The boys will soon be back in town with another Riley Covington thriller, and as Country singer Trace Adkins would say...they've got their game on! Packed with action and rich with detail, the writing team of Elam and Yohn have another hit on their hands.
This time Riley is still recovering from the sudden death of his father and the trauma of his last heroic exploit. His fame as 'Captain America' is wearing thin, and all Riley wants to do is play football with is beloved Mustangs.
Which explains his shock and dismay at the news that he's been traded. Why in the world would he be cut loose from his team and sent to another...who's pulling strings on Riley's future?
Answers come soon enough as he's whisked away from his Alaskan retreat to the action of Homeland Security in Washington D.C. There Riley reunites with Special Agent and Director Scott Ross, as well as Khadi, Tara, Gilley and the ever-present and effervescent Gooey.
Together the team attempts to thwart plans to unleash a terrorist threat of our worst nightmares: an EMP bomb. Electro magnetic pulse bombs that will knock out all of our infrastructure, down to watches, cell phones...up to planes and defense. This is the stuff of nightmares!
Will all of their expertise be enough to track this needle in a haystack attack? Who is behind it: China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran? And how is Riley going to find his way through this new tangle of issues, both professional and personal. His life makes Jake Bauer's seem like a walk in the park (not really...just like saying that...)!
Can they stop this horrendous attack, or will it truly be lights out for America? For the world as we know it? The worst of it is I can see this possibly happening...chilling thought.
Fast-pace writing ricochets off the page as the short chapters fly by. The intimate details of the behind-the-scenes of professional football add an extra layer of richness to the story. One chapter and you can tell Jason and Steve know their stuff.
This is a much anticipated January 2010 release from Tyndale, and my deep gratitude for my advance reader copy. Don't miss this heart-stopping adventure in the hottest thriller series to hit bookshelves! I can only imagine what this dynamic writing duo has up their literary sleeves next!
Happy Reading!
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Saturday, November 21, 2009
Blackout by Jason Elam and Steve Yohn
Friday, November 20, 2009
FIRST Presents "Lessons From a Broken Chopstick" by Mary Anne Phemister
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card author is:
and the book:
Lessons from a Broken Chopstick
Hannibal Books (September 30, 2009)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mary Anne Phemister is a nurse, author, mother, grandmother and wife of noted concert pianist Bill Phemister. The Phemisters live in Wheaton, IL. She has also co-authored Mere Christians: Inspiring Stories of Encounters with C.S. Lewis.
Product Details:
List Price: $14.95
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Hannibal Books (September 30, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1934749621
ISBN-13: 978-1934749623
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
The Chinese Chest
A large, beautifully carved Chinese chest rests on curved wooden legs in my kitchen. Long-legged cranes decorate the top and sides in various poses. One bird in the background looking wide-eyed and perplexed, I’ve come to call “the bewildered one.” She reminds me of my mother, full of questions she dare not ask.
A furniture maker in Hong Kong sold this beautiful chest to my parents during their early, happier years of married life. Being practical and resourceful, they knew that this fragrant, camphor-lined vault could store and preserve the many curios and keepsakes that they would be collecting over the years to ship back home, someday. A skilled Chinese woodcarver had chiseled these revered birds into the outer teak frame, knowing full well its commercial appeal. Throughout Asia, red-crested cranes are symbols of long life and good luck.
My parents, however, believed in divine providence rather than in lady luck. To them, the force that operates for good or ill in a person’s life is not as capricious and precarious as luck. Good fortune is not the result of mere chance; it is part of God’s plan. Unfortunate circumstances, like the time my father almost died of food poisoning, are blamed on the enemy of our souls—Satan, the devil or the evil one. Hence, even when God allows bad things to happen to good people, it is not without some purpose. God is teaching us something or testing our faith. Our job on earth is to trust God, who has clearly instructed us not to lay up treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt. Nevertheless, the few curios they brought home in this chest, fortified with camphor against pesky moths, could not be considered real treasures, merely mementos to display at missionary meetings.
My parents firmly believed that one should not—must not—expect to reap the rewards of living a virtuous life here on earth. However, in the life to come, all would turn out right. Then, all life’s troubling questions would be answered to our satisfaction. “All things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose” was a bible verse I had memorized at a very early age. Thus, I have always known that life has meaning and purpose. I have never doubted God’s goodness, although I have often questioned His methods.
This core belief, that all will turn out well in the end, that good will triumph over evil, that God rewards the faithful, was the force that enabled my mother to endure the countless challenges in her life. Her unshakable faith held her fast after the death of her infant son, Johnny, the puzzling alienation of her brother, Andy, and throughout her unhappy marriage to my father, notwithstanding all her attempts at being the good wife.
My parents’ acquaintance began at the suggestion of my father’s sister, Agnes. She had met Violet in Buffalo, New York and knew of her intent to go to Tibet as a missionary. Agnes suggested to her brother, Al, who was living in Shanghai at the time, that Violet would make him a good helpmeet. My father, who was on the lookout for a wife, then began a correspondence with this devout woman with a winsome smile, recently graduated from the Nyack Missionary College. Al eventually succeeded through his letters in persuading Violet to join him in China. Thus, Violet Anna Agnes Gibson and Alexander George Kowles were married on the very day the steamer docked in Shanghai harbor, September 6, 1938. She was just six days shy of turning thirty. Al, two years younger and two inches shorter, regretted these facts most of his life.
Why my parents went to China was never a mystery to me. In church service after church service they told of how God had laid on their hearts the burden for the lost. They were dedicated to answering the Master’s call for reapers to work in the harvest field for lost souls, as they would express it. They were merely obeying the great commission to go into all the world to bring the message of God’s love and salvation to people in heathen darkness. These words and phrases I heard often. I have never doubted their sincerity and resolve. They were more committed to their duty to obey Jesus’ imperative to preach the Gospel than to any other obligations, even to each other. Their marriage, based on their sincere desire to serve God, seemed to them at the beginning, to be God’s will. But before long, my mother began to recognize the smoldering notion that she had made a grave mistake. Where was God in this? How was God going to work this marriage out to his good?
“But you’re here,” my mother would say, dodging my question whenever I asked her why she stayed with my father for all those painful years. So, it was my existence and that of her other three children that enabled her to endure and be faithful. To her, the ever self-sacrificing handmaiden of the Lord and Al, divorce was unthinkable. God must have some purpose in it for her, she often reasoned throughout her prolonged heartache. It was her duty to persevere, to keep up family appearances for the sake of us children and “the ministry.”
I’m sure now that it was her strong sense of duty, her belief that marriages are made in heaven, her determination to endure to the end, bound and kept her locked in that disappointing marriage. Like the flight plans imprinted in those cranes’ brains, the mechanisms that steered the course of my mother’s life were those strongly implanted religious beliefs. I have inherited some of my mother’s sense of adventure, her perseverance, as well as strong religious beliefs, but for me, marriages cannot possibly be made in heaven. Where does it say that in the Bible? People make those choices, some good, some unhealthy. Somewhere along the line I have learned, contrary to family maxims, that if you make your bed, you don’t necessarily have to lie in it. You can get up and move, especially when one encounters, emotional, physical, sexual or even spiritual abuse.
Never once did I hear my mother question God’s sovereignty. To her, that would imply that the God whom she trusted with all her heart had led her down the wrong path. In her theology, and reinforced by my father with quotes from the Bible, that it was God’s will that she submit to her husband. She was committed (and coerced) to love, honor, and obey him until death intervened. “I accepted the future in simple faith that the Lord was leading me all the way,” she said. Simple faith did not permit her to question. A professional Christian counselor was out of the question, even if there were any around to be consulted a half century ago. Seeing a counselor pre-supposed that intense prayer and fasting and Bible reading were inadequate remedies to life’s problems. She told very few about her anguish, and never to her children while we were growing up.
During the time my mother kept the Chinese chest in her small apartment, it lay shrouded under a heavy, black brocade cloth. Stacked on top of the chest sat her phonograph player, her photo memory books, and piles of assorted record albums. Out of sight, the noble cranes lay hidden for decades until my mother moved into an assisted living residence. I remember her broad smile when I told her that I would take good care of her beautiful camphor chest, this lovely thing she bequeathed to me. She had begun to distribute her “things,” as she called them, to her four children. My mother lived to be eighty-nine. Clues to her life had been locked away in that Chinese chest for most of those years. In time, it was my joy to unearth some of the mementos and letters she had penned to her mother when she first sailed to Shanghai on the Empress of Japan to marry “by faith” a man she barely knew.
As I look at those cranes now, embedded in that chest that has come down to me, the bewildered one in particular seems to encapsulate much of my mother’s fascinating, woeful life. She, like the cranes, had mated for life, despite the unhappiness she endured. I suppose that if we children had all turned out to be preachers or missionaries to a foreign country, she would have felt some recompense, but none of us did. Throughout her lonely migrations to strange and foreign lands she kept searching for a resolution to the sadness she was feeling but could not verbalize. God did not provide the reconciliation to her husband and brother that she had so desperately prayed for. To bolster herself, she often took comfort in the words of the old hymn: “It will be worth it all, when we see Jesus; life’s trials will seem so small when we see Christ.” I am sure that now she has found the answers in heaven and has found peace--the peace that passes understanding. What has she learned over there? What have I learned from her life experiences? How does one resolve the problem of pain in a Christian worldview? C. S. Lewis has helped me understand what my mother knew and quietly bore: many questions in this life are left unanswered. Life in Christ is a faith journey indeed. The Bible reminds us that “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed to us.” (Rom. 8:18 NIV) Trust and Obey were the three little words that guided the choices my mother made throughout the bewildered maze of her life.
A large, beautifully carved Chinese chest rests on curved wooden legs in my kitchen. Long-legged cranes decorate the top and sides in various poses. One bird in the background looking wide-eyed and perplexed, I’ve come to call “the bewildered one.” She reminds me of my mother, full of questions she dare not ask.
A furniture maker in Hong Kong sold this beautiful chest to my parents during their early, happier years of married life. Being practical and resourceful, they knew that this fragrant, camphor-lined vault could store and preserve the many curios and keepsakes that they would be collecting over the years to ship back home, someday. A skilled Chinese woodcarver had chiseled these revered birds into the outer teak frame, knowing full well its commercial appeal. Throughout Asia, red-crested cranes are symbols of long life and good luck.
My parents, however, believed in divine providence rather than in lady luck. To them, the force that operates for good or ill in a person’s life is not as capricious and precarious as luck. Good fortune is not the result of mere chance; it is part of God’s plan. Unfortunate circumstances, like the time my father almost died of food poisoning, are blamed on the enemy of our souls—Satan, the devil or the evil one. Hence, even when God allows bad things to happen to good people, it is not without some purpose. God is teaching us something or testing our faith. Our job on earth is to trust God, who has clearly instructed us not to lay up treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt. Nevertheless, the few curios they brought home in this chest, fortified with camphor against pesky moths, could not be considered real treasures, merely mementos to display at missionary meetings.
My parents firmly believed that one should not—must not—expect to reap the rewards of living a virtuous life here on earth. However, in the life to come, all would turn out right. Then, all life’s troubling questions would be answered to our satisfaction. “All things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose” was a bible verse I had memorized at a very early age. Thus, I have always known that life has meaning and purpose. I have never doubted God’s goodness, although I have often questioned His methods.
This core belief, that all will turn out well in the end, that good will triumph over evil, that God rewards the faithful, was the force that enabled my mother to endure the countless challenges in her life. Her unshakable faith held her fast after the death of her infant son, Johnny, the puzzling alienation of her brother, Andy, and throughout her unhappy marriage to my father, notwithstanding all her attempts at being the good wife.
My parents’ acquaintance began at the suggestion of my father’s sister, Agnes. She had met Violet in Buffalo, New York and knew of her intent to go to Tibet as a missionary. Agnes suggested to her brother, Al, who was living in Shanghai at the time, that Violet would make him a good helpmeet. My father, who was on the lookout for a wife, then began a correspondence with this devout woman with a winsome smile, recently graduated from the Nyack Missionary College. Al eventually succeeded through his letters in persuading Violet to join him in China. Thus, Violet Anna Agnes Gibson and Alexander George Kowles were married on the very day the steamer docked in Shanghai harbor, September 6, 1938. She was just six days shy of turning thirty. Al, two years younger and two inches shorter, regretted these facts most of his life.
Why my parents went to China was never a mystery to me. In church service after church service they told of how God had laid on their hearts the burden for the lost. They were dedicated to answering the Master’s call for reapers to work in the harvest field for lost souls, as they would express it. They were merely obeying the great commission to go into all the world to bring the message of God’s love and salvation to people in heathen darkness. These words and phrases I heard often. I have never doubted their sincerity and resolve. They were more committed to their duty to obey Jesus’ imperative to preach the Gospel than to any other obligations, even to each other. Their marriage, based on their sincere desire to serve God, seemed to them at the beginning, to be God’s will. But before long, my mother began to recognize the smoldering notion that she had made a grave mistake. Where was God in this? How was God going to work this marriage out to his good?
“But you’re here,” my mother would say, dodging my question whenever I asked her why she stayed with my father for all those painful years. So, it was my existence and that of her other three children that enabled her to endure and be faithful. To her, the ever self-sacrificing handmaiden of the Lord and Al, divorce was unthinkable. God must have some purpose in it for her, she often reasoned throughout her prolonged heartache. It was her duty to persevere, to keep up family appearances for the sake of us children and “the ministry.”
I’m sure now that it was her strong sense of duty, her belief that marriages are made in heaven, her determination to endure to the end, bound and kept her locked in that disappointing marriage. Like the flight plans imprinted in those cranes’ brains, the mechanisms that steered the course of my mother’s life were those strongly implanted religious beliefs. I have inherited some of my mother’s sense of adventure, her perseverance, as well as strong religious beliefs, but for me, marriages cannot possibly be made in heaven. Where does it say that in the Bible? People make those choices, some good, some unhealthy. Somewhere along the line I have learned, contrary to family maxims, that if you make your bed, you don’t necessarily have to lie in it. You can get up and move, especially when one encounters, emotional, physical, sexual or even spiritual abuse.
Never once did I hear my mother question God’s sovereignty. To her, that would imply that the God whom she trusted with all her heart had led her down the wrong path. In her theology, and reinforced by my father with quotes from the Bible, that it was God’s will that she submit to her husband. She was committed (and coerced) to love, honor, and obey him until death intervened. “I accepted the future in simple faith that the Lord was leading me all the way,” she said. Simple faith did not permit her to question. A professional Christian counselor was out of the question, even if there were any around to be consulted a half century ago. Seeing a counselor pre-supposed that intense prayer and fasting and Bible reading were inadequate remedies to life’s problems. She told very few about her anguish, and never to her children while we were growing up.
During the time my mother kept the Chinese chest in her small apartment, it lay shrouded under a heavy, black brocade cloth. Stacked on top of the chest sat her phonograph player, her photo memory books, and piles of assorted record albums. Out of sight, the noble cranes lay hidden for decades until my mother moved into an assisted living residence. I remember her broad smile when I told her that I would take good care of her beautiful camphor chest, this lovely thing she bequeathed to me. She had begun to distribute her “things,” as she called them, to her four children. My mother lived to be eighty-nine. Clues to her life had been locked away in that Chinese chest for most of those years. In time, it was my joy to unearth some of the mementos and letters she had penned to her mother when she first sailed to Shanghai on the Empress of Japan to marry “by faith” a man she barely knew.
