Tag: christian (page 10 of 39)

August 19, 2021 / 0 Comments

Do Great Things for God (Series)

One of the bits of writing advice I absorbed during college was “Show, don’t tell.” Show me the character gnashing her teeth; don’t tell me she was angry. Show me the geriatric cat holding his ground against a pitbull; don’t tell me he still had spunk. It’s good advice for writers, but I find that “show, don’t tell” is essential advice for the Christian life as well.

Discipleship is showing, not telling: it is one believer demonstrating for another how to live in this world as a Christian. Telling is important, too, but without giving a disciple a lived example to follow, discipleship becomes—there’s no easy way to say it—hypocrisy. How much more so in parenting? My daughters have learned far more about my habits and loves than I expected them to when they were little and I was certain I could simply tell them how to live. Evidently, they’ve been watching far more than they’ve been listening. God, in his mercy, has now given me a handful of people who will (sometimes bluntly, but most often politely) call me out on my inconsistencies.

Sometimes I’m not clear on which of us is the disciple and which the discipler.

Do Great Things for God: Corrie Ten Boom, by Laura Caputo-Wickham | Little Book, Big Story

But I digress. One of the things I love best about Christian biographies is that they show, from beginning to end, a Christian life lived faithfully before God. My daughters can only look at the thirteen or ten or five years that they’ve known me and glean from that, but with Christian biographies, we can watch together how George Mueller, Phillis Wheatley, or Elisabeth Elliot lived from beginning to end.

Most of the biographies we’ve read so far have been chapter books or were intended for older readers, and I had never questioned that. In many cases, these believers lived through incredible hardship and persecution. I found it hard to imagine ever translating those stories into a form that would both appeal to and be appropriate for a younger reader.

But behold! Laura Caputo-Wickham has done it!

Do Great Things for God: Betsey Stockton, by Laura Caputo-Wickham | Little Book, Big Story

Her “Do Great Things for God” series is written for elementary-aged children. These are short picture books—beautifully illustrated by Isabel Muñoz—that show readers what the lives of Betsey Stockton and Corrie ten Boom looked like. Pause there for a moment. Betsey Stockton: a recently emancipated slave, who gave her life to missionary work in Hawaii. And Corrie ten Boom: a Dutch woman who was arrested during WWII for rescuing Jewish people from the Nazis. Caputo-Wickham simplifies these stories for the sake of her readers, but she aims high, showing readers that God is faithful even through slavery and the Nazi death camps.

And she does not overestimate her readers. My seven- and five-year-old daughters love these books. In fact, Betsey Stockton was the first full-length picture book my seven-year-old read aloud to me. I often find both girls thumbing through these on their own, talking their way through the pictures, and that is the nicest thing I can say about a picture book: my daughters choose these books of their own volition, even when there’s no one around to read to them.

So far there are just two books in this series, but I sure hope Laura Caputo-Wickham is working on more. I am so grateful for these stories that don’t just tell my daughters to do great things for God—they show them what faithfulness looks like.

Betsey Stockton: The Girl with a Missionary Dream
Laura Caputo-Wickham; Isabel Muñoz (2021)

Corrie ten Boom: The Courageous Woman and the Secret Room
Laura Caputo-Wickham; Isabel Muñoz (2021)

Disclosure: I did receive copies of these book for review, but I was not obligated to review these books or compensated for my review in any way. I share these books with you because I love them, not because I was paid to do so.

Karen Swallow Prior's Guides to Reading and Reflectioning | Little Book, Big Story

July 30, 2021 / 0 Comments

KAREN SWALLOW PRIOR’s Reading Guides

This blog has always been light on two categories: books for boys, and books for teens. But now that we have a teenager in the house, one of those categories is about to start growing. Lydia recently turned thirteen, and while I was tempted to sort of gloss over it and think about it as, well, the next number after twelve, she wasn’t having that: every few days leading up to her birthday, she’d drift through the kitchen and sigh, “I can’t believe I’m almost a teenager!” About the fourth or fifth time, it hit me: my stars, she’s almost a teenager!

