#nature faith books

[jessica-marie-baumgartner]

Thank you everyone for making yesterday's release so very magical!

Faith and spirituality are such personal aspects of life that every time I write about it I wish to do so on a fun and respectful level.

The reviews keep pouring in and I'm humbled by all your kind thoughts on this heartfelt work.

Just check out what people are saying:

[mangotalkies]

"after all, how can one feel the loss of a thing whose existence one has become unconscious to?"

a wonderful collection of essential and constant truth bombs.

[milestone-blog]

“Victory over selfishness is not a day’s battle, but a lifelong battle. But the fruits of love are worth the struggle of a lifetime. If they tell you that the miracle of love can cure diseases, what they say may be scientific, for through love harmony and order are established in the body and soul. If love has not cured anyone yet, it is because we have not yet learned how to love.”

[fictionadventurer]

The worst part about reading in a genre where you have low expectations (in this case, Christian historical fiction) is that when a book impresses you, you have no idea if it's actually good or if you're just overly impressed because it was a fraction of a degree better than the usual garbage.

[leonieanderson]

What is better than believing you are heading towards love?

- Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

[frodo-with-glasses]

Ah, now here’s one I’ve been looking forward to discussing. Lord of the Rings has a strange relationship with hope. Before I began this read-through, I would have told you that hope is at the core of LotR: hope that the war will end, hope that light will triumph over darkness, hope that “there’s some good in this world, Mister Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for”. I would have told you that it’s an innately cheerful, optimistic story, though it gets dark at times.

But over this past year, as I’ve reread this book with the eyes of an adult, I’ve begun to realize it’s more complicated than that.

Lord of the Rings is not a story about hope. It’s a story about what you do without hope. It’s a story about when your spirit is utterly defeated, and your prospects are grim, and both the best and the worst possible outcomes look shockingly alike, and yet you keep walking anyway. It’s not a story of blind, naive optimism, of sitting back and dreaming about a better about-to-be. It’s a story of weighing the facts with a clear mind, of realizing that there’s no way in hell this works out well for you, and of doggedly moving your grain of sand to tip those massive scales anyway, because the only other option would be to sit back and let the world burn.

I feel like that rings truer to the human condition, really. After all, what good is it in the end to be kind and generous and courageous; what good is it to waste our short lives trying to make this awful world a better place? For every one human being trying to be a good person, there are hundreds more who are selfish, cruel, exploitative, greedy, twisted, and wicked. For every good deed done on this planet, there are hundreds more murders and abuses and horrors. One day, you will die, and at some point, everyone who knew you will be dead. There will come a day when you will be utterly forgotten. No one will remember you. No one will remember what you did. No one will remember if you made a difference, if you tried to make the world a better place. And let’s be honest; you won’t. No matter what light you managed to throw into the world while you were alive, this awful cosmos will generate enough pain and misery to overshadow it, eventually. When you’re gone, the world will be just as bad as it always was. Always has been. Always will be.

What good is it to go on loving someone when the diagnosis is terminal—when the medicine doesn’t work—when the sickness in their head has locked the person you love behind an unbreakable concrete wall? What good is it to stand for what you believe in when it’s not popular anymore—when friends and family turn their backs and reject you—when those who gave you praise and encouragement now insult you and curse you and spit on your face? What good is it to love when your heart is broken, be kind when your skin is mottled with bruises, be brave when your back is bent and your arms are weary under the weight of it all? What good is it to cast your little candle light when all the wind in the world tries to blow it out? Why be good? Why be selfless? Why sacrifice so much, when you lose so much more than you gain?

In that moment, there’s only one answer. And it’s not hope. It’s not optimism. It’s some strange defiance, some visceral fire that roars in the chest and aches in the bones.

“I will be light,” it cries. “I will defy you,” it howls. “I will push back with the last of my strength, though you crush me down,” it screams. “Because if I am not light, I am darkness, and I cannot, I will not, I refuse; let me die with my knees unbowed and my head held high; I WILL NEVER SURRENDER”

There are many instances in the book that speak to this point—Aragorn himself says something along the lines of “we must do without hope for the moment”—but to me, nothing better encapsulates this strange spirit of hopeless defiance than this moment with Sam Gamgee.

