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.'

 

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.

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.’

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

For many years scientists had been trying to grow human cells outside of the human body in order to have a continuous (immortal) line of cells that would constantly replenish and that could be used to study any number of things,  especially viruses. Mouse cells had been cultured successfully, but every attempt to culture human cells had failed.
That was, up until 1951. That year, Henrietta Lacks, a 30 year old black mother of five young children, was admitted to the coloured ward of John Hopkins Hospital to have a biopsy of her cervix. A sample of tissue from her cervix was sent to George Gey, the head of tissue culture research at Hopkins.
At that time, if doctors wanted to use tissue from patients for purely research purposes, patient consent was not required, although it is now.
Henrietta Lack's tumour cells were put into culture and they didn't merely survive, but grew like nothing else had before.
The tumour turned out to be a very aggressive form of cervical cancer, and before long, millions of the cells had reproduced themselves in the laboratory. Gey and his assistants had grown the first immortal human cells which they named 'HeLa,' for Henrietta and Lacks. These cells became one of the most important tools in medicine and have been used in the development of the polio vaccine, in gene mapping, cloning, cancer research, and researching the effects of zero gravity and radiation on the human body.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a real page turner of a book and quite fascinating generally.
Rebecca Skloot is a journalist, which partly explains the readability of her book, and also the style in which she writes the story. To me this was both positive and negative. Positive, in that the scientific concepts were explained well enough for a lay person to understand and in a narrative style; negative, where the author injected certain incidents, such as the abuse of Henrietta's children by family members after she died, and other intimate family details, throughout the book.
I wondered whether this was really necessary, but an important aspect of this book is the recognition that behind all the science and research, there are real people. The author certainly portrayed this well.

I'm not American, so I didn't come to this book with any personal background experience of USA race relationships or much knowledge of the history and implications of segregation, therefore my reactions to this book are as an outsider looking in.
I had the impression at times that the culture of Henrietta Lacks' cells and the subsequent profits derived from their use (that the family never benefited from) was blamed for everything that went wrong with the Lacks family afterwards, but there was some serious dysfunction in the family before Henrietta ever went to hospital.
It was tragic that five young children lost their mother, but she had fairly advanced cervical cancer by the time she presented to John Hopkins' Hospital, and the treatment of cervical cancer wasn't clear cut at the time. She had the standard treatment of the time: radium and X-ray therapy. (See my comments on Cancer Ward, set in the 1950's.)
The author reveals scientific research that went beyond the bounds of decency, although not in Henrietta's case: research using cancer cells perpetrated upon unsuspecting black patients (see the infamous Tuskegee Study) that were likened to the Nazi experiments of WWII. Prison inmates were used as human guinea pigs, and the conditions of the 'Negro' mental institution where Henrietta's eldest girl was sent before her mother died were disgusting. Were other mental institutions at the time any better? I don't know.

There were also privacy concerns raised by the family. Henrietta's medical records were released without their consent, and blood was taken from various family members for research purposes without full disclosure. In fact, the family had no idea what was happening.

Henrietta's family were uneducated and ignorant of science so when they found out that her cells were 'alive' it was very confusing for them and this misunderstanding caused them a lot of unnecessary anguish. They thought that parts of her were still alive and that she could feel pain when experiments were performed on her cells.
The family also wondered, if Henrietta had been so important to medicine and scientists were buying her cells, why couldn't the family afford health insurance?
This is one of those areas where science leapt ahead before the ethics had been worked out. And this still happens.
The author included a very informative afterword that addresses tissue research and patient rights at the time the book was first printed in 2009, and gives examples of other individuals who took action against medical practitioners who profited by the sale of their patients tissues.
Fascinating!
Cell research is vital. It needs to be done ethically and in an informed manner, but what a huge can of worms we've opened up!

Some other thoughts:

Henrietta Lacks was an uneducated woman from an impoverished background and like most black patients at the time, she only went to hospital when she thought had no other choice. As I mentioned above, there had been some very unethical research conducted at the Tuskegee Institute, and other incidents, that generated suspicion of the medical profession amongst black communities.

Many doctors back then used public patients for research, generally without their knowledge - these patients were being treated for free so it was considered fair enough to use them as research subjects.

In the 1950's "benevolent deception" was commonly practiced and so it was not uncommon for patients to have no idea of their diagnosis, especially if it was something as distressing as cancer. This was also the practice in the USSR in the book I mentioned above.

