On the weekends I work at a-clothing-retail-store-which-shall-remain-unnamed. Part of my job there requires me to convince customers to open a credit card with the store, giving them all kinds of perks and insuring that they become a frequenter of the line.

Well it just so happens that I am awful at this part of my job and I hate it.

I dread it, actually to the point that I dream about it sometimes. I haven’t “opened a card” for almost two months now, which is abysmal, and I’m beginning to fear for my job. This is how my conversations go:

Hayley: “Do you happen to have a (name of retailer) card?”

Customer (with trepidation): “nooo”

Hayley: “Well you know you get this that and the other if you open one.”

Customer: “Ok, thanks for letting me know.”

Or “I’m not interested right now.” or “No thanks” OR “my accountant told me recently if you even open a card like that and then close it that it affects your credit score!!” (don’t know if that last one is true or not, but there it is.)

Anyway, in conclusion I don’t get the card and I end up feeling like a pushy person.

Now when I think of myself as a person I would like to be like mountain tops and a wide sky.

In prose that means I would like to be a person that gives people space to breathe and move and be what they want.

Mountain tops don’t sell credit cards.

Sometimes I get the same feeling that I get when I think about selling a card, when I hear people talk about sharing their Christianity. I feel like its something I’m supposed to be doing, it’s part of my job, but I’m awful at it.

I confess that I have never once talked someone through the gospel from start to finish. Not once. And I’ve been a Christian for at least 16 years.

And that is a very painful thing for me to confess because I feel guilty about it and I’m afraid you might think less of me. Part of the problem is that I feel that here in the south if someone really wants to know the gospel its not difficult for them to find out about it. In fact, I feel like everyone I know has heard it multiple times. Perhaps they don’t understand it, but they’ve heard it. So why tell them again? they’re clearly not interested. (That is if you can find someone who is willing to acknowledge that they are NOT a christian, a rare feat in the overchurched, bible-belt south.) I don’t know what this means. I hope you don’t think it means I have a poor faith because I don’t want to share it. Its not that. I love God and He has never failed me. My relationship with Him is the most important thing in my life but here’s the thing:

I don’t want to share my faith with people who don’t want it.

I was thinking the other day that Thanksgiving is a holiday that GAINs significance as you get older. As opposed to Halloween or your birthday which both lose significance.

Thanksgiving is about food and family.  I get the warm fuzzies just thinking about all those american families gathered over turkey and cranberry sauce and just enjoying each other. Family is one thing you can never appreciate enough.

So here’s a sneak peak of (hopefully) my next book review. I loved this excerpt.

“Of the company , only Hamidullah had any comprehension of poetry.  The minds of the others were inferior and rough.  Yet they listened with pleasure, because literature had not been divorced from their civilization.  The police inspector, for instance, did not feel that Aziz had degraded himself by reciting, nor break into the cheery guffaw with which an Englishman averts the infection of beauty.  He just sat with his mind empty, and when his thoughts, which were mainly ignoble, flowed back into it they had a pleasant freshness.

(OK THIS IS THE REALLY GOOD PART, SO LISTEN UP)

The poem had done no “good” to anyone, but it was a passing reminder, a breath from the divine lips of beauty, a nitingale betwen two worlds of dust.”

-A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

This is just a sneak peak because I had to return it to the library–I’m leaving RIGHT now-or pay a fine…so hopefully I’ll check it out again soon and finish it, but for now that’s all I’ve got!

I realized the other day that happiness has become my idol. The deepest desire of my heart was to be happy rather than to praise my Lord and Savior. Still I haven’t been very happy lately. So what’s going on here? I don’t know but praise God that I can cry to Him for help without knowing what’s going on.

I haven’t read any books from my book list recently but here are some quick reviews of other books I have read recently:

The African Queen: A missionary’s sister and a steamboat mechanic make a treacherous voyage down a river in Africa. A good book, but a better movie (Katherine Hepburn and Humphery Bogart). The characters in the book come off a little different then those in the movie but otherwise the two are very similar.

Nickel Mountain: Follows the twists and turns of life for an overweight diner owner in the catskill mountains. Wonderfully written with unusual and lovable characters but confusing emotionally and spiritually. I definitely recommend reading it. I will probably have to read it again to understand it fully.

Julie: This is probably my favorite of the above three. Written by Catherine Marshall author of Christy. This is the story of a girl growing into womanhood in a small town in Pennsylvania. This story has it all, romance, adventure, suspense.

to pray. Where do you go to pray? I believe Anne of Green Gables said it best when she said that if she really wanted to pray she would go out in the middle of a field and just feel a prayer. I certainly pray best in the middle of fields, or mountains. Anywhere far away from people and close to nature is a good place to pray (although you can pray anywhere, its just easier there.). There is something almost cleansing about nature and it feels like the place I am closest to God.

