Not a recent book, but definitely a good one if you can find it.
This will be somewhat of a short review, due to time—both things to do and time lapse from when I read this book.
It was at least six months ago that Lynda pulled Beyond Prison Walls by G. Frank Allee off our bookshelves. We were looking for books to read and get rid of (donate or sell), and this looked like a good candidate.
It is the story of Frank Novak. Published in 1960, it tells how Novak, an immigrant from Bohemia who fell in with the wrong crowd and found himself in prison. It was there that God got ahold of his heart. He was transformed and became a prison chaplain with a national reputation.
I sure hadn’t heard of him, but his story is amazing. The book is short, only 96 pages. Mr. Allee has done a good job telling Novak’s story. The writing is clear and precise. One leaves the book quite impressed with Novak and what he was able to accomplish with the power of God behind him.
I rate the book 5-stars. After reading it, we hate to give it up. We would like for our grandchildren to read it. We’ll see. Today I will put it in the donation pile, but maybe the grandkids will be here before it gets taken someplace.
Here it is, Monday morning, 7:42 a.m. at the new Central Daylight Time, and I’m just getting around to writing my blog post. I didn’t get up until 7:02 a.m. today. I guess I was tired.
I taught adult Sunday school yesterday. That usually takes a lot out of me, both the preparation work and the teaching. I was exhausted as I made my way from the classroom to the sanctuary, and then as I sat through the church service.
When we got home, I ate our Subway lunch then put a roast on for supper. And off to the sunroom I went for my normal reading and nap time. I don’t always nap during these sessions, but I did yesterday. I like to take a walk then, but I was much too tired to do so. I went to my reading chair in the living room, where Lynda had a UFO program on. Just the thing to have in the background when you’re too tired to do much. I decided to forego my afternoon walk.
The next couple of hours are a blur. I caught up on e-mails. At 3:45 p.m. I added the veggies to the roast. I sent an e-mail to our Life Group with the prayer requests from the morning and the scripture we studied. I really can’t remember what else took up those couple of hours. But I did learn that I had left the charging cord to my computer in the Sunday school classroom. Alas, I won’t be going anywhere near the church this week. Well, I have a second cord I keep in The Dungeon, and fetched it. I can carry it up and down the stairs this week.
When the roast was done a little after 6:00 p.m., we ate, putting on a Miss Marple TV show, one of the ones from the 1980s in which Joan Hickson plays Miss Marple. When that was over, I pulled up on my computer the Bible study I’m writing, the one that my co-teacher and I are also teaching. I started writing on that around 8:30 p.m. or so, and when I stopped at 9:50 p.m., I discovered I had added 1,800 words, and was a little ahead of schedule on where I hope to be at that point in the week.
After that writing session was reading, putting pills together for this week, cleaning a bit in the kitchen, and to bed around 11:00 p.m., my usual time. I slept okay. Up several times in the night, but was able to get back to sleep each time. I woke this morning around 6:10 a.m., and rather than get up I decided to stay in bed until my normal 6:30 a.m. rising time. The next thing I knew it was 7:02 a.m. I never sleep that late.
But, of course, we changed this weekend to Daylight Saving Time. I lost an hour of sleep. It’s no wonder I was tired. It’s going to take a couple of days to fully adjust. And Saturday, I spent a fair amount of time pulling together our partnership income tax form. We trade stocks as a partnership, and that tax return is due March 15. That actually came together pretty well. I was able to complete and print the forms on Saturday. Today I will proof them and, assuming they are correct, make my copy and take them to mail today, two days early.
I also did some writing on Saturday, in the evening, on the Bible study as I prepared the lesson for yesterday. In that session I produced around 1,200 words. I think they were good words, but I’ll know more when I re-read them today at the beginning of my writing session.
So maybe I earned that tiredness. My blood sugar readings were good, as were my blood pressure. My weight is up a little as I’ve lost motivation to eat properly. I hope to get that motivation back today.
I think also the weight of everything I have to do this week was pressing on me. Tomorrow I make a presentation to the Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers Society (one of my clubs) on Historical Letter Collections, and I’m not ready yet. With banks failing this weekend, I know stock trading today will be intense. Wednesday are our annual eye exams. Thursday is Scribblers & Scribes writing critique group, and I have to decide what to prepare.
