Fall Reading

Last year I think I read almost 30 books. This year, I've managed exactly two. But cooler fall temperatures promise rainy days and more cozy reading time. If the baby cooperates. Medical memoirs have long been fascinating to me. I'm not sure what the allure is. I feel confident that I could never and would never want to be a nurse or doctor. I have some dear friends who are and their stories, both human and humorous, are fascinating. So, in honor of fall reading weather, here's a list of some medical memoirs. The first two I've read. The last three I would like to read. Disclosure, most of them have fascinating author interviews on NPR's Fresh Air if you'd like to listen to a preview before committing to a read.

"Weekends at Bellevue" by Julie Holland

"The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History" by Molly Caldwell Crosby

"The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives" by Teresa Brown

"Stories from the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor" by James O'Connell

"Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine" by Damon Tweedy

There are some little boys in the world who, heartbreakingly, have no good male role models. And my son has several. I feel so lucky on his behalf.

 

Uncle Blake & Zeb

Baby Food

I never anticipated that making baby food would be so fun. If I come home from work tired and uninspired to cook supper, I still get enjoyment from the thought of mixing and introducing new flavors to Zeb. Plus, the lure of cute little jars of baby food is rather strong. I'll pretty much fall for anything with a strong cute factor. :) My main inspiration and resource is a blog called Baby Foode and a corresponding cookbook, which I own, called Little Foode. The author encourages the use of spices in baby food to keep it from being too bland. A lot of her recipes call for breast milk to be added to help puree but I've found that when I heat up the food, it starts to taste sour. So I leave the milk out and just add water. I had a fancy Nuk blender from my baby registry but it doesn't work well at all and smells like burning rubber when I use it. Ew.  So I use our normal blender. I wish I hadn't spent the money on the extra blender. Oh well. Live and maybe you can learn something from me. :)

Imagine I'm Jenny Horne

Imagine I'm William Wilberforce addressing the British Parliament in 1789. Or better yet, imagine that I’m Jenny Horne in front of the South Carolina Congress in 2015, choking down sobs, raising her voice to a shout, thrusting her finger in the face of her audience demanding that they give a dam. Imagine my hands curled around the podium in a death grip as passion spews forth punctuating my every word. She was celebrated for such passion. Imagine all that and more as I say this:

 

I can't count how many times a month, a week, even a day, I think about abortion. I don't talk about it much because I don't trust myself to be lucid. Ever since having a child of my own, I can't hardly think about it without tears. I have no special experience that breeds this passion inside of me. I just love people and I don’t want to see their lives taken away. I don’t think any logical person would try to argue there’s not life there. Unless we purposefully and specifically take it away, a baby in utero will continue to grow and live. If life must be removed to be stopped then life exists.

 

I’m going to make a confession. For decades, before I was even married, my vote in the political arena has been cast around one thing only – this thing. I’ve heard all the cons to being a one-issue voter and in repeatedly making this decision, I consider the following:

 

If your life is affected by any law and you’re over 18, you can vote.

If you're gay and you want to marry, you can vote.

If you're African American and you want better education or less discrimination you can vote

.

Not only can you vote, you can write an article or a blog or a face book post, you can call a senator, you can write a letter to congress. You can ask your friends and like-minded people to join in your cause.

 

If, God-forbid, you’re being trafficked and you cannot do any of the above, you can still cry out loudly. Your voice can be heard. Whether or not anyone listens, whether you get the change you hope and pray for, you can still speak.

 

If you’re a baby, you cannot vote, you cannot write a blog, you cannot even make vibrations in your larynx to utter a word. This is perhaps the only instance in all humanity, where you can do absolutely nothing to defend yourself.

 

Guess what? Every person who has ever survived an abortion has said the same thing: they wanted to live. So if you want to live but you’re in utero and someone more powerful than you wants you to die, then you die. You have not even a sliver of a chance to continue growing, learning, feeling, expressing, being.

 

*Heartbreaking

 

I will NEVER, EVER stop fighting for the utter and absolute end of the intentional taking of a baby’s life as long as I live. It does not matter one iota whether the person taking that life is the baby’s mother. As long as my right to be alive is protected by law, I am compelled to DEMAND the law extends, as it rightfully, morally, and logically should, to protect every alive human in any form – old, young, disabled, healthy, independent or dependent.

 

I will NEVER EVER cease to utter passionate OUTRAGE that this continues in my country. I would wish and pray for the end of my country if it meant the end of this horrific practice. I yearn, hope, groan, plead and look for ways to expend my energies, as William Wilberforce did to stop evil once and for all. May I live to see it's end. Oh God, may I live to see it's end!!

 

*I had to take a break here and collect myself because I was crying.

Sweet Things

Life is always a series of moments, but in this season most of those moments are hurried. Whether they're moments starting a task or completing one, moments of gathering together or going, moments of work or play, they are all swift. Unless I take pause to slow down in a moment, I'll end up with a collected bag of memories but no emotion. So here's a glimpse of two sweet things I recently paused to savor: a bouquet of zinnia's collected from my yard and a freshly laundered batch of diapers. Of course, the sweetest things are the feel and smell of my son and husband. I typically don't remember the camera during those moments; they're too consuming.

Caring Too Much

Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you. Psalm 55:22

Care, even when addressed to legitimate matters, if it is carried to excess, has in it the nature of sin. Again and again Jesus exhorted His followers to avoid anxious care. The apostles reiterated the call; and it is one that cannot be neglected without involving transgression: For the very essence of anxious care is imagining that we are wiser than God and putting ourselves in His place as if we could do for Him what He has undertaken to do for us. We attempt to think of things that we imagine Him forgetting; we work to take upon ourselves a heavy burden, as if He were unable or unwilling to take it for us.

Now this disobedience to His plain precept, this unbelief in His Word, this presumption that intrudes upon His province, is all sinful. But more than this, anxious care often leads to acts of sin. If we cannot calmly leave our affairs in God's hand but attempt to carry our own burden, we will be tempted to use wrong means to help ourselves. This sin leads to a forsaking of God as our counselor and resorting instead to human wisdom. This is going to the broken well instead of to the fountain, a sin of which Israel was guilty in the past.

Anxiety makes us doubt God's loving-kindness, and so our love to Him grows cold; we feel mistrust, and in this we grieve the Spirit of God, so that our prayers are hindered, our consistent example spoiled, and our life one of self-seeking. Such lack of confidence in God leads us to wander far from Him; but if through simple faith in His promise we cast each burden as it comes upon Him and are "not . . . anxious about anything"¹ because He undertakes to care for us, it will keep us close to Him and strengthen us against temptation. "You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you."²

^{1) Philippians 4:6    2) Isaiah 26:1}

Devotional material is taken from “Morning and Evening,” written by C.H. Spurgeon, revised and updated by Alistair Begg. Copyright © 2003, Good News Publishers and used by Truth For Life with written permission.

Snapshots of a Saturday Morning

Zeb reading his wild animals book

Laundry on the line

Rose Bush in bloom