Where did Jesus go to pray? to gardens and “mounts” and secluded places with trees not people.

I feel close to God when I watch the clouds grow pink and chase each other across the sky and the first few stars come out. Ideally I would always pray from a mountaintop or by running water.

I think God likes mountains. Let’s look at this analytically (ok, not really analytically–more like–as I think of points)
1. Where did God make a covenant with Noah? well, it was probably a mountain. No guarantees, but obviously those were the first to dry out before a flood.

2. Where did God choose to test Abraham by having him almost sacrifice Isaac? A mountain.

3. Where did God meet Moses to tell him to bring the Israelites out of slavery? A mountain. Horeb–the mountain of God to be exact.

4. Where did God meet Moses again to give him the ten commandments? A mountain. Mount Sinai this time.

And so on and so forth… so I believe that God likes mountains. And I certainly like mountains and most of all I like meeting God on mountains. So we’ll keep our tryst on the craggy places as long as I can find mountains to run to. But when I find myself as I am now without mountains in my life I’ll remember this:

“For you have not come to a mountain that can be touched… but to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”  Hebrews 12: 18-24

Summary:

This is the story of a marine fighter pilot, Bull Meecham and his family whom he rules with the strictest military discipline. The story focuses in mainly on Bull’s relationship with his eldest son, Ben. Bull is crass, crude and quick-tempered but he loves his family. The family has just had to move with Bull to his newest post in South Carolina. The book chronicles the Meecham family’s struggle to once again assimilate to a new town and a new place and Conroy also very easily transitions into descriptions of the racial and petty political tensions in a small southern town.

My Thoughts:

Conroy is a master of his craft. This book is easy to read, original and incredibly emotional. The relationships and characters in the book seem to come alive. I laughed, I cried, I want to read more by Conroy. Warning, however, some parts of the book are incredibly crude. I thought both Bull and Ben were incredibly interesting and accurate characters and the tensions between them were very thought provoking.

Rating:

♦♦♦◊ [3/4]

Blurb:

Summary: A collection of short stories by Earnest Hemingway. There are 10 stories overall, most of which deal with death in some form or fashion. I will summarize the most memorable.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro is the first one in the collection and it deals with a man and woman who have gone on safari. Their vehicle has broken down and the man is severely injured and waiting for death. The fascinating part of this story is how Hemingway approaches death. He describes how the man knows he is going to die and he will catch glimpses of death in different forms and feelings, a heaviness, a shadow, a hyena, before he finally succombs.

A Clean-Well Lighted Place is the next story. It is extremely brief but possibly my favorite. It describes the conversation of two waiters, waiting for a customer to leave their cafe. One is extremely annoyed and ready to go home, but the other man understands. The understanding waiter says “I am of those who like to stay late at the cafe…With all those who do not want to go to bed.  With all those who need a light for the night.”

A Day’s Wait is a brief but ironic story about a little boy who waits for death for a day because he has been confused between measurements in Celcius and Farenheit.  He has a fever of 100 but in France he was told you could not live with a temperature above forty four degrees.

The Short and Happy Life of Frances Macomber is a very intriguing and very memorable tale of a couple big game hunting in Africa. It is the story of the boy becoming a man, although he is middle-aged. Frances encounters a lion on the first day but runs, terrified, from it. His wife, in return, mocks him mercilessly and sleeps with their guide. The next day though, they go buffalo hunting and somehow, mysteriously, in a wild moment he becomes a man. Courageously, he pursues a wounded buffalo into the brush to finish it off, but the buffalo charges him. His wife panics and shoots, presumably at the buffalo, but misses and kills Frances. Hemingway implies, but does not state, that she shot Frances intentionally, because his change would have ended her cuckoldry and perhaps even their relationship.

My Thoughts: As always it is a relief to read Hemingway’s brutal, pessimistic and often fatalistic writing. I thank God for an author not entranced with describing idyllic scenes and touching feelings. Hemingway, to me, is oftentimes more about what is left unsaid than what is actually stated and the beauty of his stories are that they make the reader think and because they make one think they stick with you.

This book was particularly interesting to me because of Hemingway’s fascination with death. He seemed to try to trap it. It was as if he said to himself “if I can describe it, I have conquered it” and yet he never did.

Rating:

♦♦◊◊ [2/4]

(Although I am biased towards Hemingway, I could only in good conscious give this book two diamonds because some of the stories were not noteworthy at all.)

Blurb: