Jesus Wants to Save Christians by Rob Bell and Don Golden

Jesus Wants to Save Christians redifines what it means to be a Christian. The book's subtitle is: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile.

This book changed the way I understand my Bible.

Ok, let me just give you a few thoughts from this book and maybe you'll be intrigued enough that you'll want to read it for yourself.

The first chapter was particularly awesome: it's called The Cry of the Oppressed. It begins in Egypt. The Children of Israel are slaves to the Empire of Egypt. The super-power of the ancient world. Then God miraculously saves the Chilren of Israel and brings them out of Egypt, across the Red Sea and to Mount Sinai. At Sinai God gives the Children of Israel the law.

And this is where this chapter gets really awesome, because its about the fundamental purpose of the law. God begins by telling his people: "Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Exodus 19:5-6). So God wants his people, the Chidlren of Israel, to show the world who He is and what He is like--because that's what priests do.

The Cry of the Oppressed shows that the Ten Commandments are not a series of strict rules given by a firebreathing God to keep the people in line.

So the first commandment is that they have no other Gods. This is because their humanity, their value as people is directly linked to their ability to remember their liberation from slavery, because slavery is "a fundamentally inhumane condition" (p. 33) and their liberation from slavery was a gift from God. "If they forget God," the author writes, "they are at that very same moment forgetting their story. If they forget their story, they migh forget what it was like to be slaves, and they might find themselves back in a new sort of slavery" (p. 33).

The second commandment builds on the first. It prohibits any "image in the form of anything" (Exodus 20.4). The authors explain that in the ancient near East, images made of clay or wood or bronze or any other kind of material were constructed to give the gods depth and size and shape so that the people could understand just who their god was and what he or she was like. But the God of the Ten Commandments commands His people not to construct any images like this. Why? Because He wants His people to be a kingdom of priests. He wants His people to be the ones showing the world what He is like. He doesn't need an image made of wood or clay or bronze or marble, because this God has people.

The third commandment is not to "misuse the name of the LORD your God" (Exodus 20.7). So God has redeemed these former slaves and is now asking them to be His representatives to the world. His character, in a manner of speaking, depends on them and on how they carry His name. The authors write: "The command is certainly about the words a person speaks. But at its heart it is far more about how Israel carries herself as those who carry the name of God" (p. 34).

And the fourth commandment is to keep the Sabbath. They were commanded to take one day each week and rest. They were not to do any work on the Sabbath. This is because in Egypt, they worked every day without a break; they were treated as possessions, objects to be exploited and not as people. The Sabbath reminds them that they are not in Egypt anymore; they are no longer slaves. Their value does not come from how many bricks they produce but from the God who loves them and rescued them.

Here I'll just quote one whole paragraph for you: "Everything about the rest of the commandments speaks to this newfound liberation. God is inviting, God is looking, God is searching for a body, a group of people to be the body of God in the world. Following the Ten Commandments are all sorts of laws and commands about how to live in this new way. The Israelites are told not to charge interest: 'If you take your neighbour's cloak as a pledge, return it by sunset, because that cloak is the only covering your neighbour has. What else can your neighbour sleep in? When he cries out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate' (Exodus 22.26-27). Do you hear the echoes of Egypt in the command? If they begin to oppress on an individual basis, God says that when the oppressed cry out, 'I will hear.' The warning is sharp here: don't become another Pharaoh, because God acts against people like Pharaoh" (p. 34-35).

So the authors show how God continually warns His people that He hears the cry of the oppressed. They write: "It's as if God is saying, 'The thing that happened to you, go make it happen for others. The freedom from oppression that you are now experiencing, help others experience that same freedom. The grace that has been extended to you when you were at your lowest, extend it to others. In the same way that I heard your cry, go and hear the cry of others and act on their behalf" (p. 35).

Next God takes His people into the Promised Land, where they enjoy a period of prosperity. But soon, they're in Jerusalem. Under King Solomon, the Children of Israel enjoyed the greatest prosperity ever. But, the Bible tells how King Solomon used slaves to build the temple, to build his palace, to build the walls of Jerusalem, to build his military bases... slaves. So, it wasn't long then before the oppressed became the oppressors. The authors put it this way, "Jerusalem is the new Egypt" (p. 41).

And so, as God promised that He would always hear the cry of the oppressed, that He would always oppose the oppressors, it's not much longer before the Children of Israel are in slavery again, in Babylon. In Exile.

The authors put it this way: "Exile is when you fail to convert your blessings into blessings for others. Exile is when you find yourself a stranger to the purposes of God" (p. 45).

So the Children of Israel came full circle.

I liked this. It was very eye-opening and it changed the way I understood the Historical Books of the Old Testament. It helped me see what God meant when he called His people a Kingdom of Priests and a Holy Nation, and it helped me see what it's like to fail at that. It also helped me see that God's purpose for the Children of Israel is the same as His purpose for the Church. He wants someone to show the world who He is and what He is like, to show the world the freedom from the Egypt-systems that only He can provide.

The rest of the book is about how we can and have become the oppressors. How we have become strangers to God's purposes. The Church is not showing people the great power of God to liberate people from the world's systems. Instead, the Church is becoming a world-system, oppressing people. Or at least, legitimitizing the oppression of others. Turning a blind eye.

The rest of the book is about how we can return to God's purposes by following Jesus' example. By taking the downward slope of self-abasement and humility.

The rest of the book is about how Jesus has redeemed us. Jesus has spread his blood on "the doorposts of the universe" so that we could be liberated and live like liberated people.

So, there's a pretty huge gospel message in there and I couldn't do it much justice by summarizing it, so read the book. If you can't find it or can't afford it, let me know and I'll send you my copy.

I'm going to quote a few lines from the book's epilogue here and that will be the end of this:

"Jesus wants to save our church from thinking that the priests are somebody else.

Jesus wants to save us from standing at a distance, begging Moses to speak to God because we're convinced that if we speak to God, we'll die.

Jesus wants to save our Church from fear.

We haven't been brought to that kind of mountain. Sinai, alive again.

Jesus wants to save from making the good news about another world and not this one.

Jesus wants to save us from preaching a gospel that is only about individuals and not about the systems that enlsave them.

Jesus wants to save us from shrinking the gospel down to a transaction about the removal of sin and not about every single particle of creation being reconciled to its maker.

Jesus wants to save us from religiously sanctioned despair, the kind that doesn't believe the world can be made better, the kind that either blatantly or subtly teaches people to just be quiet and behave and wait for something big to happen 'someday'" (p. 178-179).

okay: in my summary, i shamelessly quoted parts of the book without attributing them. sorry. i only hope i haven't misconstrued what the authors intended to say.


also: it occurs to me that some people might misinterpret to idea of the book based on my explanation of it. so if you find yourself disagreeing with the idea of the book after reading this and not the book, please read the book and then decide.


also: if it helps, i don't think Rob Bell and Don Golden are trying to, in any way, negate or diminish what Jesus did. I don't think they're telling us that we have to do Jesus' job. Jesus came to show the world who God is and what He is like. He also came to redeem the world. our job isn't to redeem the world or to show the world what God is like and who He is in our selves but to point others to Jesus; to show the world God, through Jesus. And to do it the way Jesus did, by taking the downward slope. by humbling ourselves.

Stephen R. Lawhead - The Paradise War

So this morning I couldn't sleep after Janelle left, so I finished reading The Paradise War, book one of the Song of Albion trilogy.

Stephen R. Lawhead is a phenomenal writer. His command of the english language is impressive, even intimidating. His prose is pretty near flawless. His writing flows poetically so that its delightful to read.

What's even more astounding than his writing ability, though, is the fact that his publishers let this book be printed the way it is! It's like an unfleshed outline for a fascinating fantasy adventure.

Okay, here's a quick summary of the plot and then I'll go into what I hate about the book. Lewis and Simon are roommates at Oxford University, they're both in post graduate studies. Simon gets it into his head to go to the Otherworld, and drags Lewis along with him. Lewis fails to get through the portal, however, and returns to Oxford alone. At Oxford, weird stuff starts happening and it becomes apparent that the Otherworld is unraveling, so, with the help of Professor Nettleton, Lewis goes through the portal and enters the Otherworld to find Simon.

He finds himself in Albion, and with Simon's help, is mistaken for a warrior. The Great King, Meldryn Mawr sends Lewis to the warrior school at Ynys Sci, where he spends seven years. After his seven years are over, Lewis is a well trained warrior, and just in time too. He returns to the Kingdom of Prydain--King Meldryn Mawr's dominion--to find it ravaged by the Lord of the Dead and his demon army. He joins the great King and the few survivors of Prydain on a long trek to the King's last surviving fortress. They are pursued by the demon army, but they get to the fortress at the last minute, only to be besieged by an army they cannot defeat.

It's up to Lewis to find the Song of Albion and release it, so that it binds the Lord of the Dead to his own domain.

Okay, that's a pretty brief summary, there's quite a lot more to the story than that, but you'll have to read it yourself if you want to find out about it.

