Category Archives: reading

favorite books of 2022

Posted on by January 18, 2023

I was buying books and Vin asked me to look one up that he’s wanted for a while.

“They have it in paperback or hardback, which do you want?” I asked.

“Paperback,” he said. “It might suck.”

And that’s wisdom, my friends.

favorite books of 2022: Shannon Guerra

This was a tough year reading-wise for me. Not because I didn’t read much – I read almost fifty books – but because I quit at least five other books in disgust after anywhere from fifty to several hundred pages (I mention one of them here). Fortunately, it was also a year full of books that are tried and true, old favorites that I happened to be reading again, and they made up for it.

Reading good books is like gentle, gradual irrigation of the mind. Reading the Bible is more like a power washer, or a rushing river. But all good books dislodge rocks and embedded lies from us, and reveal truths that never change but somehow can always come alive in a fresh way. Good reading is both cleansing and nurturing; it grows within us the stuff that preserves from rottenness and brings flavor. It changes our landscape, deep and wide. We recognize things about ourselves and the world around us, and we see things articulated that we didn’t have words for before.

Good books rile up justice and goodness, and bad books make excuses for it.

Here are my favorites from last year that (mostly) do all the right stuff. I hope you find a few that become your favorites, too.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

“There seemed small need for watching in the days of our prosperity, and the guards were made over comfortable, perhaps — otherwise we might have had longer warning of the coming of the dragon, and things might have been different.”

Here is a case for rereading a classic that you didn’t care so much for the first time. (See also The Wind in the Willows.) I’ve read this twice before and it was okay, nothing that excited me too much. And then I read it again last spring with my daughter and our Gaining Ground group, and lo and behold…things came alive that I missed the first (and second) times around. I’m convinced now, it’s a keeper – and it makes the extremely Hobbity and slightly silly first chapter of Fellowship of the Rings (see below) make a lot more sense now. It is a fairy-tale-like children’s book full of trolls, spiders, thieving, sneaking, jealousy, fighting, shapeshifting, invisibility, riddles, and battles…but yeah, it really is a good book with solid values worth sharing with your kids. Or your spouse. Or your cat.

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

Hey, this one counts as seven – or actually six, because we just started the last book in the series again a few nights ago, but we read the other six out loud at dinner time to the kids throughout 2022.

If you have never read these, or you haven’t read them in years, or you only read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or you only saw the movies (egad), you should find the nearest 4- to 18-year-old and start reading this with them, post-haste. You don’t need to read them in order (chronologically or in the order they were written, and yes, those are different) but I’m still noticing details in certain stories that allude to characters or events in the other ones that I never noticed before. Every single book in the Narnia series has truths in it that are articulated brilliantly and beautifully, and they will change your life and our culture for the better.

How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes by Peter Schiff

Make economics fun again! If you need an easy refresher on basic economics or a great book for your middle/high schooler, this book illustrates the principles through a fictional land of islanders who begin their own economy through trading fish and services, on just one fish a day. It explains principles without jargon and shows how they are both used and abused. And if you know your U.S. history, you’ll enjoy a lot of the snarky humor that identifies some of those abusers, as well.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

“The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am to you, and I am standing in the spirit at you elbow.”

My first encounter with this book was in the 8th grade when our English teacher read it aloud to us the week before Christmas break. I remember very little (as in, nothing) of it, which, combined with what I already told you about The Hobbit and Wind in the Willows, is an indictment on either the Anchorage public school system or my attention span. Probably both.

But now! Ohmygosh, I love this book so much. This is the second time we’ve read it aloud as a family, and even our little guys – ages 4 and 7 – liked it. (Giving characters different voices helps.) You don’t have to read this at Christmas; it is beautiful year round, and if you want an easy way to dip your toes into Dickens’ works, this is the one to start with. (Oliver Twist is probably a good second.)

Polyface Micro by Joel Salatin

This is a good book to read if a) your life has been taken over by poultry, b) you are aware of the crisis in our food system and know the egg shortage we’re seeing is only the tip of the iceberg, or c) you want to take your dreams of homesteading and start doing something about them. This is livestock farming micro-style, for those of us with yards instead of fields. Lots of ideas here on how to do the basics, plus plenty of insight and hacks that only come from someone with years and years of experience who is willing to tell you about his mistakes so you don’t have to repeat them.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This one threw me for a loop at first. There’s a lot of dialogue but no quotation marks, an intentional lack of apostrophes in many contractions, and you quickly discover that rules can be broken if you write and tell a story as well as this guy. Every once in a while I came across a word I suspected he was making up, but then I’d check, and by golly, he pulls vocabulary up from the very bones of the earth and puts those words to work again.

