Tag: book review

Categories
Books Marriage

How to Pray for Your Husband

This is actually a book review for the book The Power of a Praying Wife by Stormie Omartian.  This book was recommended to me by several people, especially those who saw me reading it.  I’ll admit that because of the high expectation that I had of the book based on the high praises I received about it, I did not find the book to match up to my expectations.  Overall, it had a lot of great ideas for how to pray for my husband, and it was formatted in a way that made it easy for me to plan my prayers.  But it sort of seemed like the author had her own way of dealing with her husband, in terms of how she presented herself and what pleased her husband, that she portrayed as necessary for all women to have to do.  All men are different, and while they might have similarities, they do not all have the same needs and there is no textbook answer of how to meet our husband’s needs.

Nevertheless,  I did learn some good points that I believe will strengthen my marriage and help me to be more strategic in my prayers.  One thing I learned is to “shut up and pray.”  I’ve learned from experience that when my husband is struggling with something, he gets upset at me if I tell him what to do.  He does not want me to belittle him; he wants me to trust him.  When I can’t trust him, I pray, because I can trust God to intervene.  Either God will change my husband’s mind, or He will soften my heart to the issue.  It is better to pray for my husband and to let God be the one to tell him what to do.  Instead of criticizing everything he does wrong, when I see him doing something I don’t like, I should let God speak.  What he is doing may be totally wrong, or it might be exactly what God wants him to do, but I have to let God make that decision, not me.

The book is formatted with information about an area of life to pray for your husband, an example prayer, and finally key verses that can help guide your own personal prayers.  The book contains thirty chapters of areas to pray for your husband, one for each day of the month.  The first chapter, the longest chapter, is a prayer for his wife.  That’s me.  We often want to change our spouses, but it turns out that God is stirring in our hearts the desire to change.  We might get frustrated that our husbands do things we don’t like, especially if they did not do those things when we were dating.  But maybe the problem is not with our husbands.  Maybe it’s our perception of what he is doing that is wrong.  We should pray for ourselves first, to have an attitude that reflects Christ and a submissive heart that encourages our husband and does not tear him down.  We should also be reading the Word of God and praying the Scriptures over our husbands.  God’s Word can help guide and direct our prayers.

I believe that the point of the book is to develop a discipline of spending time in prayer with the Lord.  When your first priority is your husband, you are not inclined to make time for God.  But when your husband starts to do things that annoy you or worry you, that’s when God starts to grab your attention.  That’s when you turn to Him again.  And you can try as hard as you want to make your husband change, but only God can do that.

After reading this book, my plan is to see what my husband struggles with and pray for something new each day.  If I have to confront my husband on something, I will bring it to the Lord first.  It may involve simply praying about it.  But, with the Lord’s guiding, it may also involve having a graceful conversation about the issue.

I pray for unity in your marriage, and for God to speak to your heart as you pray on behalf of your husband.  Whether you want to change your husband’s habits, or you genuinely care about his salvation and his obedience to the Lord, God hears you and He is able to answer your prayer in such  a perfect way.

Photo by Diana Simumpande on Unsplash

Categories
Book Update

My Blog’s Best of 2017

As 2017 comes to a close, I thought it would be fun to show how my blog has grown this year.  I’ve gained a lot of support and feedback over the year, and I’m excited at how God has used it to touch lives all over the world!

This year, people from thirty different countries have viewed my blog.  I’ve always said that I wanted to be a world traveler, and it seems that my writing is doing that for me!  Glory to God!  Here are the top ten countries that have viewed my blog in 2017:

  1. United States
  2. India
  3. United Kingdom
  4. Australia
  5. Canada
  6. Thailand
  7. Germany
  8. Ireland
  9. Israel
  10. Spain

If you are from those countries or are residing in any of those countries, thank you for your support!  I pray that my blog has been able to help you overcome anxiety, put God first in your marriage, or dig deeper into His Word.