As I look at those cranes now, embedded in that chest that has come down to me, the bewildered one in particular seems to encapsulate much of my mother’s fascinating, woeful life. She, like the cranes, had mated for life, despite the unhappiness she endured. I suppose that if we children had all turned out to be preachers or missionaries to a foreign country, she would have felt some recompense, but none of us did. Throughout her lonely migrations to strange and foreign lands she kept searching for a resolution to the sadness she was feeling but could not verbalize. God did not provide the reconciliation to her husband and brother that she had so desperately prayed for. To bolster herself, she often took comfort in the words of the old hymn: “It will be worth it all, when we see Jesus; life’s trials will seem so small when we see Christ.” I am sure that now she has found the answers in heaven and has found peace--the peace that passes understanding. What has she learned over there? What have I learned from her life experiences? How does one resolve the problem of pain in a Christian worldview? C. S. Lewis has helped me understand what my mother knew and quietly bore: many questions in this life are left unanswered. Life in Christ is a faith journey indeed. The Bible reminds us that “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed to us.” (Rom. 8:18 NIV) Trust and Obey were the three little words that guided the choices my mother made throughout the bewildered maze of her life.
Happy Reading!
Sell Used Books - Have Your Books Shipped To Us For Free And Get Fast Cash Back!
Thursday, November 19, 2009
FIRST Presents "The Swiss Courrier" by Tricia Goyer and Mike Yorkey
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card authors are:
and the book:
Revell (October 1, 2009)
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Tricia Goyer is the author of several books, including Night Song and Dawn of a Thousand Nights, both past winners of the ACFW's Book of the Year Award for Long Historical Romance. Goyer lives with her family in Montana.
Visit the author's website.
Mike Yorkey is the author or coauthor of dozens of books, including the bestselling Every Man's Battle series. Married to a Swiss native, Yorkey lived in Switzerland for 18 months. He and his family currently reside in California.
Visit the author's website.
Product Details:
List Price: $13.99
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Revell (October 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0800733363
ISBN-13: 978-0800733360
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
To the Reader
In the early afternoon of July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus Graf von Stauffenberg confidently lugged a sturdy briefcase into Wolfsschanze—Wolf’s Lair—the East Prussian redoubt of Adolf Hitler. Inside the black briefcase, a small but powerful bomb ticked away, counting down the minutes to der Führer’s demise.
Several generals involved in the assassination plot arranged to have Stauffenberg invited to a routine staff meeting with Hitler and two dozen officers. The one o’clock conference was held in the map room of Wolfsschanze’s cement-lined underground bunker. Stauffenberg quietly entered the conference a bit tardy and managed to get close to Hitler by claiming he was hard of hearing. While poring over detailed topological maps of the Eastern Front’s war theater, the colonel unobtrusively set the briefcase underneath the heavy oak table near Hitler’s legs. After waiting for an appropriate amount of time, Stauffenberg excused himself and quietly exited the claustrophobic bunker, saying he had to place an urgent call to Berlin. When a Wehrmacht officer noticed the bulky briefcase was in his way, he inconspicuously moved it away from Hitler, placing it behind the other substantial oak support. That simple event turned the tide of history.
Moments later, a terrific explosion catapulted one officer to the ceiling, ripped off the legs of others, and killed four soldiers instantly. Although the main force of the blast was directed away from Hitler, the German leader nonetheless suffered burst eardrums, burned hair, and a wounded arm. He was in shock but still alive—and unhinged for revenge.
Stauffenberg, believing Hitler was dead, leaped into a staff car with his aide Werner von Haeften. They talked their way out of the Wolfsschanze compound and made a dash for a nearby airfield, where they flew back to Berlin in a Heinkel He 111. When news got out that Hitler had survived, Stauffenberg and three other conspirators were quickly tracked down, captured, and executed at midnight by a makeshift firing squad.
An enraged Hitler did not stop there to satisfy his bloodlust. For the next month and a half, he instigated a bloody purge, resulting in the execution of dozens of plotters and hundreds of others remotely involved in the assassination coup. The Gestapo, no doubt acting under Hitler’s orders, treated the failed attempt on the Führer’s life as a pretext for arresting 5,000 opponents of the Third Reich, many of whom were imprisoned and tortured.
What many people do not know is that Hitler’s manhunt would dramatically alter the development of a secret weapon that could turn the tide of the war for Nazi Germany—the atomic bomb.
This is that story . . .
1
Waldshut, Germany
Saturday, July 29, 1944
4 p.m.
He hoped his accent wouldn’t give him away. The young Swiss kept his head down as he sauntered beneath the frescoed archways that ringed the town square of Waldshut, an attractive border town in the foothills of the southern Schwarzwald. He hopped over a foot-wide, waterfilled trench that ran through the middle of the cobblestone square and furtively glanced behind to see if anyone had detected his presence.
Even though Switzerland lay just a kilometer or two away across the Rhine River, the youthful operative realized he no longer breathed free air. Though he felt horribly exposed—as if he were marching down Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm screaming anti-Nazi slogans—he willed himself to remain confident.
His part was a small but vital piece of the larger war effort. Yes, he risked his life, but he was not alone in his passion. A day’s drive away, American tanks drove for the heart of
Paris—and quickened French hearts for libération. Far closer, Nazi reprisals thinned the ranks of his fellow resisters. The young man shuddered at the thought of being captured, lined up against a wall, and hearing the click-click of a safety being unlatched from a Nazi machine gun. Still, his legs propelled him on.
Earlier that morning, he’d introduced himself as Jean- Pierre to members of an underground cell. The French Resistance had recently stepped up their acts of sabotage after the Allies broke out of the Normandy beachhead two weeks earlier, and they’d all taken nom de guerres in their honor.
Inside the pocket of his leather jacket, Jean-Pierre’s right hand formed a claw around a Mauser C96 semiautomatic pistol. His grip tightened, as if squeezing the gun’s metallic profile would reduce the tension building in his chest. The last few minutes before an operation always came to this.
His senses peaked as he took in the sights and sounds around him. At one end of the town square, a pair of disheveled older women complained to a local farmer about the fingerling size of the potato crop. A horse-drawn carriage, transporting four galvanized tin milk containers, rumbled by while a young newsboy screamed out, “Nachrichten!” The boy’s right hand waved day-old copies of the Badische Zeitung from Freiburg, eighty kilometers to the northwest.
Jean-Pierre didn’t need to read the newspaper to know that more men and women were losing their lives by the minute due to the reprisals of a madman.
Though the planned mission had been analyzed from every angle, there were always uncertain factors that would affect not only the outcome of the mission but who among them would live. Or die.
Their task was to rescue a half-dozen men arrested by local authorities following the assassination attempt on Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler. If things went as Jean-Pierre hoped,
the men would soon be free from the Nazis’ clutches. If not, the captives’ fate included an overnight trip to Berlin, via a cattle car, where they would be transported to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8. The men would be questioned—tortured if they weren’t immediately forthcoming— until names, dates, and places gushed as freely as the blood spilling upon the cold, unyielding concrete floor.
Not that revealing any secrets would save their lives. When the last bit of information had been wrung from their minds, they’d be marched against a blood-spattered wall or to the gallows equipped with well-stretched hemp rope. May God have mercy on their souls.
Jean-Pierre willed himself to stop thinking pessimistically. He glanced at his watch—a pricey Hanhart favored by Luftwaffe pilots. His own Swiss-made Breitling had been tucked inside a wooden box on his nightstand back home, where he had also left a handwritten letter. A love note, actually, to a woman who had captured his heart—just in case he never returned. But this was a time for war, not love. And he had
to keep reminding himself of that.
Jean-Pierre slowed his gait as he left the town square and approached the town’s major intersection. As he had been advised, a uniformed woman—her left arm ringed with a red
armband and black swastika—directed traffic with a whistle and an attitude.
She was like no traffic cop he’d ever seen. Her full lips were colored with red lipstick. Black hair tumbled upon the shoulder epaulettes of the Verkehrskontrolle’s gray-green
uniform. She wielded a silver-toned baton, directing a rambling assortment of horse-drawn carriages, battered sedans, and hulking military vehicles jockeying for the right of way.
She looked no older than twenty-five, yet acted like she owned the real estate beneath her feet. Jean-Pierre couldn’t help but let his lips curl up in a slight grin, knowing what was
to come. “Entschuldigung, wo ist das Gemeindehaus?” a voice said beside him. Jean-Pierre turned to the rotund businessman in the fedora and summer business suit asking for directions to City Hall.
“Ich bin nicht sicher.” He shrugged and was about to fashion another excuse when a military transport truck turned a corner two blocks away, approaching in their direction.
“Es tut mir Leid.” With a wave, Jean-Pierre excused himself and sprinted toward the uniformed traffic officer. In one quick motion, his Mauser was drawn.
He didn’t break stride as he tackled the uniformed woman to the ground. Her scream blasted his ear, and more cries from onlookers chimed in.
Jean-Pierre straddled the frightened traffic officer and pressed the barrel of his pistol into her forehead. Her shrieking immediately ceased.
“Don’t move, and nothing will happen to you.”
Jean-Pierre glanced up as he heard the mud-caked transport truck skid to a stop fifty meters from them.
A Wehrmacht soldier hopped out. “Halt!” He clumsily drew his rifle to his right shoulder.
Jean-Pierre met the soldier’s eyes and rolled off the female traffic officer.
A shot rang out. The German soldier’s body jerked, and a cry of pain erupted from his lips. He clutched his left chest as a rivulet of blood stained his uniform.
“Nice shot, Suzanne.” Jean-Pierre jumped to his feet, glancing at the traffic cop, her stomach against the asphalt with her pistol drawn.
Suzanne rose from the ground, crouched, and aimed.
Her pistol, which had been hidden in an ankle holster, was now pointed at the driver behind the windshield. The determined look in her gaze was one Jean-Pierre had come to
know well.
One, two, three shots found their mark, shattering the truck’s glass into shards. The driver slumped behind the wheel.
As expected, two Wehrmacht soldiers jumped out of the back of the truck and took cover behind the rear wheels.
Before Jean-Pierre had a chance to take aim, shots rang out from a second-story window overlooking the intersection.
The German soldiers crumbled to the cobblestone pavement in a heap.
“Los jetzt!” He clasped Suzanne’s hand, and they sprinted to the rear of the truck. Two black-leather-coated members of their resistance group had already beaten them there.
Jean- Pierre couldn’t remember their names, but it didn’t matter.
What mattered was the safety of the prisoners in the truck. Jean-Pierre only hoped the contact’s information had been correct.
With a deep breath, he lifted the curtain and peered into the truck. A half-dozen frightened men sat on wooden benches with hands raised. Their wide eyes and dropped jaws displayed their fear.
“Don’t shoot!” one cried.
The sound of a police siren split the air.
“Everyone out!” Jean-Pierre shouted. “I’ll take this one. The rest of you, go with them.” He pointed the tip of his Mauser at the men in leather jackets.
The sirens increased in volume as the speeding car gobbled up distance along the Hauptstrasse, weaving through the autos and pedestrians. An officer in the passenger’s seat leaned out, rifle pointed.
Jean-Pierre leaned into the truck and yanked the prisoner’s arm. Suzanne grabbed the other. “Move it, come on!”
Bullets from an approaching vehicle whizzed past Jean- Pierre’s ear. The clearly frightened prisoner suddenly found his legs, and the three sprinted away from the speedingcar.
Jean-Pierre’s feet pounded the pavement, and he tugged on the prisoner’s arm, urging him to run faster. He could hear the screech of the tires as the police car stopped just behind the truck. Jean-Pierre hadn’t expected the local Polizei to respond so rapidly.
They needed to find cover—
More gunfire erupted, and as if reading his thoughts, Suzanne turned the prisoner toward a weathered column. Jean-Pierre crumbled against the pillar, catching his breath.
The columns provided cover, but not enough. Soon the police would be upon them. They had to make a move. Only ten steps separated them from turning the street corner and sprinting into Helmut’s watch store. From there, a car waited outside the back door.
Another hail of gunfire struck the plaster. Jean-Pierre mouthed a prayer under his breath.
“Suzanne, we have to get out of here!”
She crouched into a trembling ball, all confidence gone. “They’re surrounding us!” The terror in her uncertain timbre was clear. “But what can we do? We can’t let them see us run into the store.”
“Forget that. We have no choice!” Jean-Pierre raised his pistol and returned several volleys, firing at the two policemen perched behind a parked car.
“Listen to me,” he said to Suzanne, taking his eyes momentarily off the police car. “You have to go. You take this guy, and I’ll cover you. Once you turn the corner, it’s just twenty more meters to Helmut’s store.” His hands moved as he spoke, slamming a new clip of ammunition into his pistol.
“But what if—”
“I’ll join you. Now go!”
Jean-Pierre jumped from behind the protection of the column and rapidly fired several shots. One cop dared expose himself to return fire—not at Jean-Pierre but at the pair running for the corner.
No!
Jean-Pierre turned just in time to see Suzanne’s body lurch. The clean hit ripped into her flesh between the shoulder blades. She staggered for a long second before dropping
with a thud. The gangly prisoner didn’t even look back as he disappeared around the corner.
I can’t lose him, Jean-Pierre thought, remembering again the importance of this mission.
Yet to chase after the prisoner meant he’d have to leave his partner behind.
Suzanne . . .
He emptied his Mauser at the hidden policemen, ducking as he scrambled toward his partner. Sweeping up her bloody form, he managed to drag her around the corner to safety.
“Go,” Suzanne whispered.
“I can’t leave you. Stay with me—”
Her eyelids fluttered. “You need to go . . .” A long breath escaped, and her gaze fixed on a distant point beyond him.
Jean-Pierre dropped to his knees and ripped open Suzanne’s bloodstained woolen jacket. Her soaked chest neither rose nor fell. He swore under his breath and brushed a lock of
black hair from her face.
Jean-Pierre cocked his head. Incessant gunfire filled the air. His colleagues were apparently keeping the German soldiers and local Polizei at bay, at least for the time being. He knew only a few valuable seconds remained to escape with
the prisoner.
He planted a soft kiss on Suzanne’s forehead. “Until we see each other in heaven,” he whispered.
Jean-Pierre darted to a trash can, where the shaken prisoner had hunkered down, covering his head. The resistance fighter clutched the man’s left arm and hustled him inside the watch store, pushing past two startled women. The rear door was propped open, and a black Opel four-door idled in the alley.
With a few quick steps, they were inside the vehicle.
Before the rear door was shut, the driver jerked the car into gear, and the Opel roared down the tight alley. The door slammed shut, and Jean-Pierre glanced back. No one followed.
The car merged onto a busier street, and only then did Jean-Pierre sink in his seat and close his eyes.
Soon they’d arrive at a safe house pitched on the Rhine River. And later, with the dark night sky as their protection, a skiff would sneak them into the warm arms of Mother
Switzerland—a skiff piloted by the mentor who’d recruited him. His nom de guerre: Pascal.
