New look!

Just for now. I like a dark theme, to let the snow show as much as possible, since it’s only around for a month! Speaking of which, it has been hovering around 32 F for several weeks now, but no snow to speak of, let alone a big enough accumulation to go sledding!

I am looking forward to sledding this year.

Lights have been strung on our house and they look marvelous. We are using our wood stove to heat our home. It lends itself well to heating up mugs of milk for hot coco. We have been enjoying delicious cookies and eggnog for several weeks now. It gets dark quickly, which means CANDLES! I have about 5 burning in my room right now. Bliss.

Can’t wait til it snows. It is a good time of the year.

BookSneeze Review – Fasting:The Ancient Practices, by Scot McKnight

“They were hungry enough for God’s leading that they wanted to say it with the hunger of their bodies and not just the hunger of their hearts.”

-John Piper, as quoted in “Fasting: the Ancient Practices”

For my second book from the BookSneeze program (where you get a book free as long as you agree to review it on your blog), I decided to choose Fasting, by Scot McKnight. I know friends that make fasting a regular part of their walk with God. I’ve done 30 Hour Famine with my youth group about… *mentally counts number of shirts* 4 times, but while that gives you an idea of what it’s like to feel hungry, it’s a group event designed to raise money and teach you about world poverty. Excellent, worthy goals, but not the typical goals when you fast.

Since Jesus said, “when you fast” (Matthew 6:1), it seemed to me that fasting should not be an optional or non-existent thing in our spiritual lives.  But how should fasting be done? With what goals in mind – could it be done with wrong motivations? Did it matter if it was a complete, or partial, fast?

So when I saw this book on BookSneeze’s list, I seized the opportunity to learn more on the subject.

Scot McKnight did a great job on this book. It was evident that he had done his research, and was no stranger to fasting – essential for any author on this subject.

McKnight talked about the different faces of fasting, or the different ways it could be approached. He used Biblical references that told of  instances where nations, groups, and/or individuals had fasted.  Many times he also referred to and quoted men throughout history that not only spoke of fasting, but lived the meaning of seeking God with your entire body – from Benedictine monks to Baptist preachers to St. Augustine to John Calvin. This book has some excellent words from all sorts of men from through history, referring to fasting.

Overall, however, I did not find this book enormously… moving? And found as I read on that his message became repetitive. Indeed, you could simply read only the introduction and, without reading further, have the entire book’s message. A good message, I concede, but repeated continuously throughout the book so that each chapter felt like only very slightly different angles on the same message.

Many people believe that fasting will produce results, McKnight wrote. I cannot deny that that was my view. Yet fasting is not an advanced plea to gain something, he continued, but a response to a sacred moment. A moment of intense sorrow and grief, of intense joy, of intense longing for  a nation’s freedom, for another’s salvation, or for God’s own presence – fasting is a whole-body action of expressing that emotion.

But I will not detail the book. I felt that McKnight did a good job of covering this subject and emphasizing that in the end, fasting is a response to a sacred moment that had to be responded to entirely.

This book is rare in that it is written humbly and with a yearning for God central. Other books of this topic would fall under the category of “Self-Help”, claiming to deliver something if you read the book. Miracles, spiritual freedom, or a closer, more intimate relationship with God, perhaps – simply search “fasting” on Amazon to see what I mean.

This book offers no easy ten steps to take, it simply approaches the subject with a quiet frankness. And for that I am grateful.

Victory is Ours…!

It is impossible to win the race unless you venture to run, impossible to win the victory unless you dare to battle.
- Richard M. DeVos

Hello again, the threshold between November and December. Between a month of constant writing, of Nanowrimo pep talks and competition against my fellow Nano participants, and a month of snow, cookies, sledding, and the wonderful remembrance of our humble King that Christmas brings.

This is a wonderful place to be, standing between two months, looking at the past and the future. 30 days are behind me that were full of getting ahead in word count (not much of that), falling behind and striving to catch up (a LOT of that), despising my plot and my writing and my characters and yet plunging on, determined to tell their story.

This evening my brother, a friend, and I hung out at Tully’s for several hours and one by one, conquered the number 50,000. We had been planning to attend a Nanowrimo write-in but there wasn’t really any Nanowrimo-ers there that we could tell… They must have all attended the large, end of the month Seattle event. Or we were duped by this whole Nanowrimo site and none of the other participants exist – they just wanted to see if some people out there would be dumb enough to actually try to write 50,000 words in one month. They could be laughing at us right now.

Whatever the case, there we were, ready to achieve victory. We crowded all three of our laptops onto one table and effectively distracted each other, laughing, somehow managing to squeeze in writing between the teasing and jokes. My friend had 900 words to write and reached victory first. I could tell at once from her smug smile. My brother Kevin had about 1,100 words and conquered it in no time with his awesome-ness… and I, I had 2,000 words still to write and took until Tully’s closed to type them all out.

My excuse is that while they were writing, all three of us were concentrating on writing and therefore quiet(er). While I was writing, they were both involved in distracting me. And were effective

But in the end, by 9 o’clock, we all reached 50,000 words and sat there, together, three Nanowrimo winners and just plain epic people.

We reveled in the feeling for but a moment before springing up to let the Tully’s people close…

I am still amazed at my brother’s dedication and hard work. Not once did he fall behind, and thus was an inspiration to his sister that lagged, albeit with seemingly viable excuses.

As for my friend, I am not amazed at all as this is the 3rd year she has won – and beaten me to it. Oh, Hannah, Hannah…

For all of you other Nanowrimo winners, I applaud you. You have accomplished a great thing. Even if you end up tossing out every word you wrote this month, you learned more about writing. You may have written the beginnings of a great story this November, or you may have written another stepping stone, a learning experience, that you never could have done without when you do come to write your great story. Either way, you have learned something. You set a goal and accomplished it. Good on ya, mate.

Now go enjoy December. Rediscover the real world – take a break from your novel. Eat some cookies while you lounge by a fire and watch a Charlie Brown Christmas. Let it encourage you that while your raw, unedited and hastily written novel may be a Charlie Brown tree now, it still looks better than those ugly aluminum trees, and holds a lot of potential.

Au revoir, I am off to rediscover life, aka watch some Psych.