Ageproofing (Age-Proof by Chatzky, Roizen, and Spiker)

Were these types of books out there when I was younger and I just ignored them? Maybe. Then, again, when I was younger, families thought they were feeding their children healthy food if they could afford the new boxed cereals, commercially canned fruits and vegetables (loaded with sugar and salt), and a commercial loaf of bread that could be molded into a marshmallow (with same type of texture).

A bit of a different picture this post. I actually don't know what connection I was making between these three! I may have been showing a family member how I can read three books at the same time. I started AgeProof (the book on the bottom of the picture) on January 1 and finished it on February 9. The book is meant to be worked through not raced through. The subtitle is "Living Longer Without Running Out of Money or Breaking a Hip." Jean Chatzky provides the financial information, Michael F. Roizen, MD provides the health information, and Ted Spiker writes it in a way so that the reader is not bored to death. The format is easy to work with and humorous as Spiker "spikes" (I had to) the information with quips from the two experts. The chapters alternate between finance and health (with connections to each other interwoven).

I have not read any of these authors other works so it was not a rehash for me. I did know much of the information, but it was nice to see it in writing with the background research written in common vocabulary and not medical or financial jargon.

Reviews are all over the place with this book -- the first that I've seen that happen on a site like Goodreads. The fluctuations in ratings seem to come from whether the reader gained much from the book or little, and that makes sense. If you already know the information, then the book will be boring or shallow. If the reader doesn't want to hear that Americans need to eat healthier, then that reader is going to think the doctor is pompous. Was it totally new to me? No, but did I find useful information or encouragement? Yes. Do I think the book is worth working through, if only as a checkup if you already know everything? Yes. Do I already believe in healthy eating and living healthy financially as well? Yes. My rating range: 3-5.

💕💕💕 In our family, we tend to make wise eating choices and we ended up eventually making wise financial choices, but, oh how we wish we had made those wise financial choices from the moment we married! I like how this book encourages everyone that it is never too late and even has sections for the different stages of life. My children are getting this book as a gift (and now I will find out which ones read my blog...ha).

--- It may seem strange to think that I am including my spiritual formation section in a review of a finance and health book; however, these authors have wise words about forming habits and making changes by small steps. Also, when one is wanting to change, change happens best when one replaces an unhealthy or unwise habit with a better choice rather than simply to stop the bad habit. For example, if a person wants to stop buying sugar laden lattes everyday (hard on the finances and the gut), then replace it with a smaller plain latte (less money and less sugar but still caffeine) and a small piece of extra dark chocolate.

With Christ-following spiritual formation, the replacement for gossip or lack of kindness or (fill in the blank) is knowing Christ. Not knowing about Jesus, but knowing Jesus daily. In order to do so, one way to make time for knowing Jesus and stopping the gossip or the unkindness might be to practice small steps of silence  or maybe it will be to start small steps of journaling or maybe singing grateful songs. I'll revisit these thoughts in later blogs. 

Companioning (Summer Hours at the Robbers Library by Sue Halpern...sic, as in "spelling is correct")

This book was not on any of my "to read" lists. I was wandering through the local library waiting for my granddaughter to pick out her books, and I saw this book in the NEW BOOK section. Look at this cover! How can a bookophile bypass such an offering? And, a  logophile, also.  So much so that I looked up the etymology of bookophile and logophile. At this point, if I have almost lost you, skip down to the picture! Bookophile is a recent addition to the English language. However, the word that means "lover of books" bibliophile is on record as early as 1820. If I have not lost you, logophile means "lover of words" as does lexophile; however, the latter is used mostly with people who love words in puzzles and the like. It has been at least three weeks since I have reviewed any books (although I have finished six books), and I needed to prime the brain to go into reviewing mode. Maybe I'm not such a lover of writing. What would that word be?

Awesome cover, isn't it? I have ten bookmarks in my library copy so I definitely enjoyed the book. I'm going with a rating between a three and a four. See how I rate in this post. Halpern's novel is entertaining, and I had it read within three days. Some readers think it ends abruptly, too pat (simple, glib, unconvincing) which took me back to my days of teaching denouement -- a tying up of all the loose ends into a conclusion -- a definition which is rather interesting considering I was taught the actual word means "unravelling" as in all the problems are unravelled and life settles (for good or for evil or in the case of great novels, ambiguously). I am truly digressing into words today!

One reviewer quit reading after the first chapter, which is not the first chapter but rather titled "The Marriage Story Part I". He or she called it "chic lit" and stated that starting out a book with college sex did not portend an auspicious read. (My apologies for the big words today; I'm only half way through my coffee; will that work as an excuse?) Skip that part if it would annoy you; Halpern does not actually continue in that vein.

