Follow My Leader, written by James B. Garfield
This was our fourth time through this school book about a boy who's blinded when a friend irresponsibly sets off a firecracker. It's a family favorite, a fictional story about how he learns to live as a blind person (reading Braille, using a cane, getting a guide dog) and to forgive the one whose choices changed his life forever.
*****
Home, written by Toni Morrison
I wasn't a fan of this book, but plugged through to the end for absolutely no good reason. I don't always mind disturbing things in a story, but the pros didn't outweigh the cons for me in this one about a veteran returning home from war, dealing with the fallout of time on the battlefield, and rescuing his sister.
p. 48, That's the other side, she thought, of having a smart, tough brother close at hand to take care of and protect you - you are slow to develop your own brain muscle.
*****
A Serial Killer's Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming, written by Kerri Rawson
The author and I have a mutual friend, someone Rawson knew before her dad's arrest, which is how I heard about this book. I appreciate Rawson's candor in sharing both the positives and negatives of life with her dad - the memories made as she grew up with a man she loved and the trauma of finding out that same man was a serial killer. Hers is a position that virtually no one can relate to, so it was interesting to read about her experience.
*****
What's So Amazing About Grace?, written by Philip Yancey
This word, grace, means more to me with each passing year. I'm so thankful for the grace God extends to me and pray that my heart will continually soften so that I can extend an increasing amount of grace to others. So many great quotes from this one!
p. 25, (G)race: a gift that costs everything for the giver and nothing for the recipient.
p. 62, Grace cannot be reduced to generally accepted accounting principles. In the bottom-line realm of ungrace, some workers deserve more than others; in the realm of grace the word deserve does not even apply.
p. 70, Grace makes it appearance in so many forms that I have trouble defining it. I am ready, though, to attempt something like a definition of grace in relation to God. Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more - no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less - no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.
p. 86, (speaking of forgiveness) We nurse sores, go to elaborate lengths to rationalize our behavior, perpetuate family feuds, punish ourselves, punish others - all to avoid this unnatural act.
p. 88, But the very word forgive contains the word "give" (just as the word pardon contains donum, or gift). Like grace, forgiveness has about it the maddening quality of being undeserved, unmerited, unfair.
p. 92, God shattered the inexorable law of sin and retribution by invading earth, absorbing the worst we had to offer, crucifixion, and then fashioning from that cruel deed the remedy for the human condition. Calvary broke up the logjam between justice and forgiveness. By accepting onto his innocent self all the severe demands of justice, Jesus broke forever the chain of ungrace.
p. 93, At last I understood: in the final analysis, forgiveness is an act of faith. By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am. By forgiving, I release my own right to get even and leave all issues of fairness for God to work out. I leave in God's hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.
p. 93, I never find forgiveness easy, and rarely do I find it completely satisfying. Nagging injustices remain, and the wounds still cause pain. I have to approach God again and again, yielding to him the residue of what I thought I had committed to him long ago. I do so because the Gospels make clear the connection: God forgives my debts as I forgive my debtors. The reverse is also true: Only be living in the stream of God's grace will I find the strength to respond with grace toward others.
p. 99, Not to forgive imprisons me in the past and locks out all potential for change. I thus yield control to another, my enemy, and doom myself to suffer the consequences of the wrong.
p. 187, Sin is a slave master that controls us whether we like it or not. Paradoxically, a headlong pursuit of freedom often turns into bondage: insist on the freedom to lose your temper whenever you feel anger, and you will soon find yourself a slave to rage. In modern life, those things that teenagers do to express their freedom - tobacco, alcohol, drugs, pornography - become their relentless masters.
p. 195, I have come to see legalism in its pursuit of false purity as an elaborate scheme of grace avoidance. You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of it.
p. 198, In other words, the proof of spiritual maturity is not how "pure" you are but awareness of your own impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.
p. 200, Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist. My own rules seem necessary; other people's rules seem excessively strict.
p. 204, We Christians have our own grouping of "acceptable" and "unacceptable" sins. As long as we avoid the most egregious sins, we feel pretty good about our spiritual status. The problem is, our understanding of egregious sins keeps changing.
p. 208, Legalism makes apostasy easy.
p. 209, Legalism stands like a stripper on the sidelines of faith, seducing us toward an easier way. It teases, promising some of the benefits of faith but unable to deliver what matters most.