Jean-Pierre’s mission would soon be complete, but at what cost? Another agent—a good woman and a friend—had been sacrificed.
He had followed orders for the greater good, to save the life of a nameless prisoner. He only hoped this mission was worth it.
Tricia Goyer and Mike Yorkey, The Swiss Courier: A Novel,
Revell Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2009. Used by permission
In the early afternoon of July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus Graf von Stauffenberg confidently lugged a sturdy briefcase into Wolfsschanze—Wolf’s Lair—the East Prussian redoubt of Adolf Hitler. Inside the black briefcase, a small but powerful bomb ticked away, counting down the minutes to der Führer’s demise.
Several generals involved in the assassination plot arranged to have Stauffenberg invited to a routine staff meeting with Hitler and two dozen officers. The one o’clock conference was held in the map room of Wolfsschanze’s cement-lined underground bunker. Stauffenberg quietly entered the conference a bit tardy and managed to get close to Hitler by claiming he was hard of hearing. While poring over detailed topological maps of the Eastern Front’s war theater, the colonel unobtrusively set the briefcase underneath the heavy oak table near Hitler’s legs. After waiting for an appropriate amount of time, Stauffenberg excused himself and quietly exited the claustrophobic bunker, saying he had to place an urgent call to Berlin. When a Wehrmacht officer noticed the bulky briefcase was in his way, he inconspicuously moved it away from Hitler, placing it behind the other substantial oak support. That simple event turned the tide of history.
Moments later, a terrific explosion catapulted one officer to the ceiling, ripped off the legs of others, and killed four soldiers instantly. Although the main force of the blast was directed away from Hitler, the German leader nonetheless suffered burst eardrums, burned hair, and a wounded arm. He was in shock but still alive—and unhinged for revenge.
Stauffenberg, believing Hitler was dead, leaped into a staff car with his aide Werner von Haeften. They talked their way out of the Wolfsschanze compound and made a dash for a nearby airfield, where they flew back to Berlin in a Heinkel He 111. When news got out that Hitler had survived, Stauffenberg and three other conspirators were quickly tracked down, captured, and executed at midnight by a makeshift firing squad.
An enraged Hitler did not stop there to satisfy his bloodlust. For the next month and a half, he instigated a bloody purge, resulting in the execution of dozens of plotters and hundreds of others remotely involved in the assassination coup. The Gestapo, no doubt acting under Hitler’s orders, treated the failed attempt on the Führer’s life as a pretext for arresting 5,000 opponents of the Third Reich, many of whom were imprisoned and tortured.
What many people do not know is that Hitler’s manhunt would dramatically alter the development of a secret weapon that could turn the tide of the war for Nazi Germany—the atomic bomb.
This is that story . . .
1
Waldshut, Germany
Saturday, July 29, 1944
4 p.m.
He hoped his accent wouldn’t give him away. The young Swiss kept his head down as he sauntered beneath the frescoed archways that ringed the town square of Waldshut, an attractive border town in the foothills of the southern Schwarzwald. He hopped over a foot-wide, waterfilled trench that ran through the middle of the cobblestone square and furtively glanced behind to see if anyone had detected his presence.
Even though Switzerland lay just a kilometer or two away across the Rhine River, the youthful operative realized he no longer breathed free air. Though he felt horribly exposed—as if he were marching down Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm screaming anti-Nazi slogans—he willed himself to remain confident.
His part was a small but vital piece of the larger war effort. Yes, he risked his life, but he was not alone in his passion. A day’s drive away, American tanks drove for the heart of
Paris—and quickened French hearts for libération. Far closer, Nazi reprisals thinned the ranks of his fellow resisters. The young man shuddered at the thought of being captured, lined up against a wall, and hearing the click-click of a safety being unlatched from a Nazi machine gun. Still, his legs propelled him on.
Earlier that morning, he’d introduced himself as Jean- Pierre to members of an underground cell. The French Resistance had recently stepped up their acts of sabotage after the Allies broke out of the Normandy beachhead two weeks earlier, and they’d all taken nom de guerres in their honor.
Inside the pocket of his leather jacket, Jean-Pierre’s right hand formed a claw around a Mauser C96 semiautomatic pistol. His grip tightened, as if squeezing the gun’s metallic profile would reduce the tension building in his chest. The last few minutes before an operation always came to this.
His senses peaked as he took in the sights and sounds around him. At one end of the town square, a pair of disheveled older women complained to a local farmer about the fingerling size of the potato crop. A horse-drawn carriage, transporting four galvanized tin milk containers, rumbled by while a young newsboy screamed out, “Nachrichten!” The boy’s right hand waved day-old copies of the Badische Zeitung from Freiburg, eighty kilometers to the northwest.
Jean-Pierre didn’t need to read the newspaper to know that more men and women were losing their lives by the minute due to the reprisals of a madman.
Though the planned mission had been analyzed from every angle, there were always uncertain factors that would affect not only the outcome of the mission but who among them would live. Or die.
Their task was to rescue a half-dozen men arrested by local authorities following the assassination attempt on Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler. If things went as Jean-Pierre hoped,
the men would soon be free from the Nazis’ clutches. If not, the captives’ fate included an overnight trip to Berlin, via a cattle car, where they would be transported to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8. The men would be questioned—tortured if they weren’t immediately forthcoming— until names, dates, and places gushed as freely as the blood spilling upon the cold, unyielding concrete floor.
Not that revealing any secrets would save their lives. When the last bit of information had been wrung from their minds, they’d be marched against a blood-spattered wall or to the gallows equipped with well-stretched hemp rope. May God have mercy on their souls.
Jean-Pierre willed himself to stop thinking pessimistically. He glanced at his watch—a pricey Hanhart favored by Luftwaffe pilots. His own Swiss-made Breitling had been tucked inside a wooden box on his nightstand back home, where he had also left a handwritten letter. A love note, actually, to a woman who had captured his heart—just in case he never returned. But this was a time for war, not love. And he had
to keep reminding himself of that.
Jean-Pierre slowed his gait as he left the town square and approached the town’s major intersection. As he had been advised, a uniformed woman—her left arm ringed with a red
armband and black swastika—directed traffic with a whistle and an attitude.
She was like no traffic cop he’d ever seen. Her full lips were colored with red lipstick. Black hair tumbled upon the shoulder epaulettes of the Verkehrskontrolle’s gray-green
uniform. She wielded a silver-toned baton, directing a rambling assortment of horse-drawn carriages, battered sedans, and hulking military vehicles jockeying for the right of way.
She looked no older than twenty-five, yet acted like she owned the real estate beneath her feet. Jean-Pierre couldn’t help but let his lips curl up in a slight grin, knowing what was
to come. “Entschuldigung, wo ist das Gemeindehaus?” a voice said beside him. Jean-Pierre turned to the rotund businessman in the fedora and summer business suit asking for directions to City Hall.
“Ich bin nicht sicher.” He shrugged and was about to fashion another excuse when a military transport truck turned a corner two blocks away, approaching in their direction.
“Es tut mir Leid.” With a wave, Jean-Pierre excused himself and sprinted toward the uniformed traffic officer. In one quick motion, his Mauser was drawn.
He didn’t break stride as he tackled the uniformed woman to the ground. Her scream blasted his ear, and more cries from onlookers chimed in.
Jean-Pierre straddled the frightened traffic officer and pressed the barrel of his pistol into her forehead. Her shrieking immediately ceased.
“Don’t move, and nothing will happen to you.”
Jean-Pierre glanced up as he heard the mud-caked transport truck skid to a stop fifty meters from them.
A Wehrmacht soldier hopped out. “Halt!” He clumsily drew his rifle to his right shoulder.
Jean-Pierre met the soldier’s eyes and rolled off the female traffic officer.
A shot rang out. The German soldier’s body jerked, and a cry of pain erupted from his lips. He clutched his left chest as a rivulet of blood stained his uniform.
“Nice shot, Suzanne.” Jean-Pierre jumped to his feet, glancing at the traffic cop, her stomach against the asphalt with her pistol drawn.
Suzanne rose from the ground, crouched, and aimed.
Her pistol, which had been hidden in an ankle holster, was now pointed at the driver behind the windshield. The determined look in her gaze was one Jean-Pierre had come to
know well.
One, two, three shots found their mark, shattering the truck’s glass into shards. The driver slumped behind the wheel.
As expected, two Wehrmacht soldiers jumped out of the back of the truck and took cover behind the rear wheels.
Before Jean-Pierre had a chance to take aim, shots rang out from a second-story window overlooking the intersection.
The German soldiers crumbled to the cobblestone pavement in a heap.
“Los jetzt!” He clasped Suzanne’s hand, and they sprinted to the rear of the truck. Two black-leather-coated members of their resistance group had already beaten them there.
Jean- Pierre couldn’t remember their names, but it didn’t matter.
What mattered was the safety of the prisoners in the truck. Jean-Pierre only hoped the contact’s information had been correct.
With a deep breath, he lifted the curtain and peered into the truck. A half-dozen frightened men sat on wooden benches with hands raised. Their wide eyes and dropped jaws displayed their fear.
“Don’t shoot!” one cried.
The sound of a police siren split the air.
“Everyone out!” Jean-Pierre shouted. “I’ll take this one. The rest of you, go with them.” He pointed the tip of his Mauser at the men in leather jackets.
The sirens increased in volume as the speeding car gobbled up distance along the Hauptstrasse, weaving through the autos and pedestrians. An officer in the passenger’s seat leaned out, rifle pointed.
Jean-Pierre leaned into the truck and yanked the prisoner’s arm. Suzanne grabbed the other. “Move it, come on!”
Bullets from an approaching vehicle whizzed past Jean- Pierre’s ear. The clearly frightened prisoner suddenly found his legs, and the three sprinted away from the speedingcar.
Jean-Pierre’s feet pounded the pavement, and he tugged on the prisoner’s arm, urging him to run faster. He could hear the screech of the tires as the police car stopped just behind the truck. Jean-Pierre hadn’t expected the local Polizei to respond so rapidly.
They needed to find cover—
More gunfire erupted, and as if reading his thoughts, Suzanne turned the prisoner toward a weathered column. Jean-Pierre crumbled against the pillar, catching his breath.
The columns provided cover, but not enough. Soon the police would be upon them. They had to make a move. Only ten steps separated them from turning the street corner and sprinting into Helmut’s watch store. From there, a car waited outside the back door.
Another hail of gunfire struck the plaster. Jean-Pierre mouthed a prayer under his breath.
“Suzanne, we have to get out of here!”
She crouched into a trembling ball, all confidence gone. “They’re surrounding us!” The terror in her uncertain timbre was clear. “But what can we do? We can’t let them see us run into the store.”
“Forget that. We have no choice!” Jean-Pierre raised his pistol and returned several volleys, firing at the two policemen perched behind a parked car.
“Listen to me,” he said to Suzanne, taking his eyes momentarily off the police car. “You have to go. You take this guy, and I’ll cover you. Once you turn the corner, it’s just twenty more meters to Helmut’s store.” His hands moved as he spoke, slamming a new clip of ammunition into his pistol.
“But what if—”
“I’ll join you. Now go!”
Jean-Pierre jumped from behind the protection of the column and rapidly fired several shots. One cop dared expose himself to return fire—not at Jean-Pierre but at the pair running for the corner.
No!
Jean-Pierre turned just in time to see Suzanne’s body lurch. The clean hit ripped into her flesh between the shoulder blades. She staggered for a long second before dropping
with a thud. The gangly prisoner didn’t even look back as he disappeared around the corner.
I can’t lose him, Jean-Pierre thought, remembering again the importance of this mission.
Yet to chase after the prisoner meant he’d have to leave his partner behind.
Suzanne . . .
He emptied his Mauser at the hidden policemen, ducking as he scrambled toward his partner. Sweeping up her bloody form, he managed to drag her around the corner to safety.
“Go,” Suzanne whispered.
“I can’t leave you. Stay with me—”
Her eyelids fluttered. “You need to go . . .” A long breath escaped, and her gaze fixed on a distant point beyond him.
Jean-Pierre dropped to his knees and ripped open Suzanne’s bloodstained woolen jacket. Her soaked chest neither rose nor fell. He swore under his breath and brushed a lock of
black hair from her face.
Jean-Pierre cocked his head. Incessant gunfire filled the air. His colleagues were apparently keeping the German soldiers and local Polizei at bay, at least for the time being. He knew only a few valuable seconds remained to escape with
the prisoner.
He planted a soft kiss on Suzanne’s forehead. “Until we see each other in heaven,” he whispered.
Jean-Pierre darted to a trash can, where the shaken prisoner had hunkered down, covering his head. The resistance fighter clutched the man’s left arm and hustled him inside the watch store, pushing past two startled women. The rear door was propped open, and a black Opel four-door idled in the alley.
With a few quick steps, they were inside the vehicle.
Before the rear door was shut, the driver jerked the car into gear, and the Opel roared down the tight alley. The door slammed shut, and Jean-Pierre glanced back. No one followed.
The car merged onto a busier street, and only then did Jean-Pierre sink in his seat and close his eyes.
Soon they’d arrive at a safe house pitched on the Rhine River. And later, with the dark night sky as their protection, a skiff would sneak them into the warm arms of Mother
Switzerland—a skiff piloted by the mentor who’d recruited him. His nom de guerre: Pascal.
Jean-Pierre’s mission would soon be complete, but at what cost? Another agent—a good woman and a friend—had been sacrificed.
He had followed orders for the greater good, to save the life of a nameless prisoner. He only hoped this mission was worth it.
Tricia Goyer and Mike Yorkey, The Swiss Courier: A Novel,
Revell Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2009. Used by permission
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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
FIRST Presents "So You Want To Be a Work-At-Home Mom" by Jill Hart and Diana Ennen
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card authors are:
and the book:
So You Want To Be A Work-At-Home Mom: A Christian's Guide To Starting a Home-Based Business
Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City (August 15, 2009)
ABOUT THE AUTHORs:
Jill Hart is the founder of Christian Work at Home Moms, CWAHM.com. Jill is a co-author of the upcoming book So You Want To Be a Work-at-Home Mom (Beacon Hill, Sept. 2009). Jill welcomes work-at-home questions at http://AskJill.cwahm.com/.
Visit the author's website.
Diana Ennen is the President of Virtual Word Publishing. Diana has worked from home for over 25 years and is passionate about PR, Publicity and Marketing & helping others Start their Own Virtual Assistant Business. Follow Diana on twitter at www.twitter.com/dianaennen.
Visit the author's website.
Product Details:
List Price: $15.99
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City (August 15, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0834124661
ISBN-13: 978-0834124660
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
Making the Choice to Stay Home
Today’s moms are passionate women who want both careers and families without having to give up precious time with their children. They’re searching for ways to have it all, and they’re finding that it’s possible to work from home and at the same time balance a family.
It may sound like a dream, but it’s not. It does start with a dream, though.
A few fortunate women fall into a job or business that allows them to work at home, but it isn’t that easy for most women. To find a way to stay at home while still contributing to their family financially is something that many women long for but few know how to achieve. We hope to make it easier for you.