In terms of views, here are the top ten blog posts of 2017:

  1. Why the First Year is the Hardest
    My first year of marriage wasn’t hard, but it did involve a lot of surrender and a lot of changes!  Find out how we were able to cope with those changes.
  2. Feelin’ Great After Reading This Book!
    One of my friends from church wrote the book Lose Weight and Feel Great.  I believe one of the reasons why this book review was viewed so much is because my friend shared this on his Facebook page.  Shameless plug: If you read a blog post and you love it, please share it!  My goal is to encourage people all over the world, and if something I write encourages you, maybe it will encourage your friends!
  3. My Husband is Not My Everything
    As much of a shocker as it is to society, my husband is not my everything.  Having the biblical perspective of marriage has truly improved our marriage and has helped us have healthy expectations of each other.
  4. I Have the Best Husband Ever…And Here’s Why
    Find out why my husband is the absolute best.  I know all of you with husbands would disagree, but that’s actually the point!
  5. The Power of a Nagging Wife
    This was the first blog I wrote this year, actually.  This was the post that got me back into writing.  This blog post, to the glory of God, really encouraged a lot of wives who are tempted to control their husbands.
  6. What You Say When You Attend a Wedding
    After attending about five weddings last year, including our own, we learned a thing or two about what it means to attend a wedding.  It is more than just the food, the dancing, and the drinking!
  7. Finding Financial Freedom as a Couple
    We’re debt free!  It’s amazing.  We want to share with you all what we’ve learned about financial freedom and how it is possible in this expensive, manipulative world.
  8. Anxiety Brings Me Closer to God
    I’ve been asking God to remove anxiety from my life, but looking back, it seems that God has been using my anxiety to bring me closer to Him.
  9. What’s Better than Lovey Dovey Feelings?
    People have been telling us from the beginning that our love is going to fade.  What we’ve found, and what we believe, is that our love will always be strong.
  10. Wrapped in His Arms: My Story of Singleness
    I remember being single and literally crying my eyes out some days because I felt so alone.  But I realized during those difficult days that I’m never alone.

Thanks again for helping make 2017 a great year!  For those who have been following, please let me know in the comments how this blog has impacted you this year, or if you have any feedback about how I could improve my blog in 2018.

My goals for next year are to write blogs ahead of time and have a more structured schedule.  In about 45 minutes, I’m going to watch a workshop about how to manage my time, and my husband bought me a planner for Christmas (thanks for loving the nerd in me, honey!).  My ultimate goal is to be more involved in my writing in general, but I’m at a season in my book where I’ll be doing more editing than writing, so that means more writing time to blog!  I’ll be focusing mostly on anxiety and marriage, but I’ll throw in some book reviews when I find a good read.

Happy New Year, everyone!  May God bless you abundantly in 2018.

Categories
Books

Just Courage: From Safe to Brave

The office where I work has a collection of books that the senior staff believed will help encourage us and strengthen us in our jobs.  I was interested to find a book by Gary Haugen, the founder of International Justice Mission, among the pile.  One of my friends works for IJM, so I was excited to read about the beginnings of this organization.  I also wanted to see what the work of IJM had to do with the work that I do in my church office.

The book is short, so it honestly is a nice pick-me-up, but if you really let the words settle into your soul, it will rock your world.  Haugen talks about his journey founding IJM, as well as the stories of some of his associates who have changed the world in big, brave ways.  At first, I thought this book would just be filled with success stories and a shout-out to the great staff at IJM.  But it also includes a challenge, a challenge to give up our safe and take on our brave.

Haugen uses the analogy of the cul-de-sac to describe how Christianity is today.  Most people feel that keeping their houses in a cul-de-sac area is safer because it is only one-way traffic.  However, studies have shown that more accidents occur in these areas than in other areas.  Therefore, we were wrong about what would be best for our children and families.

He expands on this idea of a cul-de-sac by saying that we tend to play safe in church.  We like our comfortable house, our kids, our pets, our finances, and we don’t really see life beyond that.  We get dissatisfied.  And the reason we get dissatisfied is because God has a bigger life for us.  He doesn’t want us to be safe; He wants us to be brave.  He wants us to trust Him.