Sliding up the scale from three stars to four, if you give an English teacher or a group discussion leader a book with talking points in it, she's going to like the book. Strewn throughout this book are quotes from poets and authors! Swoon!

There is a story. You might have been wondering. Homeschooled (wait, "Unschooled") girl Sunny steals a dictionary and gets community service time at, yes, you guessed it, the library, where she meets older single woman Kit, yes, the one involved in the marriage story, part 1, but she's not married now (and part of the draw of the story is wondering why she is not married). One also wonders what is going on with Sunny's parents, Willow and Steve.

My connections to the book -- Sunny and her parents do not eat anything with a face which leads Kit to contemplate a bible verse she learned in her college "Bible as Literature" class (Genesis, not Song of Solomon) about humans having dominion over animals. This talking point sent me off on a search of the Hebrew word radah. This is an excellent discussion of four Hebrew words used in Genesis. Rather than Sunny thinking the bible verse is a bad idea as in the book, the real Hebrew word would support her family's desire to protect and take care of animals. Also, in a connection to me,  my eating protocol at the moment is such that I'm not too keen to eat anything with a face...except maybe a fish...but that's a different blog.

Sunny and Kit have a discussion about silence and mindfulness which Sunny relates to because her parents went to a meditation retreat. Then, the two have the homeschool/unschool discussion throughout the book. Sunny states at one point about her ability to get along with younger children: "[It goes with] the whole homeschool / no-school territory. Older kids and younger kids are always tossed together. No one really makes a distinction. When you're little, you idolize the older kids, and when you're older, the little kids idolize you, and you get used to entertaining them" (71).

How about the question of reading the ending of the book first? See, if you're not a book reader, you're thinking, "Who cares?" but this is the type of question which raises voices in a book discussion group.

Another talking point: Characters change (103). Do they? Do the character traits of people change in real life?

Lest you think this is strictly a chick lit book, Halpern delves into the life and thoughts of her male character and his relationships with a group of four older men (thus, one of the aspects of my "Companioning" portion of my blog title). As much as I do not like the current wave of books where each character gets his or her own chapter, Halpern does a great job of transitioning between the characters.

Death and dying. Yup, got some death and dying in here. Got some religion, but church folks tend to get the negative aspects of the book. Maybe homeschoolers/un-schoolers get negative treatment as well, but Willow and Steve are not religious homeschoolers. No..., but I can't explain why without including plot spoilers. As a homeschooling parent who tried the John Holt unschooling, which is harder than using already written curriculum when done correctly, and a private school teacher and a public educator (not all at the same time), I'll just write that there are oddities and lawbreakers in every avenue of education.

I'll close with going back to the words and books. Halpern does include where Robbers Library comes from. It takes a long while for a short little explanation which has nothing to do with the story but satisfies those of us who kept flinching because we thought an apostrophe had been left out. After all, Sunny did steal a dictionary, but it has nothing to do with her. That's not a plot spoiler, folks. That's for all the readers who need to know that Robbers Library is not a typo or grammatical error. As for the books part -- the library -- some reviewers thought these situations would never happen at a real library. Pay attention to the reviews of the small town librarians. These activities could happen at all the small town libraries I have ever been in and used. We know our librarians. They are our people.

💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕

For the children/grandchildren part of my blog: Libraries! Go to them! Often! My children had a library card as soon as they could write their name, between four and five years old.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For the spiritual formation part of my blog: Check out that link about radah. You may not give up eating anything with a face, but what is one action you could take to protect the world we live in?
Next month is Plastic Free July . Give it a try. I have for several years now, and I've reached the point where it has become habit to avoid using single use plastic or, if possible, not use plastic at all. 

Day 12 -- Wilderness on This Twelfth Day of Advent

Wilderness gets a bad reputation in much of literature. Think of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and Dante waking in the middle of a dark wilderness. Before I lose readers in my literary allusions, I'll cut this reminiscence short with the comment: the wilderness is only scary if one is lost or the woods are on fire (Bambi).

Mary and Joseph are not lost; they're simply on their journey to Bethlehem at my house and encountered a bit of "wilderness." The wilderness can be a time of paying attention, of being reverent. Barbara Brown Taylor writes in An Altar in the World: "We pay attention to the speedometer, the wristwatch, the cell phone, the list of things to do, all of which feed our illusion that life is manageable. Meanwhile, none of them meets the first criteria for reverence, which is to remind us that we are not gods" (24). The wilderness, much as Advent calls us to do, beckons us to slow down and take in the beauty.