It’s not a kids’ book but I’d recommend it to mature high schoolers. The story is intense and fascinating, about a father and son traveling through a post-apocalyptic wasteland just trying to survive. I read it in two days and then immediately put it on Vince’s stack and demanded he read it, too – which he did, and he also loved it.

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker

File this one under “Information everyone needs to know and hopes they never have to apply” – which I guess you could also say for any book on farming. (Ha ha, I jest…sorta). Not a great book, but an important book about crime, human nature, and protecting yourself from whackos. Eat the meat, spit out the bones; it’s a three-star book with lots of five-star info.

Hinds Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard

If you are grieving or walking through a hard season, this book is a great companion. Much Afraid is a girl who has been threatened, gaslighted, and mistreated, and the Shepherd leads her on a journey that isn’t just escape, but destiny – she learns her true identity through a process of obedience, faith, and surrender. We read this in Gaining Ground last summer, and so many of us found great healing, encouragement, and revelation for different situations we were navigating.

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

A woman buys a book wagon and takes off across the countryside in the early 1900s, leaving her slightly selfish brother in the lurch and baffled at her gumption. A funny and fast book about books, and reading, and love, and surprises.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

“By reading only six hours a day, I shall gain in the course of a twelvemonth a great deal of instruction which I now feel myself to want.”

Why use a boring word like “year” when you can say twelvemonth? This story is about two sisters: Elinor is all things tact, courtesy, and self-control, and Marianne is all things honest, transparent, and idealistic. By the end of the book they are both stronger, wiser, and happier, and the reader is, too.

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

“It seemed that the evil power in Mirkwood had been driven out…only to reappear in greater strength in the old strongholds….the power was spreading far and wide, and away far east and south there were wars and growing fear….Little of all this, of course, reached the ears of ordinary hobbits. But even the deafest and most stay-at-home began to hear queer tales; and those whose business took them to the borders saw strange things.”

There’s a great evil in the world that has been hidden for ages, lurking unknown, unsuspected by those who are happily oblivious until some strange, seemingly unrelated occurrences start happening with increasing frequency. Once discovered, the evil must be completely destroyed before everything good in the world is destroyed first.

Sounds eerily familiar, yes? But no, it’s not the Deep State; it’s Sauron, the Lord of the Rings. I’ve read this at least five times but am finding parallels and wisdom for our current days that I’ve never seen before. Fellowship is the first part of The Lord of the Rings, which is really just one ginormous book of over a thousand pages, often separated into a trilogy. We’re currently tackling it in Gaining Ground and just started The Two Towers, the middle book. If you have tried Fellowship before and couldn’t get past the odd, folksy first chapter, please give it another shot. By chapter two it changes rapidly from a children’s book like The Hobbit into the life-changing and dramatic saga of good versus evil so many of us love.

Wait, you keep talking about Gaining Ground. What is that?

It’s our online book club on Telegram. It originally started a few years ago as a book club that incorporated writing coaching, but I’ve stopped coaching and now we just read and chat about books and share nerdy, bookish memes. Our group ebbs and flows every time we start a new book, but it’s grown to over a hundred people and you can join us here if you’d like.

My goal this year is more books, less videos; more pages, less screen time. More time together, more shared stories, more ideas, more joy, more justice. Less fabricated news, more newsworthy knowledge. More wholeness, goodness, and truth, with a side of coffee or tea. Probably a cat or two. Maybe a blanket. Plus a 30% chance of a huge bowl of popcorn, which I may or may not share.

P.S. Want more book recommendations? Here’s my list from last year. Reading great books is one of the easiest ways to transform our culture.

eucatastrophe: brace yourself for hope and joy

Posted on by September 14, 2022

I never rearrange furniture, but here we were doing it, moving shelves and purging drawers and hauling a chest up two flights of stairs.

Somewhere in the process of measuring to see if everything fit, I lost the tape measure. It wasn’t clipped to my pants, wasn’t on one of the shelves, wasn’t anywhere on the floor amid the piles of stuff everywhere. So I hollered upstairs to Finn.

“Did I leave the tape measure up there? On the counter? Maybe on the kitchen island?” I heard him rummaging while I sorted stacks of unused picture frames.

“Found it! It was in the drawer!” he yelled back down.

eucatastrophe: brace yourself for hope and joy

I walked back to the stairway thinking, In the drawer? I didn’t put it in the drawer… and as I came to the foot of the stairs, he approached the top of the stairs at the same time – and an image flashed through my mind of him throwing the heavy tape measure at me down the stairs. Because he’s six, and he might do something like that without thinking.

And then he did it.

His arm moved and the tape measure hurtled down the stairs at me, and I screamed.

And then I stopped screaming as it unrolled and flitted to my feet, harmless.

Here’s what happened: I was expecting the same tape measure I had lost – you know, the heavy, metal, retractable kind – but Finn had found the tape measure I use for knitting, which is just a long, plastic ribbon 60 inches long. And that’s what he threw at me.

Life has been throwing a lot at all of us lately, hasn’t it? We often don’t realize how on edge we are, just waiting for the next blow.

A couple weeks ago we finally had Reagan’s assessment. After it was done, I sat in an office with the psychologist (not the first one we miserably encountered; this one was terrific) and we debriefed on what had just happened.

We had sat through three hours of questions and exercises and tests, and Reagan had not even spelled her first name correctly. She answered the simplest of math questions wrong. When the doctor asked her how old she was, she said, “I twenty-seven,” and told him her birthday was in September. But she’s sixteen, and it’s not.

I was devastated. Ten years of parenting, homeschooling, trial and error, endless repetition, and this is what we had to show for it. All I could think was, What must this man think of our efforts as parents? It was Reagan’s assessment, but I felt like I had failed the test.

The doctor and I went over the results, her responses, her IQ, her behavior at home, the anxiety of testing, and the complications with all of her special needs. The whole time, I was bracing myself for judgment, condemnation, the pitying shake of the head, the professional condescension.

But none of that happened.

Instead, he said this:

“You and your husband have done an outstanding job with Reagan.” He paused. “The fact that she can read at all is remarkable.”

Aaaand that’s when I broke down sobbing. The weight lifted and relief flooded over me. The psychologist frantically searched for tissues, having no idea what to do with a crying woman across the desk. But he kept talking and he wasn’t just being nice; he went over all the challenges again and juxtaposed our efforts and Reagan’s abilities over them, and the result was stunning. I’m still not over it.

We often try to protect ourselves by expecting the worst. We brace for the blow because we’ve been hurt before, and we’d rather be prepared than be blindsided by calamity that comes out of nowhere.

But what about the good things that come out of nowhere, too? What if instead of the crash you expect, the Lord has prepared a soft landing?

A friend of mine said this a few weeks ago: Have you ever braced for a hard impact only to end up getting a soft nudge that barely upset your balance? It was like that. I saw the redirection coming and I expected it would bring me to my knees, but in minutes, I could already see His plan was better than mine.

I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since. We white-knuckle our way through these crazy days, expecting disappointment and catastrophe, resigned to the worst. But this is not the way of the Lord, and this is not what Godly surrender is.

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

– Romans 8:18

This brings me to a word I learned recently, so here you go:

Eucatastrophe: the sudden, unexpected, joyous turn of events.

J.R.R. Tolkien coined the term, but the eucatastrophe is all God’s doing. And this, friends, is where we’re supposed to live. Our fear can give permission to the enemy for what we dread, but our trust and expectation make way for the breakthrough.

No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.”

– Romans 4:20-22

Often, we have perfectly good reasons to brace for impact because we’ve seen how things play out. But we’ll have more peace in the preparation if we recognize that we serve the God of the eucatastrophe – the one who stills the storm, breaks bread for the multitude, and causes recklessly thrown projectiles to flutter harmlessly to our feet.

It is the story of Mephibosheth, the crippled grandson of a previous king who was called into the presence of King David. Mephibosheth had no reason to expect anything but slaughter for himself and his family; it was typical then to completely eliminate the previous regime’s offspring. He knew he’d been living on borrowed time, and it looked like that time was up.

He had no idea that God was already moving on his behalf, that the eucatastrophe was already in motion. He could never have imagined that King David was looking for a remnant in his family line not for the sake of hunting them down, but for the sake of showing kindness to them out of love for his old friend, his best friend…Mephibosheth’s father Jonathan, who died years earlier.

