May the Lord be with you and bless you on this fine day.

The highlight of today’s Kindle deals is Alistair Begg’s Brave By Faith.
(Yesterday on the blog: A Family Update for an Especially Noteworthy Week)
Baptisms in the Jordan River: A Pet Peeve
Clint may be a bit of a self-confessed curmudgeon when it comes to baptisms in the Jordan, but I very much agree with him.
We had a baptism: here’s what we were actually doing
Speaking of baptism, here’s what baptism is all about (from a baptistic perspective, at least).
Finance Professionals Make Great Missionaries
You may think that a career in missions means you would need to serve as a church planter or evangelist. This couldn’t be further from the truth. (Sponsored Link)
The Audacity of Disability
“You might have gotten the diagnosis beforehand, when the beautiful process of growth in the womb turned fearful. Or maybe it happened like it did for us, entering the hospital with excitement, only to discover something terribly wrong in the delivery room. Or perhaps it was a few years later, when you began to notice that something wasn’t quite right. However it happened, however you learned of it, disability entered your world, unexpected and unwelcome.”
Songs Are Discipleship
It’s important to consider the songs we sing. “How does this song build up the body of Christ? How does this song edify a seasoned saint? How does this jingle build up the newly-born believer? How does this worship leader understand his role and responsibility? We must take seriously the theological development of the individuals we call worship leaders because they are disciples too.”
Oneness not just faithfulness
What’s the goal of marriage? Is it procreation? Happiness? Or something else…?
The Godliness of a Good Night’s Sleep
“Sleep as healer, sleep as teacher, sleep as giver — these three give us abundant reason to actively seek a good night’s rest. In light of them, many of us may need to acknowledge how much sleep we really need and to consider some basic tips for falling asleep and staying asleep, especially in our caffeinated, sedentary, digital world.”
Flashback: If I Was the World’s Only Christian…
It’s beautifully and wonderfully true that our God is the God of all kinds of people and that he is building a kingdom of young and old, great and poor, black and white, wise and simple, famous and unknown.

The Bible…wants to introduce dissonance into your thinking, to stretch your understanding. It wants to reveal a mosaic of the majesty of God one passage at a time, one day at a time, across a lifetime. —Jen Wilkin

Good morning. Grace and peace to you.

There’s a nice little list of Kindle deals for the collectors.
(Yesterday on the blog: The Best Friendship in the World)
The Countries Where It’s Most Dangerous to Be a Christian in 2022
Joe Carter looks at a recent report about the countries where it’s most dangerous to be a Christian.
Ten Words for a Broken Society (#9: No False Witness)
Bruce Ashford continues his interesting series on the Ten Commandments. “Whereas the third commandment forbids us from telling a lie about God or attacking his name, the ninth commandment prohibits us from bearing false witness against our neighbor, i.e., from attacking our neighbor’s name: ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor’ (Ex 20: 16). And while this speaks specifically to courtroom situations, its implications are much broader.”
3 Things God Will Never Do with Your Sin
“Consider for a moment how we ‘deal’ with others. We keep fresh in our minds their injustices toward us. We nurture the memory of their faults and failings. We never let them forget what they did and we often make sure others are mindful of it as well. We seek every opportunity, often secretly and surreptitiously, to make them pay for their transgressions. We hold it in our hearts and over their heads and persuade ourselves that it’s only fair that they be treated this way.”
Marks of Manhood
Nick Batzig: “At a time when there is more confusion in the culture about gender and role relations, it would help us to take a step back and consider what Scripture sets forth as the model of manhood, namely, the Lord Jesus.”
When the Nest May Never Be Empty
Parents typically look forward to the day the nest will be empty. But for some, that’s just not reality. “When independence is the end goal for following Jesus, or for parenting, our faith is, unrecognizable from what God himself describes.”
A Proverb on Having Your Cake
I find idioms fascinating, perhaps especially when they originate from a different culture.
Flashback: Aging Brings Life-Shaping Decisions
In every way, we must be disciplined in our pursuit of God, we must build habits of holiness. We must not succumb to the ease of complacency.

They are fools that fear to lose their wealth by giving, but fear not to lose themselves by keeping it. —John Trapp

I don’t know what it is like to lose a spouse. I don’t know what it is like to bid farewell to the person with whom I’ve built a home and had a family and shared a life. I don’t know the unique griefs, the unique sorrows, the unique traumas that come with so devastating a separation. On the one hand I can’t know without actually enduring it myself, but on the other hand, I can learn from those who have experienced it and have recorded it. I can learn so I can better serve those in my life who are enduring this trial.

