this to the Official 2018 TBR Challenge

Reading, Thinking, Domesticity #3

When I started this Reading, Thinking, Domesticity series in January, I mentioned that one of the definitions of the word 'domesticate' means to tame. We're taming and reclaiming the lives of those in our home but more importantly, our own life.
Dr Harold C. Mason said that:

"Man was made to dwell in a garden but through sin he has been forced to dwell in a field which he has wrested from his enemies by sweat and tears, and which he preserves only at the price of constant watchfulness and endless toil. Let him but relax his efforts for a few years and the wilderness will claim his field again."

A.W. Tozer echoed this observation in his own words:

"The bias of nature is toward the wilderness, never toward the fruitful field," and he defined temptation as "the effort of the wilderness to encroach upon our newly-cleared field."
This 'law of the wilderness' operates universally and any part of our lives that are neglected will become overrun and any previous gains lost.

I was thinking of  the words above in the context of 3 John vs 2:
 
“Friends, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.” 

To prosper means to make good way and is linked to walking, so going back to the wilderness analogy, prospering requires a steady, consistent effort toward something. To stop walking is to wither.
Have you heard of the spinning plates analogy? It's difficult to keep all our plates spinning and they sometimes/often end up falling as we fail to keep them spinning on their sticks. Sometimes we just have too many plates. This verse in 3 John highlights the internal life, the soul/spirit, as the most important plate to keep spinning but obviously we have a responsibility to look after our physical health also.
This is possibly the last item on the agenda in many a busy home educator’s life but the older you get, the more you realise how important it actually is, and the harder it is to establish good habits!

 

These are some ways I'm addressing these areas; keeping the plates spinning and looking after Spirit, Soul & Body:

‘For the Love of God’ by D.A. Carson is a daily companion that has a systematic 365 day reading plan that takes you through the New Testament and Psalms twice, and the Old Testament once. It’s based on the M’Cheyne Bible reading schedule & includes a daily commentary that focuses on one of the chapters you’ve read that day.

I’ve been enjoying this free Bible app (Bible.is). I don’t use it for every reading but it helps me fit in a lot more Bible as I can listen while I walk or when I’m in the car. It’s been helpful when I’m tired and I lose track of what I’d just read!! or when my mind wanders.
I've always found C.S. Lewis to be very accessible and read many of his books when I was a new  Christian. I somehow missed The Screwtape Letters although my older children have read it. It is fun while being instructive.

'The Rosemary Tree’ by Elizabeth Goudge is such a wonderful story - quality nutrition for the soul. Just lovely! I've nearly finished it and have so many passages underlined ready to be put into my commonplace book.
‘Strength Training for Woman’ by Joan Pagano is an excellent, well-illustrated book and contains exercises that may be done at home or the gym. I discovered that my bone density was low which surprised me as I eat a lot of dairy products so I've been making an effort in the past year to be more consistent with weight bearing exercises. I joined the gym with my husband about two years ago but I was only averaging one session a week. I've upped that to two to three sessions a week and incorporated some of the exercises in this book. My gym-going 21 year old plumber son who is built like a tank told me I now have biceps - not very noticeable, but they're there.

When Screwtape was instructing his nephew in how to destroy a young man’s faith he said:

‘...you must always remember that they are animals and whatever their bodies do affects their souls.’

Reading, Thinking, & Domesticity #2

We started lessons again this week but we're not back into full swing yet. It will be short weeks for the next little while as we have a camping trip planned. The night sky isn't easily observed where we live so to view the sky we have to get up out of the valley and away from all the trees that overhang us. I want to use the opportunity of being away from suburbia to do some star gazing and hopefully identify some constellations.

Family from interstate visited last weekend and Moozle joined her two cousins and two aunties for a visit into the city. All three girls came back with their hair braided after a visit to a braiding shop.

While the girls were doing this, Nougat drove down to Canberra with his Uncle and his cousin to the Summernats Exhibition - a testosterone-fuelled event of noise, burnouts, and cars in general.

Our weather has been extremely hot so a family trip to the beach late in the afternoon for a dinner of fish & chips went down well last weekend and the girls and I had a couple of visits to Bridal shops this week so that Zana could try on some dresses.

Technology

It's laughable that I could share anything technologically related that would help any of my readers, but you never know...I've had some issues with Blogger over the years that I've had to sort out with a little help on the side from the techy people in the family, who say they know nothing about blogging but usually manage to point me in the right direction.