Henrietta was not told that her cells were replicating themselves in a laboratory and her family only found out inadvertently about twenty years later. By this time HeLa cells were a huge business and were sold and sent all over the world.

When the family realised that people were making money out of their mother's cells, they became angry, especially when they couldn't even afford medical insurance.

At the time this book went to press, blood samples and body bits taken during procedures such as removal of moles, ovaries, appendices, and tonsils - which are given voluntarily - are often kept indefinitely and later used to develop things like vaccines and drugs and no permission is required.

Rebecca Skloot first heard about HeLa cells when she was sixteen and doing a community college biology class. She spent a decade researching Henrietta's background including time spent getting to know Deborah Lacks, Henrietta's daughter, who helped provide much of the information for the book.

The documentary below, The Way of all Flesh was filmed in 1998 and is a very interesting account of the science behind the HeLa cells:





I read somewhere that a version for younger readers was published in 2012: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: The Young Reader's Edition by Gregory Mone, Rebecca Skloot, 256 Pages, Published in 2012, but it looks like it's out of print.

Fearfully & Wonderfully Made

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made is told from the perspective of the pioneering researcher, world-reknowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist, Dr. Paul Brand and is co-authored by Philip Yancey.
I wrote about how we used this book in a couple of different posts but this one will give you an idea of the unusual nature of this book.
The book is scheduled as a health option anywhere between Year 7 and 11 in the Ambleside Online curriculum. I've read it aloud to my 14 year old son while his 9 year old sister listened in and I did some editing on the run as it does have some mature themes. It's probably best as a read aloud for that reason, but also because it presents some wonderful opportunities for discussion.
It's a unique book in many respects as it explores the design and intricacies of the human body, its patterns and unity, and what happens when parts of the body malfunction, then and provides insights into the Body of Christ, the Church.

I have a spare copy of this book to give away to someone who will be at the Mum Heart Conference in Newcastle in June. For a chance to win this excellent book, check out my original Giveaways in the Merry Month of May post and leave a comment here and/or on my Facebook page.

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering. 

Saint Augustine

Fearfully & Wonderfully Made by Philip Yancey & Dr. Paul Brand

I've been reading a chapter of this book aloud each week, mainly to my 14 year old son but my 9 year old daughter always wants to listen in. It has required some editing but it's been easy enough to do it as I go.

The book is a unique and beautiful exploration of the human body - with an unusual twist. The author takes the intricate structure and function of cells, body chemistry, bones, muscles and the myriad other complexities of the human body, and presents them as analogies to the Church, the Body of Christ.

It is such a quotable book. Every chapter I've read has had something that has stood out to me or has prompted questions from my two listeners. My son normally doesn't like anything in the least way medical but he is enjoying this book. 

Today we read the chapter, Inside-Out, which presented us with the analogy of the crayfish. This creature has an exoskeleton. This hard, external skeleton protects the crayfish and is its defense against the outer world. We, on the other hand, have an internal or endoskeleton. Our outer bodies are vulnerable, warm and responsive.

And then the author in a twist links the exoskeleton to legalism, where Christians wear their skeletons on the outside. As he looked at the history of the Church, and its areas of failure, the author saw that the failures,

'can be traced to a misunderstanding of the place of the skeleton in the Body of Christ...

As the rules God gave to free His body begin to calcify, we tend to hunker down inside them for protection. We develop a defensive exoskeleton...

But Jesus never described anything resembling an exoskeleton which would define all Christians.'

I've been thinking lately on idealistic versus realistic expectations in regards to bringing up children. Idealism can produce unrealistic expectations. The crayfish analogy revealed an aspect of this to me. When idealism comes up against reality the temptation is to develop an exoskeleton - a hard shell that in reality is a covering  for weakness. We become legalistic and in response our children learn to wear their skeletons on the outside.
The author gives us a sobering thought relating to this:

A troubling phenomenon recurs among young Christians reared in solid homes and sound churches. After living their early years as outstanding examples of Christian faith, many become spiritual dropouts. Did they fail because they concentrated on the exterior, visible Christian life? Did they learn to mimic certain behaviours, nuances of words, and emotional responses? Crayfish-like, did they develop a hard exterior that resembled everyone else's and conclude such was the kingdom of God, while inside they were weak and vulnerable?

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made is scheduled for the upper years of Ambleside Online under Health. It has some adult content which is discussed here but as I mentioned above it isn't difficult to edit.