by Alaina | Aug 28, 2022 | Sunday Scripture
Therefore Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.
Romans 15:7
I didn’t know my husband’s grandmother well; she passed away within a year of when we started dating so I only met her a handful of times. I remember that she was really tiny, really sweet, and had a very friendly smile. I remember one other thing too…
It was approximately one week into my relationship with my then-boyfriend, now-husband, and he wanted to take me to a family picnic to meet his family—I had yet to meet his father and brothers. It was just supposed to be a small family picnic, or so I thought!
We were on the way to our local state park and I was grilling him on who all exactly was going to be there. It turned out that not only was his immediate family coming to this picnic, none of whom I had yet met, but also all of his aunts, uncles, grandma, and cousins on his dad’s side of the family. Basically it was a family reunion. We played Frisbee, ate lots of good food, and then as we finished dinner, guitars started appearing, seemingly out of nowhere, and the whole family launched into a gospel music singalong. I thought this stuff only happened on TV! All the times when I had inwardly rolled my eyes at my own grandmother asking if we had singalongs around the campfire (no one does that anymore I had thought!) came back to me in a rush as the scene unfolded before my eyes.
When it started to grow late, everyone started packing up and his grandmother was whisked off to get into the car with several of his aunts who were taking her home. Someone touched me on the sleeve and said that his grandmother had asked to say goodbye to me. I walked over to the car and she gripped my hand tightly, smiling, and said how nice it was to meet me. That was it. But it was more than she needed to do. It was more than a lot of people, anxious to get home, would have done.
She didn’t know we would end up getting married. She didn’t know I would eventually have her great grandson. But she knew and valued making me feel seen, loved, and accepted—all with the simple squeeze of my hand, the courtesy of expressly saying goodbye to me. Maybe that doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to you, but it reminds me of something Jesus would do. He was good at making people feel seen and loved.
Remember that story—Jesus was in a crowd of people and the woman who had been bleeding for many years reached out and touched his garment, hoping to be healed. And she was! Jesus turned and asked who had touched Him. He could have just let it go—it was an inconvenience to stop, but He wanted to call out the person who had faith that just touching His garment would heal her.
Then there’s the story of the little children—the disciples rebuked them and told them to go away, but Jesus said, “Let them come to me.” Jesus cared about everyone—no one was too small or insignificant. He made everyone feel that He cared, and he really did. He didn’t make people feel like assignments or tasks. He made them feel like people.
I think it was kind of like what Mahatma Gandhi must have been thinking when he uttered those sad words: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” I don’t want to be one of those Christians but I know I have been. I know there have been times when I have been too busy rushing and have let opportunities slip to make someone feel seen. I know I have rushed my husband when he was talking so I could hurry off to bed for the evening. I know I have forgotten how important it can be to pause and do that little act of kindness that makes one feel special and loved and valued by God.
Other Posts You May Enjoy:
Our Uniqueness
In Your Plenty
The Moment for Which You Were Created
Disclosure
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by Alaina | Aug 25, 2022 | Book Nook
We all love learning more about ourselves—yes, you know you do! But it can also be so overwhelming! There are so many books on the topic, ranging from the highly technical no-fun-to-read type, to the ones that are so general all you get is confused. There’s also the issue that reading a bunch of books just to learn more about yourself can feel selfish. What good does it do to know more about ourselves? Does learning about ourselves really help us interact with others better? Those topics and many more are discussed in the following books:
Disclosure
Please remember that this post contains affiliate links; that means if you click on the link, I will make a small commission at no extra cost to you. It’s a way to support my blog! I will only ever share an affiliate link if I love the product and think that you just might love it too!
Reading People
by Anne Bogel
I wasn’t sure how I would feel about this book but I really enjoyed it! I was afraid it would be a little too basic. I’m fairly familiar with a lot of the personality frameworks and I was afraid this would not quite reach deep enough for me. However, this book turned out to be an enjoyable overview/refresher of the different personality frameworks, as well as several I’m not very familiar with. I also learned that I might be a “highly sensitive person,” which is something new that I didn’t think I quite fit the bill of, but after reading more about it, I think I am a highly sensitive person—and boy that explains a lot!
If you are just starting to learn about the different personalities, this book is a great jumping off point and from there you can decide which framework you are most interested in learning more about!
The Four Tendencies
by Gretchen Rubin
The Four Tendencies is the only framework that I’m aware of (not that I am an expert by any means) that Anne Bogel did not mention in Reading People. While The Four Tendencies isn’t as recognized as the other frameworks, I think it is highly valuable as it is pretty easy to recognize the different types which makes it easier to learn how to interact with each type. This is a great book and should be mandatory reading for every office, as I think it would help solve a lot of conflicts—or at least show why these conflicts keep happening! I wrote a more in-depth post about The Four Tendencies; read that post here.
The Road Back to You
by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile
This book talks in depth about the Enneagram. The Enneagram is a personality framework that is a little more in-depth and complicated than some of the others; it sheds much valuable insight into why we act the way we do, and what we are looking for with these actions. It talks about what each of the numbers that represent the personality types look like (there are nine main types) and what each of these types looks like when they function out of a healthy place vs an unhealthy place. This book will help you to identify which type you are and help you realize what you need to do to become emotionally healthier in that place.
