A Decade of Words: Books I've Read from 2010-2019

It's s 2:50 P.M on December 31, 2019. I am sitting in my living room in Grand Rapids, Michigan, bundled up in wool socks, cozy slippers and a chunky wool cardigan, watching as the world outside has become a snow globe in a matter of hours.

It's New Year's Eve, and I can't help but think how fast this last decade has passed. So much has happened for me. Ten years ago, I was still a sophomore in college, unsure of what life would bring. So much has changed since then. Not only did I complete college with an English degree, I received my Master's degree in Social Work. I moved four times, I have two cats, and one darling husband. Through all of these changes, though. my love for reading has never faltered.

This morning, I had the inspiration to collect the titles of all the books I have read in the last decade. It wasn't too difficult - I've been keeping a reading list since 2012 when I graduated Calvin. The more difficult task, then, was finding all of the books that I read while at Calvin, at least two and a half years of novels, most of which were very specialized in their genre because of the courses I took. I had forgotten most of them. It was rather enjoyable then, sleuthing through old papers that I wrote for class, finding old syllabuses in order to piece together the complete list.

There are over 100 titles on this list. Some of them are classics. Some are favorites, and some I would never recommend that anyone ever read again. Whether or not I could vouch for the quality of every individual title. I do believe that every single book on this list, in one way or another has shaped the reader and the writer that I am today.

I wonder what the next decade of reading will bring. Happy New Year 2020!

Books of the Decade: Titles I’ve Read from 2010 - 2019 

2010:

1. The World To Come (Horn) 
2. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein)
3. Nightwood (Barnes) 
4. Shakespeare and Company (Beach) 
5. House of incest (Nin) 
6. All Other Nights (Horn) 
7. The Sparrow (Russell) 
8. Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (Foster) 
9. Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (Various) 
10.  The Screwtape Letters (Lewis) 
11.  Loves Me. Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love (Smit) 
12.  The Last Song (Sparks) 
13.   I Kissed Dating Goodbye (Harris) 
14.   Boy Meets Girl: Saying Hello to Courtship (Harris) 
15.  The Grapes Of Wrath  (Steinbeck) 
16.  Home (Robinson) 
17.  Take This Bread (Miles) 
18.  The Bible and The Future (Hoekema) 

2011:

19.  Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (Schmidt) 
20.  The Wednesday Wars (Schmidt) 
21.  Trouble (Schmidt) 
22.  Okay For Now (Schmidt) 
23.  Charlotte Temple (Haswell Rowson) 
24.  The Tale of Despereaux (DiCamillo) 
25.  Sarah, Plain and Tall (MacLachlan)
26.  Strawberry Girl (Lenski) 
27.  Farmer Boy (Ingalls Wilder)
28.  Bridge to Terabithia (Paterson) 
29.  Dogsong (Paulsen)
30.  Jane Eyre (Bronte) 
31.  Captivating (Eldredge) 
32.  England, England (Barnes)
33.  A Fine Balance (Mistry) 
34.  Red Earth and Pouring Rain (Chandra) 
35.  Map of the Invisible World (Aw) 
36.  Straw Into Gold  (Schmidt) 
37.  Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 
38.  Ghostwritten (Mitchell) 
39. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Vassanji) 
40.  The Untouchable (Banvile) 
41.  Arcadia (Stoppard) 
42.  White Teeth  (Smith) 
43.  Little Women (Alcott) 
44.  Walden (Thoreau) 
45.  New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer (Maher) 
46.  New New Rules (Maher) 
47.  Seriously...I’m Kidding (DeGeneres) 
48.  Good Stuff (Grant) 

2012:

49.  Amazing Grace (Kozol) 
50.  Dear Cary  (Canon) 
51.  Bird by Bird (Lamott) 
52.  Dispatches from the Edge (Cooper) 
53.  Knocking At Your Door (Rademacher) 
54.  Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys (Various) 
55.  It Seemed Important At The Time (VanderBilt) 
56.  Mennonite In A Little Black Dress (Janzen) 
57.  What Came From The Stars (Schmidt) 

2013: 

58.  The Ring (Steele) 
59.  The Help (Stockett) 
60.  The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) 
61.  Once Upon A Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath (Alford) 

2014:

