Guilt and Glitter

  ​Please welcome Stephanie Landem to “My Times and Places.” I first met Stephanie at a critique group we were both a part of and soon recognized a sister in the Lord. She was unpublished at the time. It has been fun to see her grow as a writer. I loved her biblical fiction, especially The Tomb, ​the story of Martha of Bethany. She just released In A Far-Off Land. It’s still biblical fiction in a way—a retelling of one of Jesus’ most well-known parables, this time set in 1930s Hollywood. It’s a wonderful read with great characters you will really care about!

 

Rent Hearth Stones

​​I’m a book person. I have a tendency to get behind in the magazines I want to read. Christianity Today is at the top of my list because it grapples with faith in a real-world context. Recently I ran across the December 2018 issue I seem to have missed in a pile (although I did recognize some articles I had read on-line at the time.) From the opening “Editor’s Note” it lamented this awful year. After 2020, I was hard pressed to come up with what had been so bad about 2018. I had to look it up—hurricanes, forest fires, school shootings, international atrocities and violence. Yeah, pretty bad stuff. And even when Coronavirus is over, bad things will continue to happen.

 

Beginning of the End?

 

“I’m excited,” I said, surprised to feel the flutter of my heart.

 
“Me too,” my husband admitted with a grin.
​

Are We Truly Free and Brave?

 ​Among the many things changed by Covid has been my involvement in a choral group that included many music teachers from surrounding communities. We rehearsed weekly in one of the high schools. Last spring as we prepared for our concert the school closed the building to outside personnel like us. Within a week school closed period. In the beginning we had hopes of rescheduling our concert for maybe June. Then September or October. My music still hangs in a bag on a hook ready to grab as I go out the door to rehearsal.

This song is not from last spring’s planned program. It is from an earlier concert, but the text by American abolitionist, James Russel Lowell (1819-1891), has stuck with me. In recent days its meaning seems all the more powerful.

Fractured Worlds

  ​I have been reading a lot about Native Americans this past year in an effort to better understand my Ojibwe neighbors. I read The Orenda by Joseph Boyden in early March, but then Covid made it seem irrelevant. Recent protests for social justice brought my thoughts back to understanding neighbors whose cultures are different from mine, whose life experiences and worldviews are different. We aren’t all alike. We are different, and that difference enriches our world. Difference does not mean one is any less an image bearer of God than any other. We all deserve respect as God’s creation. We all stand in need of the gospel of Jesus Christ—a brown man from a lower class family in a backwater of an oppressive empire.

Justice and Compassion, Hand in Hand

 

The Lord longs to be gracious to you;

     therefore he will rise up to show you compassion.
For the Lord is a God of justice.
     Blessed are all who wait for him! (Isaiah 30:18)

Compassion and Justice, hand in hand. It is who our God is. Not one or the other, but both together. "Grace and Truth" is how one of his closest friends described him when he came to live with us--Word made flesh, the One and Only come from the Father (John 1:14). 

Pain

 

“It demonstrates the deep pain of American people of color in an age of one police killing after another,” I wrote in 2016 of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me. How many more killings have occurred since then? More than I can count. (There appears to be a Washington Post data base of police killings that might answer that question,  but I’m afraid I’m not a subscriber, so I don’t have access.)