“Sam said nothing. The look on Frodo’s face was enough for him; he knew that words of his were useless. And after all he never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning; but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed. Now they were come to the bitter end. But he had stuck to his master all the way; that was what he had chiefly come for, and he would still stick to him. His master would not go to Mordor alone. Sam would go with him.”

Sam would go with him. Not “we will win”. Not “I believe in us”. Just “he will go, and I will go with him, whether this ends in (improbable) victory or (more probable) a horrible, horrible death”. It’s not that Sam’s hope began to fail here; it’s that he never had much hope to begin with, but he went with it anyway, and it’s only his cheerful disposition in the face of near certain disaster that ever began to flag. Holy cow.

Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but when the first two fail, love is the unkillable cockroach of all the virtues and will survive the nuclear winter of utter despair and grow wings and fly buzzing right up into your face just to spite you.

Now, of course Lord of the Rings does not simply leave us with the tragedy of a futile fight against the darkness. This story has a happy ending. And I’m glad it does, because sometimes, there are happy endings. Sometimes sicknesses are cured, families are restored, and old scars are healed and begin to fade. Sometimes loved ones emerge from the prison of their own minds and return to you—wiser, more melancholy, but still themselves—and you discover that the bond is deeper, the smiles sweeter, the laughter richer, and the love galvanized into something stronger than it ever would have been. Sometimes there are happy endings, and it’s not wrong to want them. It’s not wrong to have hope.

But Lord of the Rings lets us linger in that moment of hopeless defiance, because it offers an odd sort of comfort of a totally different kind.

“Lost all hope, did you?” it whispers. “It’s all right. So did Frodo, and Aragorn, and Gandalf, and Sam. But you see, they kept fighting anyway, with hope or without it, and that’s what made them heroes. Oh, you might still have your happy ending, someday, and it might come in ways you don’t expect. It is also equally likely that nothing will get better, and it will actually get much worse, and you shall die. But do keep fighting. Do keep walking. One foot in front of the other. If you do nothing, the worst will definitely come to pass; but if you fight, it just might not. So if we shall win, let’s not be embarrassed by our cowardice when that happy ending comes; and if we shall lose, let’s not go down without a fight.”

Perhaps, paradoxically, that’s what makes Lord of the Rings the most hopeful story of all. Because this is the story that whispers, “Remember, when all hope is gone…

“It isn’t.”

WORD ASK GAME!

[areadersquoteslibrary]

"Augustine held that nature itself was a continuing miracle. The miracle that Jesus performed in turning water into wine was no greater than the yearly miracle that turned water from the clouds to wine when rain fell upon vineyards."

- Martin Luther: The Christian Between God And Death

Richard Marius

[ultimatelyangel]

photo dump from a few weeks ago bcuz i haven't had my phone <3

[epicforwards]

"If it costs you your peace, it is too expensive." -- Paulo Coelho

[age-of-moonknight]

Timeless (Vol. 3/2023), #1.

Writers: Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly; Penciler and Inker: Juann Cabal; Colorist: Edgar Delgado; Letterer: Travis Lantham

[jessica-marie-baumgartner]

1 day left until release day!

[kalahs-beautiful-realm]

Quote from, The Urantia Book.

[milestone-blog]

Hate costs more than love because it is an unnatural feeling, a reverse feeling like the movement of objects against the Earth's gravity.

[fictionadventurer]

The Heir of Redclyffe is teaching me that what Little Women really needed was for the March sisters to have a clever, witty, sharp-tongued, disabled brother who was BFFs with Laurie.

[leonieanderson]

With all the consciousness of my being, I love you.

Excerpted from ‘Forty lessons with Christ: A guide to daily living’ by Leonie Anderson

[beaft]

are you excited for good omens 2?

I was talking to a friend about this just last night! Yes, I'm excited to see where it goes, and I'm excited that Jon Hamm is going to be in it more (he was one of my favourite parts of S1), and I'm especially excited that John Finnemore is on the writing team. He does really great, natural-sounding dialogue, and I think his sense of humour will fit in well with the overall Vibes of the series. I loved S1 for its optimism and charm, and for its lead performances, and for how much care clearly went into it - but a lot of the humour really didn't work for me. It was a sweet, faithful adaptation of my favourite book, it just wasn't quite "there". (Subjective, of course; I know a lot of people loved it unreservedly.) What I've seen of S2 looks really promising, and I'm curious to see how it pans out.