62. Thrive (Huffington) 
63.  Who Stole the American Dream? (Smith) 
64.  Lucky Man (Fox) 
65.  Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M (Wasson) 
66.  The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice (Musser) 
67.  I Must Say: My Life As A Humble Comedy Legend (Short) 

2015: 

68.  Summer at Tiffany (Hart) 
69.  Building the Bridge As You Walk On It (Walker) 
70.  To Kill A Mockingbird (Lee) 
71.  Go Set A Watchman (Lee) 
72.  Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must Be Reinvented In Today's Church (Colon; Field) 
73.  Orbiting Jupiter (Schmidt) 
74.  The Four Loves  (Lewis) 
75.  Silent Screams  (Gregory) 
76.  A Christmas Carol (Dickens) 
77.  We Want To Believe: Faith & Gospel in "The X-Files" (Donaldson) 

2016: 

78. From Anna (Little) 
79. Every Good Endeavor (Keller)
80.  Rebecca (du Maurier) 
81. The Prodigal God (Keller) 
82. Notes From Underground (Dostoevsky) 

 2017: 

83.  Bad Feminist  (Gay) 
84.  The Meaning of Marriage (Keller) 
85.  Wives Of War (Lane) 
86.  Disability and The Gospel (Beates) 

2018: 

87.  The Gospel According to Jesus (MacArthur) 
88.  The Disabled God (Eiesland) 
89.  The Nightingale (Hannah) 
90.  The Gospel Comes With A House Key (Butterfield) 
91.  The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and FeebleMinded (McCully Brown) 
92.  Gay Girl, Good God (Hill Perry) 
93.  Eve in Exile: and the Restoration of Femininity (Merkle) 
94.  The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Champagne Butterfield) 
95.  When Helping Hurts (Corbett; Fikkert) 

2019: 

96.  Women of the Word (Wilkin) 
97.  Wife-Dressing: The Fine Art of Being A Well-Dressed Wife (Fogarty) 
98.  The Social Contexts of Disability Ministry (Herzog) 
99.  The Scarlet Virgins: When Sex Replaces Salvation (Lemke) 
100.  The 10 Commandments: What They Mean, Why They Matter, and Why We Should Obey Them (DeYoung) 
101.  The Unsaved Christian: Reaching Cultural Christianity with the Gospel (Inserra) 
102.  Broken Pieces And The God Who Mends Them: Schizophrenia Through A Mother's Eyes (Carr) 
103.  Liturgy of the Ordinary (Harrison Warren) 
104.  Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy (Vroegop) 
105.  Girl, Stop Apologizing (Hollis) 
106.  Lies Women Believe (DeMoss Wolgemuth) 
107.  Pay Attention, Carter Jones (Schmidt) 
108.  Love Like That (Parrott) 
109.  Why Can't We Be Friends? (Byrd) 
110.  Becoming Mrs. Lewis (Callahan) 
111.  A Grief Observed (Lewis) 
112.  Same Lake Different Boat (Hubach) 
113.  Bold Love (Allender) 
114. The Holiness of God (Sproul) 
115. Joni: An Unforgettable Story (Eareckson-Tada) 

Dressed Like A Daydream: On Vintage Dresses and Body Image

I'll never forget when I acquired my first vintage dress.

It was July of 2012. Mom and I were browsing through the only (now closed!) antique store in Rockford, Michigan, and I saw this beautiful deep teal dress in the window. It was knee-length, A-line with little  turquoise fabric squares all over it. I asked the store owner if I could try it on, and she showed me the dressing room. It fit like a daydream.

"That dress was made for you!" she exclaimed. "So many women have come in here to try it on, and it hasn't worked for any of them. You're the perfect size!"

The best part? It was 30 dollars, and produced sometime in the early 1960s. Mom bought it for me as a "good luck" charm to wear on my first day of work. It became my favorite dress for many years after. I wore it SO OFTEN.  Eventually, my body shape changed so much that no alteration would accommodate, and two summers ago, I gave the dress to Goodwill. I was heartbroken.

I've been thinking a lot about my preoccupation with my weight and body image lately. I'm realizing that I have held some pretty dysmorphic views for my entire life, and it has been a challenge to look in the real and metaphorical mirror every day since arriving at this conclusion.