My problem with the story is this: it's shallow. The plot is thin. The characters are fluid and two dimensional at best. It's almost like Lawhead doesn't really even know his characters, they're just there to roll the plot along.

At Ynys Sci, three female characters are introduced, the three daughters of Scatha, the school's governor. Lewis falls in love with all three of them, apparently, and there's some kind of weird platonic sexual something going on between the four of them because they all kiss, hold hands, and cuddle with Lewis but they act like its normal, no one talks about it, and the sisters don't get jealous of each other. Lewis seems to prefer one of them, but that doesn't stop him from kissing, holding hands, and cuddling with the other two. It's just weird. And the sisters seem interchangeable, they have no definite individual characters, they always appear together or near each other and one is just as good as another. Then, one of them gives Lewis a prophecy, and they're almost never mentioned again in the story.

Almost all the characters are like this, two dimensional and interchangeable, only there to move the plot along. I'm thinking the first person narration is partly to blame because Lewis narrates like he's writing a newspaper article that lapses into poetry and excessive description.

Suffice to say, I wasn't too thrilled with this story. I didn't enjoy reading it.

Here's the thing, though, I know Lawhead can write a good story because I've read his King Raven Trilogy and loved it! And I read The Warlords of Nin and it was pretty good too, so maybe this book was just hastily written? I'm not sure what the problem is, it's just a really crappy story.

December

We got snow! It's so cold.

But temperatures are back up next week and the snow will be gone. Darn this Nova Scotian weather...

So, here's what's up this month:

On the 28th, janelle and i will be flying out to Ontario, where we will meet up with Chad and Leanne and the rest of my family at Chad and Leanne's house in the Detroit area.

Until then, i'm working five nights a week. We're having a no-tax event at the store this weekend, so it's going to be a busy one, and after that the store will be open two hours longer until Christmas (open at seven, closed at eleven). I will have to get used to working with customers again. The worst is when I still have stock on the floor when the customers arrive. It's kind of embarrassing.

And I'm reading Stephen Lawhead's The Paradise War. I'm about halfway through it, and the going is slow because I'm not so excited about it. Expect a review within the next week or two.

And Janelle is off school, as of this morning, for the holidays. I'm super excited about that! Yay.

Anyways, that's about it.

Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman

In grade 13 I had a teacher who loved Richard Feynman. He did a whole ... unit, I guess you could call it... on Richard Feynman. We watched a movie called Infinity, about Feynman's younger years, after he got his Ph.D from Princeton and while he was working on the Manhattan project, and while his first wife was dying of cancer. Hmm... that's interesting. I wonder if there's some kind of link there... Manhattan project, wife dying of cancer...

Anyways, that was the first I ever heard of him, but he was such an interesting guy. Smart, funny, really, really funny. I mean, he was the kind of guy who did just about everything... storytelling, yeah, story telling--a nobel prize winning physicist, storytelling, samba drums, drawing, and safecracking. Yes, safecracking. It was one of his many, many hobbies. Before he died, one of his last ambitions was to travel to Tuva, near the border between Russia and Mongolia because he wanted to learn how to do throat singing. But he died before he could get clearance to go there. There's a book by Ralph Leighton all about that.

Here's an interesting anecdote. While he was working on the Manhattan project, he was stationed at a remote top-secret base in the desert. The barracks where he was living was a short drive from the station where the research was going on, but to get into the station he had to go through a checkpoint and sign in. One morning, he found a hole in the fence surrounding the station, but instead of telling anyone about it, he signed in and then left the station through the hole and went back to the check point and signed in again. He did this a bunch of times before they realized that he was signing in, but not signing out and started wondering what was up. Yeah, I thought that was funny too.

Anyways, I found Richard Feynman so fascinating that I decided to buy a couple of his books. He wrote a bunch of textbooks on physics as well as a few books like The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and The Meaning of it All. He also delivered a series of freshman lectures on physics over two years at the California Institute of Technology. These lectures were so popular that seats had to be reserved for the students who had registered for the lectures because if they showed up a bit late, there'd be no seats left because of all the people trying to get in to hear Richard Feynman lecture. These lectures were published in 1963 into one book called Lectures on Physics. This book was later distilled into two short books, Six Easy Pieces: the Essentials of Physics Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher and Six Not So Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time. I originally wanted to buy Lectures on Physics but it costs over a hundred dollars, so I bought Six Easy Pieces and Six Not So Easy Pieces at something like ten dollars apiece.

I started reading Six Easy Pieces immediately and thoroughly enjoyed the beginning of it. The first part of it is all about the basics of physics: everything is made of atoms. That's easy enough to understand. Even the stuff right after, I could get: how atoms behave, and all that. After that, though... he got into Quantum something or other and totally lost me but I persevered until chapter four, where he started talking about the theory of the Conservation of Energy and I was like, okay, yeah, I get that. And he used a really neat little example, where Dennis the Menace has twenty eight blocks (or is it twenty three) and keeps hiding them on his mom, who is pretty obsessive about finding these blocks and counting them. And then he went on about how perpetual motion is impossible and a small part of me died inside. But I didn't really understand much else of it, so there's still a bit of hope left. Anyways, after that, I pretty much gave up on the book... I'd need to have a background in physics to understand it and I didn't even take physics in High School. I took biology instead. And failed it. The closest I've ever come to studying physics, aside from reading the first three and a half chapters of this book is arguing with my brother about perpetual motion. You see, I have this fantasy that a physicist will one day discover perpetual motion and then we'll all have free energy and the world will be ushered into a lengthy age of peace, socialism, and space travel. Yeah. But my brother actually understands physics because he's an engineer, you see (or is he an engineer because he understands physics?) and he knows that perpetual motion is impossible, so every time we talk about it, he's intent on crushing my fantasy, which disappoints me tremendously.

Anyways, back to the book: it's a fantastic book. Really well written. If only I could understand it.

Janelle's Illustrated Guide to PCOS

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The DaVinci Code

I'm not sure if there's supposed to be a space between Da and Vinci or not...

So, yesterday I watched The DaVinci Code movie, based on the book by that guy... I can't remember his name and I'm too tired to go look. Today, I watched its sequel. So, here's a bit of a review if you can call it that. Just of the movies, aside from the tiniest bit of curiosity, I have very little inclination to read the book.

A bit of premise: there's this group of people called the priory of zion (or is it scion?); they're kind of like an offshoot of the knights templar, and their job is to guard the secret that Mary Magdelene is actually Jesus Christ's wife and that, at the time of Jesus' death, she was pregnant. Furthermore, they're said to be guarding the location of her tomb and the whereabouts of her descendants--the descendants of Jesus Christ. The Roman Catholic Church doesn't want this information revealed because its assertion that Jesus is God is the source of its power, so through the centuries it has been hunting down the priory of zion and trying to destroy it so that the secret doesn't get out.

Here's my take. The movie was kind of boring. It was as if someone had tried to make a thrilling mystery drama from an historical debate. At the end of the movie, I felt kind of blah... and thinking, "What was all the fuss about?" because, aside from solving the murder of a museum curator who happened to also be the grand master of the priory of zion, the stakes were pretty humdrum. At least to me. The thing that kind of gets me, though, is that the historical debate was pretty much cut right out. There's one scene where Professor Robert Langdon meets an old colleague, who's obsessed with the priory of zion and the mythology surrounding it, and believes that Mary Magdalene's tomb is out there somewhere, as well as her descendants. At this point, Langdon plays the skeptic and kind of argues with the other guy for a bit, but never really brings up any valid or noticeable points. His colleague, whose name I forget, just repeats the mythology a couple of times and points out Mary Magdalene in DaVinci's painting of the Last Supper and that's enough to convince Langdon. And he's supposed to be a professor of history? There's no fact checking, there's no peer review, there's not even any research. He just wholeheartedly accepts it based on his colleague's say-so and the presence of a woman in a DaVinci painting. From that point on, Langdon wholeheartedly believes in all of it. So, the movie loses a bit of credibility, right there.

Aside from that, the movie was just another Indiana Jones style adventure. It was all about hunting for clues in painting and ancient rhyming riddles, trying to find a mythical artifact or location, all the while being pursued by a relentless assassin. Except, instead of the fate of the world, or even a whole lot of money being in the balance, it's the possibility that a myth might gain credibility and undermine the power of the Roman Church. Like I said, Ho-Hum.

As far as I'm concerned, the Catholic Church's power has already been undermined. It no longer holds a political monopoly, it's been centuries since it has. At the end of the movie, its discovered that the tomb has been moved to an unknown location, so it's impossible to empirically prove the myth. But even if it had been possible to prove, it wouldn't shake the faith of the people who believe in the Church. Most people wouldn't change their minds. A few, here and there, yes but not enough to make a difference. So as a story telling movie, it was a total flop.

I got the impression that the makers of the story, both the film version and the book, really wanted to make a documentary but didn't have any facts to support their theories, just conjecture. So, they made it a fiction instead, and invented the facts.

At the end of the film, Langdon concludes that it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe something. Or something like, it doesn't matter what you put your faith in, as long as you have faith. That's such a touchy-feely, let's all feel good about ourselves and not have any problems conclusion.