Oh, and this morning, I discovered that I also forgot my wireless mouse at church. It’s very hard to do my stock trading without that, and of course it’s important to overall computer use, so I guess I’ll make the 13 mile drive to church this afternoon and retrieve the forgotten items.
What happens when a headhunter is introduced to God?
Amazing man, amazing story, amazing book.
This was the subject of the book Tariri, My Story: From Jungle Killer to Christian Missionary, which Lynda and I read aloud a couple of months ago. The events of the book took place in the 1950s, when missionaries reached a section of the upper Amazon River at the border of Peru and Ecuador.
From the book’s dust jacket: The great chief Tariri was a legendary figure among the tribes along the eastern slopes of the Andes in southern Peru. The tales of his brutal killings were told with wonder even among his own people, the Shapras of the Candoshi group. A vital, colorful leader, he ruled his tribe through brute force and feared no one because of his fierce conviction that he was impregnable, inviolate.
Until two single women, workers with the Wycliffe Bible Translators group, arrived. Doris Cox and Lorrie Anderson, armed only with Bibles, pioneered the work among the Shapras and encountered the feared Tariri. He realized they were no threat to his rule, and so they were not accosted in any way, by him or others of his tribe. They went to work, joined by Rachel Saint at times. Slowly they helped Tariri understand that a way to live was possible without killing. That you could be at peace with rival tribes.
The Peruvian government had agents and officials within 50 miles of Tariri’s tribe, but had not had any influence on them. The killing continued. They—the Shapras—understood they should not harm the government men who lived and mostly remained at the edges of their territory, but beyond that Tariri was the law and the government in his territory.
Slowly, the two white women began to influence the jungle chief. Over time, he turned away from killing and embraced a life dedicated to Jesus Christ. The change wasn’t easy for him, but it happened. Killing as a way of life, a way of settling disputes, ended.
The book, published in 1965, was fascinating. It was a little hard to read because of all the names and terms in Tariri’s language. His words were recorded on tape, and translated to English. The book is mostly his words, his story, with a little context provided by the missionaries who worked in the area.
I have no idea where we got this book. It likely sat on our shelves for years, waiting for us to notice it. I’m glad Lynda finally did. My intention was to not keep this, mainly because we have so many other books we’d like to get through. But I think we will keep it. I’d love for the grandchildren to read it some day. It is definitely 5-stars. Still available at Amazon, perhaps other places.
I completed this book yesterday, from a Word doc from Project Gutenberg, uploaded to my Kindle library. My second reading of it.
I’m usually reading several things at once. I have a reading pile in the sunroom, where I go around noon most days to get a break from my tasks. That reading usually consists of printed books, and sometimes a magazine. I have a reading pile in the living room as well, and a basket of magazines I’m way behind on. This is usually evening reading, after all else is done for the day.
Then there’s my phone, through which I read using a Kindle app, a Nook app, and Google books. My phone I might use anywhere, and the things I read on it usually are easier reads. That may not be the best description. But I think they take a little less concentration and can be read in places such as waiting rooms, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. Any place I have a few minutes and want to engage my mind with more than people watching.
So yesterday, I read a little more than normal, and to my surprise, I finished reading four different items on the same day. How odd is that?
I always enjoy reading Poets & Writers magazine, and, on those rare occasions when I buy an issue, I read it slowly, enjoying each article. I even look at the ads.
In the sunroom, I finished reading an issue of Poets & Writers magazine. I buy one of these at Barnes & Noble from time to time. While this mag is very much oriented towards the Master of Fine Arts crowd and is far from my writing world, I enjoy it more than other writing mags. Anyway, I had only two pages left in this particular issue, and finished those pages yesterday. At a future writers meeting I will pass this along to someone.
Still in the sunroom, I next looked at an essay I’ve been slogging through on Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Years ago I downloaded this from the Bulletin for Biblical Research and printed it (at a time when the company I worked for had a generous policy of making personal copies). I may have read most of it before but, having come across it in a notebook while working on my near-continuous dis-accumulation efforts, I decided it was time to read it, absorb what it said, and get rid of it. The essay is about 60 pages long, heavily footnoted.
While I enjoyed reading it, the article was a bit of a chore to get through. When I started yesterday, I had about ten pages left to read. Maybe I had come to an easier part of the magazine, or maybe my mind was better engaged, but I got through those last pages. I’m not quite ready to discard the sheets, but within a couple of months I’ll extract the info I need from it to go into a future Bible study I plan to write.
Then, in the evening, I finished the last nine pages (of 633 total) in a biography of David Livingstone. This tome took me three months to get through, though admittedly I laid it aside several times to read other things. Other than the small print, and smaller print on the extensive quotes from Livingstone’s letters and journal, it wasn’t a hard read. Ten pages at a time was fairly easy to get through. And if I hadn’t been reading other things simultaneously, I think I would have been able to finish this in a month. It’s done now, and will likely take two blog posts to review.
Lastly, I finished re-reading Volume 1 of the correspondence between Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Years ago, long before Google Books and Kindle, I found this at Project Gutenberg, downloaded both volumes, and formatted them in Word for a blend between tight printing and easy reading. Using those printing privileges, I printed them and put them in notebooks. Meanwhile, I have recently learned how easy it is to upload a Word document to Kindle for your personal library. I did that with Vol. 1.
As I’ve said many times before, I love reading letters. Wanting something “light” for those odd moment reads, I sent this to Kindle and began reading it perhaps a month ago. I found it delightful, as I did perhaps 20 years ago. Yesterday, I came to the end of Volume 1.
This is sort of waste-of-time reading, since I have so many things to get through. But it was quite enjoyable. I was able to read it fairly quickly, including in the hospital last week with Lynda. At some point yesterday, I read a letter by Emerson to Carlyle, and was surprised to find it the last in the volume. So I promptly found Vol 2 on my computer and uploaded it to my Kindle library. Not sure when I will start this.
So, that’s the story of the strange circumstances that had me finishing four very different reads on the same day. It’s unlikely to ever happen again.
Time to pick up some new reads. One I’m already 40 pages into. What else will I pick up next?
Today began with the temperature 10 or 15 degrees below yesterday’s low. The caused a thick fog to be about, so thick that I didn’t feel like driving to church on the high-speed interstate that is the quickest route. So I went through town on the slower roads. The closer I got to the church, the thicker the fog. Yet, going slowly and having a well-marked road, as well as enough traffic to see the road ahead of me clearly.
I’m hoping that, by the end of the year, this will not be the only Bible study in my bibliography.
Thus, the drive to church was easy. I had to be there a bit early due to a schedule change in the new year and a desire that all the adult Sunday school teachers be in the lobby at certain times today. I had to take my computer upstairs first, set it up, and log into the Zoom account we are using for those who can’t come to class. Except I couldn’t log in and had to hunt someone down to get the 6-digit code to log in. Eventually I logged in, we held the class, and the new lesson series for the new year started well.
Church was good, except for the announcement that our minister of music is leaving for another church. So at present we are without a pastor, soon to be without a music minister, and have a temporary, parttime youth minister. But we will carry on. Spirts are good, workers available, and the cause will continue.
Upon exiting church, I saw that the fog had lifted. Bright sunshine and still cool temperatures were invigorating.
This afternoon, after a small lunch, I went to the sunroom to read. I got some read in a writers magazine and in an essay related to some Bible study lessons I’m writing, got them done, and fell asleep. I was in a bit of a sleep deficit due to my wife’s heart episode last night (no details required) and getting up early to study my lesson. After that. Lynda and I went for a two-mile walk, then it was reading and supper.
We watched some TV, including Midsummer Murders and All Creatures Great and Small. To multi-task while watching, I worked on the Bible study series I want to write at least part of this year. It’s a multi-volume series. In February we’ll start with Part 5 of the six-year Lenten/Easter series. One volume is about 95% done, and another somewhere around 40%. But, as I’ve worked on writing the book form of Parts 3 and 4, I’ve come to see that the way the series was broken up to teach didn’t make sense in book form. So I played around with it and felt a lot of fog—lack of a clear path on how to structure the split of the books.
