Reading Matters for September 2013

Reading Matters

September 2013

Books Purchased:

Crazy Busy by Eric DeYoung

The Hole in Our Holiness by Eric DeYoung

Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas

How to Worship a King by Zach Neese

1300 Real and Fanciful Animals from

        Seventeenth-Century Engravings by Matthaus Merian

Books Read:

Body for Life by Bill Phillips

Crazy Busy by Eric DeYoung

1300 Real and Fanciful Animals (no words, just pictures, yea!)

Bonhoeffer (started)

        I really struggled this month to get time to read. School started in earnest. My younger son is in his senior year and between physics, astronomy, pre-calc, cello, and SAT prep, I am busy with my home-school duties. He does all of his Advanced Writing and British Literature work by himself, but I sit in on the other courses, partly because of my interest in the subjects, and also to give support and instruction (and monitor his work!). I also have all of the classes I teach outside the home to prep and grade and meet weekly. Turns out, I have lost pretty much all margin for contemplative down time. I can think on the fly, did for all of graduate school after all, but I really prefer to have time to ruminate over ideas and themes before I walk students through literature or more challenging writing assignments.

        That said, I did finish two books and made a good dent in a third and spent lots of time perusing a fourth. Let me start with the least interesting: Body for Life. Phillips “wrote” the book as part of his EAS, Body-for-Life challenge program. In this fitness makeover, Phillips teaches how to lose body fat, build muscle, and increase focus in daily life. I did the Body-for-Life challenge in 1999. Back then, in my much younger years, I lost 15 net pounds. That means, I lost probably closer to 25 lbs of fat and gained 10 lbs of muscle. Now, just 14 years later, I probably need to lose 35 of those ugly fat pounds and gain that 10 of muscle back. It’s probably a function of my age and stage in life that I have lost all of the muscle tone out of my body over the past couple of years. I did join Weight Watchers and lost weight at first until it turned out that I was losing mostly muscle; then the weight came back with a few of its friends and I was bigger than when I started.

        I knew that Body-for-Life had worked before, with fatigue being the only real harmful side effect. So, I started the program in the middle of the month. At the start of October, I am on day 16. My progress is uncertain: I don’t face the horror of the scale and am not about to get out the tape measure, but my clothes are fitting better, and I can see a small rise in the area where my bicep used to be. I am following the program as well as my schedule and my advanced age will allow. I predict that the 12-week plan will be closer to 15 weeks in completion, but hey, at least I am doing something.

        The other book I finished is Crazy Busy by Eric DeYoung. The tagline on the book is A Mercifully Short Book About A (Really) Big Problem. I found book pretty interesting considering I find myself busier this year than I ever imagined I could be. What I really like about the book is that DeYoung doesn’t pretend to have conquered the issue of busyness. He takes his readers through is own journey and insights into what he sees are the key underlying beliefs that make us too busy. I know that “busyness” is kind of a trendy topic right now, with books ranging from The Four-Hour Work Week to 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The former promises to show you how to work less and have more time for the really cool stuff in life and the latter promises to show how to cram more into each moment of each day without neglecting the really important stuff.

        DeYoung’s book looks at the causes for our busyness and the problems this causes for us as believers.  I found a couple of the chapters describing me spot on: the terror of total obligation and mission creep. When he writes about “people who easily feel a sense of responsibility, people who easily feel bad for not doing more,” I thought he was reading my mind. I constantly tell myself that I should be doing more to help, praying more, reading more, writing more, cleaning the house more. That sense of obligation can blind me to what my true obligations are and bind me to the idea of doing instead of being what I am called to be.

        In the section on Mission Creep, the idea that stands out for me is that our true beliefs about our value and purpose show up in what we do. Another way to put it is that whatever drives our decisions about how we spend our time is what we have set as our mission. I try to remember this idea when I have to decide how to spend my time.  DeYoung examines other things that engage us and create time issues in our lives. I am sure that other chapters will speak to others.

        For fun this month, I perused the Seventeenth-Century engravings of Matthaus Merian collected in 1300 Real and Fanciful Animals. The images are intriguing. Many of the mammals have anthropomorphic expressions on their faces. Well-drawn horses stand and prance next to hippogriffs and dragons. Detailed images of insects fill page after page. The artwork is astonishing. And some of the creature, like the rhinoceros for example, were clearly drawn from exaggerated descriptions that Merian read rather than actual observation. The art is all copyright free, so I’ll be photocopying pages for my younger friends to color when they come to visit.

        The other book I started was Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas (high quotient of Erics this month, I see). The plan is to finish the book by the third week of November for book club.

        Despite the struggle, I am enjoying forcing reading back into my schedule. I missed it sorely.