My mother gave us this little book years ago. It sat on a bookshelf for a long while collecting dust. Now, I’m completely unsure why I barely cracked it open for so long, and also extremely thankful for this little gem. Recently I’ve been coming to it for wisdom and instruction, hoping it will show me a little bit how to pray and how to relate to God. I found this prayer this morning, and feel compelled to keep it here:
Morning
I always thought spring was my favorite season, but after returning to the midwest from six years in always-sunny southern California, autumn may be moving into the lead.
It’s especially great in Chicago, because I think fall lasts a bit longer here. It’s November 2nd, we’re still hovering around 60 degrees, and the trees are still filled with colorful autumn leaves. I love the excuse to have a cup of coffee or tea by my side through most of the day. The skies are often gray, but not dark like they are when the clouds are filled with rain. The inside of my house is filled with a cozy sense of productivity, like I could be content to work here for hours.
September brought us into a fall that began with a host of new responsibilities, sources of stress, and an endless list of to-dos. As I sit in my dining room today (pathophysiology books and study materials close at hand) I’m struck by a new sense of gratitude for this season. There’s just not enough time in life not to reflect on the good things that come our way. Of course many of those things are immaterial; the blessings of good friendships, peace in the midst of uncertainty, the license to spend time working toward a meaningful goal. But some of them are very much material. And these, I pass along to you:
I love this stuff. My favorite way to enjoy the morning is to put on a pot of this, burn my pumpkin nutmeg candle, and let the delightful smells of fall fill our apartment.
This is the tea that just might be able to break me of my coffee habit. Smooth, delicate, floral; this stuff is simply a delight. I especially love it with a little bit of milk and honey.
How many times have you been told by avid Harry Potter fans: “you have to read the books.” It took me hearing that about thirty times before I finally dove into the series. Jeremy and I read them one after another in two months, just recently finishing book seven. I loved them. Partly because they’re great stories; I had to force myself to put them down every now and again so that I could continue doing normal life things. But also because they’re great to talk about and ponder over. This has become the best selling series of books ever written and I think it’s important to be a person who can understand why.
Now I’m reading this. I’m only half way through, but I think I can recommend it. First off, I think it’s really healthy to read good books about real things that happened to real people. Fiction tends to be my favorite recreational reading, but often a good biography is just as enjoyable and can be far more rewarding. It gets a little intense at times (I probably wouldn’t give it to my kids to read), but it’s an incredible true story about a rebel kid turned olympic runner turned WWII bomber pilot.
This actually has nothing to do with my fall this year, but in the spirit of reading books (a wonderful pastime for these cozy days inside) I had to mention this. I just realized I never wrote about this book, which I intended to do when I finished it in June. It’s actually real inappropriate that this is at the end of my blog post, because this ishands down the best book I have ever read (barring the Bible, of course). Unbroken is great so far, but it doesn’t even begin to hold a torch to Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Metaxas is an incredible biographer, writing about Bonhoeffer in a captivating yet immensely informative way. This book amazed me, inspired me, and repeatedly caused me to consider my own Christian life. Bonhoeffer will forever be a hero of mine, and I’d read any biography Metaxas wrote.
Well I suppose it’s about time I get back to working on the things that need to get done and won’t do themselves. I’m encouraged by this season, and excited to see the beginning of November. Here’s to hoping and praying for the ability to keep our lives in perspective, always.
Jeremy brought this book home one day from the TFA library, figuring he should have a better grasp on the beginnings of the organization. I picked it up myself out of curiosity with few expectations and no plan to necessarily finish.
I read the book in one day, and what an incredible story. This woman, Wendy Kopp, started this nonprofit fresh out of her undergraduate education at Princeton. Now Teach for America is one of the most successful nonprofits in the nation.
Add this to your summer reading list before summer’s up. You’ll be amazed and inspired.
in no particular order:
1. Organize your Home
Go through all that old junk in those places you never see. Take everything out from under your bathroom sink and go on a throwing-away binge. Dig through your junk drawers and find purposeful places for the few things that don’t belong in the garbage. Rearrange where you keep things. Let nothing in your house have no home! It may take a couple of hard days work but it will be well worth it.
2. Get up Early on Your Day Off
Not a morning person? You should still try this. It’s good to be up when the sun has just risen and the world is not fully awake just yet. It’s very little fun getting up early for work. Choosing to get up early is a beautiful thing and, more importantly, will help you become a better person.
3. Read This Book:
This is a terrible picture of a really wonderful collection of stories. This book will be good for you whether you love to read (and do it all the time), or do not so much like to read (but kind of wish you did). [If you do not like to read and do not wish you liked to read, you should work on that. In your case, this book will also be good for you.] I recommend making a habit of reading it before bedtime, but it’s truly a delight at any time of day. People should be making sure to read quality fiction these days.
4. Listen to the Bible Being Read Aloud
The ESV website is a great tool for listening to the Word. You’d be amazed at how much Bible you can listen to in a relatively short period of time. It seems safe to assume very few of us are reading the Bible as much as we should, would like to, or would be best for us. I also think it’s important to interact with Scripture in a variety of ways. Hearing it read aloud can show and teach us things we might not see when reading it on our own.
5. Start the Day With a Cup of Coffee and a Book
Don’t like coffee? Hot drink for you, then. This book could be the Bible or any other reading material. Does a cup of something hot and some quality time with a good book sound a bit idealistic for the average working adult? It may be. In that case, consider this a good rule of thumb for days off and weekends. Relaxing with something intellectually stimulating in the morning is bound to get your day going in the right direction. If your computer screen is what regularly greets you first thing, change your ways. Reading as your first activity of the day will make your life better in ways that emailing and blogging (ouch!) cannot.