I finally settled on dividing the series into eight separate books. What we taught the first year really needs to be two book volumes, and what we taught the third year needs to be two volumes. That, I think, would make it easier for people to use for a series of Bible studies.
However, it’s still a little foggy to me, this lesson series, and so I have to call that a tentative decision. I’ll have to perhaps work with it a little more. Maybe it could be seven volumes, not eight. I have some work to do on that.
But at least I made a little progress. The eight volumes will work (and, I should say, these are not meant to be big books: maybe 35,000 to 40,000 words each). Perhaps by morning the fog will have lifted and I’ll have better clarity on the issue. I hope so.
The Epiphany was less elaborately decorated than this church, but the decorations seemed sufficient and appropriate.
In a number of past posts in Decembers previous, I shared Christmas memories. I had thought of doing another one of those posts this year, but am not sure what to write about. I’ve covered such things as the way we did our wrapping paper, how we bought and decorated the Christmas tree, the idea of progressive decorating, and the candy house. What else is there to write about?
I’m writing this on Sunday evening. Today we had an excellent service, the guest speaker being Dr. Mark Lindstrom, our former pastor and now district superintendent. Then our adult Sunday school class had its annual Christmas party, something we hadn’t had for a couple of years due to the pandemic.
Church growing up in Cranston, Rhode Island, meant services at the Church of the Epiphany, an Episcopal church. Our church was more English Catholic than Protestant. We attended Christmas morning when we were young, but I remember the year we were first old enough to attend Midnight Mass. That would have been when my brother was around 7 or 8 I would guess. I remember it was a normal work night for Dad, so Mom’s parents came from Providence to get us and take us to church.
I remember the church was nicely decorated with garlands, wreathes, and votive candles on the ledge of each stained-glass window down each side of the sanctuary. The decorations were not as lavish as churches put up now, but they seemed appropriate to us. I guess I ought to say to me, as I can no longer ask other family members about it.
The processional was “O Come All Ye Faithful”. That was different than the processional for morning service, which was “Sing, Oh Sing This Blessed Morn”. But that song wouldn’t have been appropriate for a nighttime service.
About 3/4 of the way through the service, we sang a slow version of “Silent Night”. On the second verse, the house lights slowly started to lower. By the third verse they were out completely, and only light was from the candles on the altar and the votive candles. I remember how beautiful it seemed. A few years later, when I was an acolyte at Midnight Mass, I was the one to control the lights, and was quite nervous about doing it right.
When mass was over, many families exchanged presents. I don’t remember us doing that. What I do remember is that Dad was at the back of the church. The Providence Journal let him off early from his shift, and he came straight to the church.
Once we began attending Midnight Mass, Sunday morning became a little different, but that’s a memory for another day.
I am learning much from this Livingstone biography, not all just about him, but also about the times he lived and places he traveled to. Also, as shown by this blog post, some inspirational material.
Part of my normal schedule is to read the last hour or so of the day. I normally post reviews of those books—not every one, but a lot of them. Right now, my reading is a tome: David Livingstone: His Life and Letters. I’m on page 334 of 631, so just past halfway. That’s after 30 sittings to read. Another month to go on it, I guess.
It is a good book, going into much more depth than the simple biography of him I read not all that long ago. I’m learning lots about him, things I didn’t know at all. But this isn’t a book review. Look for that in a little over a month. This post concerns a statement in this book. It quotes Livingstone as writing, “It is a pity that some people cannot see that true and honest discharge of the common duties of everyday life is Divine Service.”
The book doesn’t always do a good job of identifying the source of the Livingstone quotes, so I don’t know if this came from one of his letters or an official report he might have made concerning one of his missionary duties or exploration journeys. But this got me to thinking. Was Livingstone right? Is faithfulness to everyday responsibilities really a type of divine service?
We are coming up on winter. It won’t belong before we’ll have a snowstorm that sticks on the driveway. I’m very careful as I shovel or scrape, making sure I don’t slip and fall, don’t take more weight in the shovel than I ought to. Is clearing the driveway, something I actually enjoy doing, really an act of divine service?
What about the simple act of taking the garbage out to the compost pile, or taking out the trash on trash day? What about dusting or vacuuming? Fixing meals, washing dishes, cleaning off the counter? Or we could ask about any other type of household or employment drudgery.