And now she is one. And apart from the looming sense that she may only live with us for five more years, I love it so far: the company in the front seat of the car, the insightful conversations, the sense that the world around her is just bigger and that she’s aware of it more. Deep conversations have already sprung from her expanding perspective on the world, and we talk about these issues the way we talk about most things at our house: through really great books.

That is where Karen Swallow Prior comes in. These editions of classic books are framed by an insightful introduction by Prior, meant to introduce a Christian audience to great works of fiction, and by a selection of questions for reflection and discussion. They contain the full text of the classic work, with insightful footnotes that help decode some of the older language.

I had the chance to try these out in a small book group recently—we read and discussed Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (I’ll hold off on reading that one with my daughter for a while, though), and I was startled by how Prior’s introduction and questions gave our conversation a foundation and direction. While the whole group arrived having read the book but not sure we’d understood it at all, by the time we left we’d hit some deep points of reflection and reached some understanding of the story and the author’s main themes. It was magical.

This is a newer series, and I hope Karen Swallow Prior is working on more. I could see these being a gift for parents who want to read classics with their teens but who aren’t sure how to go about discussing them after. But already I’m struck by how much Prior’s guides add to my understanding of these classic stories—and I can’t wait to share them with my daughter.

Heart of Darkness: A Guide to Reading and Reflecting
Joseph Conrad; Karen Swallow Prior (1899; 2020)

Jane Eyre: A Guide to Reading and Reflecting
Charlotte Bronte; Karen Swallow Prior (1848; 2021)

Disclosure: I did receive a copy of Jane Eyre for review, but I was not obligated to review this book or compensated for my review in any way. I share this book with you because I love it, not because I was paid to do so.

April 30, 2021 / 0 Comments

Courageous World Changers

“I love stories like this,” my ten-year-old said, holding up a biography she found at the library. “The ones where they have to overcome something.”

And it seemed to me that most of history could fall into that category.

Shirley Raye Redmond’s Courageous World Changers is an anthology of short biographies of “daring women of God”: women who had to overcome different challenges in their lives, whether persecution, illness, suffering, or opposition. Yet this book differs from other popular anthologies about bold women or rebel girls in that the women introduced here conquer not for their own sake or even to “make a better world” but because they love and obey God, the Maker of all things, and strive to glorify him with their lives.

So, my daughter loved these stories of women facing challenges and, through God’s grace, being transformed. I loved them because reading through this book is like getting a flyover view of church history, up to and including today. Many of the women mentioned in this book are still living, which is a bold move on the author’s part—these women’s earthly stories aren’t finished yet. But by the end of the book, I came to love that aspect of it: Courageous World Changers shows church history as something that is still happening, something that our daughters are actually a part of. Redmond introduces the usual beloved cast of missionaries, mothers, hymnwriters, and wives, but she also includes athletes, professors, musicians, novelists, and more. She paints a full picture of how we as women can glorify God in whatever work he gives us to do, in any season of our lives.

I did question the decision to include a couple of women who seemed to qualify mainly because they grew up in Christian homes though, even in the biographies mentioned here, nothing mentioned about their adult lives seems to give evidence that they continued in the Christian faith. But even those entries led to some fruitful conversation with my daughters: Why do you think the author included them? What is it that makes someone a Christian? What kind of fruit would you look for? And so on. All in all, this is a great addition to the old home library—one that will elicit a lot of discussion and that will encourage readers (us as well!) to love God faithfully, wherever he sends us.

PS: Redmond has also written a book like this for boys titled Brave Heroes and Bold Defenders!

Courageous World Changers: 50 True Stories of Daring Women of God
Shirley Raye Redmond; Katya Longhi (2020)

April 16, 2021 / 0 Comments

The Bright Light & the Super Scary Darkness

Last week we took a trip to a tiny fishing town on the coast of Washington. That first night in our borrowed beach house, my husband and I settled the girls into bed and, once they were asleep, reminisced a bit about the trips of our childhood: “Remember how when you’re a kid, you don’t know what any of the weird sounds in a new place are?” We laughed. “You don’t think, Oh, that’s just the refrigerator. That’s probably a branch of the apple tree against the siding.” Every sound is new and alarming. But we’re adults now; we know better.

The next night, we woke to an ominous hissing, popping, percolating sound, so loud it woke us from two rooms away. It came from the laundry room—from a gray tank in the laundry room, which looked very much like it was under pressure and could possibly, probably, at any moment explode. Had we known what the tank was or what the noise meant, we might have been dignified about it. Perfectly calm. But for about fifteen minutes, I drafted exit strategies in my head. How would I get the girls out of the house? Where was the nearest exit? Had we seen a fire station when we drove through town? Did this town even have a fire station?

The Bright Light and the Super Scary Darkness, by Dan DeWitt | Little Book, Big Story

We prayed for wisdom and, mid-prayer, the tank simmered down. And we went back to bed feeling all the unpleasant nostalgia of being a kid in a world where home appliances are hostile and every twitching shadow might belong to a mutant spider.

So much of our fear seems to spring from what we don’t know, and the night is filled with things we don’t know. In The Bright Light and the Super Scary Darkness, Dan DeWitt (The Friend Who Forgives) acknowledges that fear and explores the way that the Bible talks about light and darkness. “The whole Bible is really one big story about the light and the dark,” the young narrator explains.

Within that context, DeWitt shares the whole story of Scripture—the times when it seemed like the dark was winning, and the times that the light won. The book ends with a fun twist that reminds readers that though the darkness can be scary, it doesn’t have to be: after all, we know the One who is the Light of the World. Whatever darkness we face, whatever uncertainty, he has already vanquished it. And he will never leave us truly alone in the dark.

The Bright Light and the Super Scary Darkness
Dan DeWitt; Rea Zhai (2020)

Disclosure: I did receive a copy of this book for review, but I was not obligated to review this book or compensated for my review in any way. I share this book with you because I love it, not because I was paid to do so.

March 5, 2021 / 0 Comments

Praying Through the Bible for Your Kids

I don’t typically review parenting books here. The pitfalls are too many, too various: I don’t want you to come away thinking that we must agree on parenting philosophies and strategies if we are to parent alongside one another.

What I do want is for us to agree on the gospel. Everything else is peripheral, and if we are teaching our children the truth of the gospel, we have a lot of room to differ on the practical stuff. How we educate our children, how we train them when they’re young, how we discipline them when they’re older: these are all matters we work through with God, within our own families and church communities. You don’t need some book reviewer telling you how you ought to feed your toddler. And so while I may occasionally mention parenting books that I have personally enjoyed or found helpful, I rarely recommend books specifically for parents about raising children.

But this book is a worthy exception. Rather than provide practical parenting advice on a particular issue, Praying Through the Bible for Your Kids begins where all our parenting must begin: with prayer, and in Scripture. Nancy Guthrie structures this book around a Scripture reading plan (which takes readers through the whole Bible in one year) and shares a series of short devotionals and guided prayers to accompany each day’s Scripture reading. The idea is to encourage parents to read Scripture and allow it to shape our prayers.

I don’t know about you, but I find that the longer I’m a mother, the more acutely I realize that I am, frankly, not big enough for this job. In defiance of every motivational Instagram tile out there, I’ll say it: I am not enough. As my children grow up, the issues they struggle with get bigger, and the roots of those issues run so deep we can’t suss them out in the five-minute motivational talks that did the trick when they were two. Parenting children through this past year alone has called for wisdom and strength beyond my natural allotment.

I may not be big enough to be all those things and meet all those needs, but God is. I need his help every day, and I suspect you do too. Praying Through the Bible for Your Kids reorients parents each morning and reminds us that this is a big task, but we do not face it alone. God equipped us for the challenges of yesterday, and he will equip us for whatever today brings as well. This book may focus on praying for our kids, but of course our contact with the Lord and with Scripture will leave us changed as well.

The One Year Praying Through the Bible for Your Kids
Nancy Guthrie (2016)

Tag: christian (page 10 of 39)

Do Great Things for God (Series)

KAREN SWALLOW PRIOR’s Reading Guides

Courageous World Changers

The Bright Light & the Super Scary Darkness

Praying Through the Bible for Your Kids

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