The second movie--Angels and Demons--was slightly more interesting and more thrilling. It was an Indiana Jones style adventure through Rome to find the perpetrators who kidnapped and threatened to murder the four leading Cardinals, one of whom is about to be elected to replace the Pope, who was murdered by the same people. Oh yeah, and if they don't solve the mystery before midnight, a bomb is going to obliterate all of Rome. There wasn't so much historical debate in this one, at least nothing significant. It was just an adventure movie, nothing more. The fake gunshots that kept going off, throughout the movie to make the audience jump really annoyed me though.

Sleepless...

So I got home from work today and hung around, had a shower, breakfast, all my regular morning rituals and then I went to bed and fell almost instantly asleep.

And then it was only three hours later and I couldn't sleep at all. How frustrating. It would be fantastic if I didn't have to work tonight. So after trying to fight it for a while, I got up, had something to eat, checked my emails and all that and read my book, Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman. And then I went back to bed only to lie awake for two hours... finally I took half a sleeping pill and now I'm drinking tea and waiting for it to hit me. Nothing yet.

An Acceptable Time by Madeleine L'Engle

As with most books by Madeleine L'Engle, this one is exceptionally well written. The story is well thought-through and its characters, at least its main characters, are well written and memorable.

So, for a quick summary of the plot: Polly is spending some time with her grandparents. Her friend, Zachary happens to be living in nearby Hartford and drives down in his fancy car to spend some time with her. Clearly, Zachary is in love with Polly. She's not quite sure if she feels the same way about him yet. Meanwhile, family friend Bishop Nason Colubra has discovered a time gate that allows access to three thousand years in the past.

This is where I get really annoyed with the story. Okay, a time gate; I generally like stories like that. But this one is really weird. Well, the time gate itself isn't so weird as the reaction of the people around it.

Bishop Colubra has been going through the time gate for quite some time, long enough to teach English to a few of the natives living in pre-columbus America, but he hasn't told anyone about it because he knows they won't believe him. But after Polly goes through the time gate by mistake, Bishop Colubra and Polly decide to tell the others--Colubra's sister, Louise, a medical doctor; and Polly's grandparents, the Doctors Murry.

They get a series of reactions that would have been comical if they hadn't been written so ridiculously. First, Polly's grandfather: his first reaction is disbelief. He thinks they are just pulling his leg, making a joke. When it becomes clear that they aren't telling a joke, he stubbornly refuses to believe them. Eventually, he is presented with enough evidence to convince him and he changes his mind, albeit reluctantly. Later he admits that he was more upset that the time gate opened on his property and someone else discovered it than he was disbelieving. Okay, my problem with this is that Dr. Murry is an astrophysicist or something like that, he traveled to a distant solar system in A Wrinkle in Time by going through a time gate--except in that book it was called a tesseract. So it seems completely crazy for him to not believe that one could possibly open up on his property. As for his being upset about someone else discovering it--well, he wasn't looking for one, he hardly ever left his house, he just sat around gloating that he knew more about physics than Bishop Colubra. Furthermore, in all the previous books in this series featuring Dr. Murry, he is a very humble gentleman, one who wouldn't be upset that someone else made a discovery in his field, one who would be happy for Bishop Colubra making this discovery. And he would be eager to explore it, find out where it goes, why it's there and how it works. Instead, in this book, he doesn't believe in it, and then he's afraid of it and makes Polly a prisoner in his house so that she won't explore it. That just seems a little ridiculous to me. Especially considering that it's a huge break from the character I was introduced to in earlier books.

Polly's grandmother is also a scientist. She studies micro-organisms or something. In fact, she's so smart, she does her experiments in her mind (could this be an early sign of senility?). When she finally gets convinced that the time gate does exist, she wants to bury all evidence of it, put it out of her mind, and forget about it, hoping that it will somehow go away as a result. And she forbids Polly going anywhere near it.

These are the same two characters who, in previous books, sent their own children through time: In Many Waters their twin children Sandy and Denys are sent through time to the prehistorical past as a result of a mistake in one of their parents' experiments. In A Wrinkle in Time, their children, Meg and Charles Wallace and one of their classmates travels through a tesseract to rescue their father, trapped in a distant solar system. In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Charles Wallace goes back in time and changes the past in order to resolve a problem in the present. So why on earth do they suddenly have a problem with tampering with a time gate?

Bishop Colubra's sister, Louise's reaction I can somewhat understand. She is a doctor and a scientist but she doesn't have the experience with space and time travel that the Drs. Murry have. Nevertheless, she is quite mean about her disbelief.

In fact, all three of these skeptics treat Bishop Colubra like a child after he tells them about the time gate. They disregard all his opinions and input into any discussion on any subject and constantly pooh-pooh him. They constantly put down his driving and his trustworthiness. So it's kind of funny that, when he isn't around, they praise his faith and knowledge of theology and scripture.

So, as you can see, I was pretty annoyed by this book. And besides, it was way too long.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

This is a very complicated book. On the one hand it's a wonderful adventure story, very thrilling, very engaging. It also has great epic themes, like the struggle between good and evil, and the fate of the world. But on the other hand, there's a very subtle message or series of messages that I'm really not comfortable with.

Okay, so if you read this book, the first thing you'll encounter is a Daemon. The story's main character, Lyra has one. In fact, every human character in this book has one. It's in the shape of an animal and it can talk. The daemon is actually the person's soul, except it's outside of the body. That's okay. Plus, it works. Pullman does a very good job of this and writes it so well that it doesn't pose a problem at all. The daemon is like a separate person, but it's also the same person; what the daemon feels or thinks or knows is known to its person and vice versa. The daemon often manifests how its person is feeling, so you would read someone's emotions or body language, not by looking at them but by looking at their daemon. And Pullman actually makes this work really well in this story.

One minor thing I didn't like so much about the whole daemon thing is that a person's job or station in life seems to determine the form of that person's daemon. For example, it is mentioned that servants, as a rule, have daemons in the form of dogs but the higher station of servitude you're at, the higher kind of dog you get; for example, the steward at Jordan college is an important servant so his daemon is an Irish Setter. Whereas, in real life, your job doesn't determine what kind of person you're like at all. But that's just a minor thing.

One of the giant themes in this book is separation from one's daemon or soul. The first hint of this I got was at the very beginning when Lyra is exploring her home, Jordan College. She finds the crypt where all the important college people are buried and notices that their daemons are buried with them in the form of a gold coin, engraved with the daemon's shape and name, placed inside the cadaver's mouth. She decides to play a trick on them and switches two of the cadaver's daemon-coins. Lyra's daemon begins to behave as if something terrible has happened and panics, but Lyra is pleased with her trick. That night, however, she is visited by the ghosts of the men whose daemons she switched and she realizes the gravity of the offense that she has committed and corrects it.

A little later on, Lyra meets a character, a polar bear named Iorek Byrnison who is enslaved by the people of a small town. She asks him why he doesn't just break free because he is obviously strong enough. He replies that the people of the town have tricked him and stolen his armour and are keeping it hidden. This doesn't seem like such a big deal...but it turns out that a bear's armour is like his soul and the bear can't stand to be separated from it.

Also, when Lyra first meets Iorek, she is very afraid of him and hides behind a fence but her daemon pulls her out of her hiding place by widening the distance between them. A person cannot be separated from their daemon by more than a few meters, and when one or the other pulls on that distance they both feel a strong physical and emotional pain because they cannot bear to be separated from one another.

Later on, we discover that the antagonists of this story are experimenting on children by physically and permanently separating them from their daemons. The children then become soulless, some of them die right away, others live for a little while longer but while they live they seem to have very little personality left. Of course, in the story, to separate a person from their daemon is a very wicked thing to do, almost like murder or worse.

It turns out that the wicked antagonists who are doing that belong to the Church (ostensibly, the Roman Catholic Church, in this story the Church is the all-powerful governing body of the whole world) and they believe that they can cure a person of original sin by separating them from their daemon before original sin comes on them. It seems as if, in this story, children are completely innocent, untouched by original sin until they reach puberty.

The messages of the story are extremely subtle. The book is so well written that its messages appear as little hints here and there. Almost as though you can't really be sure that what your reading is a message put there by the author or if it's just a part of the story... and that's kind of unsettling. If I were to write an academic essay on this book I would argue that Pullman is trying to write a kind of subtle allegory. But it would take a tremendous amount of work to argue it effectively.

King of the Middle March by Kevin Crossley-Holland

This book concludes the story of young Arthur de Caldicot. Four years have past since Merlin gave him the seeing-stone in the first book. As squire to Sir Stephen de Holt, Arthur accompanies him on a crusade to the Holy Land, however, the crusade is held up in Venice as the crusaders are not able to raise the funds promised to pay the people of Venice for the ships they have constructed. While the crusade is held up in Venice, Arthur is knighted by Sir Milon, leader of the French crusaders.

Along the way, there are plenty of adventures, both joyful and frightening. In this book Arthur experiences both the very best and the very worst of human nature and sees humanity at war with itself. In the end he finds the king within himself and comes into his own as King of the Middle March, a title he gives himself upon taking possession of his manor.