We usually think of acts of divine service as something in ministry. Participating in a church work day. Giving to and helping to staff the church pantry. Giving to a compassionate ministry. Teaching a Sunday school class. And many other things.
But to be a responsible adult, to do those works of drudgery or displeasure simply because they need to be done and someone else is counting on you to do them. I can see them as being acts of divine service.
There’s probably a biblical basis for this, though I can’t think of any right now. Paul said something about this in one of his letters to the church in Thessalonica, about living a quiet, law-abiding life. I’m happy to do that, and happy to think that, in doing so, I’m actually serving God and his creation.
‘Twas in this book that I found the essay “Christianity and Culture”. I will need to read it another time or two to fully understand it. Meanwhile, I have completed the second of three books in this volume.
The book Timeless Writings of C.S. Lewis is actually three books in one volume. The first is The Pilgrim’s Regress, the first book he wrote after his conversion to Christianity, which I read earlier this year and reviewed.
The second is Christian Reflections. This is a compilation of Lewis’s papers, talks, and essays published in 1967, four years after his death. They were collected, edited, and published by Walter Hooper, who was Lewis’s secretary near the end of his life and became his literary executor after his death. He took on the job of organizing the mass of Lewis’s writings into collections.
This book has items composed from 1939 to 1962. The fourteen items are arranged more or less chronologically. The first is “Christianity and Literature”, a paper Lewis read to an Oxford society in the 1930s, and which was included in his first collection of essays, Rehabilitations, published in 1939. I read this in one sitting back in 2019, and found it to be a great help. I found several things to inspire my writing.
The next was “Christianity and Culture”. Published in a magazine in 1940, this essay generated a debate with several critics—a debate that played out in the pages of the magazine. This book includes Lewis’s three contributions to the discussion, the original essay and two responses to his critics. I’ve been looking for the other site of the discussion. I found one item. When I find the other, I’ll come back to this for a fuller reading. I reviewed this essay previously on the blog. I read this in both August 2019 and September 2021, though I’m not sure I finished it the first time.
After this, the essays are a mixed bag. I’m not going to give all the titles here. I read them slowly, in many sittings, in 2021 and 2022. Many of them I found hard to digest. Several I don’t remember at all. I read them, at least according to the notation in the book I did, but I couldn’t tell you what they are about. Were they too difficult for me, or did I read distractedly, without the wherewithal to comprehend what Lewis was saying? The only way to know is to read them again.
And that I shall do, though I know not when. The third book in this volume is God in the Dock, another of Hooper’s posthumous collections of Lewis essays. I’ve read a couple in this, but have yet to tackle this formidable looking document. I’m going to read something lighter before I do.
What about Christian Reflections? Is it worth reading? Is it a keeper? Yes, it is worth reading, but probably only for the dedicated Lewis reader. It is available as a separate volume, if you want to pick up a copy. As to it being a keeper, yes, for sure. Not only because I have more to read in this 3-in-one book, not only because I don’t want to break up my C.S. Lewis collection just yet (if ever), but also because I need to re-read some of these, sometime years hence. Perhaps I’ll still be posting at this blog, and will have something more to say about it.
Not the most recent photo of the Snodgrass family, but a good one.
Yesterday was a sad day, as it was our pastor’s last Sunday at our church. Rev. (Dr.) Mark Snodgrass has been our pastor for close to 12 years. His children, Paul and Luke, were 4 and 1 when he and Lauren came to Bentonville in January 2011. Now they are teenagers, and this is the only home they know.
Pastoral changes are never easy. I was trying to figure out how many I’ve been through since I’ve been in the Church of the Nazarene. I think it’s around eight, though one of those happened while we were overseas. Mark is the pastor I’ve had longest, which perhaps makes it most difficult.
I haven’t been in any positions of church leadership during Mark’s tenure, as I pulled out of church leadership long ago, believing it wasn’t the ministry I was meant to be in. But as a Life Group leader, I interacted with our lead pastor quite a bit. He came to us right at the time I was starting to self-publish. I gave Mark several of my books. When I published books on Christian topics, I asked for guidance from him about whether my writing was doctrinally sound.