My whole life, people have praised the size of my body. "You're so tiny!" they would gush. "Look at your waist!" And, "Oh, to have your figure!"  I think it was compliment that I most often heard, and certainly the one that played the loudest in my brain whenever I would shop for clothing, which was very often. 

I also believed the false narrative which told me that, because I have Cerebral Palsy, I will probably always stay stick-thin because my muscles are constantly "burning calories". This isn't true in the least, but it added fuel to my fire of maintaining "the perfect size".

And what is that perfect size? Well, until three years ago, that would have been anywhere between a size 0 or a 2, depending on the brand and item of clothing. I weighed around 109 pounds at my lowest, 117 at my highest weight. I'm near 5 feet four inches, and I maintained this weight throughout all of graduate school.

These measurements made it so easy for me to fit into "true vintage" dresses that I would buy online, or pick up at antique stores. Garments that were hand-made and tailored to fit the slender figures of a Depression era or post-WWII body fit my 21st century frame like a glove. That isn't necessarily true, anymore, and I've had to part ways with many beautiful vintage dresses because of it.

Thinking about it now, it seems ridiculous that I would hope for Audrey Hepburn's measurements, especially when considering that she was malnourished for a majority of her youth because she lived in a   Nazi-controlled country during wartime.

Or, that I would yearn to fit into a true 1950s dress, and NOT include the 1950s "foundation pieces"  -- the  girdles, and garters and waist trainers to go with it. Yet, this was something of a standard that I set for myself. "I will always be super skinny." And I was, for a time. But I was dangerously unhealthy about my approach.

I'm healthier now than I was  when I was noticably thin. I actually eat full meals, and I'm genuinely happy and rested in all spheres of my life.

I think that the majority of  women, of all shapes and sizes, at one time or another, have these same thoughts. We have features that we hate, patterns or colors that we refuse to wear because of how they highlight rather than hide those too-bony, too-flabby, too-booby, too-much-butt parts of us. 

We measure our worth like we measure our waistlines.

And that's a shame.

I don't have any easy answers for how we can overcome the age-old "body image" lie, but here's how I've started to reconstruct my self-perception, piece by piece like a mosaic.

1. Joy in the art of fashion.

I've learned to pay attention to how a piece of clothing catches my eye...how it feels at the first touch, how the colors and cut are unique and beautiful. I've tried to remember that, even if it doesn't fit me, it's still a form of art that someone else will enjoy, and I can appreciate its beauty without owning it.

2. Accept the compliments of others. 

Now that I'm married, I've tried to really reflect on why my husband loves so many of my curves, and how that love is so foreign to my hatred of those same features. And I try to see his point of view. He's a smart man -- he married me, after all!

3. Gratitude and humility.

I've tried to remember to thank God for the body I have. As a Christian, I know that I am called to live my full life to the glory of God. When I think about the complicated connection between my dreams of fashion, and my nightmarish body image, the verse that often comes to mind is, "Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with hearts of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience." (Colossians 3:12, Berean Study Bible). So I try to pray, "Lord, thank you for the breath in my lungs, the beat in my heart. How can I bring glory to you in this body today?"

Joy. Acceptance. Gratitude.

I pray that no matter what I wear -- tomorrow or twenty years from now --  these characteristics will be the true foundation pieces of any wardrobe in my life.

Bethesda Mercies

March is Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month, and let me tell you, I have been incredibly aware of my Cerebral Palsy in these last few weeks.

Of my two disabilities, my Cerebral Palsy, it seems, has been more disruptive in my adult life. I am always tired, often fatigued, and experience chronic pain. Some days, this pain comes in blows that seize my muscles captive to immobility. This week has been filled to the brim with days punctuated by this pain.  And in my pain, I keep reflecting on Christ's healing of the paralyzed man at the pool of Bethesda.

The English Standard (ESV) translation of the Bible recounts the miracle as follows:

(John 5:1-8)
"Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, 'Do you want to be healed?' The sick man answered him, 'Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.' Jesus said to him, 'Get up, take up your bed, and walk.'  And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked."

Jesus and the man interact again, in verses 13 through verse 15.

"Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, 'See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him."