This book is warm and satisfying. I cannot recommend it enough.

what i am like

so, after we finished the peasant princess series of sermons on the song of solomon by mark driscoll, janelle and i started going through his series on the book of proverbs.

so last night we watched the one about planning, where pastor mark talks about the value and methods of organization. it was so inspiring that janelle and i decided to do an online calendar so we could sync our schedules ... or even have a schedule.

which led me to reflect on what kind of person i am. i love organizing. i love putting things into their categories. i love making plans and carrying them out. i love overseeing projects. i love making decisions. but, that being the case, why is my life such a disorganized mess? why am i so indecisive?

janelle has accused me of being a closet perfectionist. and i think she's right. i have a tendency to give up on things if they're not going my way. for example, when she first accused me, we were playing a game with some friends, and after losing a few times i gave up and quit and janelle said, "you're just a closet perfectionist." well, losing isn't fun! but it turns out, if i can't win i won't play.

i found myself doing this a little while ago by myself too. i was playing privateer on my computer and got to a dead end where it was too difficult and i couldn't beat it after a few tries. instead of trying again and again or changing my strategy, i opened the program files and changed the game to give myself an advantage. well, i gave myself such an advantage that the game got so easy i quickly lost interest and stopped playing.

when janelle and i were first married, we tried putting together a budget. i really like doing that. we planned our spending and saving. but as we were planning it, i was already tempted to give up on it because janelle and i weren't agreeing on how much money to spend on what. but we worked through it, put the plan in place and tried to execute it. it was a cash-only system. we would use our debit cards to make cash withdrawls and that's it. our credit cards came out of our wallets and we used them only to make online purchases or in case of emergencies. but one of us couldn't remember to bring the cash and kept using the debit card, because shopping trips are so whimsical. we just happen to be driving past the grocery store and deciding what we're going to eat at the same time and, of course, we left the grocery cash at home, so instead of going home and getting the cash and coming all the way back, we just use our debit cards.

so i gave up on the budget before we could even use it.

i like using agendas. i like to write in everything i need to do and scheduling my day months ahead of time and planning my life like that. but, i can't plan every aspect of my life like that. plans change and unexpected things happen and mess up my beautifully scheduled life. so, i give up on my agenda. i'm really inflexible that way.

i know i appear to be easy going and laid back, but really, i'm kind of uptight. it's just that being uptight isn't working for me, so i just let everything go and stop caring. i need to qualify that, though...

i like to be spontaneous and unpredictable, but even my spontanaity is planned. for example, when i asked janelle to marry me, it seemed like a spontaneous decision: i mean, janelle and i had only known each other for a few months and we'd only been together for ten days. i just bought a ring and asked her to marry me. but that had been planned, right down to the exact words i used when i asked her to marry me, months ahead of time. i just needed a time, when the time came, i was emotionally prepared for it.

some people seem to think i'm reckless and a little crazy. but i put a lot of thought into my recklessness. i'm no daredevil. i don't like taking risks. unless i'm completely in control. and i can feel like i'm completely in control when i'm climbing things crazily, or driving recklessly in certain conditions, or any of those things i do that people would consider "crazy" because the only variable i need to take into consideration is myself (and my vehicle... but i don't tend to take risks with a vehicle i'm not comfortable with) and whether or not i am able to do whatever it is that i'm doing. i can take risks, but they're managed risks, where i'm very confident that i will succeed without hurting myself or anyone else. otherwise, i don't enjoy myself. i hate amusement parks because it's always someone else doing all the decisions and i don't know what's going to happen. if i could decide what the ride would be like, i would probably love it. i really don't like the idea of a cruise ship vacation because all the stops and the times are planned by someone else.

i hate being in a state of constantly reacting to things. when we get an invitation, or a catastrophe occurs that i haven't foreseen, i get irritated. i want to have everything planned and be the one in charge and i wish people could issue invitation months or even years ahead of time so that i have time to emotionally prepare for them.

i need to have a plan, but i don't have one.

new job

so, my first real shift at my new job was saturday night. i now work as a night shift stock clerk at the atlantic superstore. what a nice surprise. it's a small store--well, not very small, but much, much smaller than the one i worked at in toronto--and much less busy. my new coworkers seem to be much more relaxed than my stressed out and edgy coworkers in toronto. of course they were stressed out--they were constantly understaffed and overworked, with management constantly threatening to keep cutting their staff and increase their workload.

working at the superstore saturday night, i felt like i had never left. it was a very comfortable and satisfying feeling and i'm happy to be working here. they do many things differently here, but i'm looking forward to learning it.

also, there's no union, so i won't always have to work weekends. and all the other union-related problems attached to working at the previous store... like part time employees who get paid half as much as their full time coworkers having to work harder than their full time coworkers because they can be dismissed easier.

but i'm sure this place has its own problems. anyways, i'm quite happy right now and looking forward to working here for the next little while.

Lunch With Lenin by Deborah Ellis

Lunch With Lenin And Other Stories is the perfect book. It is a collection of beautiful and heartbreaking short stories. Definitely a must-read for everybody.

Nothing more needs to be said.

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis is a memoir in graphic novel format. it is completely biographical. and it does many things for me. on the surface, it tells a very compelling story about a very compelling character and i like that a lot. it also makes a terrific picture of life in Iran after the Islamic Revolution because the story is all about growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution.

Marjane, or Marji as she is called in the book, is born to a family of modernists. her parents participate in the demonstrations and protests against the Shah that brought about his abdication. however, it seems that what replaced the Shah was much worse, or at the very least, no better and they found themselves opposed to the new government as well.

so, they raised their only daughter to be a free-thinking person, but her outspokenness eventually got her in trouble in Iran, so her parents sent her to Austria at fourteen. she spent four years in Vienna before returning to Iran, but in Iran after four years' absence, she finds that much has changed, most startlingly, in herself. she finds that she cannot fit in anywhere: in the west, she is Iranian, in Iran she has become westernized. this feeling of homelessness leads to depression and she tries to commit suicide by taking a drug overdose while her parents are on vacation. miraculously, she survives and decides to 'take her life in hand.'

and just that is three quarters of the novel, so i won't give away the ending. what i liked about the book is that it showed a lot of what Iran is like. i've always wanted to visit Iran because it is always a very interesting and conflicted part of the world, even in my own lifetime, but especially throughout history. so, in this book, i felt like i was being given a guided tour of Iran, its culture and ideology. that was fascinating.

also, i found the author's own political and ideological insights to be quite astute. and i really appreciated that. i appreciated her freethinkingness and how she embraced being marginalized, no matter where she was--she was marginalized in vienna as she was in iran. but she didn't resist mainstream culture just for the sake of resisting mainstream culture; what i appreciated most was her insight into the thoughtlessness of society, how so many people--both the religious fanatics and the liberals who resist the Islamic Revolution--can dispense with thinking simply because it's a more convenient way to live, they just do what they do without thinking about why they do it. she's also very honest about finding herself living thoughtlessly on several occasions and about how easy it is to dispense with thinking. to me, she showed her life as a constant struggle to be a thinking person, and she often gets encouragement from her parents and grandmother, who teach her think for herself and who sometimes lovingly show her when she is not.

that's why it stung so much when, at the end of the book, she makes some decisions, like the ones that lead to her marriage and ultimate divorce, and defends them with the same unthinking kind of logic that everyone else does. but i'll save that for another post.

in conclusion, i loved this book. it was an education without seeming like one.

Experiencing The Resurrection by Henry and Melvin Blackaby

I can't really recommend this book to everyone. For one thing, it's boring. For the first part, it reads like an academic manual. Towards the middle it becomes a bit preachy. In the end it vacillates between trying to be instructional and trying to be inspirational. When it tries to be inspirational it winds up sounding preachy, but it does a decent job of being instructional.

It begins by giving some theological facts to build the framework, that's why the first part is instructional and reads like a textbook. It talks about what sin is, that sin leads to death, and what God intends to do about that. Next it talks about how Jesus died as a consequence of our sin and in our place and how his death and resurrection made a way for us to God. The major thing to understand here is that when the book talks about experiencing the resurrection, it's not talking about some kind of mystical experience that's reserved for only the most spiritual Christians. It's talking about the newness of life that comes from being saved. Jesus died, by becoming Christians, we die with Him and are born again into a new life--the Christian life. This is the resurrection that the book talks about, the new Christian life. So, really this book is about the theology and experience of Christian living. The last section of the book talks about the fundamentals of Christian living.

The books sounds preachy when it tries to goad its reader into living the Christian life. It sounds like an old preacher, trying to preach the concept into its audience. That probably works for some people, but for me, it's a turn-off. The book is also riddled with quaint little examples from the authors' personal lives. The examples just make the book sound more preachy, because they're not clever and they're often very basic--I would have understood it without the example.

The book could have been a lot shorter and still just as effective. I learned some from reading it, but a lot of the time I felt like I was reading a poorly written textbook.

janelle's birthday!

so, we celebrated janelle's birthday this week.

we had planned to go rock climbing on friday but no one could make it, so we were a little disappointed, but janelle's classmate, angela, threw a surprise party for janelle on thursday evening and that was so wonderfully fantastic.

on friday, janelle's sister took her out to lunch and afterwards, janelle and i went shopping and we got janelle some perfume that smells like toffee or coffee crisp or something and then we went to see cloudy with a chance of meatballs and we were the only ones in the whole theatre! i like it when that happens.

the movie was super good, but all the food in it must have made us nauseous because we both felt really sick later that night.

one time, we were in toronto and we went to a really, really late movie and when we got there we were the only ones there so we picked the best seats. a few minutes later another couple showed up and janelle offered to move over so they could share the best seats with us and the gentleman replied, "i've never had such a generous offer in such an empty theatre." that was funny.

on saturday we went to eva's birthday party. i hung around the kitchen munching on cheesy crackers and cupcakes while janelle painted kid's faces. it was really neat. she turned max into a regular clown (once he put the multicoloured wig on), and she painted black and purple stars on eva's cheeks, and cupcakes on laurie's cheeks... i wanted her to paint a rainbow on my right cheek and a unicorn on my left cheek but we ran out of time.

we had dinner with jon and andrea in bedford and vince and ciela came too. vince and ciela just got engaged in cape breton and were on their way back to ottawa. so after dinner, janelle and i drove them to the airport. it was a neat little visit, a little too short, though.

what we've been up to...

moving
we got the keys to our new apartment on september 15. that morning, janelle and i took a load of things over in the car. for the afternoon and evening, janelle's classmate, angela and her boyfriend, peter help us move most of our furniture and stuff. we were at it until about ten thirty that night but we got way more done than i had expected.

we spent that night in our new apartment, sleeping on our mattress, on the floor. the next day we got our telephone and internet connected and nathan brought over an apartment warming present: some pastries from the queen street bakery. janelle was at school all day so i took her parent's car, which they had loaned to us for the move, and went back to quinpool tower to get more stuff, especially our telephone. but the automobile broke down as i was trying to get out of my parking spot for the return trip. i walked over to janelle's parent's house at spring garden road but they weren't there-they'd gone to truro for the day. it was getting late in the afternoon and janelle and i had made dinner plans to meet the ronalds--missionaries from zambia who were visiting family in halifax--at darwin and karen's house where they were staying.

scott, janelle's parent's coworker was kind enough to let me use the office computer to send janelle an e-mail, so i advised her that i wouldn't be home for a long while and began to walk...

it took me a little over an hour to walk to the new apartment. janelle had gotten my e-mail and was waiting for me and darwin was on his way to pick us up. we had a tremendous meal but afterwards i felt sick, likely from not eating all day and then that long walk and then the heavy meal. so instead of going to meeting i went home and slept.

still no results on the job hunt, so janelle and i spent the balance of the week tidying up our new apartment. and on monday janelle's parents loaned us their second car, a lovely, energetic volkswagen golf from the eighties. our friend, rebecca offered to help and brought her car along and together we packed and moved just about everything else to the new place.

afterwards janelle and rebecca went out for some wine and cheese and i joined donald, keir, and nathan for some 'go fish'.

micro$oft sucks
we finally got janelle's computer all here, so i put it together and went about installing windows all on it. first of all, i couldn't find my windows xp disk. and then i thought i found it, but i had hastily misread the label and was trying to install windows xp from the microsoft office cd. so that wasted a good bit of time. i finally did find the windows xp cd and tried installing windows but couldn't get the computer to boot from the cd even after configuring cmos.

finally it worked and i'm not entirely sure why, but once i had it installed windows wouldn't recognize any of my hardware, not even the ones that are built right into the motherboard. so i tooled around with it for hours, trying to find the disks--most of them i didn't even have and the ones i did have were for the wrong hardware. on the verge of giving up, i opened up the box and looked at the motherboard to get the name and model off it and then i used my laptop to get on the internet and download the drivers. so i burned the drivers onto a cd and installed them. all of a sudden, windows began recognizing my hardware. network connectivity, sound, screen resolution and proper colour all magically appeared.

and then it asked me for my product identification key. the one that came with the cd didn't work. i did some looking around online and discovered that because i had rebuilt my computer, my product identification key was no longer valid. of course, microsoft wants me to buy a new one because it's technically a new computer.

maybe these frustrations seem trivial to you...but i've been working with ubuntu for the past three or four years. i only just discovered how foreign windows is to me now, and i used to be so familiar with it. i'd forgotten how frustrating and complicated working with windows is, all the cds you have to keep track of, all the hardware you have to install and find drivers for, all the additional things you have to download and install from all their own different websites...

of course, this is where i put a plug in for ubuntu. on installationg ubuntu automatically detects your hardware and installs the proper drivers for it. all the software you need, you can find in one place. and you don't need a product key! ubuntu is a free operating system! you just download it and install it and you're good to go.

The Peasant Princess

Lately, Janelle and I have been watching televised sermons on the Song of Solomon by Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. He titles the series, The Peasant Princess.

The sermons take a literal interpretation of the Song of Solomon to teach practical things about the marriage relationship. I strongly recommend them to everyone who's married and even some (mature) people who are single or planning on getting married.

You can find the sermons on the Mars Hill Church website at: http://www.marshillchurch.org; at the top right corner of the main page there is a button that says "browse media" when you click it, a drop down menu pops up and the second option on that menu is "sermons" click that. This will bring you to the sermons page and on the right hand side there is a menu with all the sermon series; near the top of this menu you will find The Peasant Princess; click on that and it will show you all the sermons in that series with the first one at the bottom and last one at the top. You can watch them as a video, which is really rewarding as Pastor Mark has a commanding presence that makes it easy to listen to or you can listen to it as audio if you have a slower internet connection.

Enjoy.

It's Not About Me by Max Lucado

This book wasn't what I was expecting. In some ways I was disappointed and in other ways it exceeded my expectations.

I was disappointed that the book didn't go any deeper than it did. In many of his other books, Max Lucado writes in a way that draws the reader into deeper and deeper understanding or inspiration by using simple illustrations and examples, so those books are deep but they're not complicated. I'm talking about titles like No Wonder they Call Him Savior and Six Hours One Friday and Just Like Jesus. It's Not About Me isn't complicated.

The book is divided into two parts: God-Pondering and God-Promoting; the first part talks about what God is like and the second part explains how everything we can make out to be about us is actually about Him and how everything that happens to us, whether good or bad, can bring glory to God. And that's really what it's all about: our lives are about bringing glory to God.

I don't disagree with that. Not at all. But--and before I go into this, let me just say that my expectations are a little unfair; I mean, I was expecting something else and I was disappointed that I didn't get it. Big deal, right. It doesn't make Max Lucado a bad writer--what I was wishing for was a book that showed God and His grand scheme. The kind of book that isn't about me and how I can fit myself into God's grand scheme and finding God's will for me and all that. I wanted a book that really just says, "Look, what God is up to is so much greater than what is going on in your life" and totally skips over all the parts that talk about what that has to do with me and focusses on what God's plan is. Because God is up to something! Anyways.

Instead I found that the book was a little me-focussed. I mean, for a book called It's Not About Me ... it was about my message is about Him; my salvation is about Him; my body is about Him; my struggles are about Him; my success is about Him ... and these are all important things to realize, don't get me wrong, these are things that we need to be taught. I just think that they could have taken up a lot less space in the book. Because, when it comes right down to it, God doesn't need us to promote His glory! It's something we do because it's the only thing we can do; also, God asks us to.

So, enough of my opinions. The book did what it set out to do: it teaches that it's not about me and about my glory, it's about God's glory; my job is to reflect God's glory. It did it in typical Max Lucado fashion: with uncomplicated illustrations and easily understood examples. Great job. And the writing was exactly what I've come to expect from Max Lucado: it's what will keep me reading his books for some time to come. The book was just a little fluffy for my taste; that's all.

Fired.

So, Janelle and I were fired from our job today.

I have to say, I'm really relieved. We've been considering quitting for a few months now and, to our employer's credit, we've received a much better severance deal this way than if we had quit. Thankfully, it wasn't entirely a surprise and we were prepared for it. We've already found potential new jobs and a new place to live and we don't have to go to work until we start our new jobs.

There are plenty of reasons why they may have fired us. We weren't told exactly why we were fired, but we have our suspicions. Most recently being things that occurred during the September first move-out, move-in rush.

Unrelated funny story: I was doing a move-in inspection with a new tenant and his father. The father was particularly picky and wanted to make sure everything worked and was okay. So he turned the oven all the way on and stuck his hand inside. "This doesn't work," he said. I was like, "What?" And reached down to stick my hand in and see for myself. As I reached for the lower oven element, my arm brushed along the upper 'broil' element. I jerked my arm away with a sharp, "Ow!" as I felt my skin burn. "Um, I think it's set to broil," I told the father.