From time to time, I would have lunch with Mark. Once I retired in January 2019, my trips from home to Bentonville greatly reduced but, not having a job to do, I suggested we get together for coffee when I made the 13 mile drive for some purpose and when he had time and I had time. This resulted in us meeting at the Bentonville Library around four times a year. Those were good times. We discussed church topics, politics, social types—just about anything.
In these conversations, it became quite apparent that our politics differed. So did our belief in what I call social styles. Mark is big on community. I’m big on individualism. He’s an extrovert (a social style also called “Expressive”). I’m an introvert (a social style also called analytical). I tend to crave being alone and thrive working by myself. I embraced self-checkout at Wal-Mart, not because I want to do that work but because that means one less person I need to talk with each time I went shopping. Mark loves to be among people and probably thrives when working in committee. But despite these differences, we became good friends. I will miss these occasional meetings.
We didn’t sell out of the book, but we sold a lot. I increased the print run from what Mark wanted. Turns out he was correct.
In November, 2020, Mark asked if I would write a history of our church’s Centennial. I agreed, and began work in January 2021. I made some amazing discoveries, which I shared with Mark along the way. He seemed pleased with the work I showed him, though some I didn’t tell, but let him see them as posts on the church’s website. The impact of those surprises were good. I don’t think Mark ever felt he made a mistake in his appointment of the “church historian”. That’s the closest I got to church leadership during his pastorate.
Mark has been called to a strong church in the Kansas City area. That’s only four hours away, and Kansas City was once Lynda’s and my home. Is getting together possible sometime in the future? Part of the process of a pastoral change is the letting go. The pastor has to let his/her current church go in order to fully minister to the new church, though of course a pastor never totally forgets those he/she ministers to. But the church also has to let the pastor go, not keep bugging him/her as they seek to acclimate to their new congregation.
The separation is hard, especially after twelve years. But I’ve prayed that God will confirm his call to his new church as he ministers there.
An excellent book about a man who suffered horrendously at the hands of the Soviet communists.
When you are a buyer of used books, you sometimes wonder where you got this or that book, how long you’ve had it, and why you bought it. So it is with the book Witness: An Autobiography by Josyp Terelya with Michael H. Brown. Terelya was a prisoner in the USSR in the 1960s-80s because of his Christian faith.
The reason I wonder why we bought the book is because Terelya is Ukrainian Catholic, which is attached to the Roman Catholic Church. As a Protestant, I’m not anti-Catholic, but I don’t usually read Catholic books. I suspect we bought this at a thrift store, based on the price marking.
However, it is an excellent book. Terelya was born to Communist parents in Ukraine during World War 2. In fact, they were leading communists and very much in favor of Ukraine being part of the Soviet Union. Terelya was influence by his grandparents and others, and became a devout Catholic, much to his parents’ dismay. The USSR suppressed religion, especially any religions that competed with the Russian Orthodox Church.
When Terelya became an adult, he did not hide his religious observances, and was soon put in prison for it. He escaped. He was captured and his sentence increased. Put in a more secure prison, he escaped again. He was beaten, spent much time in solitary confinement, Food rations were inadequate. He developed health problems. The guards also tried to break him psychologically, with frequent interrogations and beatings. As a consequence of his long imprisonment, he developed chronic health problems.
Through this, Terelya survived. He found ways to share his faith and prepare printed materials. Once when he was released for a couple of years, he married and fathered his first child. In later years, two more children were added to the family.
A portion of the book deals with “appearances” of Mary, the mother of Jesus, over a several week period in a small Ukranian village in 1987. Terelya was out of prison by then and took part in observing the visions. He went into considerable detail about these.
My wife and I read the book aloud in the evenings, taking about a month to complete it (with a few interruptions). I’m glad we did. It was unexpectedly timely due to the current war in Ukraine, and it told us a piece of history we had no idea of. Learning new things while being entertained is a good thing.
The book, published in 1991, is likely out of print. But it is worth the read if you can find it. I give it 4-stars, it losing one star due to what I consider an overabundance of placenames without providing a map to give at least a basic idea where places were. Alas, the book is not a keeper. We are going to give it away to a Catholic relative, and hope they, in turn, pass it on to someone who will enjoy it.
