Friday, June 16, 2017

Update on Lisa 6/16/17


The Good News:
  • We serve an awesome, merciful God who has been so good to provide Lisa with exactly what she needs minute by minute throughout this ordeal. 
  • We have a wonderful support system of friends and family. We truly cannot thank you enough for all of your prayers. Lisa says she has felt them consistently throughout her hospital stay, and I have most definitely felt them as well. 
  • The surgeon feels confident he got all the cancer removed, and it does not appear to have spread anywhere else! 
  • Lisa is recovering slowly but surely from the surgery. As of today she is still in the hospital, but they are hoping she will be well enough to go home soon. 



The Not So Great (but okay!) News:
  • She will require chemotherapy which everyone knows is no fun. We are happy, however that God has allowed doctors to be able to treat cancer this way, and we're trusting in Him to heal her completely and restore her to perfect health! 

Friday, June 9, 2017

Update on Lisa 6/9/17

I really can't thank everyone enough for all of the prayers and sweet words of encouragement and love. We are so thankful for our family in Christ.

The Good News:

  • The doctors were able to successfully remove the mass.
  • Lisa is doing very well so far. Her pain is managed, and her sense of humor is still fully in tact! 

The Not So Great News:
  • The small piece of the tumor that they examined during surgery did prove to be cancer.
  • We are still unsure of the origin or stage of the cancer or what will come next.  
That's all for now. I will post another update as soon as I know more--probably the middle of next week. Thank you all again for all of the love you've shown us during this frightening time. 

~Phil. 4:4-7


Wednesday, July 27, 2016

COMING SOON!!!


Must-read:The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom




I’m ashamed to say this, but I did not want to read this book. For several stupid reasons.
1.      It’s nonfiction.
2.      I knew the outcome.
3.      The beginning was slow.

God, however, had different plans.
Long story short, I needed a book to read with my 8th grade English class that would provide a Christian’s perspective on the Holocaust, and my always-wise big sister suggested The Hiding Place.  
I started it several times, whining as I plodded through the first chapter about how difficult the Dutch words would be to pronounce, etc., but by the time I reached chapter 3, I realized why this book and Corrie ten Boom mean so much to so many people.
I could go into detail about the many ways God spoke to me through Corrie’s story, but the lessons I took away were deeply personal. I’ve read a lot of books by this point in my life, but I have to say that no book, other than the Bible, has had such a profound impact on my heart and mind. I could go on, but I won’t. The book speaks so beautifully for itself, I would feel silly even trying to write a review. But if you’ve not read it, don’t let Satan dissuade you from checking it out.
Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Psalm 32:7

Monday, July 28, 2014

Book Review: The Blessings by Elisa Juska

Let me just say, first of all, that I am a big fan of Elise Juska, and that I admire her talent immensely. Getting Over Jack Wagner is one of the funniest novels written by a woman I've ever read, and her short story “The Way I Saw the World Then” is one I have read aloud in my writing classes many times as an example of beautifully written, heart-wrenching  literary fiction. Therefore, when I discovered her new novel, The Blessings, I was so excited I found myself frantically tapping the good old “Buy with one click” button before I’d even read the sample (in truth, before I’d even read the summary!)—something I have never, not once, done before with any other author’s work. So as you can imagine, it was tough for me to give this book a mere two-star rating.

The Blessings, which is the story of a large Catholic family experiencing one problem right after the other, in my humble opinion, reads more like a series of writing exercises than a novel. For example, Chapter One is told from the point of view of college-bound daughter Abby. We spend a few pages in her head, getting to know her and her opinion of her family members, but then the chapter ends and we move on to another character’s head, and the next time we see Abby again, we are viewing her through another character’s eyes; she is several years older, and we have no access whatsoever to her inner self. And so the book goes, chapter to chapter, character to character, crisis to crisis. As a reader who likes to become immersed in the hearts and minds of characters, this structure alone is something I found very unrewarding. We would visit a character for a few pages, hear his or her tale of woe, and then move on.

The other thing that really bothers me about this book is that the characters are all so completely self-absorbed and miserable. Don’t get me wrong; I love drama and am all for torturing fictional characters with all manner of illness and bad luck. But there is nothing fun about these characters or their misery. The book is depressing, full of maudlin, discontent characters, who just do not seem to love one another in any genuine way. I know one reviewer called this a “bighearted novel,” but where is that heart exactly? In the couple that can’t cope with their daughter’s bulimia and therefore divorce; or in the sister-in-law who, after years of trying to get pregnant and the birth of one child, hints to her husband that she wants to have an abortion after accidentally becoming pregnant with a second; in the deadbeat son who attacks an innocent old man in the Wendy’s parking lot so that he and his friends can rip off his car stereo; in the brother who travels to Spain with his girlfriend only to mope and sit silently through most of the trip for reasons I still have yet to fathom; in the doctor husband with two beautiful children and two homes to boot (one of them beachfront!) who considers having an affair with a woman he works with just because she can bake cupcakes and his wife is a lousy cook . . . ? I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it. What this family needs is a priest or therapist to come along and tell them all that happiness is often a choice, to remind them that true love is often a matter of will, and that life is a gift. Ugh. I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you the rest.

The Good Stuff:

Elise Juska can write—no doubt about it. Her descriptions are amazing and the dialogue is painfully real.

The Not So Good Stuff:

See my rantings above.

Overall Score: Even though I am obviously not a fan of The Blessings, I cannot bring myself to assign a score to a writer whose talent I admire as much as Juska’s.

Bottom Line: I did not like this novel and would not recommend it to a friend.