Anyways, here are some of the things that may or may not have led to the termination of our employment:

Most recently, I was doing a move-in inspection in an apartment that had been recently cleaned and saw a cockroach behind the refrigerator. This was the second or third apartment I had seen a cockroach in. The tenants may or may not have seen it, and if they did see it, I'm not entirely sure they knew what it was but I wrote on their inspection form that there was a cockroach in the apartment. When our manager learned of this, she was furious that I had essentially told the tenants that they had cockroaches in their apartment and told me to never do that again. This upset Janelle who confronted our manager and asked her if we were expected to lie to our tenants. Our manager refused to speak to Janelle, and all three of us went home upset. (As a side note, if I was moving into an apartment and there was a cockroach there I would want it to go onto my inspection report because that would serve as proof that the cockroaches were there before I moved in so that my landlord could not justifiably pass the cost of removing the cockroaches to me. If my superintendent put it on the inspection report, I would be grateful to him or her, feeling confident that they intended to take care of the problem.) The next day, Janelle apologized to our manager for speaking out of turn, but was ignored. Our manager gave Janelle and I the 'silent treatment' for the next two days before having us fired.

Another incident that upset our manager: I did a move-out inspection in one of our apartments. It was obvious that the tenants had worked hard to clean the apartment, but they had missed certain things. For example, the stove required some cleaning, and a few other things weren't in perfect condition. Our company's standards require that a tenant pay for the cleaning of the apartment, if any is required, out of their damage deposit, which amounts to half a month's rent. I charged $10 for cleaning the oven and that was it. Later, our manager called me back to the apartment and picked out all the things that were dirty, telling me that the charge of $10 was ridiculously low and that I should have charged more and she had me clean the apartment thoroughly. I believe that I should have and could have charged more for the cleaning of the apartment. I also believe that my manager was right to make me clean the apartment. Nevertheless, I still believe that $10 is a not unreasonable amount to charge for the cleaning of that particular apartment. We, as superintendents were paid to clean apartments at a rate of $25 per apartment if the cleaning charges applied amounted to $25 or more. If the charges were lower, we got nothing, but still had to clean the apartments. So, what it costs our company to clean the apartment is pretty much $25, I might add another $10 to cover the cost of cleaning supplies but $10 in cleaning supplies per apartment is a very generous estimate. So, in my defense, $10 is about one third of what the company would pay to clean even the most dirty apartment. This apartment was far less than one third as dirty as the dirtiest apartment I'd cleaned for $25. Therefore, I maintain that my charge of $10 was reasonable. I also believe that the usual amounts our company charged tenants--and here is a quick breakdown of costs from our company's guidelines: full clean of the stove = $65; partial clean = $35; full clean of the fridge = $35; garbage removal = $25 minimum; and so on, so immediately you can see that the charges against the tenant outweigh the actual cost of cleaning the apartment and that while we were telling the tenants that we were taking their money (and it is their money, being held in trust by the company) to cover the cost of cleaning the apartment, most of the money was actually going into the company's pocket--this is theft, plain and simple.

One apartment that we cleaned was so dirty that our co-workers, Joy and Jane each spent two hours removing garbage, our maintenance man, Henry spent four hours removing garbage, and Janelle and I spent eight hours each removing garbage and cleaning the apartment. Joy and Jane got nothing, Henry got nothing, Janelle got nothing, and I was paid the $25 that the company promised me for cleaning the apartment. This, I have no problem with; the company told me what it would pay me and paid me that much. I do believe, however, that the others would be right in feeling cheated by this deal, because they received nothing. What I do have a problem with is that the company pocketed the very large amount of money that was left of the damage deposit, letting the tenant believe that it was supposed to cover the cost of cleaning the apartment.

Furthermore, when we were hired, we were told that we would not have to clean apartments at all and that our responsibilities were restricted to the maintenance and cleanliness of the building. This was one of the reasons why we accepted the job. Not having to clean apartments, that's pretty attractive. Well, that didn't last a very long time. Nevertheless, new recruits are still being told that they don't have to clean apartments. What a nasty surprise on your first day of work.

In addition to that, our manager could argue that I was slothful in performing my duties at this job. Two complaints that I know she had were that I didn't work as fast as my co-worker, Joy. Also, she complained that I often "disappeared" on what she assumed to be extra long breaks. To these complaints, I can say that I know I didn't work as fast as Joy, but I was thorough and the work I performed was generally good quality work. I took pride in my work and made sure that I gave it my best and it showed. As for my disappearances, I have three defenses, firstly, I did most of my work in areas where my manager could not easily see me. She would try to keep tabs on us by watching the security cameras. However, there are no security cameras in the hallways and stairwells. So, the most time-consuming tasks, including vacuuming the hallways and sweeping and mopping the three thirteen-flight stairwells, occurred off-camera and for the hours I spent cleaning in those areas, I was invisible to my manager. As for the extra long breaks, I took my lead from my immediate supervisor, Joy who treated the job as a 24 hour job, which it was. We worked around the clock. Certain things had to be cleaned daily and we cleaned them regularly but most other things we worked on throughout the day without a real schedule. Our manager wanted it to be an eight hours a day job, with us working during the hours she was present in the building. But we often ended up working as late as seven or eight o'clock in the evening and on some occasions, we had to get up during the night and work for several hours because of some sort of emergency; and this additional work, we felt, went largely ignored by our manager. So, yes, I did take the occasional extra break or added an hour or half hour to my lunch but I generally made sure that my day's work was completed, which is the important thing. Also, my immediate supervisor took a lot of the same breaks as I did, (like I said, I took my lead from her) but our manager never--to my knowledge--confronted her about it, just me. Which seems a little unfair.

I could go on with some personal complaints about the job, but I think I've already gone on too long about this. I don't intend to sound grouchy or sound as though I'm complaining about my job, and about being fired, I'm not. It was a good job while it lasted. I gained plenty of experience and I'm happy I did it. Whatever reasons I was fired for, I don't really care. Our life is going to change now and I'm happy and excited about that.

Scarlet by Stephen R. Lawhead

The first thing I should say about this book is that it's very remarkably well done. It's narrated in the first person by Will Scarlet, a Saxon-Englishman who has been removed from his position as chief forester to King Aelred, when that king is evicted and his lands placed under forest law. Scarlet finds his way into the greenwood forest of Wales where he finds Rhi Bran and his band of merry men and becomes a valued member, accompanying them on many adventures (and misadventures).

The first person narration is astoundingly well done. Reading it, I could hear Scarlet's voice in my head, with his charming brogue and unique words. It made it much more realistic, that it was written in Scarlet's voice. I appreciate the hard work that went into that aspect of it.

One thing that I found a little difficult was the way the narration switched between first and third person throughout the book. Even so, there was enough change in the voice--from Will Scarlet's beautiful narrating voice to the distant, omniscient, third person narrator--that it was easy enough to adjust to. It just felt a little disjointed at first.

The story itself was well told. The characters were colourful and well made. This novel made a good continuation to the story begun in Hood. Also, the ending was very compelling. It makes me really want to buy the next book.

So, here's my verdict: it's well worth the time it takes to read it.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle

What a disappointment this book was. Okay, here's the premise:

The Murry family (a family of geniuses: Meg is the most normal one and she's got a phenomenal IQ; unfortunately, she's pregnant in this story and her husband is giving a lecture at a university in England, so her family is constantly sending her to bed in this story; both her parents are Phds doing research on all kinds of weird stuff and they frequently get calls from the president for advice; Meg's twin brothers Sandy and Denys are in university, studying law and medicine respectively; and Charles Wallace, the youngest is now fifteen and has an IQ that is outstandingly phenomenal even by Murry family standards and he has extra sensory perception and can read certain people's minds;) anyway, the Murry family is sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner when the president calls to alert them that the United States is on the brink of Nuclear War with the small country of Vespugia.

Charles Wallace is tasked with the saving of the world and to do it, he rides a unicorn through time and becomes an observer in all kinds of historic events in one location. Oh yeah, and he's armed with St. Patrick's Rune--a rhyme that defeats evil.

At the end of the book, the story seems to credit Charles Wallace with having changed history and saved the present, but it's very hard to tell exactly what the boy did. He observes the story of a Welsh prince who fled to North America and married a Native American woman and follows the story of this man's descendents, but he doesn't actively do anything. Apparently, he changed history by observing it.

Okay, obviously, I don't have much patience for trying to make sense of this story, maybe I'd understand it more if I did and maybe if I understood it, I'd enjoy it more. For now, though, my verdict is this: what a dumb book, I can't believe I read the whole thing.

Here are only two of my simplest problems with the story: L'Engle doesn't even discuss the moral implications of changing the past; and her characters are so spectacularly phenomenal that they're unbelievable.

Halifax Gets a Wet Willy

So, Hurricane Bill blew past us this weekend. At least, that's what the weather network says. We got some rain and wind, but nothing near as bad as what they'd predicted. As usual, it was all media hype and the real thing failed to live up to it. I was very disappointed.

Here's a photo of some waves caused by the hurricane. In the evening, we went for a walk along the water. The waves were pretty boring right next to shore, but outside the breakwater they were huge. Nothing too severe though--a lot of people went surfing. I swam in worse ones on Lake Huron.

The Heaven Shop by Deborah Ellis

Our co-worker, Ali recommended The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis to Janelle a week or two ago, so Janelle went to the library to get it, but it was out and there were hundreds (literally) of holds on it so Janelle got The Heaven Shop instead. She enjoyed it so much that I decided (reluctantly) to read it as well.

