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This book reads as though it were written by Anne Shirley.

I had no expectations of this book and am pleased with how good it is. Spunky 12 yr old girl with a magician father and her own secret.

Going to have to buy this one.

This is waaayyyy more complicated than the GF sourdough I made during lockdown from plain sorghum flour. Very daunting to me to have a starter that needs 3 feedings a day and won’t store in the refrigerator longer than a week.

She takes her time setting things up. Ch 12 (out of 28) and she is still introducing characters.

🤯 believing in an actual resurrection (not Platonic death is “going home at last”) is consistent with a strong view of God’s Justice and God as good creator. English evangelicals gave up the urgency of improving society about the same time they traded resurrection for disembodied heaven. Did this same shift happen in the US?

Some of you will appreciate his discussion of hymns - “a glance through the average hymn book reveals that a good many references to the future life beyond death are closer to Tennyson, or even to Shelley, than they are to orthodox Christianity.”
(He goes on to list specific hymns that also include Buddhist eschatology, Gnosticism, and Platonism.

I am reduced to reading the ebook in my phone 😭

Thought I wasn’t going to keep going at first - way too much fawning over cats at the beginning 😆
but characters are being established and plot developing that includes magic. Unusual for me to read two magic related books in a row.

This book has the best illustrations!

“A society that believes the heart is a pump is a society that accepts centralized control, planned economies, central banks, a national farm policy, government-dictated medical policy, chain stores for our clothing and one big company that makes everyone’s shoes.”

Learned a new word:
“You see, we live between resurrection Mark One (Jesus’ own resurrection) and resurrection Mark Two (when all God’s people will be raised); or if you like, between Pentecost and Parousia.”

They are having a Twelfth Night party. It sounds like fun. Maybe we should have one!

Just like hallmark Christmas movies are good anytime of year so are regency era Christmas books.

…the Union of God and his people enfleshed, incarnated, in the mystery of the Lamb and the Bride; …heaven and earth; Judean and Gentile; the one body; God and his people;…no wonder marriage has been under attack in our increasingly pagan society…(marriage) remains a signpost to the new creation, which is characterized by differentiated unity.

🤯 🤯 re: 5:28-32 (Paul) quotes Gen 2:24 (man leaves parents becomes one flesh with woman) and reads it as referring to Messiah and Church. He interprets Gen 2 as a long range prophecy of God’s son leaving his original home and going to find his appointed bride. … looking on toward Rev 21 where coming together of heavens and earth is symbolized perfectly in marriage of Lamb and Bride.

“…for Paul, what ‘being filled with with spirit’ looks like (anticipating, we recall, God’s filling of all creation) is a life of music and thanksgiving, of delight that turns into song, and of a singing joy which leads naturally into mutual submission as we share in the powerful love of God.”

Not only is Vera my age, she also has a distinct bias towards tea and against photogenic coffee drinks

I really tried.
I’ve renewed this book every three weeks for the last five+ months. I just can’t get through.
Turning it in today.

Now that I have finished book one I can get back to this one. 😅

“The memory of Jesus, and his extraordinary and tender love for them, resonated powerfully with his first followers, and was reinforced by the continuing sense of his strong, loving presence with them in their worship and prayer.”

I love how Wright phrases things. Speaking about 4:22 he says “…hardened hearts and darkened minds cover up their condition precisely by advertising themselves as clever, ‘modern’, ‘ahead of the curve’, whatever. This is what ‘deceit’ is all about. Twisted desires do not present themselves by whispering, ‘If you come this way you will go mouldy and fall apart.’”

I just realized I started Book 2 before reading Book 1 🤦🏼‍♀️

“No ordinary person could have prevented – but what good is it to be Hercule Poirot, with grey cells of a finer quality than other people’s, if you do not managed to do what ordinary people cannot?”

Eph 4:11-13 “…unity doesn’t mean uniformity, but plurifomity doesn’t mean chaos. How easy it has been for leaders with different gifts and styles to develop ministries around themselves, after their likeness, pulling away from what’s going on elsewhere in God’s purposes and priding themselves on doing their own thing”

The setting of the Majestic Hotel sounded so familiar, even though I haven’t read this book. Then I realized BBC used this book as a Miss Marple plot for their TV show.

Paul would be shocked by the very idea of ‘denominations’, close to one another in the same street but not even trying to join in sharing missions and resources…given recent centuries in Christian history it’s better at least to have unity of fellowship, prayer and mutual support…reading Eph 4 we can’t imagine our present multiple disunities don’t really matter.

For The Economy was studying the purpose of The War, which is to purchase and not have. The customers of The War (all of us, that is) purchase life at a great cost and yet lose it. And The War was just as busily studying the purpose of The Economy, which is to cause people to purchase what they do not need or do not want, and to receive patiently what they did not expect.

“…in Genesis, the story is about the creator’s purpose for his creation, and the human responsibility for sharing in that purpose. The failure of humans was as much a failure of vocational obedience as disobedience to one rather strange command.”