The Book: Shepherding a Child’s Heart, by Tedd Tripp

The Story: This really is just another parenting book. The “twist” on this one, I guess, is that Tedd Tripp claims that his method of parenting is firmly based in the Bible and is the technique that will guide your kid down the “straight and narrow” from the time s/he is very young.

What I Thought: Parenting is weird because you’ll read half a dozen books on parenting techniques/ideas in a true pursuit of “figuring it out” and then really just feel out what works best for you and go with that. I have taken a lot of tips and pointers from parenting books, but I have always had this idea that it was a kind of “take what you want and leave the rest” proposition.

Guys, there was nothing here for me to take.

I think I picked up this book because I liked the title and the blurb on the back. The idea is that we can never “fix” our kids without knowing their heart issues. We should be able to kind of get to the heart of their issues and work from there instead of just disciplining behavior or talking to them about their actions. This seems true and right to me, and not just for kids. When I take time to see my husband’s heart on a matter instead of just getting mad at what he’s doing, things seem to go more smoothly too. I guess I thought that this book would talk a lot about how to get to those heart issues and helping the kid work through them. I was pretty wrong.

Tedd Tripp’s (what is with the extra D anyway?) idea is that at the heart of every misbehavior is sin. Dirty, evil, rotten sin. Tripp’s “biblical plan of child rearing” is to first communicate why what the kid did is sinful and wrong and then get rid of the sin. And apparently the Bible says that the ONLY way to get rid of that is by spanking. Like… he started spanking his kids when they were around 8 months old. EIGHT MONTHS. I’m not a doctor or anything, but I’m pretty sure that the “cause and effect” area of a child’s brain isn’t fully formed at 8 months…. right? He says that if you fail to spank you are saying you don’t love your kids enough to raise them the way that God said… or something. What?

There is just so much wrong with this that I am not going to even go through it point by point. I think that the constant spanking was my huge turn off (he spanked his kids from the time they were infants until they were 12-13….. every.single.time they disobeyed their parents), but it was more than that. I just felt like Tedd Tripp really thinks that talking to kids about what they do wrong and then spanking them is it, is the whole goal of parenting. To teach our kids that all this stuff that they do is wrong and that they need to first honor their parents and, in that, honor God. This just feels… wrong… to me. Really, really wrong. He kind of sets up this relationship early on that, “I’m your parent, therefore your adversary,” and I will take the opposite approach with my kids. “We are family, we are in this together. I am your parent, so I will teach you things, but you’re my kid, so you’ll teach me things too.”

I guess that was the whole problem… Tedd Tripp’s method may work for some people. Whatever. I’m too soft/too much of a hippy for that.

The other thing is that when he wrote this Tedd Tripp’s kids were all grown and out of the house. Maybe he forgot that parenting- being in the thick of it- is much different than looking back later. He just kept saying he did the communicate/spank for every time his kids disobeyed or acted out. What about little stuff? What about just normal KID stuff? I think that there is a possibility that he was just too far separated to remember what parenting little kids is really like….

Anyway, I could go on and on, but I’ll leave it at this: this book set wrong with me like very few books have. While I was comfortable with the blurb on the back, that was about it for me. The rest of it felt very harsh and wrong. Yuck.

Conclusion: I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. Ever.

The Book: The Shack, by William P. Young

The Story: Mac’s daughter is kidnapped on his watch. He is watching the kids play while they are camping, there is an accident and his youngest daughter goes missing. By the time she is found in a small shack in the woods, she is dead and her murderer has fled.

Mac and his family deal with the kidnapping and death in very different ways.

One day, Mac receives a note in his mailbox telling him to come to the shack where his daughter was found. Thinking it may be her killer, he packs up for a final showdown. What he finds at the shack is quite different. Quite different indeed.

What I Thought: I know that this is another craze I was totally late for. When this first came out it was one of those really talked about books. I’ve had a few rough run ins with popular Christian fiction, and so I always just kind of rolled my eyes at this one. Earlier this year, not one but two of my very trusted friends recommended this book to me. One friend even bought it for me. He said that I would love it and went on and on.