Being Content at Home
You might have expected us to immediately launch into a chapter about how wonderful life can be if you work at home. However, with the authors having worked from home many years, we realized that you first need to be content in your home life to make it work. The focus of your mind is where true happiness lies. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21).
Before beginning your search for a career that will allow you to work from home, it’s important to remember that God has put you where you are for a reason. It may be for a season of your life, or it could possibly be long-term. Either way, trust that God will provide what’s best for you, and that may look a little different than what you think is best.
Being a mom and working outside the home can be incredibly challenging. Coordinating schedules, running kids to and fro, and being so tired by evening that you don’t have the energy to enjoy your kids take their toll. However, being a work-at-home mom every day, all day, presents its own unique challenges. It can become monotonous, even tedious. The kids, the house, the responsibilities—the list goes on and on. In either case, it can feel downright impossible to have an attitude of gratitude. The road can be hard, but in the end, your life will be less stressful and more satisfying if you can overcome discontentment. Following are some ideas for building contentment.
Be Grateful
One of the hardest attitudes to achieve is that of gratefulness. It’s easy to get caught up in the negatives that happen each day. However, it’s important to be grateful for each and every blessing that God gives.
Make a list of things in your life that you’re grateful for. You can start your list with your family and the opportunity to work from home, and continue from there. Take the time to thank God for each of the things on your list. As you begin to develop a grateful attitude, you’ll begin to notice more and more things each day you can add to your list.
Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that (1 Timothy 6:6-8).
Give Back
Changing your attitude is the first step to finding contentment. Reaching out and helping others is a proven way to change your attitude. When you extend help and graciousness to others, it can’t help but benefit you as well.
Find someone who needs a friend, and make a conscious effort to reach out to him or her every week or every month. Or find a ministry that you admire, and get involved. You’ll be surprised what investing something of yourself in others will do for your attitude. If you’re running a business from home, you may be able to bless others with a product they can’t afford or a special discount that will brighten their day. Maybe you can mentor someone. Be careful, though, that you don’t get so involved in helping others that you neglect your own business.
Choose to Accept Your Situation
A key component of contentment is acceptance. Acceptance doesn’t mean you don’t strive to better your life. It simply means that you make peace with where you are in life at this time.
There will always be more to attain—more money, more prestige. If you spend your life focused on what you don’t have or what you haven’t attained in life, you’ll be sad indeed. Celebrate each and every success, no matter how big or how small.
Examine your life and see all that is good in it. Each good thing is a gift from God. Accept that He is with you at this point in time. He’ll be with you in every success and every setback. Nothing you do will make Him love you more, and there’s nothing you can do that will make Him love you less.
We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:10).
Focus on Christ
This may sound like a cliché, but it’s easy to allow focus to move from the Lord to self. When moms work at home, the needs of family, business, and self can sometimes be all-consuming, leaving little time to meet spiritual needs. But focusing on your relationship with the Lord is what should come first. If your relationship with Christ is weak, all other relationships will be affected.
Here are practices that will help keep you focused on Him:
1. Read your Bible every day. Make the commitment to read at least one verse every day. The Book of Proverbs is a good place to start, or start with verses from the Gospel of John for a close look at the life of Christ. As you progress to reading more each day, consider purchasing a Bible that will guide you through reading the whole Bible in a year. There are also versions available that will lead you through the Bible in ninety days.
Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful (Joshua 1:8).
2. Cultivate an active prayer life. You can pray anytime and anywhere—when you’re driving, putting on your makeup, cooking, even as you drift off to sleep at night. Take advantage of these precious moments to spend them with your Heavenly Father.
Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18).
3. Meditate on the Word of God. When you find a verse or verses that have deep meaning for you, allow your mind to dwell on them, and let them soak into your spirit. A good starting point might be Romans 8:38-39—“I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Make note of the verses you’ve chosen, and jot down thoughts or ideas that they bring to mind. Keep your mind focused on Him, and be in prayer that He will open your eyes to what He would have you learn from the verses.
4. Wait. Contentment will not be attained overnight. Feelings of discontentment will push their way in. When they do, look through your life to bring to mind the ways God has changed you, the things He’s done to bring you closer to an attitude of contentment. Contentment comes in His timing, so allow Him the time to work in your life.
Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him
(Psalm 37:7).
If the temptation to wallow in discontentment continues to present itself, find someone who will hold you accountable—someone you can trust to be kind but firm who will speak the truth to you lovingly.
When you’re feeling dissatisfied or frustrated, give your accountability partner a call, and be honest about your feelings. Every mom gets frustrated; you’re certainly not alone. When you find someone you can talk with honestly, it will be an excellent help in overcoming negative thoughts and feelings. Accountability partners know each other on a very real and honest level and still accept and love each other. This allows both of you the opportunity to be supported as well as supportive.
Contentment may seem elusive, but with prayerful deliberation it can be achieved and will bring you more joy and peace than you can imagine. Start working toward an attitude of contentment today.
When your mind and heart are in a good place, it’s time to begin thinking about the choices that are available to you. Can you work from home? Should you work at home? And how in the world do you begin your search for success?
Setting Priorities in Business and at Home
Working from home, particularly if you’re running your own business, is a time-consuming endeavor—especially for moms. You’re responsible not only for the success of the business but for your family as well. You must be self-reliant, self-motivated, and self-disciplined in order to attain success in both areas.
When you work at home, it’s easy to let phone calls, e-mail, and paperwork keep you tied down and cause you to feel you don’t have time to take a break or choose to spend top-quality time with your family. Maybe you’ve noticed that you spend more time in front of your computer or on the phone than you expected to when you made the decision to work at home. Maybe you see your kids acting up and trying to get your attention. Maybe the work-at-home dream you envisioned isn’t happening.
You started out with noble intentions, but now the excitement of success in your business has caused you to lose sight of the primary reason you chose this path. It happens to many of us who work at home, so don’t worry. Help is on the way.
She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard (Proverbs 31:16).
Here are five tips for setting priorities in your life and business:
First, be honest. You probably didn’t start your work-at-home career to climb the corporate ladder. Spend some time in prayer, and ask the Lord to show you the things you need to change.
Take a few minutes to answer the following questions about how you’ve been handling the time commitment of owning a business.
• Are you spending too much time on the phone with clients?
• Do you think about business to the point that you’re distracted when you’re doing family activities?
• Is television getting more top-quality time with your children than you are?
• Do you snap at your children because of the stresses of your business?
Second, make a list. Sit down and write out a list of things you see that you would like to change. This can be a list of tasks you can do differently, such as limiting the time you spend on your business or ways you can reduce stress so you can deal kindly with your family.
Third, log your time. Buy a notebook or create a spreadsheet to log the time you spend on business. Make a column for each day across the top and a row of half-hour increments down the side. Time yourself every time you sit down at your desk by writing “in” in the box that corresponds to the time and day. Every time you leave your desk or complete a task, write “out” in the appropriate box.
At the end of the week, total up the hours you’ve spent each day on business tasks. Take special note of how much time you spend on e-mail and things that aren’t billable. Are you surprised, or is it about where you thought it would be? This can be a real eye-opener and show you in black and white if your priorities have gotten off track.
Fourth, take a break. If you’re in shock after examining your time log, it’s time to take a break. If you normally work during the weekend, make it a point to take this weekend off. Shut down your e-mail, turn off the ringer on your business phone, and shut the door to your office.
Plan ahead and schedule your time. Prioritize your workload, and have the work that will require the most effort and concentration scheduled for your peak time. Try not to get sidetracked; stay on task and focus on what you need to do. For example, you’ll be amazed by how much more you can accomplish by changing the way you handle e-mail. If you answer it only at scheduled times, you’ll find you have more time to do the tasks at hand.
Reevaluate the ways you’re spending your time. Try to plan when you can work on your business without losing time with your children. If your children are in school, make it a point to stop working when they get home. If your children are still small, try to plan your time accordingly. Perhaps a babysitter for several hours or days a week is necessary. Another possibility would be to have a grandparent or neighbor watch them once or twice a week to allow you time to work without interruptions.
Fifth, plan an activity. Now that you’re ready to make a change in your routine, why not plan an activity once a week? This can be an outing with your children or something simple, like setting aside time to make cookies together. You’ll notice that when you plan for these times, they actually happen.
If possible, find another work-at-home mom, and hold one another accountable to keep to your new schedules. Make a weekly play date for your children to spend time together. You and your friend can talk business if necessary, or you may decide to make it a “no business talk allowed” time.
Remember that the years you can work at home and have time with your children are a gift; your business is a gift also. How that will work for you and your family will take a little time to determine and will be different for each family. Take the time to find what works for you, and set your schedule accordingly. Reevaluate your priorities every few months to make sure that you’re making the best use of your time. The rewards will be well worth it. Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him (Psalm 127:3).
Today’s moms are passionate women who want both careers and families without having to give up precious time with their children. They’re searching for ways to have it all, and they’re finding that it’s possible to work from home and at the same time balance a family.
It may sound like a dream, but it’s not. It does start with a dream, though.
A few fortunate women fall into a job or business that allows them to work at home, but it isn’t that easy for most women. To find a way to stay at home while still contributing to their family financially is something that many women long for but few know how to achieve. We hope to make it easier for you.
Being Content at Home
You might have expected us to immediately launch into a chapter about how wonderful life can be if you work at home. However, with the authors having worked from home many years, we realized that you first need to be content in your home life to make it work. The focus of your mind is where true happiness lies. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21).
Before beginning your search for a career that will allow you to work from home, it’s important to remember that God has put you where you are for a reason. It may be for a season of your life, or it could possibly be long-term. Either way, trust that God will provide what’s best for you, and that may look a little different than what you think is best.
Being a mom and working outside the home can be incredibly challenging. Coordinating schedules, running kids to and fro, and being so tired by evening that you don’t have the energy to enjoy your kids take their toll. However, being a work-at-home mom every day, all day, presents its own unique challenges. It can become monotonous, even tedious. The kids, the house, the responsibilities—the list goes on and on. In either case, it can feel downright impossible to have an attitude of gratitude. The road can be hard, but in the end, your life will be less stressful and more satisfying if you can overcome discontentment. Following are some ideas for building contentment.
Be Grateful
One of the hardest attitudes to achieve is that of gratefulness. It’s easy to get caught up in the negatives that happen each day. However, it’s important to be grateful for each and every blessing that God gives.
Make a list of things in your life that you’re grateful for. You can start your list with your family and the opportunity to work from home, and continue from there. Take the time to thank God for each of the things on your list. As you begin to develop a grateful attitude, you’ll begin to notice more and more things each day you can add to your list.
Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that (1 Timothy 6:6-8).
Give Back
Changing your attitude is the first step to finding contentment. Reaching out and helping others is a proven way to change your attitude. When you extend help and graciousness to others, it can’t help but benefit you as well.
Find someone who needs a friend, and make a conscious effort to reach out to him or her every week or every month. Or find a ministry that you admire, and get involved. You’ll be surprised what investing something of yourself in others will do for your attitude. If you’re running a business from home, you may be able to bless others with a product they can’t afford or a special discount that will brighten their day. Maybe you can mentor someone. Be careful, though, that you don’t get so involved in helping others that you neglect your own business.
Choose to Accept Your Situation
A key component of contentment is acceptance. Acceptance doesn’t mean you don’t strive to better your life. It simply means that you make peace with where you are in life at this time.
There will always be more to attain—more money, more prestige. If you spend your life focused on what you don’t have or what you haven’t attained in life, you’ll be sad indeed. Celebrate each and every success, no matter how big or how small.
Examine your life and see all that is good in it. Each good thing is a gift from God. Accept that He is with you at this point in time. He’ll be with you in every success and every setback. Nothing you do will make Him love you more, and there’s nothing you can do that will make Him love you less.
We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:10).
Focus on Christ
This may sound like a cliché, but it’s easy to allow focus to move from the Lord to self. When moms work at home, the needs of family, business, and self can sometimes be all-consuming, leaving little time to meet spiritual needs. But focusing on your relationship with the Lord is what should come first. If your relationship with Christ is weak, all other relationships will be affected.
Here are practices that will help keep you focused on Him:
1. Read your Bible every day. Make the commitment to read at least one verse every day. The Book of Proverbs is a good place to start, or start with verses from the Gospel of John for a close look at the life of Christ. As you progress to reading more each day, consider purchasing a Bible that will guide you through reading the whole Bible in a year. There are also versions available that will lead you through the Bible in ninety days.
Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful (Joshua 1:8).
2. Cultivate an active prayer life. You can pray anytime and anywhere—when you’re driving, putting on your makeup, cooking, even as you drift off to sleep at night. Take advantage of these precious moments to spend them with your Heavenly Father.
Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18).
3. Meditate on the Word of God. When you find a verse or verses that have deep meaning for you, allow your mind to dwell on them, and let them soak into your spirit. A good starting point might be Romans 8:38-39—“I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Make note of the verses you’ve chosen, and jot down thoughts or ideas that they bring to mind. Keep your mind focused on Him, and be in prayer that He will open your eyes to what He would have you learn from the verses.
4. Wait. Contentment will not be attained overnight. Feelings of discontentment will push their way in. When they do, look through your life to bring to mind the ways God has changed you, the things He’s done to bring you closer to an attitude of contentment. Contentment comes in His timing, so allow Him the time to work in your life.
Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him
(Psalm 37:7).
If the temptation to wallow in discontentment continues to present itself, find someone who will hold you accountable—someone you can trust to be kind but firm who will speak the truth to you lovingly.
When you’re feeling dissatisfied or frustrated, give your accountability partner a call, and be honest about your feelings. Every mom gets frustrated; you’re certainly not alone. When you find someone you can talk with honestly, it will be an excellent help in overcoming negative thoughts and feelings. Accountability partners know each other on a very real and honest level and still accept and love each other. This allows both of you the opportunity to be supported as well as supportive.
Contentment may seem elusive, but with prayerful deliberation it can be achieved and will bring you more joy and peace than you can imagine. Start working toward an attitude of contentment today.
When your mind and heart are in a good place, it’s time to begin thinking about the choices that are available to you. Can you work from home? Should you work at home? And how in the world do you begin your search for success?
Setting Priorities in Business and at Home
Working from home, particularly if you’re running your own business, is a time-consuming endeavor—especially for moms. You’re responsible not only for the success of the business but for your family as well. You must be self-reliant, self-motivated, and self-disciplined in order to attain success in both areas.
When you work at home, it’s easy to let phone calls, e-mail, and paperwork keep you tied down and cause you to feel you don’t have time to take a break or choose to spend top-quality time with your family. Maybe you’ve noticed that you spend more time in front of your computer or on the phone than you expected to when you made the decision to work at home. Maybe you see your kids acting up and trying to get your attention. Maybe the work-at-home dream you envisioned isn’t happening.
You started out with noble intentions, but now the excitement of success in your business has caused you to lose sight of the primary reason you chose this path. It happens to many of us who work at home, so don’t worry. Help is on the way.
She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard (Proverbs 31:16).
Here are five tips for setting priorities in your life and business:
First, be honest. You probably didn’t start your work-at-home career to climb the corporate ladder. Spend some time in prayer, and ask the Lord to show you the things you need to change.
