Pretty Fly

The angry atheists strike again....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ 2008/oct/21/religion-advertising

Sadly I can completely understand their reaction against the kind of Christian advertising the article refers to - threatening eternal tormet to non-believers. Nice going.

This book review should have been on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. But because the seller I bought it from on Amazon uses a method of shipping slightly slower than carrier pigeon, I haven’t even started it yet. Instead I picked up a Bill Bryson which I got for Christmas – The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

This is mostly an autobiography of Bryson’s childhood and early teens, but that seems almost incidental to simply being a history of 1950’s America. It was a fascinating time. Who knew? Bryson presents a picture of a time when families were happy, comfortable and safe, and when life in general seemed golden. The semi-fictional protagonist in Memoirs of a Geisha (which, as those of you who have been paying attention will know, I reviewed earlier) writes of her visit to New York at about the same time Bryson is describing, and relates her astonishment at the wealth and luxury. While electricity was becoming common in Japan, in America it burned everywhere, all day every day. While Tokyo was proud of its first concrete train station, the stations in New York were made of solid marble. With a similar astonishment, Bryson describes the fact that Americans had more mod cons (refrigerators, televisions, assorted obscure gadgets) than the rest of the world combined.

Having updated the last tagging game, and since Brian has updated his, here is an update of "My Life in Pictures".

The game goes thus: You type the answers to the questions into google images, no quoatation marks, and pick one of the pictures from the first page only.

The Town I Grew Up In

Today, Thursday August 7, marks one whole year since we packed up and moved to LA. I can't quite believe a whole year has passed. But it's been an interesting one.
 
We love living here. We love the weather, the beaches, our friends, our church, I love my job and Jonathan has just started his. We've also just moved into a new apartment, which we love. 

But it's been a challenge too. Jonathan had to finish law school, study for, take and pass the bar exam, and find work, and in the meantime we had to survive on just my salary. With hindsight, all of those things actually went pretty smoothly, and God took good care of us, but at the time they felt like dark places of fear and doubt and struggle.

I must begin by apologizing for the extreme length of this blog entry, but I have just read two amazing books in quick succession, which I now realise must be reviewed side by side. One being Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the second being Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha.

I want to review them together because I find their similarities intriguing, not least because they are not immediately obvious. Both deal with the role of women in societies rather alien to our own, and specifically the power of female sexuality. But they each deal with these issues in very different ways.

I’ve recently finished reading Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm.

Those of you who have read it will recognize that line, which runs through the story like a black thread through an otherwise brightly coloured tapestry. In some ways it’s just one more comic element…. except that what Aunt Ada Doom saw in the woodshed as a very young girl was so “nasty” that it had a profound impact on her life, her marriage and her mental health. While her madness may be as questionable as that of Hamlet, there is no doubt that she was, and remains, deeply disturbed and haunted by that woodshed.

I just realized that in my eagerness to share all the good news that has been happening recently, I have completely neglected to keep up the book reviews to which I committed several blog entries back. You might not care, but I do :o)

I recently finished my first Mexican novel (and a Mexican best seller) Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. My husband bought me this book, allegedly because he enjoyed the film and thought I would enjoy the book. I suspect it has more to do with the fact that the novel is interspersed with traditional Mexican recipes, particularly as he loves Mexican food and knows that since it has the word “chocolate” in the title I wouldn’t be able to resist reading it.

One of my favourite Bible verses is the second half of Malachi 3:10 - "Test me in this', says the Lord Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it".

In context it's about tithing, but in the broader sense it's an illustration of how amazingly generous God is. Seriously. When the Bible talks about him giving us more than we could ask or imagine, it wasn't kidding. God will give us things we would never dare to ask for, things we wouldn't even think to ask for. This has been brought home to me time and time again recently.

Why is it that when I really really desperately want something, need something or am deeply concerned about something, I pray and pray (with varying degrees of faith) and am always stunned when God answers?

And yet immediately afterwards I start depending on my own strength, skills and "wisdom", start making plans without bothering to consult God, and then am stunned when things go wrong. Then comes the desperate praying. And so ad infinitum.

If you can, please remember my colleague Jan and her daughter in your prayers. Jan's son-in-law (her daughters husband) was killed yesterday in a motorcycle accident while visiting family. His wife is only 36 and today she has to go and collect his body.
 
I don't need to tell you how horrific that all is - I'm sure for many of us it's our worst nightmare. I can barely pray about it without crying, so please join me if you can.