A Word for Wednesday

"In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go.
The driver who cannot tear his eyes away from the wall as he spins out of control will meet that wall;
 the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free will regain control of his vehicle.
 Your car goes were your eyes go."

~from The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein~

A Word for Wednesday

"This is a rule of racing: No race has ever been won in the first corner; many have been lost there."

~from The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein~

A Word for Wednesday

"If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship,
the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony,
it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note.
Aristotle has told us that a city is a unity of unlikes,
and St Paul that a body is a unity of different members.
Heaven is a city, and a Body, because the blessed remain eternally different:
a society, because each has something to tell the others—fresh and ever fresh news of the 'My God' whom each finds in Him whom all praise as 'Our God'."

~from The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis~

A Word for Wednesday

"The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key:
and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock.
Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit
a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance,
or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.
For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved,
but you—you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith.
Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's.
All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction.
The Brocken spectre 'looked to every man like his first love', because she was a cheat.
But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand."

~from The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis~

A Word for Wednesday

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: 

it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

~from The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis~

Let's Bust a Recap : My Bedtime Anytime Storybook

My Bedtime Anytime Storybook is a collection of short stories for children written by V. Gilbert Beers that was published in 1992 and gifted to my siblings and me back in 1995. As the self-proclaimed book hoarder collector of the family, I claimed this book for my personal library after we all grew up, and this summer I read the whole thing out loud to the almost-three-year-old that haunts this place. Each day before naptime, we'd visit our colorful friends to supposedly be entertained and learn valuable moral lessons about forgiveness, helpfulness, working together, sharing, pride, etcetera etcetera. 

The stories feature the little adventures and scuffles of six animal friends: McWhiskers the mouse (quite obviously the author's favorite character and the most virtuous of the bunch), Bru the bruin bear (the one who has the most lessons to learn but never seems to actually learn them), Puddles the blue hippo, Tux the penguin, KaWally the koala bear, and PJ the zebra (all of whom are definitely secondary characters to McWhiskers and Bru). While the book is well-intentioned and the stories have the potential to teach good lessons, the moral is often vague and overshadowed by other bad characteristics displayed by the characters in the story. For example, we may be reading a story about Bru and his pridefulness, and in the process of Bru learning how wrong it is to be proud, all the other characters get angry, yell at him, even call him names. While we get the hazy impression that pridefulness is wrong, we never read anything about anger or unkindness or see Bru's friends apologize to him for their own moral missteps. The endings are extremely weak and fail to drive the moral lesson home, and on top of that, the stories are largely forgettable. 

The biggest selling point is definitely the colorful, cartoonish illustrations by Tim O'Connor that draw the eye on every page and is what I remember being attracted to as a child flipping through this book. But that hardly makes up for the poor content of the stories. While this book wasn't terrible and there were a few stories that I liked, overall I'd recommend skipping My Bedtime Anytime Storybook. There is certainly better material out there particularly if you're looking for something to help teach your children Christian values. 

What's your favorite read-aloud storybook?

A Word for Wednesday

"We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts,
and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his 'bad days' and mistakes his rare successes for his normal."

~from The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis~