Excellent post this morning by Al Mohler. I don’t have time to write all the things I’d like to on this topic and make it to work on time, so I’ll leave it for now.
From the BreakPoint blog.
“I’m not a Christian anymore,” the 12-year-old girl I have been mentoring for four years just informed me.
She tells me she has decided to become a Muslim.
Once in the car on the way to our regular date to the library, I ask her to elaborate.
She has recently had a conversation with her stepfather, who is a Muslim and who is apparently trying to convince her to follow the ways of Islam.
Child has been in Christian school is now in public. The author doesn’t want to shove Christianity down the kid’s throat, but . . .
What advice will you give this discouraged mentor?
I ran across an article about making the library entertaining in the summer for kids. Actually, I see a lot of these usually with programs from the small to gigantic and some specific plans for how to make them work. They look fun for the kids and range from little work to tons of work for the staff.
It got me to thinking though about my own youth trips to the library and I don’t remember any except the school library and the bookmobile, but I always had books to read – lots and lots of books. I think I bought quite a few from scholastic (or its ancient equivalent). My own foray into the public library didn’t happen until after I could drive there myself. I’ve also been thinking about all the teens I’ve worked with that don’t like to read, resent school trips to the library, have no clue how to pick out a book for pleasure reading.
Do these programs work for their intended purpose? Probably if the purpose is to increase summertime library attendance. But if the goal is to entice life-long reading, I’m not sure that they do.
Maybe the best summer program is to just read together.
I just happened on Inkheart from Cornelia Funke several years ago. I reread it and am rereading Inkspell in anticipation of reading the last book in the series Inkdeath.
She is a vivid writer. You can tell she reads extensively and loves books herself.
Meggie, the young heroine, is trying to decide what books to take with her on an adventure. She’s looking in the book box that her father Mo has made her . . .
But her old friends, the books Meggie had already owned before they had moved in with Elinor, still lived in the box, and when she opened the heavy lid it was almost as if half-forgotten voices met her ears and familiar faces were looking at her. How well worn they all were . . . “Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said when, on Meggie’s last birthday, they were looking at all her dear old books again. “As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells . . . and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower . . both strange and familiar.”
So my question to you, do you have one or more favorite book/s of your youth or childhood? One that is that it is all the fatter – pages stuffed full of memories.
I didn’t know.
I didn’t know the distance at which I’d kept God for so long.
I didn’t know how I really didn’t trust him.
I didn’t know how much I feared that He’d betray me.
I didn’t know.
I didn’t know how much was colored by my childhood by anyone’s childhood.
I didn’t know that if you’re raised around so much anger that you are angry too.
I didn’t know that I had quit talking for fear it would be repeated.
I didn’t know that I’d quit writing for fear it would be found.
I didn’t know how much on earth is reflected spiritually.
I just didn’t know.
I didn’t know how long pain could be carried.
I didn’t know how strongly He wanted my attention.
I didn’t know how much hurt I could feel.
I didn’t know how humbled I could be.
I didn’t know how bad things really had been.
I didn’t know I could feel.
I didn’t know how much He loved me.
I didn’t know how open I could be.
I didn’t know how glorious things are.
I didn’t know.
Now I do.
Praise God.
I didn’t know.
When I was in the 7th grade, my periods were terrible – so bad, that I could hardly get out of bed or keep any food down. I had to go to the doctor. He put me in the hospital. I missed enough of school that I got my one and only D in math. I also got several blood transfusions which made going to the bathroom impossible. I might not remember Mother and the cold bedpans at all except that our next door neighbor, Mrs. Rollo came to relieve her for a spell and during that period, I had to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Rollo warmed the bedpan for me to use. She didn’t make me use a cold one – she warmed it!
This would be my dad. I know this is why he worked the way he did because at work he could shine. At home he was just one of the rest of us. He was abused like we were. He even escaped once and came back! Ann and I probably had something to do with that. He didn’t stay gone long enough for us to adjust and we were stuck with mother. We didn’t know then that we had any other choices than to be her children.
Daddy’s childhood was emotionally crippling if not physically crippling. I’m sure of the first. The second is not so easy to discern. Every thing they owned was sold out from underneath them. PaPa left with other women. He moved off with at least one. Laverne left and moved half way across the country as soon as she could. Martha Jean, well, she’s the one we strongly suspect sexual abuse with, but too much time as passed and too many ties have been broken.
Daddy’s first wife favored his sisters we’ve been told. She drank. She ran around on Daddy. She gave him a son and verbally abused them both.
Mother and Daddy met at Western Union in Baton Rouge. Married, had me, led and idyllic life. Right. Daddy had a great need to be dependent on someone, to have his life organized for him, to be told what to do and when to do it. Mother had a great need to make people dependent on her. It was the perfect union.
