Specific acts of kindness

You can always count on my friend Terry Esau to offer deep insights through unconventional means. I love his writing style - it's edgy (who doesn't love to peer over the edge to see what lies beyond your ordinary horizon!), it's fresh, it's powerful, it's challenging.

Terry is the master storyteller. He can extract truth from the most trivial of circumstances and he does it in a way that makes you laugh one minute and grab your chest the next. I loved his latest, Be The Surprise. It's a companion piece to Suprise Me, God - A 30-day Faith Experiment, that challenged readers to pray a simple prayer, and only this prayer, for 30 days: "Suprise me, God."

In Be the Surprise, Terry turns it back on us, the God-followers, to look past comfy-coziness and endeavor to be the surprise someone else is praying for. And to do it now. I love this quote from the book: "The present will never reveal its full potential unless God is riding with us, enhancing our awarness of it. God brings the present to life; or should I say he brings life to the present. When we live with this awareness, we will no longer desire to rush past the now, hoping that our later will be better, because the now will have become our favorite stretch of highway."

Foisting kindness onto the hurting world is what Christianity should be all about, you know?. It's what the -anity should be if we put flesh on it. We show Christ when we give, when we reach out, when we respond to need. We show Christ when our "anity" is love that surprises.

Great book, Edglings. A quick read, a powerful read. A keeper.

Stepping into sunlight . . .

I have not walked every road of pain. I've had my bouts of bad days, certainly, but I've been spared the private agonies of such trials as clinical depression, post-traumatic stress and sheer panic. I can only imagine what it must be like to feel as though you are tethered to nothing.

My dear friend Sharon Hinck's newest release, Stepping Into Sunlight, ushers the reader straight into the shadowy world of emotional turmoil and she does it without melodrama. It feels real. Sometimes a little too much so.

Here's the set-up: Penny Sullivan witnesses a terrible crime, one that shatters the routines of daily life and leaves her in the grip of fear. Ordinary days become more than she can handle. Her military husband is away at sea and she has a 7-year-old son depending on her so hiding isn't an option. She formulates a restoration plan to keep from losing it compltely - do one kind thing for somebody every day.

Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about it: "Hinck, a 2008 Christy finalist for visionary fiction, offers an especially grounded tale of sudden trauma and slow healing. Narrator Penny Sullivan witnesses a horrific crime shortly before her navy chaplain husband is deployed, so she is forced to cope alone with the psychological fallout from what she saw. Family issues from her past complicate her struggle and enhance its credibility. Strong Christian themes form a natural part of the narrative. Penny Sullivan's faith is shaken, and she wonders why God would appear to permit evil and whether her emotional turmoil can be healed. A supporting cast of characters, from a nosy neighbor to the busy faithful servant to the downtrodden who heads a local mission, adds quirk and richness. Hinck is a mother of four, and it shows in authentic details in her characterization of the narrator's worried, loving seven-year-old son who gets his first pet in some cute comic relief. Hinck has done her homework on post-traumatic stress syndrome, and is not afraid to show readers that challenges can deepen faith."

Sharon has created wonderful new blog to dovetail with the release of the book where other bloggers can step up to the challenge of doing one kind thing everyday, kind of a pay-it-forward response to personal loss. It's hard to wallow in self-pity when your feet are busy propelling you forward to help someone else. You can find the Penny's Project blog here.

If you'd like to win a copy of Stepping Into Sunlight, just toss a comment onto my blog here by Monday, Sept. 29, at midnight. I'll draw a winner Tuesday morning.

Life ain't easy sometimes. The sun is usually shining somewhere, though. We just have to find our way out of the shadows and step into it.

Mercy takes shape. . .

It is the eve of the release of my tenth novel, The Shape of Mercy. Tomorrow it will hit the street, as they say.

Every book I've written I've invested into it threads of myself. And I don't just mean time and mental gymnastics. But this one. . . This one emerged from somewhere deep inside me. I found myself pondering just about everything that really matters when I was writing this one. A novelist bleeds his or her worldview onto the pages when he or she writes; Sometimes we bleed a little, sometimes the pages seem red when we're done.

The concept behind The Shape of Mercy stayed with me long after I finished it, which was nearly a year ago. And I know why it did. I am guilty of the weakness Lauren my protagonist had to discover - and admit - about herself. She, like me, like so many, judge better than we love. And we let fear dictate how much love we will extend and to whom we will extend it. Not always, not in every circumstance. But it happens often enough to know I might['ve easily kept my quivering mouth shut had I lived in Salem in 1692. I can't see myself accusing my innocent neighbor of bewitching me, but I might've said nothing - out of fear for my own life -when someone else did the finger-pointing. And I might've said nothing still when the Village marched to Gallows Hill to watch the accused hang. We tend to fear what we can't comprehend. And we tend to understand only what we want to.