I appreciate the work of IJM and the faith of Gary Haugen to start this organization.  I will admit that it is not a long book, so there is not much more to discuss.  But a powerful sentence can change the course of your day, even the course of your life.  Gary Haugen’s book Just Courage, although it is short, packs a punch that gets you thinking.  If you let it, this short book could change the course of your life.

In terms of how it relates to my job at the church, and my job as a writer, it reminds me that an act of courage can truly impact the world.  The courage that will truly change the world for good, though, is the courage that comes from knowing Jesus Christ as Savior.  I personally tend to be a fearful person, who even gets nervous going to work on occasion, but when I trust in the strength that God gives me, I am able to drive through traffic, make it to work, talk to people on the phone, interact with my co-workers, and handle all the tasks before me.  In my blog post next week, I’m going to share about what courage looks like.

Categories
Books

Freedom’s Ring: Boston Comes Alive

It is ironic to me that I’m writing a Christian fiction novel and I really don’t read a lot of Christian fiction.  When I went on the reNEW writers conference, I met a sweet woman who had just published her first novel.  It was so great listening to her story and hearing the journey that she endured while writing, rewriting, editing, and submitting her first novel.  I am glad that Heidi Chiavaroli’s novel Freedom’s Ring was my first real look at Christian fiction.

Freedom’s Ring is a time-slip novel, a novel that compares two stories in two different time periods.  The story follows Anaya, who, along with her family, suffered trauma from the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.  In the midst of the chaos that day, a mysterious hero gives Anaya a ring that is able to sustain her through her healing journey.  They spend the rest of the book learning the history of the ring, trying to discover its ancient meaning, while learning about themselves in the process.

The ring dates back to the 1700s, on the onset of the Boston Massacre.  During this time, Liberty, whose brother James is a Patriot, is servant to a Redcoat.  She develops feelings for the Lieutenant and must choose between her allegiance to her country and her desire for love and acceptance.

This book was Christian fiction done right.  It captured my heart with emotion, but it also left me inspired.  I felt like I was there with the women in the story, talking with them, getting inside their brains.  From a writer’s perspective, I was able to admire the character development and the change of thought as Anaya heals from her trauma and Liberty undergoes the trauma of the Boston Massacre as well as the political drama of the American Revolution.  Heidi does a wonderful job in making a story so historical to us so relevant to the reader.

I also love that Heidi brought to life the city of Boston.  I didn’t really know a lot about Boston when I read this book.  I have been to Boston a few times to check out colleges around there and to visit my aunt, but the streets were not familiar to me after visiting a few years ago.  I felt like I had bought a one-way ticket to Boston and had taken the scenic route, admiring the culture of this city rich with history.

The book is great for anyone who loves history.  I can imagine a few people I know that like Christian fiction and history enjoying this novel.  The romance is innocent, the emotions are real, and the historicity is realistic.  I give a solid thumbs up to Heidi for a great success on her first novel.

For more information about the book, including where to buy it, you can check out Heidi’s website at http://www.heidichiavaroli.com/

Categories
Books

What I Learned from “Gray Faith”

I met Carrye Burr on the reNEW retreat that I attended on Columbus Day weekend.  She was one of the women who encouraged me and now continues to encourage me with my writing.  We sat next to each other in the main room where we had our plenary sessions.  At the retreat, they had a Book Celebration and Signing for everyone who had published a book that year.  Carrye’s name was on the list!  I was sitting next to a published author!

I read the excerpt from her book Gray Faith on a sheet that we had received of everyone who published a book.  She wrote that she had grown up in a Christian home, the daughter of a pastor, and she had a lot of questions about her faith.  But, because she grew up as a pastor’s kid, she did not feel she had permission to ask those questions.  Nevertheless, she writes this book with the answers that she has discovered throughout her life, especially through the various trials that she has endured with her health, raising her kids, and the adoption of her son.

When I saw her summary, I instantly wanted to buy a copy of her book, not just because she was a debut novel writer, but because she had a story that was worth sharing.

The book is a fairly quick read (about 100 pages), but the information that she provides is genuine and fresh.  Without giving away too much about the book, Carrye includes issues that people deal with today, such as “seeker-friendly” churches and how to deal with sin.  Through the lens of a mother of three kids and a daughter to an obedient pastor, she is able to provide parenting advice for those who want to foster spiritual growth in their children, especially for those kids who have these times of questions about faith.