6. Send a Note by Snail Mail to Someone You Love
This is good for everyone involved (duh). It requires a fair amount of thought, effort, and others-focusedness. Sending friendly greetings via the world wide web is good and important too. We should make an effort to do that as well. But when you send a card through the USPS, you spend some good focused minutes thinking about someone else, and you have to construct a jumble of words that is worth getting written down and sent on actual paper to this person for no special occasion. I don’t think I have to mention how great it feels to get a “just because” card in the mail.
I happened to do all six of these things today, which inspired me to write them down as things that will make your life better. Go ahead, try them out.
Well. We joined a co-op. I know what you’re thinking. It has to be one of three things:
1. What the heck is a co-op?
2. ERIN? Joining a CO-OP? What happened to my non-health-conscious, junky-food-loving [friend/daughter/sister/in-law/other-appropriate-relational-title]?
3. They’ve been in Echo Park for more than a year now. It was bound to happen.
If you’re in the camp that was pondering #1, let me explain exactly what “we joined a co-op” means. A co-op–or, a food co-op, to be more precise–is a form of something known as community supported agriculture, or CSA. We join, or subscribe to, a group of local farms from which we’ll receive a weekly box of produce. Our group is called Abundant Harvest. You don’t choose what’s in your box; the farmers fill it with whichever crops are in season and ready to be harvested. It comes just like this:
It’s all organic. And the point is to eat more (as well as a wider variety of) real food that is good for you, rich in nutrients, and grown by people you can actually meet, as opposed to mass-producing farms across the country (or the world, for that matter.) That’s good.
Well now that you know what a co-op is (or at least have a bit of an idea… I would encourage following my link to Abundant Harvest’s website above to find out more), I’ll address those of you who were thinking #2. (I’ll be clear right now: I’m not going to address the #3′s. Valid thinking, #3′s.)
I guess for me, my great awakening came as a result of this book: In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, the tag line of which is “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
The book is by a guy named Michael Pollan; an author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at UC Berkeley. It’s a book you should read, regardless of whether or not you care about health and eating. It’s an extremely interesting read about American Nutritionism, the Western diet, and the simple answers to our unending list of questions about what we should eat as a result of our obsession with so-called “health.”
To give you a taste of what this book is about, Pollan makes these five suggestions in his chapter entitled “Eat Food: Food Defined:”
1. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (The idea is that a few generations back, we were still eating real food, not mass marketed “food products” processed and packaged to look like real food, but made with significantly less nutrients and significantly more unnatural ingredients. His example: Go-gurt. Would your great grandma see a package of go-gurt and think maybe it was toothpaste?)
2. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup. (These are some hallmarks of processed food labels. For example, a loaf of bread shouldn’t have 41 ingredients, half of which you’ve never heard of and/or can’t pronounce. Apparently this is the case with Sara Lee’s Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread.)
3. Avoid food products that make health claims. (The foods with the most license to make health claims don’t have packages to make them on, for one. Also, foods that need to make bold health claims in order to convince you they’re healthy are often making claims off of “incomplete and often erroneous” science.)
4. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle. (You’re more likely to pick up real food here. The most processed foods are typically found in the middle aisles.
5. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. (Because even the most real foods you’ll find in the supermarket are likely grown and raised in environments that cause them to be far less nutrient-rich as a result of modern industrial agriculture.)
This book has had a profound impact on the way I think about eating, and how to live life in general. We’re a part of a generation that increasingly has no idea how to prepare a meal without taking a trip to Fresh and Easy for something pre-marinaded that we can pop in the oven. We’re lovers of all things easy and convenient, often at the cost of growth and quality. The food that we eat has an impact on far more than our own personal health and well-being. Eating real food is a service to the entire food chain, and a step in the right direction for cultivating a healthy culture, environment, and world. Let’s be wise stewards of what God has entrusted to us here on Earth.
I made a goal for myself this summer to read one book a month, and then blog about each book after I’d completed it. Well, I finished Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis in about seven days, and I’ve been putting off writing about it for nearly a month now.
I suppose I put off the writing because I had no idea what to say about the book. Before I read it, I had multiple people tell me it was a very difficult book. As I began to read, I had no idea what they were talking about. I found myself speeding through it and never felt like I had missed information crucial to the storyline. But the deeper I got into the book, the more I understood what my friends meant about it being hard, and by the time I finished I had no idea how to reflect on it. The only things I could think through were my emotions as I progressed through the book. Even here, though, those seem difficult to express, and I’m afraid I don’t have much insight to share. This post will have to be a plea for insights from anyone else who has read the book, and might be able to reflect some to my benefit.
Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they might be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
-Phillip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families
For three weeks in the fall, I will be visiting Kibuye, Rwanda with a team of nursing students. Kibuye sits on the eastern border of Lake Kivu in western Rwanda. This town was hit hard by the genocide in 1994, suffering the loss of most of the city’s Tutsis, which accounted for nearly one third its population.
For the month of June, I read We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families.
Journalist Philip Gourevitch, of The New Yorker, wrote this New York Times bestseller and winner of the Los Angeles Times book prize and the Polk award for foreign reporting. The back cover calls it, “an anatomy of the killings in Rwanda, a vivid history of the genocide’s background, and an unforgettable account of what it means to survive in its aftermath.”
True to this description, Gourevitch does an incredible job bringing to light what happened in Rwanda nearly fifteen years ago. He interviews survivors of the genocide, individuals accused of committing genocide, important political leaders on both sides, and anyone else willing to talk to him. He examines the response of the international community to the crisis and writes during the early post-genocide years of the country.
This is a book everyone should read. It was incredible how little I knew about such a significant tragedy, and I found myself surprised at my lack of understanding of how much learning about the genocide matters for me as I seek to understand, help and love people of Rwanda today. If you’re looking for a page turner that will teach you a great deal and inspire you to think, this is the book.
