The Sacred Sandwich made me laugh harder than I have all week.

Tired of Postmodern “Conversation,” Pastor Tells Congregation to Shut Up:

Sadly, this was not the first time Wynn had exhibited a drift toward fundamentalism and biblical certainty. Two months earlier, church leaders became concerned when Wynn became noticeably excited about ordering the new ESV Study Bible. “Things just didn’t seem right with Tuck after that,” said tattoo and piercing minister Leslie Moore. “First he started using big words like hermeneutics, exegesis, and perpiscuity. Then he started hammering us on doctrine, of all things. Before we knew it, he was blowing out our candles and turning up the dimmer switch in the sanctuary so we could read the Bible during worship. Talk about a buzz kill. We could barely see the Nooma videos with all the lights on.”

I hadn’t seen this site before. HT to Tim Challies for pointing me there.

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Diane shares a A lovely tribute to her father and the peace that forgiveness brings.

Tim Challies lists, in no particular order, the things he misses about cable TV.

I’m not ready to talk about what I was doing on a site about writing fiction, but I was intrigued by the snowflake method of novel writing.

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It’s been a week of fiction.

In the spirit of “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”, I’ll only talk about the fiction that was decent.

I talked about Expectations, by Melanie Jeschke, last week, but since I finished it this week (and since I don’t want to talk about the books I threw down in disgust), I’ll mention it again.

There are a lot of things that are just going to appeal to me about this series. It’s set in Oxford. It’s character-driven. The characters spend a lot of time talking about writers like Shakespeare and C.S. Lewis. The author makes several subtle nods to Jane Austen by giving characters names like Austen, Bingley, and Elinor. I mean, what’s not to like?

All that to say, I would have liked this series if it hadn’t been so well done. But it was well done, which made it all the more enjoyable.

I’m not saying that this is going to be the next enduring classic, but it was a very fun read, and that’s really nice sometimes.

I talked about Evasions, also by Melanie Jeschke, yesterday. It’s a prequel to the other books in the Oxford Chronicles series, set during World War II. I swallowed this one whole. Very fun.

And then I tried some other fiction, but I’m not going to talk about that.

But when it comes to a good love story, does any body do it better than Jane Austen? I think not. Miss Austen is the master, so I picked Persuasion up off the shelf and started it. Again. I tend to read through Austen’s oeuvre every year or so. I think this may be one of those times.

It’s been a couple of years since I read Pride and Prejudice and Emma. They may be next.

Unless I get distracted by something else, first.

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This week, I finished the third book in Melanie Jeschke’s Oxford Chronicles series, Evasions.

I liked this series very much. The plots were interesting, the characters were well-developed, the writing was good. If all Christian fiction were this well done, I would be a much happier person.

I’ve written about it at length, but the state of fiction today has made me a woman without a country. Fiction is very much my first love, but I don’t find a lot of new fiction that I like to read. Popular fiction is often the literary equivalent of watching a soap opera. Literary fiction is often well-written, but no matter how talented the author is, I’m not interesting in reading a page after page where the main character ponders an oozing, gangrenous wound and its significance in his life. Real life is tedious enough without all that.

Some Christian fiction is good, but most is disappointing. Too sweet, too perfect, too self-righteous. I have long felt that the submission guidelines for the major Christian fiction publishing houses contributed to the problem, but that’s another post for another day.

The Oxford Chronicles gave me hope. Perhaps the state of Christian fiction had improved.

I picked up a book by a new author that I hadn’t read yet. It was okay. Exciting plot, so-so writing. The author was trying too hard to make the characters funny, and had a penchant for bad metaphors that put me in the mind of Dan Rather on election night, but it was bearable.

From there I went to a book by another Christian author who has had an enormous amount of success. I have read and enjoyed a few of her books in the past, so I thought I’d give it another go.

Ugh. I didn’t make it past the first ten pages. The main character was very rich and very beautiful. She had a gorgeous boyfriend with a soap opera name. We learned on page two that she had a tiny waist. Shortly after that, she was examining her face in the mirror.

Since I’m being mean, I’m going to paraphrase, but this very close. If you read this passage in another book, it’s just a coincidence that handily proves my point:

She examined herself in the mirror. Her large, round, wide-set eyes, as blue as the spring sky on a windswept day, stared back at her. She had her mother’s small, pert nose. She leaned closer to the mirror, dismayed to see the beginnings of a pimple beneath her full, round, red lips, and sighed. Her hair was pulled back in a clip, and she reached up to release it, shaking her head as her thick, luxurious blond mane fell in soft waves to frame her oval face.

Somebody, please find this writer and take away her computer.

There is nothing I hate more than when a character examines herself in the mirror so the author can work in a description. I’m probably guilty of it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Anyway, I ended the evening reading Persuasion. Kind of like a palate cleanser.

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Rechelle, the Country Doctor’s Wife, is getting her outfit together for an eighties party. So I’m reading her post and scrolling through the pictures, and BAM!

Because right there, in living color, is a dress EXACTLY like the dress I wore to my sorority’s spring formal in 1992.

Black and white polka dots. I LOVED that dress.