After Daddy left and came back, Mother had everything, absolutely everything put in her name — bank accounts, business, CDs, house, retirements. She had that right. He’d left. He’d not been honorable. He knew he was tied to her in unimaginable ways. One of Mother’s new favorite stories was that she could just utter the words, “Travis, we need to talk,” and Daddy would blanch. She loved the control.
The moment Daddy went back to mother, I realized how dependent he was on her. They were tied together with a gossamer thread, but not the pretty kind like you think of fairies using. This one is harsh and cold and unrelenting. This thread is the kind that nightmares is made of.
Mother was sexually abused by her grandfather while her mother watched. She’s lied so much about so many things and I have only her word for this, but I believe her. It makes so many things right. It explains so much.
I don’t even know if she remembers telling Ann and I — not at the same time, but at different times. Once, when we were all here together in Winston Salem, after she’d moved, she told us in one of her pronouncements that she wanted to have sit down and explain some things to us that might help us understand her better. That’s what made me think she’d forgotten that she’d ever told us. She wanted to tell us again. I cringed. There are some things you just don’t want to hear. There are some hurts you are healing yourself and you don’t have the strength to help your abuser heal.
There was one young couple in Fort Worth. I don’t remember their names. They were fun. They laughed. She had the cutest hair and they had a little chihuahua. They had holes in the bottom of their car and I remember that I was always afraid that my shoes would fall off and land on the road.
He worked for Daddy.
They came over for dinner one night and admired the handiwork of some salt and pepper shakers that Daddy had made. The set was wooden and had little tiles around the middle. They were eight or nine inches tall. There was another set in the drawer and I told them about the other set.
Mother and Daddy both said, “NO.”
I should have caught on, but I was a kid. A pretty small one if we were still in Fort Worth.
“Yes, there is. See!” And I hopped up to get them. Well what I ruined I didn’t know, but I ruined it.
Later that couple quit coming over. Daddy said the young man stabbed him in the back. Typical. It was always something. I guess when I said that Daddy never had a friend I forgot this one. He behaved more like Mother than I thought. Best friends and then no friends.
I’m not talking about the one from Narnia. I’m talking about the one in my memory. I’m not sure when I realized that’s how I thought of her. It is sometime in recent history though.
Presents were odd things.
First of all, sometimes they were hand-me-downs. If Mother and Daddy got a replacement, Ann and I knew that the old would show up as a gift.
Second of all, we didn’t get taken shopping. One year we made net hangers for gifts and Daddy asked what I was going to get Mother for Christmas. Why he asked I didn’t know. I’d made her a set of net hangers and told him so.
“How do you think that will make her feel? That’s what y’all made everyone else.”
There was no offer to take me shopping. I didn’t make an allowance anyway. I rewrote a poem I’d written for school and scrounged around and found a frame. It was the only gift I remember giving.
Now Daddy was Scout Master. I can see him in his uniform. One evening I burnt my tongue on too-hot hot chocolate and he put a slab of cold butter on it. He was in his scout uniform.
I remember the scouts coming to the house, mowing the yard. I watched them from my bedroom window when I was just a squirt supposed to be napping.
I stuck my hand in a wasp’s nest once when he was ready to leave for scouts and he put a baking soda paste on it.
Ann remembers going to the beach.
I love the beach. Why can’t I remember going to the beach?
When I was little, we made one move to Chattanooga. We lived in a trailer in a trailer park. Apparently we weren’t going to be there very long.
It was before Ann was born.
There was only one bedroom and the bed was so big that the door wouldn’t shut. That’s where I slept. The bedspread was pink. Mother and Daddy slept on a couch that wasn’t a sleeper bed but more like and old timey futon. It just kind of laid down into a bed. I only remember Daddy in the mornings.
In my memories, the trailer park is deserted except for one woman. She must have been the manager. I remember leaves and a pool. I remember mother and I going to a park – just the park as if from a distance. Not that we did anything just that we were there. I don’t remember swings or slides or sand. Just a park.
Nothing was ever discussed fully.
You want to go to college? OK, apply. That was my college talk.
Daddy had open heart surgery and I found out after he’d had it.
Your Father’s been married before. I was a teenager when I found that out. Something was about to happen. mmmm Maybe that was the year I had a brother. Maybe that was the year his exwife called everyday.
Mother made Barbie clothes. She also sold them – that I didn’t know until I saw my next door neighbor with the same Barbie clothes I had. She’d gotten hers from Santa. I told her where they really came from. Shouldn’t have done that.
Information was doled out in bits and pieces or no pieces. Just enough to make you wonder what was happening. Just enough to keep everyone on their toes.
I spent a lot of time in my room.
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