* At one stage Feedburner stopped sending out emails to some subscribers to this blog. Apparently, whenever I copied & pasted what I'd written from a Word document directly to my blog post, rather than typed directly onto Blogger, it included lots of random HTML code. You can check this out by clicking on the HTML link at the top left hand side of your dashboard. For some reason this can interfere with Feedburner. The problem is, you don't know you have a problem unless someone tells you they're not receiving your blog's emails. The solution was to copy & paste my Word document contents onto an online notepad and then copy it from there onto your blog post. A couple of online notepads I've used are: rapidtables and anotepad.

*  Wordpress users sometimes have difficulties posting comments on Blogger. To fix this, I went into Settings & clicked on Posts, comments & sharing. In comment location you have four choices: embedded, full page, pop up window & hide. I've always used 'embedded' but this supposedly was causing problems, so I changed that recently to pop up window & it seems to be working ok. What I don't like with this new setting is that you can't always reply directly to a comment. Your comment just goes under the last one that was logged so it can be confusing if you don't address each person by name when you reply to them.

*  On occasion, I've used Google Forums if I had a problem. Often you'll find it's not only your own blog but others are having similar issues, like I discovered last year when my followers gadget disappeared.

Reading

These are my unfinished books from last year that I will be reading in 2018. I'm taking ages to read N & N as I really have to be in the right frame of mind to read it. It's good but very dense. Or maybe it's me that's dense:

Norms & Nobility by David Hicks

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason

Parents & Children by Charlotte Mason

Life Under Compulsion by Anthony Esolen - Esolen throws in all sorts of quotes and references to authors and literature, which is something I enjoy & appreciate, and I like to know what books an author has read or been influenced by.
Esolen's Introduction alone refers to Genesis, Little House on the Prairie, The Screwtape Letters, The Bethrothed, Dante, and Thomas Aquinas!

I read the three books below last year but never got around to writing about them until now:

The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt was written in 2007 and is a Newbery Honor book. It is set in 1967 and centres around the mishaps and adventures of Holling Hoodhood, a 7th Grade student, who is forced to read Shakespeare by Mrs. Baker, whose husband has just been deployed to Vietnam.
At first this book annoyed me. It's written in the first person from the protagonist's point of view and it struck me as frivolous at first. It's quite funny in places and when Benj read it at around 15 or 16 years of age he thought it was good. It grew on me as it went on and the conversations between Mrs. Baker and her student about life and Shakespeare's characters showed sensitivity and thoughtfulness. Readers from about age 14 years and up would enjoy this - boys, especially, and particularly boys who don't like Shakespeare! With it's backdrop of the Vietnam War, Holling's family tensions, and even some of the reflections about Shakespeare, some maturity on the part of the reader would be helpful in order to get the most out of this story.

"You know," I said, "it's not easy to read Shakespeare - especially when he can't come up with names you can tell apart."

..."Shakespeare did not write for your ease of reading," she said.

No kidding, I thought.

"He wrote to express something about what it means to be a human being in words more beautiful than had ever yet been written."

"So in Macbeth, when he wasn't trying to find names that sound alike, what did he want to express in words more beautiful than had ever yet been written?"

Mre. Baker looked at me for a long moment. Then she went and sat back down at her desk. "That we are made for more than power," she said softly. "That we are made for more than outr desires. That pride combined with stubbornness can be a disaster. And that compared with love, malice is a small and petty thing."
  
Dombey & Son by Charles Dickens - Paul Dombey is a cold and ambitious man whose wife had died leaving him with two children, his daughter Florence, whom he callously ignores and neglects, and her younger brother, whom he positively dotes on. Pride is the overarching theme of this book and as the Book of Proverbs says, 'Pride goes before destruction,' so it goes with an array of characters in this story; but there is also an eleventh hour where love snatches a life from the jaws of Pride, the destroyer. As is usual with Dickens' novels, it is peppered with deplorable characters, the worst of whom is Mr. Carker, who is an even darker and more dangerous version of David Copperfield's Uriah Heap. A great story!

The Root of the Righteous by A.W. Tozer- I loved this book and I've scheduled it for Moozle in Term 3 of AmblesideOnline Year 7 in place of the suggested devotional book as I thought it would be a better fit for her. The Root of the Righteous is a simple & wise book that I let distill into my soul for the better part of last year:

Speed and noise are evidences of weakness, not strength. Eternity is silent; time is noisy. Our preoccupation with time is sad evidence of our basic want of faith. The desire to be dramatically active is proof of our religious infantilism; it is a type of exhibitionsm common to the kindergarten.

