Wrestling Prayer by Eric and Leslie Ludy

I honestly don't know what to write about this book. Not because I didn't like it, but because I am still trying to comprehend it's implications for my life. Overwhelming, challenging, mind-boggling, life-changing are all suitable but also insufficient attempts at description.

"We are to be the fearless ones, the courageous ones, the ones who stand when every other man sits, the ones who storm the gates when every other man turns and hightails, the ones who say, 'I will fight 'em!' when every other man sinks in despair." I am afraid that more often I am sinking in despair than prepared to storm the gates, but Eric and Leslie have an answer for that. "There is absolutely  no excuse to stay where you are at right now. If you are weak, He can make you strong. If you are timid, He can make you brave. If you are a pervert, He can make you pure. If you are selfish, He can make you selfless. If you are a shepherd, He can make you a king. If you are mediocre, He can make you a Mighty One of valor."

Growing up in church, prayer is often talked about, preached about, and tried about....but the prayer described in this book (as taken from examples from the Bible) is really not something I have ever seen in practice. "If you want to get serious about prayer, you have to make a conscious decision to ignore all of those brilliant-sounding excuses. You have to choose to make prayer the highest priority of your life - no matter how your flesh screams in protest."

Perhaps one of the passages that most pierced my heart was the one asking why more people aren't willing to devote their lives to this kind of prayer. "We hesitate because we instinctively know that life will forever change if we seize this opportunity. We know that we will never be able to go back to our days of selfish and fleshly ignorance. We are aware of the fact that we are not just gaining something great, but we are losing something in this transaction. ...We are losing the controls of our life. And, to be quite frank, we like being in control. ...We are giving up the confidence in our self, our abilities, our intellect, our wisdom, and our might. ...We are giving up all the excuses that we have concocted over the years for living a mediocre and marginal existence."

Mountaineer Dreams & Cajun Hearts

I don't know that this is the best reason to choose books, but I have a strange affection for books from Barbour Publishing. It isn't their award-winning authors  or fascinating story-lines (both statements made tongue-in-cheek). Instead it is the fact that Barbour Publishing is located in Uhrichsville, Ohio. If you have ever been to Uhrichsville you can understand my frequent amazement that it would be home to a publishing company. Located in a tiny town in the middle of rural Ohio, Barbour has been making a name for itself in the Christian publishing circle, not necessarily for producing great literary works but more for reproducing inexpensive editions of Christian classics from time gone by.

Barbour's novels provide an afternoon's distraction, a quick break from the routine of life and, most importantly to me, a connection to home.

Beguiled by Deeanne Gist and J. Mark Bertrand

After the last book I read by Deeanne Gist, I wasn't too anxious to begin this one...until I realized that it was set in Charleston. I may not be a South Carolina native, but I truly enjoy any glimpse I can get into my new home. Unlike the last novel, which was set in the past and focused on the romance of the story, this novel is set in modern Charleston and focuses on a series of unexplained burglaries.

Rylee is a woman trying to hold her life together, the victim of a tragic past. A past that tortures her present as she is tied to a string of thefts throughout the city. As all evidence begins to point to her guilt in the crimes, the feelings of guilt and abandonment that plagued her childhood begin to resurface. Her feelings of abandonment intensify once she is thrown in jail. Thinking back on her grandmother's promise to protect her "An impossible vow. A vow no one could keep. Unless they were God. God. She scoffed. Even He was gone. She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt His presence. Not here. Not anywhere."

Sitting in the jail she realizes that it isn't God who has abandoned her, but she who has abandoned God. "She might go to church and read her Bible, but she was just going through the motions. On the inside, she'd quit. Quit spending time with Him. Quit telling Him her secrets. Quit saying her prayers." While I enjoyed the suspense of the storyline, this was the part of the novel that most impacted me. I couldn't help but wonder how many times and in how many ways I have quit on God only to later feel like He had abandoned me.

Rylee later discovers the truth behind the robberies, she discovers the truth behind her childhood abandonment by her parents, she discovers the security of a love that will never abandon her, but is the discovery that she will never be abandoned by God that gives her future more hope than her past.

Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz

Solitude is something with which I am very familiar, or at least I thought I was, so when someone posted the link to Deresiewicz's address to class of West Point cadets on Twitter ( http://www.theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/ )I was intrigued. While solitude may seem like such a normal part of my daily existence, the thought of solitude influencing leadership was not.

I found Deresiewicz's lecture to be challenging on many levels, the first and foremost being the way I view solitude. When you spend large amounts of time on your own you begin to see yourself as an expert at it. You are able to find all kinds of ways to fill your time, to stay busy, to distract yourself from the aloneness. In Deresiewicz's view, solitude should instead be embraced as the opportunity to think away from the multitude of distractions that life has to offer. "Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people's ideas, or memorizing a body of information...I need time to think about it [his first thought on a subject], too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing," This kind of thinking, concentrating, devoting your focus to one idea, is difficult, but I think the difficulty is imperative because we never fully recognize the value of things that come too easily.

The second challenge (in order of importance to me, not as found in the reading) is that of friendship. Deresiewicz links the ideas of solitude and introspection with friendship in a way that most of us probably overlook. He feels that friendship is a crucial component to developing this kind of deep and meaningful thought life. He is very careful to make clear the distinction between what he calls "the deep friendship of intimate conversation" and the "968 'friends' that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day." He places so much importance on friendship because it is though these realtionships that we "feel safe enough ... to acknowledge things - to acknowledge things to yourself - that you otherwise can't. Doubts, you aren't supposed to have, questions you aren't supposed to ask. Feeling or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities." This was a challenge to me because while I stuggle with developing these kind of friendships, I very much sense their importance in our lives.

The final challenge I found in the lecture was in how I, as a teacher, and education, as a system, are seeking to prepare students for the world. Deresiewicz is delivering this address at West Point and spent ten years as a professor at Yale, so he has seen some of the best and brightest that our nation has to offer, and while he doesn't doubt their ability to become successful, he also isn't too terribly impressed. He claims that what we are producing, as an educational system, is a bunch of "great kids who have been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors." While as a middle school teacher, who often wishes her students could meet more of her goals and pass more of her tests, there is some appeal in this image he paints. The problem, according to Deresiewicz, is that "We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned by earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don't know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don't know how to set them in the first place. ...What we don'e have are leaders. What we don't have, in other words, are thinkers." What am I asking of my students, to become the next generation of leaders and thinkers, or the next generation of "technocrats"? Can I ask something of my students that I'm not sure I'm all that successful of doing myself?