And Mephibosheth the son of Jonathan, son of Saul, came to David and fell on his face and paid homage. And David said, “Mephibosheth!” And he answered, “Behold, I am your servant.” And David said to him, “Do not fear, for I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan, and I will restore to you all the land of Saul your father, and you shall eat at my table always.”

– 2 Samuel 9:6-7

We keep expecting more situations like what we’ve already lost. But loss is not what God gives us when we turn to Him. Our losses are not compounding; they are recompensing.

Be glad, O children of Zion,
    and rejoice in the Lord your God,
for he has given the early rain for your vindication;
    he has poured down for you abundant rain,
    the early and the latter rain, as before.

The threshing floors shall be full of grain;
    the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.

I will restore to you the years
    that the swarming locust has eaten.

– Joel 2:23-25a

I had a dream recently that Vince had been emailing back and forth with someone about a history course he offers. The man’s name was Bao Leng, and when he purchased the course, Vin said, “Bao Leng came through!” In my dream, I immediately heard the Lord say, Look up the meaning of that name. So I tried to do it, but as often happens in dreams, things didn’t work – I tried typing letters into my phone but they wouldn’t enter correctly, the search engine was all messed up, and my laptop was just as useless.

But as soon as I woke up, I looked it up. And here’s what I saw:

A breakthrough. Huh. Not like we haven’t been talking about that at all lately.

Okay, so now we have two new words in our vocabulary. Let me give you one more.

Respair: The return of hope after a period of despair.

And this is also where some of us are being called to. We were never meant to walk in fear, talking ourselves out of the big things He’s called us to instead of getting to experience the eucatastrophe of His grace on us.

She had been setting her teeth and clenching her fists for a terrible blast of lion’s breath; but the breath had really been so gentle that she had not even noticed the moment at which she left the earth.

– C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

Yes, situations are hard and the world right now is a circus on psychotropic drugs. But no, fear does not get to win the day. Fear doesn’t even get to take a backseat and come along for the ride. Fear needs to be shoved out the door while we’re hauling down the highway.

This is not the season to entertain fear. This is the season for eucatastrophe, for bao leng, for respair.

What if our “what ifs” have been all wrong?

What if some of the struggles we’ve accepted as just part of life were actually just part of a broken mindset? What if some things are meant to be easier, and not harder?

What if the things we’ve struggled over in time-consuming labor came effortlessly in comparison? What if the path was made flat, the boulders moved out of the way, and we could spend more time enjoying the view?

What if the Lord is still turning Sauls into Pauls? Because He is, and each person transformed changes the trajectory of our culture in this era.

What if instead of bracing for impact, we braced for breakthrough?

While we endure, God is working on our behalf in ways we would never imagine. So we trust Him with great expectation. That hope is not wishful thinking; it is the powerful currency that buys us time before the eucatastrophe.

Bible thumping: how we see beyond the surface

Posted on by October 30, 2023

There’s a kiddo on the deck standing with one hand on the door, and one hand holding a rag. It’s been a rough few days for that little girl; she’s supposed to be working off a consequence but instead she’s just standing there. You can’t force her to move faster (or at all), but sometimes you can remind her what she’s supposed to be doing. And sometimes it helps.

But sometimes it doesn’t.

bible thumping: how we see beyond the surface

She’s not really a little girl, I know. She’s sixteen. But she’s also three. And sometimes seven, and sometimes anywhere in between.

Thanks to our chickens we have a new compost bin arrangement, but she couldn’t figure out how to work it. And in spite of being told not to, she dumped the compost on a small garden bed instead, destroying half the veggies and a couple sunflowers I’ve been growing for two months.

She doesn’t always remember things she’s been told, and sometimes she does but chooses not to do them anyway. Problem solving and critical thinking are really hard for her, and rare occurrences.

As her mom, one of my biggest challenges has been learning to correct her in love, and lead her toward maturity and growth when she has no inclination to go there.

Can we blame her? We often want to do the easy thing ourselves, without the excuse of brain trauma. But look around; we’re reaping the consequences of a culture obsessed with ease, prioritizing rest over righteousness at every opportunity.