I empathize with the paralyzed man. We know from the text that he was with many others who have disabilities, and that he was considered sick and an outcast. Those who know about Disability history in the United States might see many similarities to modern society. For many years, people with disabilities were placed in institutions or "colonies" where they were locked away from the rest of the world. People were sterilized, abused, and often forced to live in their own filth. People were often denied adequate medical attention and dignity. This was legal until the 1970s, when the Independent Living Movement began to demand basic human rights for people with disabilities.

I empathize with the paralyzed man because, in many ways, society continues to segregate people with disabilities -- in its attitudes, fears, structural barriers and lack of opportunity. Like the paralyzed man, I understand what it feels like to be pitied or ignored because of false perceptions about my physical limitations. I understand the feeling of helplessness associated with physical pain and immobility.

But, much as I empathize with the man who received the miracle, today, I am compelled to think on the One who bestowed it.

The miracle at Bethesda signifies so much about the character of God, and how we are to respond as followers of Christ.

When Jesus healed the paralyzed man, He showcased not only His benevolence, but also His commitment to making all things new, and to reverse the physical and spiritual effects of a world that is broken and marred by original sin. Christ has come to heal. Heal our hearts. Heal our minds. Heal our bodies and our world. Though I will not experience physical healing on this side of eternity, I am assured that Christ is working in me and through me, daily, to heal my heart, renew my mind, and build my strength through faith in Him. In reading this passage of Scripture, I am assured that there will be a day when all things are restored, both physically and spiritually, and I yearn for that day.

The healing at Bethesda signifies Christ's holiness and power. It shows that Jesus is the sovereign God and Messiah that the world longs for. He commands that the paralyzed man get up, walk, and sin no more. Christ’s act of physical healing is directly connected with His adamant disapproval of sin. As Christians, we are not healed and cleansed to continue in our old ways of life, or to pursue the sinful ways of the world. In Christ, we are given new hearts, new minds, new desires, and the new freedom to struggle with the difficulties of our imperfect world and imperfect bodies and minds.

Jesus has three commands for the paralyzed man in this particular passage of Scripture, and I believe that these are critically important to my understanding of how to interact with my Cerebral Palsy, especially on days when it literally takes my breath away because of pain and frustration.

1. "Get up. (Take up your bed.)"

2. "Walk."

3. "Sin no more."

Hearing the call of Christ to “Sin no more!” grounds me in the stern reality of why I believe in Jesus to begin with. My sin is great and abysmally present, but His Mercy is more. He calls me out of sin, and into life with him, with every breath, every heartbeat. He is making me new, sanctifying me by the Holy Spirit. I am called to live a life that is abundant -- not because of my merits, but because of his mercy.

Hearing the call of Christ to "Get up, take up your bed!" is a command that is so challenging, yet exactly what I need to hear on days when I'd much rather give up, and hide in my bed. And, of course, there are moments when I rest in my pain and self-pity, and I grapple with the reality of a disabled body. But Christ doesn't want to me to live there. “Get up!” Get up, live life, worship my Savior with all that I am!

Hearing the command from Christ to “Walk!”, propels me to action; not only to  physically walk through my day, (sometimes in staggered, imbalanced steps), but also to walk in my profession as a social worker and counselor, to walk alongside my clients who are struggling with the very same doubts, struggles and barriers related to their own disabilities. To walk alongside my husband. To walk alongside my family and friends, and community. And most importantly it is a command to walk with the Lord, humbly following Him all the days of my life.

God is so very good.

Disability, Adoption, and the Heart of the Gospel

I was 24 years old. I was walking up Ionia Avenue, back to work from my lunch break. It was an unusually cold and icy day in March 2014, and served as a reminder that Grand Rapids, Michigan had just survived the "Polar Vortex".  It had been a terrifying winter for me. That winter, my body had been blackened and bruised by ice and pavement over and over again. I was so afraid to leave my apartment every morning. I didn't trust my body to keep me safe. 

A co-worker of mine had been pregnant that winter, and as her belly grew with new life, I noted how challenging it was for her to navigate through her daily life. I was thinking about her as I was walking back to the office that day. I was thinking about my own limitations with Cerebral Palsy, and how I couldn't even fathom the compound difficulties of carrying a human life in my often hostile body.  And then, just like a light switch, an idea came to my mind. "I don't need to give birth in order to be a mother." 