< snip >
At first glance, legalism seems hard, but actually freedom in Christ is the harder way. It is relatively easy not to murder, hard to reach out in love; easy to avoid a neighbor's bed, hard to keep a marriage live; easy to pay taxes, hard to serve the poor.
p. 210, Compared to a holy and perfect God, the loftiest Everest of rules amounts to a molehill. You cannot earn God's acceptance by climbing; you must receive it as a gift.
p. 229, The time has come to return to a practical question: If grace is so amazing, why don't Christians show more of it?
p. 242, If my activism, however well-motivated, drives out love, then I have misunderstood Jesus' gospel. I am stuck with the law, not grace.
p. 103, God used Jacob with his slippery ethics, David with his moral lapses, Jeremiah with his morosity, Saul of Tarsus with his abusive past, Peter with his bodacious failures.
p. 163, We thrive best, and society works best, when sex goes along with commitment, when we take care of our bodies, when the strong care for the weak.
p. 228, How differently would the world view Christians if we focused on our own failings rather than on society's. As I read the New Testament I am struck by how little attention is gives to the faults of the surrounding culture.
*****
Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?, written by Philip Yancey
This was the second of Yancey's books about grace I read this month. It was harder for me to get into than the first, but it still had plenty to think about in its pages.
p. 32, I'm convinced that human beings instinctively seek two things. We long for meaning, a sense that our life somehow matters to the world around us. And we long for community, a sense of being loved.
p. 66 (quoting a woman named Susan), "If I forget that God goes ahead of me, and think instead that I am bringing God into the room, I can have an air of smugness."
p. 96, The church is, above all, a place to receive grace: it brings forgiven people together with the aim of equipping us to dispense grace to others.
p. 251, The late Kurt Vonnegut, a satirical American author, wrote: "For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the beatitudes. But - often with tears in their eyes - they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't hear one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, be posted anywhere."
p. 263, Herein is grace: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Christians are simply pilgrims who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.
*****
When I Found You, written by Catherine Ryan Hyde
I'd heard about this book from several people and assumed it was a love story. It's not, at least not in the traditional sense. It is, however, a neat story of one man's lifelong commitment to the newborn baby he found nestled at the base of a tree when he went duck hunting one morning. Loved this book, both the writing and the storyline, and look forward to reading more books from the same author.
p. 117, What a man eats, he should be willing to kill. It's not absolutely necessary that he do so, but he should at least be willing to face the reality of it. To eat a chicken only if it comes from the market is the height of cowardice and denial. Someone had to kill it.
p. 219, (in response to answering that nothing was wrong when it was clear to the person who asked that there was a problem) No happy marriage was, in his estimation, ever based on thoughtless, automatic untruths and exclusions. And the best way to make someone unhappy, if not downright unbalanced, is to tell her that what she sees with her own eyes is not there at all.
p. 220, Nathan had never liked anger. It seemed a barbaric and undignified emotion. He knew it always masked fear or hurt, and had often wished everyone could simply be sensible enough to cut out the middleman.
p. 229, "You can't tell someone to pursue their dream only if it's a good match for your own."
p. 274, "Most people prefer to think that their resentment is entirely the fault of the person they resent, and that twisted logic seems to make sense in their minds. But it makes no sense to me at all. It's like saying it's your fault if I shoot you, because the gun is aiming at you. It completely disregards who's doing the aiming. But it's a popular point of view. Probably because it's so much easier. It relieves you of the burden of any and all self-examination."
*****
The Year of Miss Agnes, written by Kirkpatrick Hill
Everything changes for the kids in an Alaskan village when Miss Agnes becomes their teacher. Each child is valued, learning becomes fun, and the community benefits from what's happening in the classroom. This is one of my all-time favorite school books!
p. 64, Miss Agnes didn't think school was just for kids.
"You have to keep learning all your life," she said.
That was a good thing to think about, always learning something new. It wasn't like you had to hurry up and learn everything right away before the learning tie was over, it was like you could kind of relax and take your time and enjoy it.
** This post contains affiliate links and I'm grateful when people use them. **