The Five Love Languages
by Gary Chapman
What makes you feel loved might not make someone else feel loved and if you don’t understand how to make someone close to you feel loved, then they may doubt that you do in fact love them. In this book Gary Chapman details the five different ways that people perceive love. Everyone is a combination of languages but you will have a primary love language, as Chapman calls it. If you are not familiar with The Five Love Languages, I would get your hands on this as soon as possible—your relationships are bound to improve as a result.
by Alaina | Aug 21, 2022 | Sunday Scripture
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
1 Corinthians 12:12 ESV
I was reading a book on personality the other day. I, like many of us, enjoy reading books that shed valuable insight into our makeup, showing how we are wired to do the things we do and why we do them. I tend to be the hard charging, analytical type that prioritizes getting things done on a schedule! My personality, without exception, tends to be described as someone who is focused, who values getting things done, and analytical enough to spot a problem and start solving it. What a great personality type to have! My husband, on the other hand, tends to value fun. Sure he’s willing to go over to someone’s house and help with a difficult project, but let’s also bring hot dogs so we can have a cookout afterwards! We were discussing our personality types and I read the description of his, thinking all the while about how much these fun-loving types really need to buckle down and worry less about having fun so they can accomplish something with their lives when a big smile breaks across his face and he says, “Yes, I’m the fun type, that’s the best!” I thought my personality type was the best.
Not only did I think my personality type was best (even though yes, yes, all personalities are needed and none are better than the others), but I had been sure that people with other personality types wished they could be more driven and as leveled headed as my type. The fact that someone considered a fun-loving personality type as the best had never occurred to me—seriously, why does the world need fun? Fun never solved anything.
This conversation made me stop and think about all the times when my husband made us prioritize fun. Well, a fun life has been the result! If it was up to my husband, we would have had a lot more fun in our married life—we also would have never completed one house project and the laundry would be always overflowing! However, if we listened to me and never prioritized fun we would have an immaculate house and yard and be miserable from working ourselves too hard. We need both to balance each other out.
This brings to mind I Corinthians, Chapter 12. Paul is talking about how each member of the church is like a part of the body. We each have our unique job to do, and our specific personality traits help us deliver those results. All of us are needed to use our God-given talents to make up one whole, functioning body known as the church. We need those hard-charging detailed business types to keep the church on budget; we need the people who just want to have fun to plan the next church outreach event. We need intuitive helpers who are able to connect well with people to discover how the church can help in our community—and not one of these types is more important than the other.
My personality type might be great for running an event, organizing the details and people, and getting cleanup done afterwards, but it doesn’t see the need first. Many times we are able to see other characteristics when they are things we want to cultivate in ourselves, but what about when they are traits we don’t value as much? Just because we may not value certain traits doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t valuable. So the next time you’re getting irritated by someone with a different skill set than you, let’s take a breath and remember that God made us all different for a reason, and then see how we can be stronger when we blend all of our strengths together.
Other Posts You May Enjoy:
How Could I Pick Just One?
The Interests of Others
by Alaina | Aug 14, 2022 | Sunday Scripture
So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Psalms 90:12
My phone died. And just like all those commercials advertising backups for your computer, I lost a lot of data, namely my pictures. These weren’t just any pictures, they were pictures of the first month of life of my first child; they were pictures of our vacation to Mexico; and, oh, a number of cat photos the world will never see again! All my pictures and screenshots of the past two years were gone.
Now I admit, I was partly to blame for this loss. My phone, while not quite “old” (it was still under two years) had been starting to be a little glitchy. It would sporadically decide it was tired and just turn off. It would vibrate like I was getting messages while none appeared—until I would power it down and restart it. Sometimes I had to restart it two or three times. My husband said we should make sure everything was downloaded to the Cloud and I agreed but we never took any action. I felt sure there would be time to do this. I kept thinking that before it finally died, it would give me a warning—a kind of false-alarm crash which would be scary, but we would then have the opportunity to download everything before it officially crashed. Unfortunately, my phone didn’t play by these rules—it just died.
I got a new phone and anxiously waited to see if, miraculously, everything would transfer with no loss. The setup process completed, my husband handed me my phone and I touched the photo app hoping against hope that all of the pictures I had taken of the early days with my son would be there. They weren’t. It was like my phone had amnesia. Everything from the past two years, apparently my storage had reached maximum capacity, was gone. Looking at it you would think the past two years had never happened.
Of course, the first thing I thought of was the loss of photos of my son which, if I am being honest, isn’t the loss it first sounds like as I sent the really cute photos to my family and friends and can recoup them by having them sent back to me. In addition, my husband still has all his photos. The second loss was all the screenshots and pictures of notes I had taken over the years of things I wanted to be sure not to forget, recipes, quotes, funny memes—gone. Then, of course, I realized how many photos disappeared of my first babies—my kitties and my doggie, and then I realized that all of my photos from trips we had taken over that past two years were gone.
