My connections with Famous Authors

I am very excited for two lovely ladies who are about to have books published! 

The first Famous Author is my dear friend from Brazil, Jenny Spinola.  She’s an American from the small Virginia town where my mom now lives who met her Brazilian husband while she was a missionary in Japan.  (Three hemispheres!  One family!)  We met at the International Baptist church in Brasilia.  Recently Barbour Books picked up three of her books.  The first one, Southern Fried Sushi, will be released this coming Saturday.  Woohoo!  The book has been getting some lovely reviews.  The second in the series will be released in just 6 months.  So everybody rush to your nearest bookstore, computer or kindle and buy it!

The second Famous Author is Katy Pistole.  I don’t technically know Katy, but her mother was my mentor in the CS Lewis Fellows program last year and is one of the sweetest ladies I know, so I’m sure Katy is wonderful!  She has already published a series of four children’s books, but last night she won the American Christian Fiction Writers’ Genesis Award for Contemporary Fiction.  So her first book for adults will be published soon!

Congratulations, Jenny and Katy!

In memoriam

Today I remember a beautiful clear day 10 years ago. A day just like any day, when I rode the bus to the Pentagon, transferred to the metro, and arrived at my office just across the river.

I remember my office-mate receiving a phone call from a friend saying that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. We found a little radio and started listening to the news. The correspondent at the Pentagon reported that the entire building just shook, and he thought a bomb had gone off. 

Rumors of another plane. It’s heading for the White House, just up the street, where a number of my friends are working. Or it’s heading for Congress, just up the street the other direction, where more of my friends are working. 

I wake up my Dad in Hawaii so that he will know I’m okay. I can’t get a hold of my Mom, because she’s in training, but I leave a message. Cell phones aren’t always working because everybody is calling loved ones to make sure they’re okay. 

We’re told to go home. But my route home is through the Pentagon. No metro. No bus. Four of us decide to walk to the closest person’s apartment. We walk across the 14^th Street Bridge, past a smoking Pentagon and tons of emergency response people. We walk through the Pentagon City neighborhood, where we meet some Air Force officers who had been just down the hall from where the plane hit. They were looking for a sports bar where they could get a drink and watch the news. 

We arrive at the apartment and watch the news. All day. Trying to figure out what is going on. Being told that nobody is allowed to drive on the streets unless it’s an emergency. After dark, the roads are opened, and we are able to go home.

I remember generosity and kindness in a city known for neither of those things. I remember people passing out lemonade to the thousands of people walking to their homes. I remember patriotism. The tons of American flags flying on cars, at homes and office buildings for months afterwards. Songs like “God Bless the USA” and “Bring on the Rain” playing on the radio. 

I remember our pastor that Sunday speaking about the problem of evil in the world, and the sermon given by an incredibly gifted young intern – just as his grandfather had preached the Sunday after Pearl Harbor. I remember the many people asking for prayer for friends and family in New York or who worked at the Pentagon. The man crying because his small children couldn’t understand why their friends were never coming back to the day care. 

I remember anxiously watching planes fly across the sky for months afterwards. Riding a silent train through an eerily closed Pentagon metro station.

I remember all of the jokes about having to go shopping to keep the economy running, “or else the terrorists win!”

I remember the debris at the Pentagon being removed and a new clean wall rising up, with the American flag flying above it.

I remember a beautiful clear day a year later, exactly the same as the year before. Dawning in a world that was never the same.

Life in language training

It’s been an interesting few weeks. We’ve had an earthquake, a hurricane and now floods. I’ve discovered that my cat freaks out and runs behind the sofa when there’s an earthquake and won’t come out for an hour afterwards. I have a little pile of things to superglue as a result of the earthquake. And after this week of continual torrential downpours, I’ve been thankful that I live on the third floor of my building.

My life is currently dominated by studying Japanese. It’s pretty much all I do. A lovely friend gave me the opportunity to go to the beach in North Carolina over Labor Day weekend. It was beautiful and relaxing and occasionally a fascinating (Southern) cultural experience! And I flipped through flash cards on the beach. I’m pretty much always studying Japanese. I have class 5 days per week, 5 hours per day, one on one. And then there are the hours and hours of studying outside of class. I have been in class for 4 weeks and completed 6 chapters in the book. I think you learn a lot about a culture when you study the language. In Japanese, I’ve learned that there is no distinction between singular and plural or between the present and the future. I’ve learned that pronunciations imported 1,600 years ago are still considered “imports”. I’ve learned that stroke order (the process of drawing kanji – the imported Chinese characters – knowing which line is drawn when and in what direction you move the pencil/brush) is very important. I’ve also discovered that, when under pressure, the only foreign language that pops into my head is Portuguese. I start Japanese Area Studies next week (1 full day about every 2 weeks for 10 months). That should be really interesting.

When taking a break from Japanese, I’ve been reading John Stott’s book “The Contemporary Christian”. I’m only part way through it, but I would highly recommend it. I’ve underlined a lot, but I have two favorite quotes so far. For one, his definition of sin strikes right to the core: “…what the Bible means by ‘sin’ is primarily self-centredness. For God’s two great commandments are first that we love him with all our being and secondly that we love our neighbour as we love ourselves. Sin, then, is the reversal of this order. It is to put ourselves first, virtually proclaiming our own autonomy, our neighbour next when it suits our convenience, and God somewhere in the background.” 

My other favorite quote was his succinct and eloquent discussion of how we find our humanness in relationships of love: “True love, however, places constraints on the lover, for love is essentially self-giving. And this brings us to a startling Christian paradox. True freedom is freedom to be my true self, as God made me and meant me to be.  And God made me for loving. But loving is giving, self-giving. Therefore, in order to be myself, I have to deny myself and give myself. In order to be free, I have to serve. In order to live, I have to die to my own self-centredness. In order to find myself, I have to lose myself in loving.”

In other thoughts… Over the summer, I posted links to several commencement speeches where the speaker talks about failure and how it’s okay if our dreams fail. I think those talks spoke to me, because I think we are often defined not by how we live in supposed perfection but by how we face difficulty and failure – or the risk of failure. Some of the darkest moments in my life have been turning points that have grown me as a person, and specifically as a person of faith. Some of the biggest moments of risk in my career have turned into wonderful opportunities and fascinating experiences. To act out of fear – of failure or of pain – is to withdraw from life. To take a step of faith, to follow where God leads, to trust in His goodness, to take what the world might call a great risk, is to experience the wonder of God and His creation. The process may be terrifying, but when you stand at the other end and look back, you see an abundance of reasons for praise.

Finally, adding to my current trend of including fun or interesting links:

Here is an article about how God is good – ALL the time – including singleness (as the author was at the time). I think it's both amusing and encouraging.

I think this video on “Wrong Worship” is hilarious.  And maybe just a little convicting.