My favorite part of the book is the chapter on the church.  Having grown up in the church, Carrye never really thought about what it would be like for first-time guests to a church.  She felt comfortable in her church, so she thought everyone did as well.  But as she moved from place to place with her family and tried out different churches, she realized that all churches do not do things the same way.

Because of the rise of “seeker-friendly” churches (the ones with the dim lights and the coffee and the pastors wearing jeans), Carrye begins to question how comfortable the church should actually be for first-time guests.  Yes, we want them to feel welcome, but Christianity in and of itself isn’t always about comfort.  As a matter of fact, it’s about conforming to God’s standard for our lives, which almost always means a surrender of our plans for our lives.  That doesn’t sound too comfortable to me.  Since I work for a church that I think does a pretty good job of making it seeker-friendly but also Christ-focused, it was encouraging for me to do a heart check of what is important in a church.

The book Gray Faith demonstrates a sign of maturity in the Christian who asks these questions. The Christian who questions does not take everything at face value. If you have these questions, they might not get answered through reading this book, but the book was meant to start a conversation. May your questioning bring you closer to God.

Carrye Burr self-published this book, and it was a great book to get her name out there to continue building her platform as a writer.  At the retreat, she was already playing around ideas for another book, so I’m excited to see what other ideas God gives her!  You can purchase Carrye’s book Gray Faith on Amazon.

Categories
Book Update

Book Update: My Journey at reNEW

Nine thousand, one hundred, and seventeen.

That’s how many pages I had written toward my third rewrite of my book.  By hand.  All my book needed was time, character development, and a meaty storyline.  I’m pretty sure God gave me all of that when I went on this retreat a few weeks ago.

I’d signed up for reNEW (retreat for New England Writing) over the summer.  One of my friends from church invited me after she saw that I wanted to pursue a career as a writer.  The three of us from church who traveled together on Columbus Day Weekend did not know what to expect.

I’d already told you about what I learned spiritually and emotionally.  You’ll be amazed to know what I learned vocationally.

The retreat took place at Holy Family Retreat Center in West Hartford, Connecticut.  Having been built in the early 1950s, this retreat center has served as a source of hope, recovery, and a renewed love for Jesus Christ.

Believe it or not, this is what my book was missing!

As you know, my book is about a young woman who struggles with anxiety and learns to deal with the wounds from her past.  My book started as a testimony of how God healed me of anxiety.  Because I wanted to minister to a non-Christian audience (so that they can also find freedom from anxiety), I made God a symbolic, ambiguous character in the story.  When people read the story (even Christians!), they had no idea that the King was supposed to serve as the God character.

Before going on this retreat, I had been wrestling with how much of God I should put in my book.  On this retreat, I learned that God should be where he always was in my life, my marriage, and my writing: right at the center.  After walking through the Stations of the Cross, I could imagine my character walking along the trail, seeing her anxiety through the eyes of her Savior who literally moved Heaven and Earth to save her.  That experience brought healing not only to my soul, but to the soul of my main character, Tori.

If you never read anything from me again, may this message stick with you: Jesus Christ died for all of our sins, defeating death and all that it entails, and rose again three days later, carrying with him the hope of eternal life.  We think that eternal life begins when we die.  Well, we die when we surrender our lives to Christ, and He gives us new life right now.  And that’s how I was finally able to understand how to overcome anxiety, when I realized how dead I was before Jesus came and breathed new life into me.  Now my anxiety has no power over me.  And that’s the message behind my book Kingdom of Truth (title pending).

I’m thankful for the people who made reNEW possible.  I’m so blessed to have met some wonderful ladies who are now encouraging me in my writing and are giving me some interesting material to read as well!  I felt like I was a spark plug in need of an outlet, and this retreat truly helped me get connected and revived.