Naturally all of this got me thinking … how much of this “loss” would really have lasting value? How much would end up mattering that I lost in the end? The photos of my son I will miss. The pictures of the good times on vacation, I would miss. A few of the kitty photos will also be missed … but the rest? I haven’t missed them yet.
Just as my phone’s storage was full of lots of things that didn’t really matter, I wonder: Are our lives the same?
How do we spend the time of our lives? There is the staggering statistic that the average American spends three hours a day watching TV, three hours! Is TV watching that important to us? Most say no, but still spend the three hours watching anyway. We spend one-eighth of our day doing something that hardly matters to us—we are spending this with the currency of time, the only non-renewable resource on this planet. We are wasting the time of our lives.
I thought there would be time “later” to download all the photos on my phone. What other things in our lives do we think there will be time for later?
When we look back over the years of our lives, how much of it is spent doing what we really want to? I was listening to a podcast by an author by the name of Oliver Burkeman who was being interviewed about his new book and the gist of his quote was that we wait to start the thing we’ve said we have always wanted to do, in part, because we think there will be time later; we don’t have to face the fact that the time of our lives is not infinite.
The time of our lives is not infinite, yet we get so caught up pursuing things that don’t matter and which are not truly important to us. I lost two years of photos on my phone and most of them didn’t really matter and I’m guessing the same might be more or less true for you, but what if we erased the last two years of our lives? Would we miss it? More importantly, would others miss it? Or have we been so self-centered that our time has revolved just around us and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference to others if it had never happened. Have we spent our time wisely and invested in people, things, and in places that will make a difference in eternity?
Other Posts You May Enjoy:
Time is But an Illusion
The moments of our lives
A Sense of Eternity
by Alaina | Aug 11, 2022 | Book Nook
I can’t believe it but unfortunately summer is almost gone! The summer is winding down, school will be starting for the kids soon, and it can make us feel like summer is over but—I’m fighting this feeling! According to the calendar, we still have well over a month until fall (September 21st) and hopefully the weather will cooperate and we will still have time to sit outside and enjoy our books late into the evening.
If you are like me and still hoping to squeeze in some more summer reading, check out these titles to see if any pique your interest!
The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel
Inspired by a true story, The Book of Lost Names is the true story of Eva Abrams, a Jewish Holocaust survivor. As a graduate student in 1942 Eva is forced to flee Paris for a small town in the Free Zone of France. While there, Eva is offered to use her artistic abilities to help forge papers to help smuggle Jewish children out of France and into neutral Switzerland. Eva soon discovers that erasing names comes with a price—she and Remi (her handsome partner in the endeavor) devise a way to help preserve the heritage of these children. Now, years later, the book of code names has resurfaced and it is up to Eva alone to tell the story hidden within its pages.
Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor
Beautiful Little Fools is a twist off of the Great Gatsby. Told after Gatsby’s death, this is the backstory, told by alternating views of the women we know from The Great Gatsby, as to why Jay Gatsby was found dead … and why there was a diamond studded bobby pin found in the bushes near the pool where Gatsby was found dead. Frank Charles is the detective investigating this case even though the case has officially been closed? Something about it just doesn’t sit well with him and he senses one of the women is lying to him. But which woman is the liar and what is she trying to hide?
Our Last Days in Barcelona by Chanel Cleeton
I have been a huge fan of Ms. Cleeton’s other books (check out my post on her books Next Year in Havana and When We Left Cuba here) and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this one! This story continues to tell the story of the Perez family, who we met in Next Year in Havana and When We Left Cuba, told this time from the perspective of the eldest daughter, Isabel. Isabel has always been the reliable and responsible one of the family. She is now married to a wealthy American and is living in Palm Springs, Florida when she becomes troubled by the seeming disappearance of her wild and impulsive sister, Beatriz. Iasbel decides to take off to Spain where Beatriz is currently living to find her sister. However, while there, she happens upon a mysterious photograph of her, her mother, and a man she has never seen before which was taken in Spain. When Isabel confronts her mother about it, her mother insists that they’ve never been to Spain leaving Isabel with yet another mystery to try to unravel.
Surviving Savannah by Patti Callahan
This story tells of the sinking of the ship, the Pulaski, known as the Titanic of the South. In 1838, the Pulaski was advertised as a safe way to travel in style with only one night out at sea. What a fateful night it was—culminating in the boiler of the ship exploding and approximately 130 of the 190 passengers dying! This story alternates between telling the story of Augusta Longstreet and Lily Forsyth, who were passengers on the ship and Everly, a modern day history professor, who has been asked to curate a new museum exhibit of this event. Everly is eager to delve into the research to discover the truth of what happened that night, however in doing so, she will have to face her own ghosts in a past that she would rather forget.
I hope these titles will help you relax and drink in the last bit of summer that is left! As always, if you haven’t yet, be sure to subscribe to our email list so you never miss a post and if you have enjoyed this post, please share.
Other Posts You May Enjoy:
End of Summer Historical Fiction Round 2021
Author Spotlight – Susan Meissner
Author Spotlight: Books by Ann Rinaldi
