📍 Put A Pin In It #03

Snow! - Amish Romance - Prayer

📍SNOW TO REMIND ME
On the afternoon of Super Bowl Sunday I was FaceTiming with a friend in Montreal (hi, you!) and she turned her screen to the window to show me piles of snow on the ground outside.

WHAT?!!? You have snow???
For a long time already and a long time still, she said.

I had not recently thought about snow that comes in the long winter and sticks around!! And I truly don’t miss it. For many years I lived in a place where I could walk out my front door and ski down trails any day the snow was good, if I felt like it. Since snow was on the ground November - April (and some years even longer), I had lots and lots of fabulous days to choose from.

But no longer living in that place, I have discovered that I really do not miss the challenges of refrigerated daily living. ever. Some rare moments during these past 3 years I actually do wish it wasn’t a 1.5 hour drive to the mountains because I might be inclined to go skiing if it didn’t require planning and energy and the risk of garbage snow in the mountains on the day we choose to try. We have not tried.

And the feeling passes.

All this to say that last Friday morning I woke up to snow falling on the other side of my window. I sent my friend a text and blamed her for cursing me with the view out her window. I sent her this picture of mine¹ —

This is the sort of snow that often came in the transition between winter and spring in Anchorage, and I used to call it Time Delay Rain. The kind that piles up like fun and then spends the next days melting into huge puddles everywhere.

Friday afternoon, before our meltdown began, the dog and I went out to our field to play in the snow. It was not scritchy snow but rather, snow that is good for building and I thought to give a shot at making a snowman, but Rusty bounded with glee into every big ball of snow I managed to roll and eventually I got tired of the challenge.

At one point while he and I were tromping around I noticed the XTRATUF footprints I was leaving —

And I suddenly remembered a particular blog post that I once upon a time wrote about my Alaska life. It’s a two parter - the beginning is pulled from my journal in 2014 and the ending made from thoughts in 2016 when I posted it to my blog. In both cases I’m wrestling with my relationship to Alaska (there were 10 years of my life where I did that a lot 😬), inspired by this bumper sticker:

https://jennifersearls.com/sticker-thinking/

It’s the recurring story of my life². A fight with circumstances that feel like they have spun beyond my imagination and out of my control.

It’s a view into the handholds I reach for in the work to Be Here Now.³

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📍AMISH ROMANCE: An Old Reading Adventure

Two different things crossed my path last week to bring me to this pin —

1. A podcast headline caught my attention — Interesting, entertaining voices having a conversation about “Christian” books and publishing is catnip for me and so of course I listened in. (I’m not going to link it here because I didn’t think it was a particularly generous conversation and not the 📍 I want to pin.)

2. Historian Kristin Du Mez linked to a collection of books she’s curating to help readers make sense of what’s happening in the world these days - and as a Christian in America, these things feel especially troubling. In the Substack posting where she linked the books she says —

   Good history presents the past—and reckons with the past—with nuance and complexity. It allows us to wrestle with what has happened and with what we commemorate, with what we choose to remember and forget, with whose stories get told, and with what it means to love our neighbors in the midst of all of this.

(That’s not really the 📍 I want to pin right now either, but I feel it is important and worth saying, and her work is important reading, and the collection of books she links to is worth exploring.)

ANYWAY, the aforementioned podcast on Christian publishing headlining Amish Romance pulled me in to listen and I saw that Kristin Du Mez’s book collection included Daniel Silliman’s book, Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped A Culture and A Faith. And that’s where this pin punches down. 📍

I read Silliman’s book when it came out several years ago and - funny thing - it inspired me to read a ways down an Amish Romance trail. Running across reference to his book along with the podcast on Amish Romance this past week reminded me that I have had a Word doc floating around on my computer desktop for a couple years now. I wrote it after I read Silliman’s book, but never got around to finishing and posting it. I opened it up to see what I had to say…..

In late 2020, I read Jesus & John Wayne by historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez. In this work, Du Mez focused in on evangelical culture and I found her book super interesting in the ways that it connected dots from my youth. One of the things Du Mez examines in her book is how the market gives shape to evangelicalism. I am definitely interested in evangelicalism as defined by consumption and so when, in late 2021, I saw Du Mez posted a conversation she had with journalist Daniel Silliman about his academic thesis turned book, Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and A Faith, my curiosity was piqued.

(not to brag, but) I am an avid reader with some legit evangelical culture credentials in my background, I was of course, intrigued by such a book and right away put it on my TBR.

Silliman chose to examine five particular books based on the fact that they were popular in the market and each represented some sort of marker moment in the Christian publishing/selling arena. When I initially picked up his book, I thought it could be interesting to read the fiction texts alongside his commentary, and so first up - Love Comes Softly by Janette Oke. I read a lot of Janette Oke books when I was in junior high and early high school and fully expected to gag my way through this time around, but was instead surprised……..

If you want to see more of my thoughts from that reading adventure, I have posted them here.

(The 5 books are Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack. I [tried to] read them all and along the way really did find myself wondering: what in the world?!?!? Do I Like Reading Amish Romance?)

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📍PRAYER
Somewhere in the past week I ran across a list of somebody’s top five books on prayer. I can’t remember where I saw the list and what all was on it now, but I do remember that Anne Lamott’s Help, Thanks, Wow was on the list, and it may also be on mine.

Last week my sister mentioned that she was reading another one I’d probably put on my list — Tish Harrison Warren’s book Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep. I went looking for my notes on that book and found them posted here on my blog.

Last month the Renovaré newsletter (I highly recommend signing up for this newsletter!) included a link to a recording of Dallas Willard speaking at Azuza Pacific University years ago.

I made note of many things while listening to him speak on The Role of Faith in Prayer, but one in particular that I have quoted in my own words repeatedly since I heard it —

Prayer is talking to God about projects we are working on together.

There is much more I could say about that, but I don’t know how right now. So I will leave it with this gorgeous performance of When My Mama Prays —

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And here is a Rusty The Farm Dog picture to close out this edition of Put A Pin In It (PAPII#03):

Rusty the Farm Dog & His Stuffie in the Snow

1. This dear friend of mine for 35 years…..she got her due, just saying. Back-to-back storms completely buried her world in huge metric measurements of snow this weekend. 😬 She sent me pictures. Meanwhile, I went outside and pruned our apple trees and gave thanks for the peony shoots popping out of the ground today.

2. See also - https://jennifersearls.com/losing-the-map-and-finding-the-way-home/

3. Cue The Porter’s Gate’s Centering Prayer here —

I want to be where my feet are
I want to breathe the life around me
I want to listen as my heart beats
Right on time…
I want to be where my feet are