Now that I’m back to “the real world,” please pray that I would take the time to really invest in this book.  I have very little free time in my schedule, and when I actually have time, I’m tired and just want to curl into a ball and drink some tea.  But the desire to write has been burning within, even more now that I’ve attended this retreat.  My goal is to finish the book by the end of this year.  I’m celebrating each time I write even a hundred words (a paragraph) a day.

Thank you all for your support and prayers!

Photo courtesy of Green Chameleon on Unsplash.

 

Categories
Books

Just Mercy: A Book that Made Me Cry, Ponder, and Cry Some More

As much as I love reading, it takes a lot for a book to make me cry.  Usually I cry at movies because the screen is right in front of me.  But a book has to be written in such a way that I can literally imagine myself standing in the same room as the one being hurt, and feel bad for him/her.

Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption was written in that exact way.

This book was another read recommended by the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit.  The book was so well-written that I literally read it cover to cover.  I even read the Acknowledgements!

While reading the book, I thought that I was reading a fiction novel.  The book was written in a descriptive narrative that appeared to be omniscient perspective.  Stevenson had been able to perfectly replicate the feelings, thoughts, and actions, and motives of all the people who he highlighted in his book, just like a novelist would.

But that wasn’t the only reason why it felt like a fiction novel.

The book summary highlights the story of Walter McMillan, a man who was put on death row, having been wrongly accused of murdering Ronda Morrison of Monroeville, Alabama.  However, Stevenson also includes the stories of other cases that he had helped, especially children who had been sentenced to life without parole for non-homicidal actions.  McMillan’s story, as well as the others, exposed the racial injustice in the judicial system that Stevenson’s agency, Equal Justice Initiative, fights to correct.  The injustice that I read in the book was so terrible that I had wished throughout the entire book that it was a fiction novel.  I couldn’t believe that this was true, that these events had actually happened in our country.

The book is a timely novel in that there is currently debate over whether racism still exists today. For such a touchy subject as racism, Stevenson does a brilliant job of appearing unbiased toward the criminals as well as toward the victims.  Since the book was written in 2014, and the trials that he discusses took place between 1980 and 2010, it seems that Stevenson wants to continue the conversation of racial injustice in the judicial system so that it does not continue.  History has a habit of repeating itself.  If we forget about the mistakes of our ancestors, we run the risk of making the same mistakes.

While I was reading the book, my husband noted how often I would gasp.  I didn’t even realize I was doing it.  My gasps were in response to the incredulous actions of the court.  There were situations where they disposed of evidence in favor of the defendant, they forbade people of color to enter the courtroom, and they even sentenced the defendants to life without parole without any credible evidence that they committed the crime.  For the most part, the court just wanted to blame someone.

My gasps were also in response to the terrible lives that these criminals had to endure.  Stevenson writes in detail what it actually looks like for people to be executed in the electric chair.  I cried right along with them as the flesh was burning off of their skin.  One little boy was so small that the headpiece of the chair fell off his head when they did the first shock.  Stevenson also shares their backstories.  Some kids had watched their mothers get sexually and physically abused right before their eyes.  Some kids were good kids, but they hung around the wrong crowd.  Some had mental illnesses.

What Stevenson portrays in his book is that these people are, well, people.  They are people created in the image of God who have been tainted by sin, who have been broken by the world.  Just like all of us.  Maybe killing the broken people of this world isn’t the best way to make the world right.

To present a critical analysis of this book, I must point out a message that may not be clear to every reader: the fact that these criminals have terrible backstories does not excuse their behavior.  These stories may explain their behavior, but they do not excuse their behavior.  If a rape victim murders somebody because she feels paranoid that everyone is out to get her, it’s sad that she feels that way, but it does not make the fact that she murdered someone okay.  These kids did commit acts of violence that were completely and totally wrong.  What I think Stevenson is trying to argue, however, is that there should be a different way of dealing with these situations, such as through counseling or other correctional programs.  Simply killing someone (or letting someone rot in jail) who made a mistake does not fix their behavior.

For more information about Bryan Stevenson’s work with the Equal Justice Initiative, visit his website (click here).  The work that EJI continues to do demonstrates that the issues in this book are not completely resolved.  Pray about the part that you will play in promoting justice and mercy in our society.