Take a few minutes to answer the following questions about how you’ve been handling the time commitment of owning a business.
• Are you spending too much time on the phone with clients?
• Do you think about business to the point that you’re distracted when you’re doing family activities?
• Is television getting more top-quality time with your children than you are?
• Do you snap at your children because of the stresses of your business?
Second, make a list. Sit down and write out a list of things you see that you would like to change. This can be a list of tasks you can do differently, such as limiting the time you spend on your business or ways you can reduce stress so you can deal kindly with your family.
Third, log your time. Buy a notebook or create a spreadsheet to log the time you spend on business. Make a column for each day across the top and a row of half-hour increments down the side. Time yourself every time you sit down at your desk by writing “in” in the box that corresponds to the time and day. Every time you leave your desk or complete a task, write “out” in the appropriate box.
At the end of the week, total up the hours you’ve spent each day on business tasks. Take special note of how much time you spend on e-mail and things that aren’t billable. Are you surprised, or is it about where you thought it would be? This can be a real eye-opener and show you in black and white if your priorities have gotten off track.
Fourth, take a break. If you’re in shock after examining your time log, it’s time to take a break. If you normally work during the weekend, make it a point to take this weekend off. Shut down your e-mail, turn off the ringer on your business phone, and shut the door to your office.
Plan ahead and schedule your time. Prioritize your workload, and have the work that will require the most effort and concentration scheduled for your peak time. Try not to get sidetracked; stay on task and focus on what you need to do. For example, you’ll be amazed by how much more you can accomplish by changing the way you handle e-mail. If you answer it only at scheduled times, you’ll find you have more time to do the tasks at hand.
Reevaluate the ways you’re spending your time. Try to plan when you can work on your business without losing time with your children. If your children are in school, make it a point to stop working when they get home. If your children are still small, try to plan your time accordingly. Perhaps a babysitter for several hours or days a week is necessary. Another possibility would be to have a grandparent or neighbor watch them once or twice a week to allow you time to work without interruptions.
Fifth, plan an activity. Now that you’re ready to make a change in your routine, why not plan an activity once a week? This can be an outing with your children or something simple, like setting aside time to make cookies together. You’ll notice that when you plan for these times, they actually happen.
If possible, find another work-at-home mom, and hold one another accountable to keep to your new schedules. Make a weekly play date for your children to spend time together. You and your friend can talk business if necessary, or you may decide to make it a “no business talk allowed” time.
Remember that the years you can work at home and have time with your children are a gift; your business is a gift also. How that will work for you and your family will take a little time to determine and will be different for each family. Take the time to find what works for you, and set your schedule accordingly. Reevaluate your priorities every few months to make sure that you’re making the best use of your time. The rewards will be well worth it. Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him (Psalm 127:3).
So You Want to be a Work-at-Home Mom, by Jill Hart and Diana Ennen © 2009 by Jill Hart, Diana Ennen, and Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, Kansas City, MO. Used by permission of Publisher. All rights reserved. Visit www.beaconhillbooks.com to purchase this title.
Happy Reading!
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Kids' Bible Facts by Barbour Press
Again, my son is a fact fiend, and he found this book to be both enlightening and engaging. I enjoyed thumbing through it as well, and I think you'd find it to be a great Christmas gift!
"Kids' Bible Facts" is a value press book from Barbour (thanks to Angie Brillhart for my copy) that is packed with details about people, places and things found in both the Old and New Testaments.
Animals are examined, such as donkeys and ways God uses them in Scripture. Did you know the Bible has a ghost story in it? Just check out I Samuel 28! Now about a gross disease...right up a boy's alley, huh? Read all about it in Acts 12:20-23!
Kids often say reading the Bible is boring...I challenge them to say that after taking a peek inside the "Kids' Bible Facts" book! Written to deepen a desire for God's Word, this book accomplishes its goal. I was intrigued to see things I've missed in my years of reading God's Word.
It's well-packaged, with full color illustrations and photographs, as well as a sturdy binding and easy to read language.
I'm giving this one five out of five bookmarks, with a bookmark as a charm. Buy a few copies for your children, nieces, nephews and grandchildren this Christmas!
Happy Reading!
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
FIRST Presents "Unfaithful" by Gary & Mona Shriver
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card authors are:
and the book:
Unfaithful: Hope and Healing After Infidelity
David C. Cook; Revised edition (November 1, 2009)
ABOUT THE AUTHORs:
After going through therapy to save their marriage from a devastating affair, Gary and Mona Shriver searched in vain for another couple who could offer them tangible hope that they could heal. Responding to this need in their community, the Shrivers cofounded Hope & Healing Ministries, Inc., an adultery recovery peer support ministry. They are members of the Association of Marriage and Family Ministries (AMFM) and participants of the AMFM ministry team for Reconciling Troubled Marriages. The Shrivers are also members of the Stanislaus County Healthy Marriage Coalition in California. Visit the author's website.
Product Details:
List Price: $14.99
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: David C. Cook; Revised edition (November 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1434765334
ISBN-13: 978-1434765338
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
Revelation
He reveals the deep things of darkness and brings deep shadows into the light. Job 12:22
Gary’s Story
It must have been about 9:30 p.m. as I pulled into the driveway. Everything looked dark and settled down for the evening. As I stopped the car, my heart pounded in my chest like never before. For a moment I wondered if I might be having a heart attack. I took a deep breath, got out of the car, and headed for the back door. I unlocked it and walked onto the back porch. The house was quiet. The three boys were in bed. The only light was a dim glow from the master bedroom at the end of the hall.
Our bedroom. I wondered if that would be the case in the aftermath of the bomb I was about to drop. I stopped and asked myself, Should I really go through with this? This could be the end of everything I know as my life: my family, my church, my business, my friends. Not one area of my life would be unaffected by the event about to occur. Should I tell her or just keep living the lie?
No, I couldn’t continue deceiving her. I had just spent the last two hours in my senior pastor’s office confessing my sin. I confessed the double life I had been living for the last few years. I couldn’t believe his first response. “Are you serious?” he asked. “I can never tell when you’re kidding me. Are you really serious?” I sat in his office with tears streaming down my face, and he asked if I was serious.
He also didn’t want it to be true.
I just nodded, and he let it sink in. We talked and prayed, and he kept looking at me. I knew what was going through his mind. He was saying great words of spiritual wisdom and offering encouragement, but behind his words, shock and disbelief were apparent. He referred to spiritual leaders who had fallen. He said, “This is happening all around us.”
At that point, I could only think, That doesn’t make this any less ugly. I knew he was trying to encourage and comfort me in my darkest hour, but the darkness that enveloped me was beyond penetration. He and I both knew that everything was not all right and that it wasn’t going to be.
He asked if Mona knew. I shook my head no. He looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Do you intend to tell her?”
I nodded.
“When?”
“Right now,” I said. “I need to go right now.”
It had taken all I could muster to meet my pastor and confess my dark and horrible behavior. I had to complete my confession. And I had to do it now. On my way home I thought of other men I knew who had committed adultery and who hadn’t said a thing to their wives. They seemed to have gotten away with it. But a Bible verse kept ringing in my ears: “You may be sure that your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23).
And that it had. Earlier that afternoon the recording studio engineer at my production company had confronted me with this “problem” he thought I had. He came quoting Matthew 18:15–17, saying that if I didn’t come clean, he would go to my pastor with the affair he believed I was having.
Affair. What a fluffy word. It sounds so cheery and acceptable. Let’s call it what it really is: adultery. Black-hearted, not caring anything about anybody else, completely self-centered, the absolute epitome of selfishness. Adultery. And I was an adulterer. Finally after years of my wrestling with Him, God had brought me to a point of brokenness. I just couldn’t go on like this anymore. I had to tell Mona. The only way I could ever hope to save my marriage was to be totally honest. God was chasing me. I had to deal with it now!
I walked into the bedroom. The lamp on her bedside table glowed. There she lay, leaning back on her pillow propped up against the wall, reading. She looked up and said, “How was your meeting?” Just about then our eyes met. “Honey? What’s wrong?”
I hadn’t rehearsed anything. I didn’t know what to say. I sat down on the bed next to her and looked in her eyes.
“You’re scaring me,” she said.
I started to cry.
“Now you’re really scaring me.”
“I’ve betrayed you,” I whispered.
Her eyes glazed over. She seemed to stare through me. “What?”
“I’ve been unfaithful to you,” I repeated.
She went limp. I thought for a second she was going to pass out. Her stare went from distant to direct and cold.
“Who?” she demanded.
I said the name.
“I knew it,” she said.
But I knew she hadn’t known. I tried to hold her. She started to hold me but then pushed me away. She was shell-shocked.
“How long?” she asked.
I whispered, “A long time.”
“How long?”
“A couple of years.”
“Years? Ever since you started working with her?”
“Almost.”
Her lip quivered.
As her world crumbled around her feet, my heart raced again. This time I could feel it in my temples. How could I say more? How can I, Lord? I can’t tell her everything. Yet God was insistent: Tell her!
I felt like Moses must have. I can’t, Lord. I can’t!
Tell her now! God demanded.
I had to tell her everything. God burned into my heart that if our marriage were to have any chance at all, it had to be with a clean slate. No more lies. No more secrets. I had to tell her everything.
“There’s more.”
“More? What do you mean more?”
“There was a one-night stand with another woman.”
I honestly did think she was going to pass out at that point. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and then things got eerie.
I knew at that moment our lives had changed forever, and I didn’t know what to expect in the aftermath of my horrible revelation. After we sat for what seemed to be an eternity, her blank stare suddenly focused, and the flurry of questions began. “Do you love her?”
“No, I love you.”
“Do you want a divorce?”
“No, I want to stay with you. Do you want a divorce?”
“I don’t know what I want. Why did you do this?”
I didn’t know how to answer that question. I didn’t know how I’d gotten where I was. I explained there had been no pursuit. I said that it was a friendship that had gotten out of control, and that I had felt trapped. I had never stopped loving Mona.
The blank stare was back. I kept trying to explain. She didn’t want to hear—or couldn’t hear—anything more. After a while she started asking me about the second woman.
“It was a one-night thing. Honestly, she threw herself at me. She made up her mind to have me. She set her sights, and she was going to have her way.”
What was I saying? It was all the truth, but what was I trying to do here? Justify my adultery? My second incidence of adultery at that!
I shut my mouth and started to cry again. I didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She didn’t want anything from me. I was dying inside. I needed to know what she was thinking. She was in shock. Was she thinking of leaving? Was she going to ask me to leave? What was going on in her head?
It seemed there was nothing more to say. I offered to sleep on the couch, but she declined my offer. She explained that if we were going to try to work this through, she saw no sense in my sleeping on the couch.
If. Such a small word to hold one’s whole future.
It was quiet and still, but I knew the explosion was yet to come. She stared blankly into the corner of the ceiling. I lay there, knowing her mind was whirling. I was sure her thoughts were bouncing from one horrific scenario to another, and all I could do was lie next to her and watch as her entire foundation cracked, crumbled, and fell away. Every now and then I could hear a sob escape her throat.
My God, what have I done? In a matter of seconds I have ripped the heart from the woman I love. The bride of my youth. Will she ever forgive me? Can she ever forgive me? I had no idea how much pain this would cause. If we make it through this, one thing is certain: We will never be the same again.
God, please forgive me.
Mona, if you can find it in your heart, please try to forgive me.
Mona’s Story
I don’t remember what book I was reading, but I do remember I never finished it. I threw it away. It would always remind me of that night.
I heard the back door open and thought, Gary’s home a little early—must have been a short meeting.
I heard him walk down the hallway. He opened the bedroom door and just stood there, staring at me.
I said something like, “How’d your meeting go?” I watched as my husband of more than nineteen years began to crumble. His body sagged as if under a heavy weight.
His eyes filled with tears and he said, “We have to talk.”
I knew something was terribly wrong and remember thinking someone had died. I wonder if it’s our pastor. He must have found out something horrible at the church meeting. Compassion overwhelmed
my heart, and I reached out my arms, inviting him in. “Oh, honey, what’s wrong?”
He came to the bed, sat down by me, and allowed me to hold him while sobs racked his body. I had never seen him like this. Through his muffled tears I heard, “I have betrayed you.”
I felt my body stiffen. A tragedy had happened, not to someone else, but to me. My mind refused to process his words. “What?”
“I have been having an affair.”
These words penetrated, and I felt my own tears rise. I heard the word come from my mouth before I realized I had even thought it:
“Who?”
Why was there no surprise when he said her name? I remember even then knowing there was really only one true possibility. I also remember other names going through my head, almost hoping he’d say one of
those instead. I had never suspected. I trusted them both implicitly. He was my husband, whom I loved and who I thought loved me. She was his coworker, a fellow church member, and the woman I had considered my best Christian friend for the past three or four years.
“How long?” I asked.
“Awhile,” he mumbled.
I began to feel the first stirring of rage. “How long?”
“A couple of years maybe.”
Not just once or even twice. Not a few weeks or even a few months! Was I a complete idiot? How could something like this go on for so long and I not even have a clue? They must have thought I was so stupid! How many times had they laughed at my naïveté?
I pulled away from him, unable to touch him, unable to do much more than breathe.
Then I heard these words: “There’s more.”
More? More than the destruction of my life, my family, my church, my home? More?
“I also had a one-night stand with another woman.” Then he named her, a twenty-year-old single mother and non-Christian with whom we’d had business dealings.
“She came over one night uninvited when you were gone.”
Here? In my house? Nothing was sacred. Every aspect of my life was involved. My home. The church where I always sat with my best friend. Gary’s production business where I worked part-time. Even the hospital where I worked as a nurse was filled with people who crossed over into these aspects of my life.
I was nauseous. Repulsed. This was something horrible men did. Not my Gary! Not the man I had always jokingly said I’d have to catch in bed naked before I’d ever believe he’d be unfaithful. The man couldn’t lie for beans.
Gary was not the man I had thought he was, but I was no longer sure who I was either. For that matter, who were we as a couple? Were we a couple?
I looked at him and froze. This was the man I’d been married to for almost twenty years. He’d been my lover, my best friend, and my confidant. My family loved him because he was so wonderful. All my friends thought he was wonderful—he did dishes, laundry, and changed diapers. I had lost count of how many times I’d been told how lucky I was.
My body was numb, wooden, overwhelmed. The weight Gary had walked into our bedroom wearing was now being shared.
“Do you love her?”
“No.”
“Do you want a divorce?”
“No.”
“Does her husband know?”
“I think she’s waiting to see if I really tell you first.”
“You have to let her go.”
“I know.”
The particulars of our conversation blur in retrospect. He told me he had gone to the church to confess to our pastor. The pastor had called in another pastor, they had all prayed, and then they sent Gary home to tell me.
He told me that the recording studio engineer had confronted him that day. He had suspected what was going on and had gone to his pastor, who advised him to confront Gary. What strength that must have taken for such a young man!
Gary said God had been preparing him for this revelation for a long time. Promise Keepers, meetings, sermons, his conscience. He had felt trapped in the relationship with his coworker for quite a while. If he broke it off, he knew the ramifications and the possibility of losing his family, his business, and his church. They had broken it off many times in the past and yet would find themselves back together. He couldn’t remember when it started, but the last time they’d been together was just three days earlier. I remembered trying to reach him that day. They had gone out of town to see a client and I’d wondered why they were so late getting back.