Honestly, I feel like I may have read a different book.

This was the cheesiest thing I have ever, ever read. It is a Lifetime movie waiting to happen. For a vast majority of the book I could even picture the white haze around the outside of the frame, like one of those strange “inspirational” pictures of an angel sitting by your bed or something. It was just one cliche after another after another. I almost felt embarrassed to be reading it.

I did enjoy the first part, when it was kind of this mystery. I thought that the guy’s life was interesting and I think that I would have liked the book better if it had just been about how he, as a Christian, dealt with the loss of his daughter and then forgiving her killer. I just feel like William Young could have conveyed his message just as well without diving off the cheesiness cliff. (Yum! Cheesiness cliff?! I love it!)

The one part of Mac’s vision that I really enjoyed was the idea of God as a big black lady. Again, I think that there is a lot of stereotyping going on here, but that’s just a cozy picture and I liked it. I also thought that he thought of a clever way to explain the Trinity, but I think that the cherry pie analogy we were taught in Sunday school was just as good.

I get the idea. I commend it even. It is hard to explain the triune God, and when you can kind of wrap your head around it, it is pretty amazing, and I think that this idea is what motivated William Young. I think that his intentions were good, but is just came off really strange for me. I know that a lot of people talk about this book changing their lives. More power to them, I’m glad that they found something that they really connected with. For me? Not so much.

Conclusion:If you are kind of searching or wondering what the Christian idea of God is, check this out. If you’ve been around Christianity enough to be annoyed by the cheesiness of it all sometimes, skip this. Please.

The Book: The Preservationist, by David Maine

The Story: You know this one, I’m sure.  Noah builds a boat.  Noah gets the animals in two-by-two.  Big flood comes and washes everything away.  Noah & his family are the only survivors. They re-populate the Earth. There ya go.

This book bounces from perspective to perspective:  Noah, his wife, his sons, and his daughters-in-law and we get to experience the flood in all these different lights.  We get to see them argue and bicker and help each other out and work their butts off.  What you get, in the end, is a more complete look at what it may have looked like to live for months in cramped quarters with thousands of animals and your family members while this giant historical event is happening right outside your window.

What I Thought: I haven’t read too many re-tellings of Biblical stories just because I generally get annoyed at the agenda that Christian Fiction tries to push.  I did read Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve and really loved it.  I loved the new, fresh perspective, the humor, and the way he relied on the Bible but also added his own bit of humanity to the story.

I can say the exact same thing for this book.  I cannot tell you how impressed I was.  David Maine didn’t take off on this “God faked us out, Noah is a crazy dude” tangent, nor did he get all pompous and preachy.  The tone that he struck was pretty much perfect for the events that were happening and it just made these characters seem very real.

This could have been written as this long, dense, heavy book but it’s really not.  It was super short- maybe 250 pages or so- and I finished it in just a few hours of reading.  It was light and easy to read.  I would almost recommend it as bedtime reading to my friends who have middle-school age kids, but there’s far too much “rutting” going on here for that.  Meh. Oh well. I’ll recommend to the parents instead.

Conclusion: Give this one a go.  It’s a quick little read that kind of fleshes out a story that everyone has heard but maybe not put a lot of thought into.  I guarantee that it will make you laugh a little and reconsider how these events actually took place.  Fun, fun.

The Book: Same Kind of Different As Me: A modern-day slave, an international art dealer, and the unlikely woman who bound them together, by Ron Hall & Denver Moore

The Story: Denver Moore and Ron Hall really could not have led lives that were more opposite than the ones that they were leading:  Denver was a former share-cropper (pretty much a slave) who was living in a shelter and Ron was a super-rich art dealer.

Ron’s wife Deborah had a real heart for the homeless and started working at the shelter where Denver was living.  He was the meanest, toughest, most hard-to-reach man there, but for whatever reason, Deborah felt really drawn to him and encouraged Ron to start a friendship with him.  At first, Ron really did just pursue Denver because his wife wanted him to, but over time it turned into a true friendship.

In alternating chapters, Ron and Denver both talk a lot about how they felt about this new friendship.  Ron was blown away that he could love someone so different than himself.  Denver was touched and truly changed by the fact that Ron saw value in him and trusted him.

Faced with a horrible circumstance,  Ron and Denver’s friendship continues to grow deeper as they learn to lean on each other.

What I Thought: No where on the book jacket did it say that this was a straight-up religious non-fiction book.  I had no idea.  I am a Christian and “get” that part of the story so it didn’t annoy me, but I just want to warn you right off that if that kind of thing gets under your skin, you’ll just want to skip this.  Faith and Jesus and church and Heaven come up over and over and over.

That being said, I was sort of blown away by this book.

Initially I was just amazed at Denver’s life up to this point.  I had heard of share-cropping but wasn’t entirely sure what that meant and surely didn’t know that it went on as recently as the 60’s and 70’s.  I was amazed when he said that he had no idea that WWII, Korea or the Vietnam War had ever happened- he was totally separated from the rest of the world- but just living in Louisiana.  Totally wild.  I am not sure if he is literate now or if he just did his part of the book orally and had someone transcribe it, but his “accent” comes through clearly in his chapters and I really did feel like I could hear his voice by the end.

Ron’s past was less interesting and to be perfectly honest, I never really liked him.  I was touched by his relationship with his wife, but as far as him as a person… eh.  I felt like his devotion to Christianity was a little bit… off.  He admitted that when he was younger he really did the “religion thing” to appease his wife, but from the book, I felt like he was like that straight to the end.  I don’t want to be quick to judge, but he just never seemed real to me like Denver did.

Their friendship and their story together was kind of wonderful.  At one point, Ron’s daughter needs help moving some stuff and he can’t do it.  Denver offers to do it with his newly acquired driver’s license.  He said he was even kind of joking- it was something like an 800 mile trip and he didn’t even have a car.  Ron handed him a few hundred dollars and the keys to his truck.  This was a big turning point not only in their friendship but in Denver’s life.  Never had anyone just trusted him with their money and their stuff and their family.  It gave him worth and he started believing in himself.  Kind of beautiful.

The part that just about destroyed me though was Deborah getting sicker and sicker.  I think I need to stop reading books about spouses dying.  I’ve been hovering over Shaun for weeks and checking on him all the time and trying to force him to go to the doctor for no reason.  I also make him hug me about every 10 seconds. I need to read a happy book or two.  Seriously.  Anyway, Deborah getting sick was awful.  Reading it from Ron’s point of view was just about more than I could take.  I ugly-cried.

The quote that the book title comes from is kind of beautiful. I dog-eared the page so I could share: “I used to spend a lotta time worryin that I was different from other people, even from other homeless folks. Then, after I met Miss Debbie and Mr. Ron, I worried that I was so different from them that we wadn’t ever gon’ have no kind a’ future. But I found out everybody’s different – the same kind of different as me. We’re all just regular folks walkin down the road God done set in front of us. The truth about it is, whether we is rich or poor or somethin in between, this earth ain’t no final restin place. So in a way, we is all homeless – just workin our way toward home.”

Conclusion: Seriously a beautiful, gut-wrenching story.  Know going into it that there’s going to be a lot of religion presented and just be ready for it.  I don’t think it’s presented in a shove-it-down-your-throat kind of way, but it is there.  Also, if you see your significant other reading this, expect that they’ll hover for a few days and need lots of hugs.

The Book: Kaleidoscope: Seeing God’s Wit and Wisdom in a Whole New Light, by Patsy Clairmont

The Story: The idea here is that kaleidoscopes are kind of whimsical and just offer up random little pictures and yadda yadda.  In this book, Patsy Clairmont does a similar deal only out of the book of Proverbs.  She just takes random verses here and there and illustrates them and what they have meant in her life and the lives of her friends and family.

The chapters are each like short, concise little sermons and each one is followed up by questions (”Bits and Pieces”) to make you think about the verse and story that was presented.

What I Thought: I have two confessions: First, I got this book from the publisher.  I’m not sure if they contacted me or if I contacted them, or really how I ended up with this book.  I should write things down.  Second, I have had the book for probably two months. Maybe longer. I actually have no idea. I lost it and forgot all about it.  Recently, it floated to the top of the pile of stuff in the back of my car and I didn’t even recognize it.  I’m a mess and Shaun says that the baby has stolen every single one of my brain cells. So there are my confessions. If you are the one who sent me this book, I apologize a thousand times.

I thought that this book was just kind of… sweet.  Patsy Clairmont is kind of one of those hip older people who realizes that she’s getting old and just kind of goes with it.  She has a little witty sense of humor and is pretty self deprecating, which I love. She also has a Kindle and she’s like 60-something. I love that even more.  All that to say: I want her to be my grandma or my aunt or something.  Parts of it were kind of cheesy and some of her stories were a little over-done, but it wasn’t distracting or anything. In fact, it kind of made me like her more.

The chapters were short but really got to the point. Some of the little stories didn’t really seem to tie into what the verse was saying, but somehow she kind of made it work.  While this was a book about the book of Proverbs, it really wasn’t very “meaty.” It was just kind of light and inspirational.

I read this by myself and actually didn’t do the questions at the end or really slow down enough to think many of the points through.  The whole time I was thinking that this would be a really great book to go through slowly and think through each question, either alone or with a small group.

Conclusion: A fun, sweet little book by a great woman.  I would recommend this to any woman, although older women may enjoy it even more.

The Book: Stalking the Divine, by Kristen Ohlson

The Story: One Christmas, Kristen Ohlson wondered into a Catholic church in Cleveland.  She had wondered away from any type of religion for years and just wanted to go to church on Christmas.  It turns out that this Catholic church has a cloister of nuns called the Poor Clares.

The Poor Clares are a small group of elderly nuns and they absolutely capture the author’s heart and attention.  She goes on to research their past and their present to write a newspaper article and decides to expand that into a book.  As she gets to know the nuns better and hear their stories, she finds part of herself awakening too.  She makes attending mass a priority although she doesn’t really believe most of what they say.  She becomes part of the “regulars” at church, has regular meetings with the priest and even attends and all-night prayer meeting.  She is sort of doing all of these things for the book that she’s writing, but she talks a lot about the effect that these relationships and meetings effect her life.

What I Thought: I know it’s a weird thing, but I’ve always kind of liked nuns.  I was not raised Catholic, and although my step-dad comes from a Catholic family, have had very little exposure to the Catholic faith.  What attracts me to nuns is just that level of devotion.  To leave their families and their lives as they know it to live a totally different lifestyle is something that I cannot entirely wrap my head around.  It is just this beautiful and selfless thing.  I also love the pictures of, say, nuns ice skating or riding bikes or whatever.  Pretty cute.

Anyway, I got this book from a thrift store and it had a sticker on it that it originally came from a bargain bin.  My expectations were pretty much nil.

I was pleasantly surprised.

I really loved “meeting” all the nuns.  Kristen got to sit down and chat with a lot of the nuns and hear their life stories.  The variety here and just the sweetness of it all blew me away.  One of the nuns had been cloistered since the 50’s.  Literally had not left or talked to anyone “outside” in over 50 years.  She loved, loved, loved Indians baseball though and was so happy that the stadium was close enough that she could hear the fireworks and cheering when they won.  She always nabbed the sports section from the newspaper first.  I just love that.  There were a lot of stories of living full, rewarding lives then feeling like their next step was a nunnery, then how they followed through with that.  Seriously, fascinating.

The part about the author’s journey was kind of second-rate for me.  I’ve been a Christian for as long as I can remember and have had my fair share of faith struggles.  I still could not relate to her in any way.  I felt like she just tried to be logical and reason everything out, ignoring a lot of the faith-related issues that come with any religion.  I feel like even though she was trying to ACT super spiritual, that she never really let anything go any further than skin deep.  This made her whole struggle seem shallow and meaningless.

I know that this sounds weird, but I think that this would have been better had the author decided to write it as a novel.  I think that that separation- leaving herself out of the equation or creating a character to represent her- would have went a long way towards making this book more relatable.

Conclusion: An interesting history of a cloister of nuns written from a semi-secular point of view.  That is a pretty unique case and something worth taking a look at.

The Book: Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality, by Rob Bell

The Story: This book, as the subtitle says, goes into the connections between God and sex.  It starts out very broad, talking about how we’ve distorted sex and our sexuality until it has little to do with what God has in mind for us.  He talks about how our connections and our love effect everyone around us, and that is a form of sexuality that we’ve just tossed to the side somewhere along the way.  He focuses a lot on the fact that we were created in the image of our Creator and that gives us worth and value beyond what we would ever have alone.  And finding that value and owning it, is what makes us sexy, according to Rob Bell.

As the book goes on, his focus becomes narrower, and he goes into chapters and chapters about marriage and what God has in mind and how sex comes into play and what that means for our spirituality.  He talks about how the whole time Jesus was on earth, he was playing out this wedding story with his followers.  Even the whole “I go to prepare a place for you…” is from the traditional wedding stuff.  He talks about Johnny and June Cash and how their love got deeper and deeper and how they did it.  Rob Bell does a lot of weddings and marriage counseling and he shares a lot of stories from that and gives examples.

The biggest focus of this book is just living love.  Within friendships, and with strangers, and with your spouse. Just love.

What I Thought: I had skimmed this book about 50 times in the bookstore, but never read it all.  I think I was mostly attracted because I read Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell and really liked it, but also the cover is beautiful and it has “sex” in the title and is in the Christian Inspiration section, so that’s different.

The thing that I didn’t like about this book is that by the end, I felt like it was getting repetitive.  I know that you learn things by hearing them a lot of times, but some of the points seem like they were driven home just a few too many times.  I also didn’t like that there wasn’t really a flow to this book.  It kind of hopped around, even within chapters. I almost felt like I was reading just little random thoughts. I would just get locked into one idea, and he’s off on another one and I just got annoyed with that.

However. I loved the ideas presented.  I love the idea of a Christian book that says “sex” about half a million times. I’ve always kind of thought that the way that Christians avoid the topic of sex is a little bizarre.  Without being vulgar, Rob Bell actually wrote a book about sex how it should be, according to the Bible.  It is refreshing.  I like, though, that he didn’t focus entirely on sex, but also talked about value a lot, and the value that we have and how we shouldn’t settle.  I think that is a message that we need to hear over and over and over. His focus, in the last few chapters, about marriage really got me.

My favorite part of the book was the focus on the Hebrew language. I always love hearing what the original Hebrew says and how that translates into English.  There was a ton of this, and I just ate it up. Good stuff.  I also liked the information on how the Jews used to do weddings and what that looked like and how Jesus applied that and how it applies to us.  For me, the chapter about Chuppah was totally fascinating.

I must also mention the footnotes.  I wasn’t reading them at first, and then I flipped to see what one was and was surprised to find that the footnotes take up the last 20 or so pages of the book. There are a lot of them and they are interesting.

Conclusion: I think that this would be a perfect book to read as an engaged couple.  Not only is it good teaching, but it opens up a lot of points that you may not have talked about without the aide of a book.  Not only about sex, but about the Biblical view of marriage and how you should treat each other.  Beyond that, if you’ve never read Rob Bell, I’d say go for Velvet Elvis first.  Its view is broader and will give you a view of how Rob Bell writes and what he believes.  But this book is surely readable for anyone that is interested in what the Bible says about sex and sexuality.