Mary Echols lost her husband very suddenly and unexpectedly after he suffered a heart attack. And in the aftermath of her loss she was desperate to find out how much of her experience of loss was typical. “I began looking for something I could read that would allow me into someone else’s journey and help me to see that the little things I was stressing over were okay,” she says. “I needed to know that someone else couldn’t change the sheets, that someone else washed her spouse’s clothes with hers, that someone else would open his bathroom drawer that held hairbrush, aftershave, cologne, and breathe in his scent. I needed to have these things validated!” Because she couldn’t find anything, she decided to journal her journey and the result is And Then There Was One: An Emotionally Raw Journey Through Spousal Grief.
The book’s format is what I have found typical for a book that has been written in a time of deep grief in that it is comprised of short thoughts that are often very urgent and very poignant. Some of it is written as if to her husband, some as if to herself, and some as if to an unknown reader like you and me. She recounts returning home to find her husband slumped in his chair and tells, how though she was a seasoned RN, nothing had prepared her for the moment. She tells about the early hours in which, as if in a terrible dream, she went through the motions of calling her children, and the early days in which she cried herself to sleep in a bed that was now cold and empty.
But time passes and she finds that, though time does not heal all wounds (as some insensitively suggest) it does provide space in which healing can begin to take place. She observes that the initial stages of healing seem to proceed in six-week increments where every six weeks she realizes she has begun to see some change in herself, some new ability, some new acceptance. She begins to do those things all grieving spouses must—write thank you notes to people who have brought her a meal, box up her husband’s possessions, learn to shop for one instead of two.

What happened? We used to be together. We sat at the same table, ate the same food, watched the same TV shows, slept in the same bed, breathed the same air, and then you went away. Funny how that changes everything. I still sit at the same table, eat the same food, watch the same TV shows, sleep in the same bed, and breathe the same air, but none of it is the same.
❖
I am alone and I’m so afraid. I’ve lost so much with your death. It’s not just the loss of my husband and friend. I’ve lost my protector—the one who always saw to it that I was safe from the world, the one who stepped in when I couldn’t handle something and took care of it for me, the one I turned to for guidance when I didn’t know what to do or how to do it, the one who was my emotional support, the one I leaned on. You were so strong when I was weak, and now there is no one to be strong for me. Now I have to handle the world all by myself, take care of things I know nothing about, and trust people I don’t know to help me.
❖
My mind is gone and I’m not sure I want it back, as I don’t know where it’s been. What kind of strange journey is it on, and why didn’t it give me some notice that it was leaving? The audacity of it to just leave me without so much as a hint it was going. I would much rather my heart had left and taken the pain of your death with it—but maybe, my mind decided I should only deal with one thing at a time, and that grieving should be top priority. But doesn’t my mind understand that its leaving just made the grieving harder? How can I concentrate on grieving when I can’t concentrate? My mind is gone, and I wish I had gone with it.

There is a turning point along the way where she gains a deeper acceptance of her circumstances. The day comes when she realizes she may be tempted to turn some of her husband’s things in a shrine and resists that temptation. The day comes when she realizes she doesn’t mind making decisions for just one person instead of two and living according to the plan and schedule of only herself. The day comes when she faces some of the regrets from her marriage, when she utters one final apology and grants one final forgiveness. After all, “We were just two people who loved each other and did the best we could with who we were.”
By the end of the book she has emerged from the worst of her sorrows. She may not be healed, but she is healing. She may not be over her sorrows (as if anyone ever is) but she is once again getting on with life. She is laughing again and experiencing joy. She has come to the other side of her grief. She has begun experiencing a new normal. “I am at the end of my grieving now. I find I can think of you without tears or heartache, for those things have been replaced with sweet memories. I can talk about you without tears yet, sometimes the memories are so sweet that the tears still come, but they aren’t tears of grief any more, but of fond remembrance. You are still as much a part of me as ever, and I find myself talking to you every now and then when I need another viewpoint because you were always so wise.”
In my assessment, this book has two notable strengths. The first is related to Echols’s realness. She simply lets us into her journey as she goes through it and is honest about her joys and sorrows, her fears and doubts, her submission and her anger. The second is related to her faith. She writes as a Christian who mourns, but not without hope, and who grieves, but not without a sense of God’s will being expressed even in something as tragic as death. Her book is not a theology of death, yet teaches that God reigns over death and provides ultimate hope beyond it. This is a beautiful, hopeful little book and one I’m glad to recommend.

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