As I tried to pin down the time period of the affair, it became clear that it had been going on for about three years. It began shortly after she started working with us. Her marriage was in trouble and had been for a very long time. She and I had talked about it often together. I felt like such a fool. Gary and I had even discussed her vulnerability and her attractiveness before they started working together. I knew she envied our relationship, but I hadn’t realized that she had actually been wishing for Gary himself. She, as it turned out, knew better than I what my marriage was really like.
That night my life took on a new timetable: before the affair, during the affair, and after the affair. Everything during was now marred and distorted: our family trip to Disneyland, Gary and I going to
Hawaii. I recalled snippets of conversation with both Gary and my friend and suddenly heard and saw completely different things. He asked me that night if I would come to work for him fulltime at our production company and we’d rebuild our lives and the business. I was furious. How dare he! I told him I wasn’t going to give up any more of me than he’d already ripped away. I was a nurse. I was
a good nurse. I couldn’t lose that, too.
He asked me if I wanted a divorce, and I said no. What would that do to our boys? Where would I go? What would I do? We talked about counseling. To what end? I was so overwhelmed that even counseling seemed senseless. I wanted it never to have happened and a counselor couldn’t do that.
Gary told me about the night the young woman had come over and seduced him. He said it was very intentional on her part. I said that did not exonerate him. He knew that. The story of that one night stand sounded like a despicable movie.
Soon it seemed there was nothing left to talk about. Or maybe it was just that we were incapable of talking anymore. Gary reassured me that he loved me and wished he could take it all away. He asked for my forgiveness and told me he’d do anything I asked. I knew that adultery was biblical grounds for divorce, but I didn’t know if that still applied when the offender repents and asks for forgiveness.
My mind, soul, and body were exhausted by the events of the night. I knew I wanted to follow God in this, no matter where that led. I knew I needed a godly friend and felt again the pain of loss. Who would I call now that my two best friends had betrayed me?
When we went to bed, Gary asked if I wanted him to sleep somewhere else. I said no. I figured he’d been in my bed during the last three years, so what difference would it make now?
And so I clung to my edge of the bed and listened to my husband fall into a deep and restful sleep. Sleep would evade me. I would spend most of what was left of that night in the family room crying.
Gary’s weight had begun to lift. Mine had only just begun to press heavily upon me.
The Story on Revelation
That night happened in 1993. We can now say with absolute sincerity that we have fully healed from the adultery. Our marriage is strong and mutually satisfying. We have love and trust.
We refuse, however, to say that our marriage is better. We had heard “now they have a better marriage” in reference to couples who had gone through serious problems, and it only caused us more pain. We’d thought our marriage was good before the adultery. We loved each other; we were best friends. Certainly we had issues; all couples do. But our marriage prior to the adultery had value and was good. What happened to us happened to a good marriage. Most people have a hard time believing that because if they do, it makes every marriage vulnerable—including their own. Certainly there are those instances when the whys and wherefores are clear, but often all the answers we seek cannot be found. So instead we say we are wiser than we were then. We make better choices now. And we no longer believe we are invulnerable to attack. Our marriage is better only because the two people in it are now better people.
If you have picked up this book, you are probably going through, or love someone going through, the aftermath of finding out about a spouse’s adultery. Our hearts break for you, and we want you to know there is hope. Marriages can heal. We know because ours did. We know because we’ve been able to support other couples facing this anguish. We also know it will be one of the hardest things you will ever go through. We believe it would have been far easier at the time for us to split up. And we would not have been condemned for doing so. That same thing is true for many others.
We know these words seem hard to believe. When you go through this crisis, you feel as if the weight of the world is pressing down on you. Then the fiery darts from hell come faster and faster, and your shield of faith seems to offer little protection. You are fighting for your marriage with every ounce of strength you can muster until you begin to fear you’re going to lose the battle. This is where Satan wants you, and he will be faithful to keep the burners on high. Why? He wants nothing more than to see your marriage fail. He wants you to become another statistic. So let us repeat ourselves: You don’t have to give up! You can make it!
How? We want to share with you what made the difference. We were Christians when the adultery happened. We are still Christians. What we will share with you is definitely from a Christian perspective, but it is also from a practical, real-life perspective.
Is our marriage now perfect? No. We still have issues, and we’ve learned that some will remain until we get to heaven. Perhaps we’ve learned to pick our battles with more grace and wisdom. We have also learned that some battles were due to our own selfish desires and were far removed from the marriage
partnership.
We are not, nor do we claim to be, experts in anything. We have no educational or professional background to validate us. Those people are out there, and their resources are available to you. You’ll need them, too. But if you seek two ordinary believers to share their extraordinary experience, then here we are. We do not undertake this task lightly. This is not our idea of fun. In the early stages of writing, our emotions often overwhelmed us, and there were times we would leave our desks sobbing. We found ourselves crying over things we hadn’t cried over in years. Our God, however, is a great God and gracious to His people. In time we felt that we were merely observing a sad story, rather than reliving the awful past.
Getting the Most from the Rest of This Book
Terminology
Before we start sharing with you our own story and healing process, we need to establish a common language. Many have different ways of identifying people and moments in time when talking about adultery. Some are terms we wouldn’t be allowed to print here. So, to get us on the same page, we’ll define some terms and provide you with information that can help you walk through your recovery. Nothing about infidelity recovery is simple or easily explained, but there are definitely areas where, if both of you have the same understanding, you can avoid some common pitfalls.
First, the terminology for the cast of characters will be borrowed from the very practical book Torn Asunder: Recovering from an Extramarital Affair by Dave Carder:
Infidel: the one who strays and gets involved in an illicit relationship—it simply means unfaithful.
Spouse: the one married to the infidel.
Partner: the person with whom the infidel was involved.
A term we use often is revelation. This refers to the event where the infidel admits to the spouse that an illicit relationship has occurred. Sometimes the word is plural, revelations, because the full story takes more than one admission, as parts are revealed over time. Revelation is used throughout the book as a reference point.
Finally, the adulterous relationship will be referred to as an affair with the disclaimer that the word sounds much too playful for the seriousness of this offense.
We also need to agree on what adultery is. That might sound pretty silly to a lot of you, but differing on what comprises adultery can cause some serious problems. In fact, former President Clinton provided us with a classic example of what constituted “sex” when he denied having sex with another woman, yet later admitted to sexual intimacies with that woman. We can only imagine the private conversations he had with his wife when the truth was revealed.
We’ve heard some infidels deny adultery because they didn’t have sexual intercourse even while admitting there was sexual contact. They admit what they did was wrong but do not call it adultery.
As a matter of fact, the dictionary definition of adultery states it just that way: “Voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and a partner other than the lawful spouse.” Infidelity is defined as a
lack of loyalty to one’s spouse. By the adultery definition, President Clinton was correct. By the infidelity definition, any number of things could fall into that category—anything a spouse would consider disloyal.
Looking exclusively at either dictionary definition allows one to go to opposing ends of the spectrum of possibilities.
While the dictionary may disagree, for our purposes adultery and infidelity will be equivalent terms. The truth is that there is no one clear and concise definition of infidelity or adultery that everyone agrees on.
We’ll define adultery as unfaithfulness to the covenant (i.e., marriage) vows you made to your spouse. Vows are the promises we make to one another when we stand before God and whomever else to become legally wed. We promise (vow) to love, honor, and cherish the person we are marrying. We promise this person that they are now the number one person in our life, even if our health and wealth and other circumstances change.
We also vow to forsake all others. That means we have reserved the intimacy space of the marriage relationship exclusively for the person we married. Anytime we put another person in that relational space promised to our partner—be it sexual or emotional or both—we have committed adultery. We have violated the intimacy of marriage, we have broken our promise, and we have had an illicit relationship.
We love the description Dr. Shirley Glass gives in Not “Just Friends”:
In a committed relationship [marriage], a couple constructs a wall that shields them from any outside forces that have the power to split them. They look at the world outside their relationship through a
shared window of openness and honesty. The couple is a unit, and they have a united front to deal with children, in-laws, and friends. An affair erodes their carefully constructed security system. It erects an
interior wall of secrecy between the marriage partners, at the same time it opens a window of intimacy between the affair partners. The couple is no longer a unit. The affair partner is on the inside, and the
marital partner is on the outside.
And here is the true acid test. It’s simple. It’s easy. It’s three words: Ask your spouse. Explain everything about your other relationship. Be 100 percent honest about every detail, thought, and touch. Then ask your spouse. They’ll be able to tell you if it fits the definition of adultery in a heartbeat.
Time Frame of Chapters
What we are sharing with you is not chronological. Quite frankly, healing isn’t that neat. And often many of us wander in and out of these areas throughout the recovery process. So rather, we have chosen to share with you by topics: those areas we needed to explore and deal with as we healed. We hope all of you will deal with each principle area, but the truth is that none of you will do it at the same time. When you encounter each principle area will be determined by who you are, what type of affair you’re dealing with, and the journey our Lord has you on.
We do, however, believe the first two principle areas, commitment and faith, are foundational. So if you need to camp out there for a while, that is okay. These two areas will provide the sure footing you’ll need to walk through the rest.
We can relate only our experience and a glimpse at others we have known. Yours will be entirely different, but we are certain that you, like the couples in our groups, will find some value in the sharing.
Seek other godly counsel and ask God Himself to help you filter through and apply what is right for your situation.
When we were in the deepest pit of our crisis, we wanted to sit across from a couple whose marriage had survived this horror and who now had a marriage they both cherished. Someone who could look us straight in the eye and tell us we could make it because they had. Someone who could help us understand we weren’t crazy but rather experiencing a horrendous crisis—validating what was normal for the abnormal situation in which we found ourselves. This is what we’ll offer you.
Now, come with us and we’ll take you along through snapshots of our journey of healing. We’ll give you some ideas and concrete suggestions as to how some of these things we’ve talked about can look. We pray you’ll see truth, reality, and hope, and that God will use what we share to help you on your journey.
We have seen the Lord do marvelous things, and we will pray those same marvelous things for you.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so
also through Christ our comfort overflows. —2 Corinthians 1:3–5
©2009 Cook Communications Ministries. Unfaithful by Gary and Mona Shriver. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.
He reveals the deep things of darkness and brings deep shadows into the light. Job 12:22
Gary’s Story
It must have been about 9:30 p.m. as I pulled into the driveway. Everything looked dark and settled down for the evening. As I stopped the car, my heart pounded in my chest like never before. For a moment I wondered if I might be having a heart attack. I took a deep breath, got out of the car, and headed for the back door. I unlocked it and walked onto the back porch. The house was quiet. The three boys were in bed. The only light was a dim glow from the master bedroom at the end of the hall.
Our bedroom. I wondered if that would be the case in the aftermath of the bomb I was about to drop. I stopped and asked myself, Should I really go through with this? This could be the end of everything I know as my life: my family, my church, my business, my friends. Not one area of my life would be unaffected by the event about to occur. Should I tell her or just keep living the lie?
No, I couldn’t continue deceiving her. I had just spent the last two hours in my senior pastor’s office confessing my sin. I confessed the double life I had been living for the last few years. I couldn’t believe his first response. “Are you serious?” he asked. “I can never tell when you’re kidding me. Are you really serious?” I sat in his office with tears streaming down my face, and he asked if I was serious.
He also didn’t want it to be true.
I just nodded, and he let it sink in. We talked and prayed, and he kept looking at me. I knew what was going through his mind. He was saying great words of spiritual wisdom and offering encouragement, but behind his words, shock and disbelief were apparent. He referred to spiritual leaders who had fallen. He said, “This is happening all around us.”
At that point, I could only think, That doesn’t make this any less ugly. I knew he was trying to encourage and comfort me in my darkest hour, but the darkness that enveloped me was beyond penetration. He and I both knew that everything was not all right and that it wasn’t going to be.
He asked if Mona knew. I shook my head no. He looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Do you intend to tell her?”
I nodded.
“When?”
“Right now,” I said. “I need to go right now.”
It had taken all I could muster to meet my pastor and confess my dark and horrible behavior. I had to complete my confession. And I had to do it now. On my way home I thought of other men I knew who had committed adultery and who hadn’t said a thing to their wives. They seemed to have gotten away with it. But a Bible verse kept ringing in my ears: “You may be sure that your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23).
And that it had. Earlier that afternoon the recording studio engineer at my production company had confronted me with this “problem” he thought I had. He came quoting Matthew 18:15–17, saying that if I didn’t come clean, he would go to my pastor with the affair he believed I was having.
Affair. What a fluffy word. It sounds so cheery and acceptable. Let’s call it what it really is: adultery. Black-hearted, not caring anything about anybody else, completely self-centered, the absolute epitome of selfishness. Adultery. And I was an adulterer. Finally after years of my wrestling with Him, God had brought me to a point of brokenness. I just couldn’t go on like this anymore. I had to tell Mona. The only way I could ever hope to save my marriage was to be totally honest. God was chasing me. I had to deal with it now!
I walked into the bedroom. The lamp on her bedside table glowed. There she lay, leaning back on her pillow propped up against the wall, reading. She looked up and said, “How was your meeting?” Just about then our eyes met. “Honey? What’s wrong?”
I hadn’t rehearsed anything. I didn’t know what to say. I sat down on the bed next to her and looked in her eyes.
“You’re scaring me,” she said.
I started to cry.
“Now you’re really scaring me.”
“I’ve betrayed you,” I whispered.
Her eyes glazed over. She seemed to stare through me. “What?”
“I’ve been unfaithful to you,” I repeated.
She went limp. I thought for a second she was going to pass out. Her stare went from distant to direct and cold.
“Who?” she demanded.
I said the name.
“I knew it,” she said.
But I knew she hadn’t known. I tried to hold her. She started to hold me but then pushed me away. She was shell-shocked.
“How long?” she asked.
I whispered, “A long time.”
“How long?”
“A couple of years.”
“Years? Ever since you started working with her?”
“Almost.”
Her lip quivered.
As her world crumbled around her feet, my heart raced again. This time I could feel it in my temples. How could I say more? How can I, Lord? I can’t tell her everything. Yet God was insistent: Tell her!
I felt like Moses must have. I can’t, Lord. I can’t!
Tell her now! God demanded.
I had to tell her everything. God burned into my heart that if our marriage were to have any chance at all, it had to be with a clean slate. No more lies. No more secrets. I had to tell her everything.
“There’s more.”
“More? What do you mean more?”
“There was a one-night stand with another woman.”
I honestly did think she was going to pass out at that point. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and then things got eerie.
I knew at that moment our lives had changed forever, and I didn’t know what to expect in the aftermath of my horrible revelation. After we sat for what seemed to be an eternity, her blank stare suddenly focused, and the flurry of questions began. “Do you love her?”
“No, I love you.”
“Do you want a divorce?”
“No, I want to stay with you. Do you want a divorce?”
“I don’t know what I want. Why did you do this?”
I didn’t know how to answer that question. I didn’t know how I’d gotten where I was. I explained there had been no pursuit. I said that it was a friendship that had gotten out of control, and that I had felt trapped. I had never stopped loving Mona.