Last week on social media I shared a talk by a prominent Bible scholar and translator on women in leadership, and based on the responses of those who have only given the Bible a surface reading, you would have thought I committed the highest form of blasphemy. I can’t begin to tell you the amount of hate and accusations that poured in from complete strangers who have no idea who I am, what our family has taken on, or the everyday situations we deal with (which admittedly are probably a mystery to many of you who are new here because I don’t talk about them as often lately). It was a sight to behold from people who claim to be Christians, who claim to be passionate about the Bible, but are in fact extremely selective on how they actually study or practice what it says.

What is that Scripture? Oh, yes: “They will know we are Christians by our scathing insults, accusations, fragile egos, and self-righteous condescension.” #almost #soclose Ain’t nobody got hate and meanness like a so-called Christian’s hate and meanness.

I am giving you a new commandment, that you love one another; just as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples: if you have love for one another.

– John 13:34-35

It’s just easier to not be challenged, to not learn something new, to not think critically about what we believe and what the Bible says and whether or not those two things are actually in alignment. But Jesus is continually leading us forward in love and maturity, even when we have no inclination to go there.

But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses.

– Acts 3:14-15

Do we just want to be right? Or do we want to be righteous?

Pharisees have been bringing death and destruction for a long time; people who miss the forest for the trees and offer to call fire down from heaven have been rebuked by the Lord for their misplaced zeal from the very beginning.

And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers.

– Acts 3:17

You can’t force people to think harder or to love better (or at all), but sometimes you can remind them what they’re supposed to be doing. (And sometimes it helps. But sometimes it doesn’t.)

So we go back to the Word. Not just a surface reading that takes in the obvious, but a daily, deeper study that looks at all the things – the ones that don’t make sense, the ones that seem to contradict, the ones that are inconsistent with the rest of the Word when taken out of context. We take the time to ask Him what they mean, and we take the time to listen.

If you feel threatened by the basics of studying the Bible and learning something you didn’t understand before, why are you reading it at all? Do we go to God’s word only to be patted on the back? Do we only go to church to be spoon-fed what we already know?

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

— Hebrews 5:12-14

Friends, with all love, you shouldn’t be reading my stuff (or any stuff) if you just want to be told what you already know. What a waste of time that would be. And if you don’t think women should be speaking, teaching, or sharing about Jesus, I’m not sure what you’re doing here in the first place.

If someone touts unbiblical principles that conflict with God’s word and character, yes, you should call them out on it. But if what you are calling out is just a deeply held belief that is contradicted throughout Jesus’ life and all of scripture, you should look more closely at the context of that.

If it causes insecurities to rile up within you, spewing hateful, holier-than-thou things at others, you should look more closely at that, too.

If any issue is so sacred to you that looking at the Bible’s original language, context, and culture actually frightens or angers you because you cannot consider it from any other angle than the one you have held on to, then that issue is a sacred cow and it probably needs to go to the grill. If it causes you to say things to perfect strangers online that would make an atheist smirk, that cow needs put out to pasture until you can examine it without raising your blood pressure and displaying spiritual brain trauma.

Do we just want to be right, or do we want to be righteous?

(One reader pointed out that those who are afraid of a little research, deep thinking, and contrasting perspectives are exactly the kind of people who, yes, shouldn’t be teaching or leading. This is why we can’t have nice things, Timothy.)

If you believe context and culture don’t matter and everything in scripture should be interpreted exactly at face value, you should probably avoid Job, certain Psalms, Ecclesiastes, several sections of the prophets, parts of the New Testament, and most public social settings.

(Oh…and definitely beware of Song of Solomon. SO DANGEROUS.)

Because context and language matter.

Truth matters. Sometimes you need to pay attention to see it, though. And yes, if you’ve read the Bible, you’ve seen women speaking, leading, and teaching in it with approval, in spite of a few verses that seemingly oppose it on the surface.

But wait, should we have to work to understand the Bible? Well, what does it say? Here are just a couple of examples:

It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.

— Proverbs 25:2

In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.”

— Luke 10:21

Yes, we should read and expect God to speak to us. And also yes, we should take the time to dig deeper when we notice things that don’t make sense, or that we don’t understand, or that are confusing.

Because if we claim to already understand everything we believe, we probably made it up — and we need to consider who we’re bowing down to.

But if you don’t think language, culture, and context matters, fine. No problem at all.

Just know that you ought to greet everyone in church on Sunday (and, well, every day, since it doesn’t specify) with a holy kiss.

No, no, no, it doesn’t say handshake, side hug, or fist bump — it says a holy kiss.

Have fun with that.

xo