love to paint

Last week I read a book that I enjoyed.  I began reading the book cautiously, but with curiosity.  The author's unique life experience intrigued me and I wanted to hear what God had taught her and what conclusions she arrived at along the way. The book is a surprisingly popular book.  It has unexpectedly gained national recognition because of three interviews with the author on Family Life Today in September and there are over three hundred reviews of the book on Amazon with only five reviews giving the book under 3 stars (and one of them isn't a real review because the review doesn't agree with the rating).  That says something about the book. The book is The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey Into Christian Faith by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.  The book has been talked about by John Piper, Family Life Today, World Magazine, and many other Christian media sources.  I'm sure it's all over the blog rolls, actually. ...

Sometimes I watch a movie that leaves me feeling...  well, I don't really...  just weird!  Someone asked me this weekend about the movie Silver Linings Playbook.  The person thought I might have seen it.  I hadn't.  I knew the basic plot of the movie and I felt like it could go either way--I could either really like it or really hate it.  There were some details of the story that you know going into it that made me a little uncomfortable about the characters. So, I watched it today.  Granted, I did fast forward some clips.  But, I watched most of it.  At the end, I didn't feel better than I did before I watched it.  I felt puzzled.  I am still trying to figure out the message in the movie and what the author and director believe. Here's my thought.  The movie seems to say that we just have to take people as they are.  Our world tells us this constantly.  I am who I am.  Love me the way I want to be loved...

I've known many women who read all of the books in a series.  Karen Kingsbury is known for writing book series with five to eight books in them.  Series typically drive me crazy because they leave me hanging at the end of the book and I have to wait for the next one.  That happened to me with the Cedar Keys novels.  The books were released so far apart that I couldn't remember what had happened in the other books and who was who.  It was quite frustrating for me.   When Jen Turano began her series of books that began with A Change of Fortune , I wondered how the series would go.  The first one was a funny melodrama and I had high hopes that this would be a fun, lighthearted series to read.  The first book turned out, in my opinion to be the best one of the series.  The others seemed to all follow the same kind of formula revolving around the same families (which I did like), which seemed to be entirely (entirely!) predictable.  I misse...