I would say the Creator of the wilderness blessed it with an atmosphere of refreshment and wonder. For the most part, the wilderness remains so. One still has to pay attention; it is, after all, a wild place, a place we can not tame.  There are natural cycles of drought and rain, cycles of fire and growth, but there are also surges of unnatural dryness created by cement jungles and unnatural fires born out of greed -- perhaps these are our vain attempts to be in control.

However, as I wait during Advent for the celebration to come, I will wait for the days when "the beasts of the field will not be afraid, the pastures of the wilderness will spring forth, the trees will bear fruit.." (Joel 2:22).

I will practice knowing that God is present in the wilderness. I will practice slowing down and paying attention. I will practice reverence. 

Ugh. I Missed a Special Moment

This week I had one of those ironic life moments. I was so busy "enhancing" a picture of God's creation (the photo below) by adding a scripture verse that I missed His handiwork right in my own yard: a deer with a fawn that I saw running off (after I decided a picture of God's creation was beautiful enough without a verse on it)! Many verses could go with this picture, or it could point back to the Creator Himself.

I like beautiful pictures with verses on them, and I don't necessarily think a picture with a verse is what Dallas Willard had in mind when he wrote about "clothing and greeting card graffiti" or "be cute or die" (The Divine Conspiracy 10), but go into a Christian bookstore and verses on anything and everything are certainly commercial products. Those products can be great reminders of God's words to us, but I was so busy trying to do something for God that I missed just being with Him in His creation and seeing His handiwork. And, if I am going to be transparent, maybe my picture idea wasn't cutesy, but I'm just as guilty as the next person at striving for cuteness in my Facebook posts!

I'm thankful for both Dallas's gracious words: "Absurdity and cuteness are fine to chuckle over and perhaps to muse upon" AND his exhortation: "But they are no place to live. They [absurdity and cuteness] provide no shelter or direction for being human" (ibid 11).

"Yet, in the gloom a light glimmers and glows. We have received an invitation. We are invited to make a pilgrimage -- into the heart and life of God" (ibid).

This week I was looking at journal prompts and I chose one where we write about 3 brights. The prompt fits well with Willard's quote above and looking for God in His creation (see also Romans 1:20). I wanted three bright things that anyone anywhere could see God in. The first is water as above. For the second, I chose flowers. Even in the most dismal of places, flowers show up.

Thirdly, I chose a child's face. Many, many years ago, I heard of a Russian scientist who came to believe in God as he looked at his child's ear. The ear is so intricately made as are all the parts of us! The eye amazes me with the number of colors that can be seen. Truly "we are fearfully and wonderfully made."

I don't have to miss work or be lazy in order to slow down long enough to be present to what is in front of my eyes. I can stop filling my calendar so full that there is no time to rest. I can look up, see the deer, see the bright beauty of water, flowers, a child's face -- to see God in His creation and worship Him.

I invite you to join me on this pilgrimage "into the heart and life of God." I'm looking for Him in His creation.

If you're a reader and joining me on this slow reading adventure, I moving on to pages 13-17 of The Divine Conspiracy. 

I am the oldest of seven siblings, so I grew up looking for that occasional place where I could retreat. If I was reading a book, the world could fall down all around me, and I would never notice. It was a shock to my system when I had children--four of them! Moms aren't allowed to escape. Now days I can lie still for five minutes of quiet in the morning or five in the evening, but back then I read to the children at night--everyone had to take a turns on whose bed I would sit and read. I would soon find myself asleep. Quiet time in the shower is also a good place (yes, I know there is the sound of running water, but it really is a good place for God to talk!) The best way, as a mom to be with God and nature was at the back of a stroller. I might not be still, but I could be silent.

I am blessed to have a big backyard with lots of trees, and I also live up the street from a small lake where I walk for exercise, prayer, and contemplation. Last week a night heron was sitting on a rock up close to the path. I have learned to enjoy sights such as this, but my tendency is to look for a lesson in everything.

I've always believed in seeing God at work daily, and that really became important to me last year when I was laid off from teaching. One day He encouraged me by having a red bird sit on my mailbox (so Hallmark card!!). I paused from driving my car down the driveway to contemplate what lesson God had for me in that bird sitting there. And, it was as if God said to me, "For heaven's sake, Debbi; it's this amazingly intensely red bird sitting on your mailbox making a beautiful picture for you to see and enjoy! I'm showing you beauty and grace because I love you. That's it! There doesn't need to be some hidden analogy, allegory, or allusion!"

So here I am. I enjoyed that night heron immensely, but I've turned that red bird into a lesson that there doesn't have to be a lesson. LOL!