There is a shimmering ray of hope, however. And it actually permeated all of 1692 Salem, though it hasn't garnered the same spotlight as the delusions of frightened and empowered people. The innocents who were hanged as witches refused to confess an allegiance to the Devil. Refused to the point of death. I find that remarkable and magnificent. It fills me with hope to consider that while we have the capacity to judge when we should show mercy, we also have the capacity to embrace Truth for all we're worth - even if it means we give up everything for it.

It wasn't all darkness and deception in 1692 Salem. There was light there, too. It flickered every time the noose was pulled tight on the throat of one who would not give up on God and everything holy and good.

This book isn't a book about the Trials, just a contemporary look at what they teach us.

And so it begins; my little roving commentary on the things we must learn from our weaker moments in history.

And the things we must commemorate. . .

Hidden in the pages

A few years back I read Geraldine Brooks' debut novel Year of Wonders, a story set in the time of The Plague, and was moved by her literary artistry. Somehow I missed March, which came out a few years later and won the Pulitzer. This one was based on Louisa May Alcott's fictional March family in Little Women, and imagined for us what the Civil War taught the March girls' father since in Alcott's book, we read of his experiences only in his letters to his daughters. It received a starred review in Publishers' Weekly.

I still need to read that one.

But I just finished her most recent work, People of the Book, and was again taken by Brooks' ability to usher the reader straight into the complicated past - in all its beauty and ugliness.

In People of the Book, Brooks' fictinalizes the finding of an ancient Jewish book known to contemporaries as the Sarajevo haggadah. (FYI, the haggadah is the text of the Passover seder and the Sarajevo haggadah is beautifully engraved with artwork, quite unique). Thought destroyed during the bombing of Sarajevo in 1992, it resurfaces in 1996 and Brooks' character, a rare book expert named Hanna Heath, is called upon to prepare it for display.

When the pages are cracked open, the reader is sent on a secret trip through the centuries. In her restoration work, Hanna finds within the pages a white hair, an insect wing, missing clasps, a smidgeon of salt, a wine stain - all of which point to the haggadah's 500-year journey. Hanna can only guess how a wing from an Alpine butterfly ended up in a Jewish tome penned in Spain in the fifteenth century, but Brooks takes the reader to the place Hanna can only wonder about. In between the chapters dealing with Hanna's own peculiar struggles, the reader is let in on all the secrets of the haggadah. It's sort of a "if-these-walls-could-speak" tale that makes you ponder if only for a second what any antique would tell us if given a tongue.

I imagine the first words across the board might be, "When will you people learn?!"

I was too tired most nights when I picked up People of the Book to read before bed, and I fell asleep more than once with its pages in my face, but I found remarkable satisfaction in being let in on mysteries the wise Dr. Hanna Heath could only speculate about.

Excellent read, Edglings. Off to find March. . .

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen. adieu

There they go. Flying off to some sunny vacation spot, free from inner turmoil - or at least free from having to think about anything more intense than cream or no cream in their java.

I finished a book this weekend. Closed the Word file. Sent it off to my editor. Emerged from the cave where my cast of troubled characters have held me bound.

We've been through a lot together the last few months. There were times when I wanted to vaporize these people, times I wanted to take them out for fish tacos (that's a good thing, amigos) and times I wanted to break out the magic wand and tap their problems to oblivion with just a flick of the wrist.

I've agonized over their woes, knowing I was the source and I pondered their deliverance, knowing I was the source of that, too. It's an experience that is slightly Edenic in nature, being a novelist. It is a heady thing to hold the fate of half a dozen people in your hand.

In the end, no pun intended, I crafted for them - and for the future reader - a resolution I hope is believable, satisfying and cheeseless. The characters seemed happy with it. They know I've left them in a place where they can still mess it all up if they choose to. That's part of the Edenic nature, too, isn't it?

And so I wrote the last word, we embraced, and I told them how proud I was of their accomplishments. I helped them pack their bags, drove them to an imaginary airport and shooed them away with all the love and insistence of a parent sending a child off to summer camp.

We need a break from each other.

Goodbye, I called out to them. Enjoy your little vacation! Rest from your labors! Breathe deep the aroma of freedom and peace.

And for pity's sake, don't get into any trouble . . .