I have never before read such a rewarding and joyful book. That may seem a little sensational, but honestly, this is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read.

Its main character, Binti Phiri lives in Blantyre, Malawi with her father, and older brother and sister. Her father owns the Heaven Shop from the title. He makes coffins. The business' slogan is, "Our coffins will take you swiftly to heaven." Binti and her siblings go to private schools. Binti's older sister, Junie, is engaged to a young man named Noel and they plan to be married when she graduates. Kwasi, her brother, is an artist. He loves to draw. Binti is a radio star: she performs as a voice actress on the radio show Story Time that is broadcast throughout Malawi.

Unfortunately, her father has AIDS and dies of pneumonia. The extended family swoops down, sells the house and business and take the children away. Junie and Binti are taken away from their brother, Kwasi and taken to live in Lilongwe with their uncle Wysom and aunt Agnes and their children. They are mistreated and made to work hard. They are not allowed to eat with their cousins or use the same dishes or utensils because their father died of AIDS.

The story is full of sorrow and joy, grace and forgiveness, and love. It is a remarkable story of victory over injustice and triumph over circumstances. The greatest injustice in this story is AIDS. Many of its characters have AIDS through no fault of their own but they choose not to let that define who they are and they live brilliantly and victoriously in spite of it. Other characters are abusive and self centered, they take advantage of others; but the story's protagonists, though often brought down, triumph graciously in spite of all the abuses they are made to suffer and learn to show grace to others.

The rampant grace demonstrated in this novel is what moved me most. I want to tell Deborah Ellis that her novel is life-changing and give her a giant hug for having written it. I hope that doesn't seem creepy.

Memories of my Father

There are three things that stick out in my mind when I think of my father. They are, a photograph of him drawing the string of his bow, ready to release the arrow; his piano, all apart and in pieces in the basement and the old twelve string guitar that he gave to my brother, Chad; and my father's Bible. These three things have become symbolic of my father in my mind, so that whenever I see them or think of them, I am flooded by some of my favourite memories of my father.

So if you'll forgive the sentimentality of this post, I'd like to tell you about my father.

My father's bow is really big. I don't remember ever being strong enough to draw the string back far enough to launch an arrow any great distance. In the photograph, my father is standing, one foot in front of the other, his right arm straight and strong, holding the bow, the other arm drawing an arrow on the string past his ear. He is wearing a leather guard on his right forearm so that the string does not strip the skin off when he releases it. He is slim and fit and very strong, quite dangerous, in fact, but good. There is something majestic about him in the photo. He is confident, proud, and strong. In another photograph, taken on the same day, he is kneeling on the ground; my brother is standing in front of him, no more than five years old and about three feet tall. My father's arms are on his arms as he tries to draw the bow.

I have never seen the old piano all in one piece. For all my life it has been all apart in the basement. I remember coming home from school once or twice to find my father working on the old piano. Inexplicably, this filled me with an incredible sense of joy. I always liked seeing my father working on the piano. I don't really remember all of what he did, but he fixed all the hammers and made all the keys hit all the strings ... Then he would sit there and play the Homecoming.

The piano is my favourite instrument. I could sit and listen to a well-played piano for hours and hours and I loved listening to my father play. He'd only play two or three songs, but I could listen to him play them over and over again.

He also had an old twelve string guitar. Some of the posts had broken, so he only used six strings on it. But, one day he gave it to Chad, and together they replaced the broken posts and strung it with all twelve strings. That was the first time I'd ever heard a twelve string guitar, and it was really impressive.

My father has an old black leather-covered Bible. It has a binding that can open and close, almost like a binder, but it doesn't look like a binder, it looks like a Bible. He can open the binding and bind his notepaper to the Bible, wherever he wants to. I always thought that was fascinating. It was really neat to leaf through it and feel the smooth, thin pages of his Bible and the rough notepaper all together. Some days he would sit in the living room arm chair, next to the front window and spend what seemed like hours reading his Bible. When we got up in the mornings, he would have already left for work, and his Bible and reading glasses always sat on the table where he had eaten his breakfast.

I remember when my father became an old man. We were playing baseball, he was running backwards to catch a fly ball and turned at the same time, tearing the cartilage in his knee. It took surgeries to fix it and he was on light duty at work after that. He couldn't be as active as he used to and he lost his slim, muscular physique. Before long, I could easily outrun him. That made me sad. While he was still far from being frail or weak, the image I had of him being invincible and powerful was permanently destroyed.

Even so, my father is still probably one of the most creative people I know. I don't think there's anything he can't fix or build. Even if it's something he probably hasn't done before, he'll find a way to fix it or build it. He seems to be a natural born problem solver. He's also a great teacher and he loves to teach, which works out just great because he can teach complicated mechanical stuff to someone like me. And he has a very witty and dry sense of humour. I like to think that I get mine from him. Most people just don't get it, but I find the weirdest things funny.

I think my father is sometimes misunderstood. He may seem severe and strict, and he can be, because he has very high standards. Also, he doesn't beat around the bush with anything--if he has something to say, he comes right out and says it. So, he may seem kind of scary sometimes. But he's not very judgemental, because if he has a problem, it's already out in the open because he's told you about it, so you don't have to worry about what he might be thinking. It also shows that he cares and that he's not quite as hard and severe as he seems.

My father likes to tell jokes with a poker face, just so you don't know how to take it, so you look at him kind of confused for a while and then his eyes start to twinkle and his mouth starts smiling and the humour of it dawns on you and you start laughing.

Hood by Stephen Lawhead

Some years ago, I read Stephen Lawhead's The Warlords of Nin. It was a well told story with memorable characters and I was curious and interested enough in the story to want to read the preceding and succeeding novels in the series. I never got around to it, though. The writing wasn't so great and it seemed, to me, like a Lord of the Rings knock off. Not that that's a bad thing, I just noticed that it seemed to have all the same elements. Maybe that's true of all fantasy novels.

Now, Lawhead has had the time to write quite a few more books and this one came recommended from Joey and Colin. So I read it. After having read Kevin Crossley-Holland, though, I found the writing of this book a little difficult to navigate. I found myself annoyed with the writing at first. But as I read more of it I enjoyed it more. I shared this with Janelle who had read the book before me and she said, "Crossley-Holland's writing is like a thick, nourishing but refreshing smoothie. It's both enjoyable and easy to consume. Lawhead's writing is like a thick juicy steak. You enjoy it tremendously and it's very nourishing, but it's difficult to consume. It takes effort." And I found this to be true. I found myself liking the writing more and more as I read further into the book.

The story is a unique and original retelling of the legend of Robin Hood. Lawhead puts Robin Hood in Wales, far from Nottingham and Sherwood Forest. Robin Hood becomes Rhi Bran--King Raven--the prince and heir to the throne of Elfael, a small Kingdom in the Welsh Marches. However, the Norman conquerors have ambitions in Wales and invade Elfael, killing its king and sending Bran into exile in the forest.

The story is very slow paced. Lawhead takes his time telling it, and goes into all the political intrigues surrounding the story. He gives all the details. It makes for a long, and sometimes tedious, but rewarding read. Also, he does a fantastic job of bringing the world of Wales and Norman England to life. And he does it subtly like by giving the French names of the conquered English places or having his characters speak French rather than English or by having his characters allude to historical events in their conversations, for example, King Harold, son of William the Conqueror, is famous for having been shot in the eye with an arrow and this event comes up again and again.

If you like history and fiction and well told stories and memorable characters, you'll love this book. I'm looking forward to reading the next in the series.

At The Crossing Places by Kevin Crossley-Holland

This brilliant sequel to The Seeing Stone continues the story of young Arthur de Caldicot, bastard son of the crusading knight, Sir William.

Having been squired to Sir Stephen de Holt, a Lord over the Middle March, Arthur moves to Holt castle to begin his training and to prepare to go on crusade. At Holt he encounters a whole new set of adventures and challenges and continues to look for his mother. All along, the seeing stone continues to show him episodes from the life of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table that strangely seem to parallel his own life.

Richly written, the stories told in this book make a wonderful continuation to those begun in The Seeing Stone. There is much feeling and its world is rich and vivid. It's just like stepping into medieval England. Crossley-Holland demonstrates a wonderful sense of humour that makes these novels such a pleasure to read. And his characters are simply unforgettable.

a newsy post

i guess its been a while since i've written a newsy post and a lot has happened.

first of all, our baby died. that was very sad and disappointing. being pregnant, we had such high hopes for the future, so not having the baby is like an ongoing disappointment. every now and again we just have to stop and grieve for a bit.

we are joyful that God gave us our little baby bean for those nine and a half weeks, though. it brought us so much joy and let us know that people really do care about us, even people we would never have thought to turn to for comfort or support. everyone was so kind and generous and we thank God for showing us that. and we still have lots of hope for the future.

we had a bit of a busy july with lots of visitors. we had angele and robb with us for a saturday and that was wonderful. we also had justin and bekah over a couple of times. they went on a honeymoon and bekah broke her knee or something while rock climbing, so she came to see us in a wheelchair. and yesterday they brought her crutches back and came to visit us, it was super nice.

we were expecting to have wens and ada with us for a week or two, but after our baby died they disappeared without a trace.

we also spent an afternoon with sarah and donald. andrew and emma joy were there too and we hung out by the lake and rode the sea-doo. it was really nice except i got a nice sunburn. donald barbequed some steaks and they were wonderful, tasty and tender.

on thursday we spent an evening at rebekah daigle's house with a few friends. jonathan and andrea were there too, they just moved to halifax from ottawa because jonathan is a rcmp officer. it was lots of fun and rebekah made some enchiladas and we consumed them with relish. and afterwards there were some left over and rebekah sent some home with us and we had them for lunch the next day and they were still delicious.

work has been getting busier and busier as we get closer to september first.

also i've got some awesome books to read.

well, i guess that's about it, though.

The Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland

To begin with I have to say that this is a very good book.

In Children's Laureate, Anne Fine wrote, "This is astonishing ... a book that lasts has to create a world so real that you can run your fingertips over its walls, feel its morning frost bit at your throat, and remember the people who lived there for a lifetime. Crossley-Holland has done it and I am so, so jealous."

I don't think I can say it any better.

I could write on and on about how wonderful this book is but I'll just keep this short and make you curious enough that you'll want to read it yourself!

Here's a quick quote from the beginning of the book, just to give you an idea of how it goes.

"Tumber Hill! It's my clamber-and-tumble-and-beech-and-bramble hill! Sometimes, when I'm standing on the top, I fill my lungs with air and I shout. I shout."

The book is full of this kind of excited writing. Crossley-Holland makes excellent use of hyphenated words. I think that's my favourite thing, his hyphenated words, they're just so beautiful and exciting.

Also, the story and characters are so full of feeling, just bursting with emotion. It's hard to find any book or story that comes even close to being as well rounded and well written as this! I'm looking forward to devouring the sequel.

If only I could write as well.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

This isn't a "Christian" story. Jesus doesn't show up anywhere in it. It has little to do with God too. But it does have much truth in it.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a fable about a man who dies and then has his life explained to him by five different people who crossed his path at one point or another in his lifetime. Although the story is about death, it has more to do with life and how it's lived.

I thought this story would be a little like The Shack, where the reader gets a glorious glimpse of Heaven that has the potential to be life-changing. But it was nothing like that. Rather, this book was more like a quiet reassurance.

The truth in the story comes in five different lessons, the first one is that there are no accidents, no coincidences. Everything happens for a reason. The second lesson is about the meaning of sacrifice. The third lesson is about the importance of forgiveness--not so much for the other person, but for yourself. The fourth lesson is about the strength of love. I'm not totally sure what the last lesson is, but I think it has something to do with how important the little things are, like fixing rides at an amusement park may not be a very fulfilling job and it doesn't bring a whole lot of meaning to life, but it's a very important job because without someone doing it, all kinds of little people would die in horrible amusement park accidents. Either that, or the good things you do in life make up for the bad things ... but that's not so good or true, so I'll stick with my first thought.

This book tries to be one that comforts you before you die, tells you that everything will be okay, that what you've done with your life wasn't meaningless, that you were important to someone or to lots of someones. It tries to help you face death.

How to Lose a Battle by Bill Fawcett

I found this book at a small bookstore while waiting for a flight out of Toronto's Pearson Airport. After leafing through it and laughing at Fawcett's unique humour, I decided to buy the book. Of course, I didn't want to be gouged at the airport, so I ordered it from Amazon.ca.

The book arrived and I read a few of the more interesting chapters. Today I read the whole book while waiting at the hospital for Janelle to come out of the OR.

It's a great book, very funny, very easy to read, and very accessible if you know even just a little bit about history. Bill Fawcett is not the author of the book, but its editor. The book is actually a compilation of articles written by various historians about poorly commanded battles throughout history. The first chapter deals with Alexander the Great's battle against Darius III at Arbela and the last one details the bungled battle of French commander Navarre at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. A handful of the articles are written by Bill Fawcett himself, and these are the best ones. They're funny, witty, and well written. Some of the other ones are less interesting. For example, the author who wrote about the civil war seemed kind of cranky--like he had a point to prove; and the author who wrote about the Six Day War seemed to have a political agenda because the article was more about the politics surrounding the war and the historical events leading up to the war than the actual war itself. But, mostly, the articles are right on, fun to read and short enough that you can read one or two in one sitting without getting bored out of your pants.

So it's a fun and interesting book if you're interested in this kind of thing.

Meet the Austins by Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle is well known for the book, A Wrinkle in Time, which is sort of metaphysical science fictiony and quirky weird in a good sort of way that makes it interesting and fun to read. Also, it's very well written.

Meet the Austins is not like A Wrinkle in Time. I was actually kind of surprised, because I was expecting it to be kind of metaphysical and science fictiony but it wasn't. Instead, it told the endearing story of the Austin family. The father, Wallace is a country doctor, the mother, Victoria is a musician and a homemaker. They have four children, John, who wants to be an astronaut and is building his own space suit; Victoria, who's a bit of a bookworm, but is mostly just plain and ordinary; Suzy, who wants to be a surgeon and is exceptionally smart, extremely stubborn, and always practicing surgery on her dolls; and Rob, who likes being the youngest very much and wants to be a ferry pilot when he grows up.

Their adventure begins when their Uncle Hal dies in a plane crash. That same plane crash leaves a family friend, Maggy Hamilton, orphaned. So, until everyone can decide what's to happen with Maggy, she is placed in the care of the Austins and goes to live with them. However, living with Maggy is no easy task because she's spoiled, willful, and generally hard to get along with.

I liked this story, even though it didn't have all the exciting science fiction stuff going on. It moved at a slow pace that made it easy to enjoy. The characters are very well developed and interesting and the more I got to know them, the more I liked them. There wasn't a whole lot of action or suspense but I kept reading it because the story was just so well told and well written and fun and interesting. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes to read, it's all kinds of fun and I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

more adventures

last monday i swept and mopped our main staircase from top to bottom. no sooner had i finished than i discovered that someone had urinated on the landing between the main floor and the first floor. right in the middle of the afternoon, no less, and while i was mopping it!

so, last night was my only night off all week. janelle and i watched a movie while we had supper, and then i rode the bike to the library and returned some books and took out Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce and went to canadian tire and bought a new weight scale and then picked up some arrowroot cookies and gingerale for janelle. janelle and i spent the rest of the evening relaxing and doing not much of anything and around eleven thirty we went to bed. we read together for a little bit and talked for a while and then i turned out the lights and we prepared to go to sleep.

no sooner had i closed my eyes than a horribly annoying ringing sound started going off in my ear. it took me a few seconds to figure out what it was. the fire alarm. as i climbed out of bed, janelle looked at the clock. midnight. dang. it always happens at midnight.

i got my pants and shirt on and called joy. she was heading down to the fire panel to find out where the alarm was going off. the fire panel indicated four locations, one being the eleventh floor, another being the second floor, and two in the basement. she directed me to the second floor but when i got there, there was nothing happening, no fire, no sprinkler, just the annoyingly persistent ringing of the fire alarm. looking through the window, i noticed that the fire department had arrived, so i made my way down to the main floor and found joy, just as the firefighters were coming in.

joy took two of the firefighters down to the basement sprinkler room and i took the rest up to the eleventh floor in the elevator. my fire key broke off in the elevator key hole, so joy and i had to switch keys, which resulted in an embarassing fiasco that i'm not going to write about here.

henry, our maintenance chief showed up shortly after the firefighters did and immediately took charge.

anyways, we got to the eleventh floor and saw water streaming out from under the door of two of the apartments. the firefighters got the door of one opened, and were banging on the other one but there was no answer. i unlocked it but the door was chained shut, so they banged and yelled some more. finally they cut the chain and forced the door open, stamping into the apartment. water was streaming into the apartment from under the wall. the carpet was already soaked. the firefighters had to wake up the occupants. back in the other apartment, they discovered that a sprinkler head had gone off, spraying water all over the apartment. when they had made certain that there was no fire, the firefighters turned the water off for that floor and smashed the toilet to drain the water, then started the long and tedious process of containing the water spill. i fetched a shop-vac from the basement and brought it up to begin vacuuming water out of the carpets.

the firefighters did what they could and then left, and the sprinkler people came and replaced the sprinkler head and turned the water back on and then they left. and joy called the carpet people and then we waited for them.

it turned out that the water flooded the apartments on the tenth, ninth, and eighth floors as well.

i was impressed with the carpet people. there were four of them, they came at around two thirty, one at a time. they brought sixteen dehumidifiers, at least as many blowers, and a bunch of water sucking vacuumes. they lifted the carpets and cut out all the underlay and threw it in the garbage, and then stuck blowers and dehumidifiers under the carpets.

as soon as the carpet people got themselves all set up, henry went back home and joy and i went to bed. it was three o'clock by the time i got home. thankfully, they let me sleep in until noon the next day.