The bias of nature is toward the wilderness, never toward the fruitful field.

Of all persons Christians should have the largest hearts; to them the narrowing of the heart should be an unthinkable calamity...
And one singular characteristic of the enlarging life is that it is quietly unaware of itself. The largest heart is likely to be heard praying, 'Narrow is the mansion of my soul. Enlarge Thou it.'

January Reading:

The Gulag Archipelago by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn - this will take me a few months I expect. Non-ficiton, very readable, but awful in places. Goodness! How can we not learn from history?

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

Crafting

This is what Moozle has been working on:




Update: this is what Moozle made after watching the video above. Very cute:

A neat little boxed stationery set

Take the lid off and there's a storage area for cards, notepads, pen, etc

Who Has Seen the Wind?

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Ambleside Online Year 7: plans & modifications

Whenever I start planning a new year of home education I'm reminded again of the fact that each of my children are unique and what might have been good for one may not be the right choice for another at the same age. So just when I thought I should have all this figured out the seventh time around, I've been mulling over a few niggling thoughts I've had about Moozle's Year 7 content, trying to discern what is best for this girl of mine:

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight,  so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ,  filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.

Philippians 1:9-11

We're going into Week 4 tomorrow and I wanted to wait for a few weeks before I posted what we'll be doing to see how my ideas work out in practice. I've made a few adjustments for different reasons, which I'll explain as I go, while still keeping to the basic structure of Ambleside Online Year 7 (because Years 7 & 8 are two of my favourite AO years!)
The main changes are:

Devotional Reading

I've used the first two books on the AO schedule for this year with Moozle's older siblings but the more I thought and prayed about what I should be doing, the more I've felt sure that what she needs at the moment lies in the way of story. It's not so much that the books are challenging - she's an advanced reader - but it's the spiritual aspects and the 'didactic' approach that I don't think she's ready for. Biographies, on the other hand, I know she will relate to. These are the books we'll be using instead - the first two (set in India & China respectively) serve the double purpose of devotional reading and books set in Asia/Pacific, which I cover because of their proximity to Australia and our connections with people from that area. (I've linked to reviews I've written on some of them):

* Ten Fingers for God by Dorothy Wilson

** The Small Woman by Alan Burgess

*** The Root of the Righteous by A.W. Tozer - now this isn't a biography but I've included this in third term as an introduction to the devotional book scene because it's a book I love and Tozer uses the analogy of the tree and its fruit so the book has the feel of a parable.

History

We'll be doing the AO scheduled readings (scroll down the page) except for The Magna Carta. Instead I'll schedule this book over a few weeks because I have it & it's good. (181 pages)

Science & Natural History

We won't be doing First Studies of Plant Life or Adventures with a Microscope and will be substituting a couple of Australian titles:

A Bush Calendar by Amy Mack
First Studies in Plant Life by William Gillies. This is different to the one mentioned above (both the Aussie titles are free online)

We're also doing Apologia's Anatomy & Physiology and using some of these free resources I put together a couple of years ago for her brother. I usually do this in Year 6 but I didn't want Moozle to miss out on the excellent Science selections scheduled in that year. I'll be cutting out some of the activities in the Apologia book, I think.

Fine Arts

We'll be using the books pictured below for Music & Architecture in addition to our regular composer & picture study.

The Gift of Music by Jane Stuart Smith & Betty Carlson - I'm reading this aloud & this term we'll just be covering a few Baroque composers.

Cathedral by David Macaulay

String, Straight Edge, & Shadow by Julia E. Diggins - scroll down to see an overview of the book on the link. This is really the story of geometry but it dovetails nicely with the study of architecture and helps the reader to appreciate the significance of the Golden Mean in art and architecture...

Architecture by Gladys Wynne - I'd heard about this book but it's out of print and I really didn't know how useful it would be until one of the lovely ladies on the AO Forum posted a link to Archives and I had a chance to view it before I bought it from Amazon in the UK.

Shakespeare

Julius Caesar 
Richard the Third

Plutarch


We're still reading the Life of Julius Caesar and have three more weeks left until we finish. We'll have a break before we start another life and just concentrate on Shakespeare for awhile.

French & Latin

We're continuing with French for Children B and there's quite a bit of grammar included so our English grammar study is taking a back seat for the time being.
We're still slowly going through Our Roman Roots by James R. Leek.

The Harp & Laurel Wreath by Laura M. Berquist is one of my favourite poetry anthologies and I take turns reading aloud this and the one in the picture above aloud.