As you can imagine, when I was wearing that dress fifteen years ago, I didn’t foresee that I would be sitting here on my couch today remembering the dress and the dance and the guy who took me to said dance, and being so, so grateful that guy dumped me a couple months later and left me brokenhearted.

Thank you, Lord.

I spent the summer of 1992 in misery, convinced that my life was over. I had loved and lost, and was destined to spend my life as an old maid. I was twenty.

You are absolutely allowed to say that I was being a tad melodramatic.

Because later that fall, I heard a sermon that changed my life forever. Then, less than a year after that dance, I met a man at church, and that changed my life forever, too.

But oh, how I loved that dress.

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When I was in college, I applied for a job that required a math test.

It wasn’t a hard test, just common, horse-sense arithmetic (to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite professors). Fractions. Decimals. That sort of thing. When I went to the interview, I was congratulated because I got a perfect score on the math test.

I later learned that the math test requirement caused quite a bugaboo when it was instated. The department manager finally got it through to the powers that be that since the people he hired were going to be mixing IVs, it was kind of important that they know how to add and subtract.

All this to say that I get math. But it wasn’t always that way. I still don’t like my third grade math teacher, simply because she’s the person that introduced me to long division and that’s just cruel.

And even though my friends insist that I’m just embarrassed that I burst into tears in class that day and she showed me no sympathy, I think that’s indicative of a very hard heart. Counselors should be made available when long division is introduced. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

But around the time I started high school, it all came together. I now realize that it’s part and parcel of being a big picture, right-brained person. When I could grasp the “why” behind it all, I rocked. Just give me a page of long division and I will knock it out.

And fractions? I am one with the fraction. I can be the fraction. Fractions don’t stand a chance against me. I have mad fraction skillz.

Unless I am trying to teach another right-brained, big picture person. And if that person hasn’t reached the stage where it all starts to come together, you’re in for some hard days.

That’s all I’m going to say about that. I’m just glad we’re on to decimals.

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If this continues, I may have to go back to staying up half the night. I’m starting to think that my efforts to get more sleep have caused some sort of molecular shift and I’m now living in a parallel universe.

Kind of like how the flutter of butterfly wings in Iowa is said to eventually result in an Atlantic hurricane.

It’s seven o’clock in the morning, and my oldest child is up doing math.

Either he’s picked up on my good example, or he wants to play the Wii game he bought with his birthday money.

One of the two.

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Last week I decided that even though I’ve always been able to function on much less than the eight hours of sleep they all say we need, as I travel this strange land known as the “mid-thirties,” perhaps I need to make a real effort to get myself to sleep at a decent hour.

Since I get up at five-thirty in order to see Theodore off, this requires a bedtime favored my third graders all over the nation. I haven’t quite made it that early, but I’ve been closer than ever.

The thing is, every night since this momentous decision (I decided this on Thursday), somebody or something has woke me up (awakened me? I’m too tired to puzzle out the verb tense.) at least once during the night.

Last night a child needed me at 4 AM. And while this child made a valiant effort to get himself back to sleep, we’ve been sitting here since six looking at the latest Lego magazine and discussing our favorite episodes of Scooby-Doo (which is apparently ALL of them).

Or at least one of us has been doing this. The other of us has been drinking coffee as fast as possible. I’ll let you figure out who’s who.

I have been enjoying this time, but I am not so tired that I can’t do the math. This child, who usually gets up at nine, has been up since four. That’s five hours less sleep than usual. I’m a little nervous about the state of the emotions around supper time.

The good news is that I already have the second load of laundry in the washer. By my calculation I should collapse from exhaustion about the time it’s all dry and on my bed needing to be folded.

I think I’m going to got start another pot of coffee. May your day be happy and may mine include a nap.

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In God We Do Not Trust. Mark Driscoll points out that our nation does not need a mere president, but a Savior.

Angie at Bring the Rain is praying Seven Prayers a Day for her children.

Shannon offers a Very Squishy Public Service Announcement.

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Trusting God: Even When Life Hurts by Jerry Bridges. I highly recommend this book. The only reason I didn’t get it reviewed is…well, I don’t know, but I meant to review it. It covers a lot of the same ground as Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest, but in a slightly different way. Trusting God starts with God, while Running Scared (which I reviewed here) starts with worry and works backwards. I think Trusting God is more thorough, and therefore does a better job at quieting fear. It was a good book to be reading during the election, particularly the chapter on God’s sovereignty over the nations. I’ve yet to meet a book by Jerry Bridges that hasn’t strengthened my faith. Hat tip to Connie at Practicing Theology for recommending it.

Reforming or Conforming?: Post-Conservative Evangelicals and the Emerging Church Takes a bit more concentration, and lately I haven’t been in a place conducive to sustained, silent reading (both literally and figuratively). I’ve been skipping around a bit. I’m learning a lot, but I keep on getting sidetracked by the footnotes. There are LOTS of footnotes.

Expectations, by Melanie Jeschke, is the second book in the Oxford Chronicles. I frequently find Christian fiction exasperating, but I’ve enjoyed this series. It’s kind of fun to pick up a book and read for the sheer entertainment of it. I gave a brief (and rather flippant) review of the first book of the series here.

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