The Simmering Mind

I hope your Christmas was merry!  Ours was delightful, and I am very much enjoying my new Kindle, a gift from my wonderful, generous husband!  As much as I love real books, e-readers have fascinated me for a long time (when I was younger I thought I had invented the idea for my book…haha).  I love the idea of being able to take a ton of books with me everywhere, in a device small enough to stick inside my – rather tiny – purse.m

Reading this week: Give Them Grace by Elyse M. Fitzpatrick and Jessica Thompson (my first Kindle read!).  The basic premise of this book is that many Christian parents, although believing on a spiritual level that only Christ can change our hearts, end up trying to make their children “good” through law, rules, guidelines, etc. on a practical level.  The book urges and encourages Christian moms and dads to point their children toward Christ and His righteous fulfillment of God’s law on our behalf.  Although I have a few beefs with some of it, it’s a really good book overall (it’s worth buying for the chapter on human weakness and failure alone!).  I wholeheartedly recommend it to Christian parents – and even those who aren’t yet parents, as I found the book applied more to my life and my legalistic tendencies than it did to my future parenting.  Actually I recommend the general “gospel application” parts of the book more than the specifically parenting-related parts!

Writing this week: not a lot, due to the Christmas holiday.  I’ve been writing a miscellaneous scene that came to me on Christmas night, about a girl whose car crashes off the side of the road during a snowstorm.  She may or may not encounter magical creatures in the roadside woods…

Quotes I’m pondering today: 

“…Paul was familiar with real suffering, but this thorn was far worse.  This thorn was ordained by God to keep Paul humble, dependent, and weak.  Paul also recognized that this thorn was a messenger of Satan.  Here’s the astonishing truth: God used Satan to keep Paul from the sin of pride.  God always employs Satan to God’s end, to serve God’s people.  God uses Satan to produce godliness in us too, just as he did in Paul.  …None of us want to appear weak or incompetent…we hate it when we can’t boast…yet we can grow in our faith to believe that the Lord is sending a particular trial because it glorifies Him.  …  Paul understood that personal success and strength were barriers to his experience of God’s grace.  God’s sustaining power is seen and developed in our weakness and failure.” – Elyse M. Fitzpatrick, Give Them Grace

“But he [the Lord] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’  Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” – 2 Corinthians 12:9

Stuck in my head today: the theme song from the show Eureka, which my husband and I have been watching voraciously.  Or, alternately, the ditty my son’s new cookie jar toy sings every time you stick your hand in…

Coming soon: the first chapter of The Queen in the Wooden Box!