I was single at the time, and in my first year of graduate school to become a social worker. I had never been in a serious relationship, so the hope of marriage seemed very unrealistic. Yet, this idea of adoption-only motherhood opened the possibility that I could still love a child, and raise a family, even if I didn't have a husband. 

This decision sat in my heart and mind for a while, with more than just my disability building the logic of my case.  As a social work student, I was continually being exposed to the overwhelming need for good and loving parents in a very broken foster-care system. To live out the social justice of my profession, I had a moral responsibility to adopt and advocate for adoption above all else. I even wondered why couples were still choosing to have biological children -- didn't they know that this world is overcrowded, and that thousands of children age of out foster care without knowing the stability of loving parents? Adoption, I self-righteously believed, would be my radical proclamation that my children don't need to look like me in order to be loved by me. As an adoptive mother, I would be respecting my physical limitations and reflecting my professional convictions. 

Sharing my decision, however, was something I was less comfortable with. I knew that people face infertility, so choose to adopt. Or I knew people like my parents who, as part of their deliberate family plan, have two biological children and one adopted child. But were there people who could have children, but chose to adopt instead? Would people consider me less of a woman because I was willingly giving up a natural, God-given function of my biology? 

Some people cautioned that my feelings would change when I met the "right man”. They assured that if he wanted biological children, I would, too, and that it wasn't entirely fair of me to make this decision on my own as a single woman. Or, from the disability angle, they would tell me stories of other women they knew who have Cerebral Palsy, and how, "She had children, you can, too!" Even my gynecologist was skeptical of my absolution. She shared stories about patients who have Cerebral Palsy and actually experienced relief during pregnancy. She didn’t want me to make such a life-altering decision at such a young age. 

The following summer (2015), was an incredibly reforming summer for me. I began truly exploring my Christian faith for the first time in a long time. I began reading books and articles about the importance of honoring Christ as a celibate, single Christian. In that elementary research, I began to learn very sound Biblical teachings about the rightness and importance of adoption in the Christian life. It was refreshing and relieving, so different from the "be fruitful and multiply" Christian rhetoric and culture that I was so familiar with. 

That same summer, I met David, and for the first time, saw the glimmer of a good and God-honoring relationship. When he and I were first spending time together, I was nervous about sharing my convictions with him. My choice to not have biological children was resolute, and if he expected to marry a gal who would bear him lots of children, then I had to tell him wasn’t the one for him. I brought up this “deal-breaker” on our second date, and carefully outlined all of my reasons. He was immediately affirming of my decision, and pointed to Scripture’s revelation that we are adopted through Christ. He shared stories of Christian couples he knew who chose adoption as a way in which they deliberately lived out the Gospel, and as an answer to the problem of abortion. I had never heard of this before, and I deeply respected it.  

My thoughts on parenthood and fertility and reproductive choice have ebbed and flowed over these last three years, and this blog piece has been drafted, deleted and re-written numerous times over the last year – our first year of marriage. This summer, I discovered the writings of Rosaria Butterfield, and though I resonated with so much of her clear, direct Gospel-centered writing, the way that she writes about her role as a foster and adoptive mother, has finally prompted my own writing about this subject. I cheered out loud when I read the following passage from her book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert. She writes about the struggles and heartbreak of a failed adoption when she says: 

“Betrayal and risk are at the heart of the gospel life. This I know: God heard my prayers. In this broken world, people break promises (and contracts). The social worker that made the contract and the social worker that broke the contract are women I respect and value. We come to the table with different points of view. Because we are Christ’s, we know that children are not grafted into a family to resolve our fertility problems or to boost our ego or to complete our family pictures or because we match color or race or nationalities. We know, because we are Christ’s, that adoption is miracle. In a spiritual sense, it is the miracle at the center of the Christian life. We who are adopted by God are those given a new heart, a ‘rebirth’.”

If David and I adopt children, we know that there is potential for heartbreak and struggle and uncertainty. Yet we also hold firmly to the convictions that Paul writes in Ephesians 1:4-14: 

“For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.

In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will,  in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession— to the praise of his glory.”

This is our aim in marriage, in (potential) parenting, and in life. That all things may be done to the praise of his glory.