The blank stare was back. I kept trying to explain. She didn’t want to hear—or couldn’t hear—anything more. After a while she started asking me about the second woman.
“It was a one-night thing. Honestly, she threw herself at me. She made up her mind to have me. She set her sights, and she was going to have her way.”
What was I saying? It was all the truth, but what was I trying to do here? Justify my adultery? My second incidence of adultery at that!
I shut my mouth and started to cry again. I didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She didn’t want anything from me. I was dying inside. I needed to know what she was thinking. She was in shock. Was she thinking of leaving? Was she going to ask me to leave? What was going on in her head?
It seemed there was nothing more to say. I offered to sleep on the couch, but she declined my offer. She explained that if we were going to try to work this through, she saw no sense in my sleeping on the couch.
If. Such a small word to hold one’s whole future.
It was quiet and still, but I knew the explosion was yet to come. She stared blankly into the corner of the ceiling. I lay there, knowing her mind was whirling. I was sure her thoughts were bouncing from one horrific scenario to another, and all I could do was lie next to her and watch as her entire foundation cracked, crumbled, and fell away. Every now and then I could hear a sob escape her throat.
My God, what have I done? In a matter of seconds I have ripped the heart from the woman I love. The bride of my youth. Will she ever forgive me? Can she ever forgive me? I had no idea how much pain this would cause. If we make it through this, one thing is certain: We will never be the same again.
God, please forgive me.
Mona, if you can find it in your heart, please try to forgive me.
Mona’s Story
I don’t remember what book I was reading, but I do remember I never finished it. I threw it away. It would always remind me of that night.
I heard the back door open and thought, Gary’s home a little early—must have been a short meeting.
I heard him walk down the hallway. He opened the bedroom door and just stood there, staring at me.
I said something like, “How’d your meeting go?” I watched as my husband of more than nineteen years began to crumble. His body sagged as if under a heavy weight.
His eyes filled with tears and he said, “We have to talk.”
I knew something was terribly wrong and remember thinking someone had died. I wonder if it’s our pastor. He must have found out something horrible at the church meeting. Compassion overwhelmed
my heart, and I reached out my arms, inviting him in. “Oh, honey, what’s wrong?”
He came to the bed, sat down by me, and allowed me to hold him while sobs racked his body. I had never seen him like this. Through his muffled tears I heard, “I have betrayed you.”
I felt my body stiffen. A tragedy had happened, not to someone else, but to me. My mind refused to process his words. “What?”
“I have been having an affair.”
These words penetrated, and I felt my own tears rise. I heard the word come from my mouth before I realized I had even thought it:
“Who?”
Why was there no surprise when he said her name? I remember even then knowing there was really only one true possibility. I also remember other names going through my head, almost hoping he’d say one of
those instead. I had never suspected. I trusted them both implicitly. He was my husband, whom I loved and who I thought loved me. She was his coworker, a fellow church member, and the woman I had considered my best Christian friend for the past three or four years.
“How long?” I asked.
“Awhile,” he mumbled.
I began to feel the first stirring of rage. “How long?”
“A couple of years maybe.”
Not just once or even twice. Not a few weeks or even a few months! Was I a complete idiot? How could something like this go on for so long and I not even have a clue? They must have thought I was so stupid! How many times had they laughed at my naïveté?
I pulled away from him, unable to touch him, unable to do much more than breathe.
Then I heard these words: “There’s more.”
More? More than the destruction of my life, my family, my church, my home? More?
“I also had a one-night stand with another woman.” Then he named her, a twenty-year-old single mother and non-Christian with whom we’d had business dealings.
“She came over one night uninvited when you were gone.”
Here? In my house? Nothing was sacred. Every aspect of my life was involved. My home. The church where I always sat with my best friend. Gary’s production business where I worked part-time. Even the hospital where I worked as a nurse was filled with people who crossed over into these aspects of my life.
I was nauseous. Repulsed. This was something horrible men did. Not my Gary! Not the man I had always jokingly said I’d have to catch in bed naked before I’d ever believe he’d be unfaithful. The man couldn’t lie for beans.
Gary was not the man I had thought he was, but I was no longer sure who I was either. For that matter, who were we as a couple? Were we a couple?
I looked at him and froze. This was the man I’d been married to for almost twenty years. He’d been my lover, my best friend, and my confidant. My family loved him because he was so wonderful. All my friends thought he was wonderful—he did dishes, laundry, and changed diapers. I had lost count of how many times I’d been told how lucky I was.
My body was numb, wooden, overwhelmed. The weight Gary had walked into our bedroom wearing was now being shared.
“Do you love her?”
“No.”
“Do you want a divorce?”
“No.”
“Does her husband know?”
“I think she’s waiting to see if I really tell you first.”
“You have to let her go.”
“I know.”
The particulars of our conversation blur in retrospect. He told me he had gone to the church to confess to our pastor. The pastor had called in another pastor, they had all prayed, and then they sent Gary home to tell me.
He told me that the recording studio engineer had confronted him that day. He had suspected what was going on and had gone to his pastor, who advised him to confront Gary. What strength that must have taken for such a young man!
Gary said God had been preparing him for this revelation for a long time. Promise Keepers, meetings, sermons, his conscience. He had felt trapped in the relationship with his coworker for quite a while. If he broke it off, he knew the ramifications and the possibility of losing his family, his business, and his church. They had broken it off many times in the past and yet would find themselves back together. He couldn’t remember when it started, but the last time they’d been together was just three days earlier. I remembered trying to reach him that day. They had gone out of town to see a client and I’d wondered why they were so late getting back.
As I tried to pin down the time period of the affair, it became clear that it had been going on for about three years. It began shortly after she started working with us. Her marriage was in trouble and had been for a very long time. She and I had talked about it often together. I felt like such a fool. Gary and I had even discussed her vulnerability and her attractiveness before they started working together. I knew she envied our relationship, but I hadn’t realized that she had actually been wishing for Gary himself. She, as it turned out, knew better than I what my marriage was really like.
That night my life took on a new timetable: before the affair, during the affair, and after the affair. Everything during was now marred and distorted: our family trip to Disneyland, Gary and I going to
Hawaii. I recalled snippets of conversation with both Gary and my friend and suddenly heard and saw completely different things. He asked me that night if I would come to work for him fulltime at our production company and we’d rebuild our lives and the business. I was furious. How dare he! I told him I wasn’t going to give up any more of me than he’d already ripped away. I was a nurse. I was
a good nurse. I couldn’t lose that, too.
He asked me if I wanted a divorce, and I said no. What would that do to our boys? Where would I go? What would I do? We talked about counseling. To what end? I was so overwhelmed that even counseling seemed senseless. I wanted it never to have happened and a counselor couldn’t do that.
Gary told me about the night the young woman had come over and seduced him. He said it was very intentional on her part. I said that did not exonerate him. He knew that. The story of that one night stand sounded like a despicable movie.
Soon it seemed there was nothing left to talk about. Or maybe it was just that we were incapable of talking anymore. Gary reassured me that he loved me and wished he could take it all away. He asked for my forgiveness and told me he’d do anything I asked. I knew that adultery was biblical grounds for divorce, but I didn’t know if that still applied when the offender repents and asks for forgiveness.
My mind, soul, and body were exhausted by the events of the night. I knew I wanted to follow God in this, no matter where that led. I knew I needed a godly friend and felt again the pain of loss. Who would I call now that my two best friends had betrayed me?
When we went to bed, Gary asked if I wanted him to sleep somewhere else. I said no. I figured he’d been in my bed during the last three years, so what difference would it make now?
And so I clung to my edge of the bed and listened to my husband fall into a deep and restful sleep. Sleep would evade me. I would spend most of what was left of that night in the family room crying.
Gary’s weight had begun to lift. Mine had only just begun to press heavily upon me.
The Story on Revelation
That night happened in 1993. We can now say with absolute sincerity that we have fully healed from the adultery. Our marriage is strong and mutually satisfying. We have love and trust.
We refuse, however, to say that our marriage is better. We had heard “now they have a better marriage” in reference to couples who had gone through serious problems, and it only caused us more pain. We’d thought our marriage was good before the adultery. We loved each other; we were best friends. Certainly we had issues; all couples do. But our marriage prior to the adultery had value and was good. What happened to us happened to a good marriage. Most people have a hard time believing that because if they do, it makes every marriage vulnerable—including their own. Certainly there are those instances when the whys and wherefores are clear, but often all the answers we seek cannot be found. So instead we say we are wiser than we were then. We make better choices now. And we no longer believe we are invulnerable to attack. Our marriage is better only because the two people in it are now better people.
If you have picked up this book, you are probably going through, or love someone going through, the aftermath of finding out about a spouse’s adultery. Our hearts break for you, and we want you to know there is hope. Marriages can heal. We know because ours did. We know because we’ve been able to support other couples facing this anguish. We also know it will be one of the hardest things you will ever go through. We believe it would have been far easier at the time for us to split up. And we would not have been condemned for doing so. That same thing is true for many others.
We know these words seem hard to believe. When you go through this crisis, you feel as if the weight of the world is pressing down on you. Then the fiery darts from hell come faster and faster, and your shield of faith seems to offer little protection. You are fighting for your marriage with every ounce of strength you can muster until you begin to fear you’re going to lose the battle. This is where Satan wants you, and he will be faithful to keep the burners on high. Why? He wants nothing more than to see your marriage fail. He wants you to become another statistic. So let us repeat ourselves: You don’t have to give up! You can make it!
How? We want to share with you what made the difference. We were Christians when the adultery happened. We are still Christians. What we will share with you is definitely from a Christian perspective, but it is also from a practical, real-life perspective.
Is our marriage now perfect? No. We still have issues, and we’ve learned that some will remain until we get to heaven. Perhaps we’ve learned to pick our battles with more grace and wisdom. We have also learned that some battles were due to our own selfish desires and were far removed from the marriage
partnership.
We are not, nor do we claim to be, experts in anything. We have no educational or professional background to validate us. Those people are out there, and their resources are available to you. You’ll need them, too. But if you seek two ordinary believers to share their extraordinary experience, then here we are. We do not undertake this task lightly. This is not our idea of fun. In the early stages of writing, our emotions often overwhelmed us, and there were times we would leave our desks sobbing. We found ourselves crying over things we hadn’t cried over in years. Our God, however, is a great God and gracious to His people. In time we felt that we were merely observing a sad story, rather than reliving the awful past.
Getting the Most from the Rest of This Book
Terminology
Before we start sharing with you our own story and healing process, we need to establish a common language. Many have different ways of identifying people and moments in time when talking about adultery. Some are terms we wouldn’t be allowed to print here. So, to get us on the same page, we’ll define some terms and provide you with information that can help you walk through your recovery. Nothing about infidelity recovery is simple or easily explained, but there are definitely areas where, if both of you have the same understanding, you can avoid some common pitfalls.
First, the terminology for the cast of characters will be borrowed from the very practical book Torn Asunder: Recovering from an Extramarital Affair by Dave Carder:
Infidel: the one who strays and gets involved in an illicit relationship—it simply means unfaithful.
Spouse: the one married to the infidel.
Partner: the person with whom the infidel was involved.
A term we use often is revelation. This refers to the event where the infidel admits to the spouse that an illicit relationship has occurred. Sometimes the word is plural, revelations, because the full story takes more than one admission, as parts are revealed over time. Revelation is used throughout the book as a reference point.
Finally, the adulterous relationship will be referred to as an affair with the disclaimer that the word sounds much too playful for the seriousness of this offense.
We also need to agree on what adultery is. That might sound pretty silly to a lot of you, but differing on what comprises adultery can cause some serious problems. In fact, former President Clinton provided us with a classic example of what constituted “sex” when he denied having sex with another woman, yet later admitted to sexual intimacies with that woman. We can only imagine the private conversations he had with his wife when the truth was revealed.
We’ve heard some infidels deny adultery because they didn’t have sexual intercourse even while admitting there was sexual contact. They admit what they did was wrong but do not call it adultery.
As a matter of fact, the dictionary definition of adultery states it just that way: “Voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and a partner other than the lawful spouse.” Infidelity is defined as a
lack of loyalty to one’s spouse. By the adultery definition, President Clinton was correct. By the infidelity definition, any number of things could fall into that category—anything a spouse would consider disloyal.
Looking exclusively at either dictionary definition allows one to go to opposing ends of the spectrum of possibilities.
While the dictionary may disagree, for our purposes adultery and infidelity will be equivalent terms. The truth is that there is no one clear and concise definition of infidelity or adultery that everyone agrees on.
We’ll define adultery as unfaithfulness to the covenant (i.e., marriage) vows you made to your spouse. Vows are the promises we make to one another when we stand before God and whomever else to become legally wed. We promise (vow) to love, honor, and cherish the person we are marrying. We promise this person that they are now the number one person in our life, even if our health and wealth and other circumstances change.
We also vow to forsake all others. That means we have reserved the intimacy space of the marriage relationship exclusively for the person we married. Anytime we put another person in that relational space promised to our partner—be it sexual or emotional or both—we have committed adultery. We have violated the intimacy of marriage, we have broken our promise, and we have had an illicit relationship.
We love the description Dr. Shirley Glass gives in Not “Just Friends”:
In a committed relationship [marriage], a couple constructs a wall that shields them from any outside forces that have the power to split them. They look at the world outside their relationship through a
shared window of openness and honesty. The couple is a unit, and they have a united front to deal with children, in-laws, and friends. An affair erodes their carefully constructed security system. It erects an
interior wall of secrecy between the marriage partners, at the same time it opens a window of intimacy between the affair partners. The couple is no longer a unit. The affair partner is on the inside, and the
marital partner is on the outside.
And here is the true acid test. It’s simple. It’s easy. It’s three words: Ask your spouse. Explain everything about your other relationship. Be 100 percent honest about every detail, thought, and touch. Then ask your spouse. They’ll be able to tell you if it fits the definition of adultery in a heartbeat.
Time Frame of Chapters
What we are sharing with you is not chronological. Quite frankly, healing isn’t that neat. And often many of us wander in and out of these areas throughout the recovery process. So rather, we have chosen to share with you by topics: those areas we needed to explore and deal with as we healed. We hope all of you will deal with each principle area, but the truth is that none of you will do it at the same time. When you encounter each principle area will be determined by who you are, what type of affair you’re dealing with, and the journey our Lord has you on.
We do, however, believe the first two principle areas, commitment and faith, are foundational. So if you need to camp out there for a while, that is okay. These two areas will provide the sure footing you’ll need to walk through the rest.
We can relate only our experience and a glimpse at others we have known. Yours will be entirely different, but we are certain that you, like the couples in our groups, will find some value in the sharing.
Seek other godly counsel and ask God Himself to help you filter through and apply what is right for your situation.
When we were in the deepest pit of our crisis, we wanted to sit across from a couple whose marriage had survived this horror and who now had a marriage they both cherished. Someone who could look us straight in the eye and tell us we could make it because they had. Someone who could help us understand we weren’t crazy but rather experiencing a horrendous crisis—validating what was normal for the abnormal situation in which we found ourselves. This is what we’ll offer you.
Now, come with us and we’ll take you along through snapshots of our journey of healing. We’ll give you some ideas and concrete suggestions as to how some of these things we’ve talked about can look. We pray you’ll see truth, reality, and hope, and that God will use what we share to help you on your journey.
We have seen the Lord do marvelous things, and we will pray those same marvelous things for you.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so
also through Christ our comfort overflows. —2 Corinthians 1:3–5
©2009 Cook Communications Ministries. Unfaithful by Gary and Mona Shriver. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.
Happy Reading!
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The Handy Answer Book for Kids (And Parents) by Gina Misiroglu
I have a son who loves books of facts...the more facts, the happier he is. While "The Handy Answer Book for Kids" is packed with facts, I don't know that I'd turn a child loose with the book.
It's sub-titled 'your smart reference', which it is. These aren't your garden variety facts. Many of the answers are detailed and rich. You won't get a simplistic answer to why the sky is blue! And for fun, you'll determine whether it really rains cats and dogs.
What bothered me were the responses concerning creation vs. evolution, some responses concerning sexuality and reproduction, and a few others. These deal with mature and controversial subject matter, and it would be excellent for a parent to be reading along.
The layout is appealing, and the binding is sturdy...two necessities for a children's book. But due to the topics covered, read it with your child...for fun or for a school report!
I'm giving this one three out of five bookmarks, simply because I disagree with some of the responses...either as incomplete, or just incorrect. But I'm including a magnifying glass as a charm.
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Listen by Rene Gutteridge
2010 has some fantastic fiction releases, and I am privileged to read a handful in advance. Thanks to my friends at Tyndale, I received a sneak peek at a thriller written by one of my all-time favorite multi-genre novelists, Rene Gutteridge!
What would change if you knew the world was listening? Would you watch what you say if you knew someone had the ability to "Listen" in? How would it affect your relationships with family, friends and co-workers? What kind of damage would be done?
That's the basic premise of her new thriller, "Listen", releasing February 2010 from Tyndale. Marlo is a quiet town...rather small and kind of "Mayberry-ish". Until the website appears.
Listentoyourself.net has turned the town upside down. Damien, an op-ed writer for the local newspaper, is now writing investigative pieces, and he's on the trail of the mysterious blogger intent on invading everyone's privacy. But he can't help being torn knowing that his once beloved town has become a hotbed of gossip and slander.
Or does he?
Frank, a veteran of the Marlo police department, has his own concerns about the website. He can't get over his ex-wife, Angela, and suspects that some of the website's contents pertain to her. Plus, Frank has a vested interest in the undoing of the site.
Or does he?
No one is above suspicion, it seems. From the local high school brat pack to the pastor, everyone is looking to find out who would dare to "Listen". I was hooked from page one, and it made me think about what I say.
Rene is a talented author with the ability to draw you in to her stories, whether thriller or clever humor. Her messages about life and the believer are carefully woven into the fabric of the story, preventing the narrative from feeling preachy, yet you most definitely walk away with a powerful message.
None as powerful as found in "Listen". I'm awarding this one five out of five bookmarks, with a cell phone as a charm. Whether you text, chat, or have regular conversations, you may be watching over your shoulder after reading "Listen". Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
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Sunday, November 15, 2009
Coffee Cup Bible Studies: Kona With Jonah
Another Bible Study series that I've enjoyed is the "Coffee Cup Bible Study" series by Sandra Glahn. This one is designed more specifically for women's groups, and each book is coffee themed...which I absolutely love!
"Kona With Jonah" is one of several titles released so far. Right from the beginning, I loved this book for more than just it's coffee theme: it has a spiral binding so it lays flat when you're reading or writing in it. As someone who does a lot of studies, this feature is HUGE to me!
Each book has an introduction with some practical anecdotal description as well as historical and geographical description to help the reader focus on more than just the text, but also the context. The intros are fairly in depth, with text box quotes from other sources imbeded in the text, so you get a real feel historically for the book you are studying.
The study on Jonah is broken down into weeks of study instead of days--this one has four weeks. So for a small group, that might be a challenge, but for personal study it's great. Each week is then broken down into daily readings and assignments, with some anecdotal reading and the entire book of Jonah printed in the study book for you.
I don't know if Sandra does this with every book she's written about, but I would guess that she does. And I like that. In a group, it keeps everyone on the same page (different translations can either help or hinder a group depending on how the study is designed--I personally like this idea). Plus, you can just grab and go with your study guide to a coffee shop to meet with a friend:-)
This study is fairly in depth...breaking down verses into words and phrases, and analyzing what some words actually mean and side studies on different topics (i.e., discussion on translation gets over 2 pages). There are questions about the actually text, then questions on personal application.
There are also sidebar notes and text boxes highlighting key points or giving extra background on particular topics (i.e., Jonah's name translation). Each section closes with a prayer and with a passage for memorization. This is a study that is rich, full, and deep.
The only complaint I have is minor: with the pages printed on cream paper and the text in a medium brown, it was a little hard on my eyes. But other than that, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this study...and plan on making it my own personal study for the new year!
To read about other books in the "Coffee Cup Bible Study" series, click here. I give "Kona With Jonah" five out of five bookmarks with a coffee cup and a highlighter as charms. Now, I'm off to put the rest of these books on my Christmas wish list!
Happy Reading!
Deena
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Saturday, November 14, 2009
Come To Our Table by Anita Lustrea and Melinda Schmidt
The niftiest cookbook came in today's mail from Moody Publishers. Compiled from a variety of Christian authors and some listeners to The Midday Connection, "Come To Our Table" is unique, clever and creatively packaged.
Jan Silvious, author of "Look at It This Way" shares her recipe for Chocolate Delight, while Lisa Whelchel of "The Facts Of Life" and author of "Creative Correction" gives her take on Seasonal Colors, along with a favorite recipe.
Also sprinkled throughout the book are some old-fashioned, classic advertisements for kitchen and household products, adding a unique flavor to the book. Recipes are divided into categories, and indexed in the back of the book.
While I loved the different recipes, I loved reading what the authors and others had to share on different topics, like being a good hostess and family memories or traditions. Kendra Smiley, author of "Be The Parent" shares about The Aluminum Table, a heart-warming story.
I was delighted with my copy of "Come To Our Table"! Buy a copy for the cook in your family, or for a friend who loves recipes. I think you'll have a hit of a gift! I'm giving "Come To Our Table" five out of five bookmarks, with a set of measuring spoons as a charm.
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Friday, November 13, 2009
The Chic Shall Inherit The Earth by Shelley Adina
Shelley Adina brings a satisfying conclusion to her six-book series, "All About Us". We come full circle in this final novel, with Lissa Mansfield front and center once again.
This time, she's done with men...er...boys. After the embarrassing debacle in "It's All About Us" with Callum McCloud, Lissa has no use for a boyfriend. Which leaves her out quite often.
When the opportunity to chair the final cotillion of Spenser Academy drops in Lissa's lap, she finds herself back at the top of the popularity food chain. This means boys...asking her to the dance, paying attention to all she does...
...except the one boy Lissa does have feelings for. Has she waited too long to discover her true intentions, and has he fallen for her best friend? Or are things always as they appear to be?
Lissa also has matured in her faith, which serves her well when the time comes to put feet to her faith. Befriending the most despised person at the school totally contradicts the rules of popularity, and even Lissa's close Christian friends are warning her to tread lightly.
Will she follow God's leading, or cave in to pressure from peers? And can her simple acts of kindness lead to friendship and forgiveness, or will animosity remain between Lissa and her nemesis?
I truly enjoyed getting to know all the girls of Spenser Academy, even the ones who didn't quite jell with me story wise. But Shelley Adina has earned a spot on my top ten teen lit bookshelf, and I'm hoping she continues to write stories that appeal across the Christian/general market divide.
I'm giving "The Chic Shall Inherit The Earth" five out of five bookmarks, with a bottle of ginger ale and a package of crackers as charms. I know you'll figure out why...the key is who!
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FIRST Presents "Leaning into God When Life Is Pushing You Away" by Robert Anthony Schuller & William Kruidenier
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card authors are:
and the book:
Leaning into God When Life Is Pushing You Away
FaithWords (November 12, 2009)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Robert A. Schuller is the former senior pastor of the Crystal Cathedral. He has written twelve books, including the bestseller Walking in Your Own Shoes. His most recent book, coauthored with Dr. Douglas DiSiena, is entitled Possibility Living. Schuller has four children and resides in Laguna Beach, California, with his wife, Donna.Product Details:
List Price: $22.99
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: FaithWords (November 12, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0446580988
ISBN-13: 978-0446580984
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
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Thursday, November 12, 2009
FIRST Presents "Enjoy Your Money! How to Make It, Save It, Invest It and Give It" by J. Steve Miller
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card author is:
and the book:
Enjoy Your Money! How to Make It, Save It, Invest It and Give It
Wisdom Creek Press, LLC (March 11, 2009)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
J. Steve Miller - educator, investor, entrepreneur, and speaker - has taught audiences from Atlanta to Moscow. He’s known for drawing practical wisdom from serious research and communicating it in accessible, unforgettable ways. Steve is the founder and president of Legacy Educational Resources, providing global resources for teachers of life skills in public schools, churches, and service organizations at www.character-education.info. A self-styled "wisdom broker," he collects wisdom from many fields and packages it for teachers and writers via his published books and the Web. His wife, Cherie, and their seven sons continually remind him what works and what doesn’t.
Visit the author's website.
Product Details:
List Price: $15.99
Paperback: 270 pages
Publisher: Wisdom Creek Press, LLC (March 11, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 098187567X
ISBN-13: 978-0981875675
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
Preface
This book will help you to:
get out of debt and accumulate wealth.
get ahead, even when the work you love doesn’t produce big bucks.
find your strengths and passions and make a living with them.
live a more fulfilled life.
You'll discover the wisdom of the great makers and accumulators of wealth, presented in a story form to help you understand, internalize and have fun in the process. You’ll learn investing from Warren Buffett, the world’s greatest investor and wealthiest man in the world. You’ll learn principles of business success from Sam Walton, the uber-successful founder of Wal-Mart. You’ll find advice on landing and succeeding in a dream job from experts in career guidance.
Is This Book for Me?
You're never too young or too old to discover these ageless principles. They apply to the seasoned business executive as well as the entrepreneur with his first lemonade stand. Warren Buffet caught his vision at age five and started investing at age 11. My grandmother started multiplying her money in her mid-60's. At age one hundred and two, with her sharp mind intact, she's accumulated a small fortune.
What's Unique About This Book?
Many books teach personal money management. Some of them are good. But, as Paul A. Samuelson (MIT Professor of Economics and Nobel Laureate) said:
"The same surgeon general who required cigarette packages to say 'Warning, this product may be dangerous to your health' ought to require that 99 out of 100 books written on personal finance carry that same label. The exceptions are rare." 1
I strove to be one of those exceptions by basing my advice not just upon years of personal experience, but upon the knowledge and experiences of well over one hundred wise people. In the process, my house at times bore more resemblance to the famed library of Alexandria than to a home. But each new book or interview seemed to offer new angles or fresh insights, often pointing to new paths just begging to be traveled. 2
After writing my first draft, I put it into the hands of over forty smart people I respect, asking them, "If you could put a lifetime of financial wisdom into a book, is this what you'd say? Be ruthlessly honest!" Their input proved invaluable.
Essentially, I distill the wisdom of the wise on working hard, working smart, saving, investing and giving - all the ageless basics - applied to today's world. I was especially fascinated with the counterintuitive nature of so much of their advice. The more you study the successful, the more you see why most people aren't very successful. The path to financial freedom isn't the path that initially appears obvious. Thus, the need for books to challenge the conventional thinking of popular culture.
I cover critical topics often left out of books of this nature. For example, the excellent studies of millionaires by professors Thomas Stanley and William Danko found that character traits such as integrity, diligence and thrift are shared by most who accumulate wealth.3 The massive Gallup study of managers and people at work helps us discover our passions and strengths and put them to work in a fulfilling career.4
Finally, people usually seek money, not as an end in itself, but as a way to find peace and happiness. Funny that so many money books assume that lots of money will automatically cure our ills and put smiles on our faces. When does money help lead us to happiness? When does it hinder our happiness? Social scientists have studied happiness extensively and drawn some fascinating, counterintuitive conclusions.5 Isn't happiness important to consider in handling your money?
Money management can be exciting! I believe that this story of Antonio, Akashi, James, Amy and their mentors can build some of that excitement. It's fun to beat the system. It’s fun to see your money grow. It’s fun to feel successful. It’s fun to have enough money to help others. To this end, I hope you have fun reading my book.
Table of Contents
Page
Preface…………………………………………………………………………
Introduction……………………………………………………………………
Part One – Investing Money
Breakfast 1 – Discover the Basics……………………………………………
Breakfast 2 – Catch the Vision………………………..…………………
Breakfast 3 – Don’t Lose Money in Stocks……………………………………
Breakfast 4 – Make Money in Mutual Funds……………………………
Breakfast 5 – Diversify with Real Estate and Prepare for Hard Times ……
Breakfast 6 - The Breakfast that Almost Wasn’t…………………………
Part Two – Saving Money
Breakfast 7 – Live WAY Beneath Your Means…………………………
Breakfast 8 – Save on Food and Clothes ………………………
Breakfast 9 – Save on Cars…………………………………………
Breakfast 10 – Save on Houses……………………………………
Breakfast 11 –Ten Popular Ways to Lose Loads of Money………………
Part Three – Making Money
Breakfast 12 - Find Jobs You Love………………………………………
Breakfast 13 – Excel at Your Job…………………………………………
Breakfast 14 – Invest in your Mind………………………………………
Part Four: Enjoying Money
Breakfast 15 – Look for Happiness in the Right Places…………………
Epilogue: Where Are They Now?
Web-Based Complementary Resources
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………
Bibliographical References
Index
Introduction
From Cliff Hanger to Hash Brown’s Breakfast Bar
August 15, 2005, Somewhere in the Montana Rockies…
Dangling off the edge of a massive rock, something had to give. Antonio could no longer hang on to both his well-chalked handhold and his struggling, neophyte climber - a Down ’s syndrome teen named Chad.
Antonio shot a piercing glance directly into Chad’s fear-filled eyes. “I’ve got to let go of ya, Chad! Trust in what you’ve learned and hang on to that rope!”
After the briefest silent prayer, Antonio let go….
Chad let out a blood-curdling scream, which quickly shifted into quiet concentration as he relaxed his death-grip on the rope and let it slide through the carabineers. He pushed off of the rock and began bouncing down the cliff. Rappelling with newly found confidence and his own distinctive style, his silence erupted into laughter. Chad had conquered yet another challenge during his week-long retreat with Extreme Wisdom Wilderness Adventures.
Antonio free-climbed his way down the adjacent rock, shouting triumphantly to the cloudless sky, “What a job! The wilderness is my office. My clients love me. I’m changing the world, one person at a time!”
Then, he chuckled to himself as his mind rewound to a decade earlier, to “In School Suspension,” “The Counterculture Club,” and that loony old Mrs. Kramer, who turned out to have more sense than anyone he’d ever met.
“Without them,” Antonio thought, “I could have never landed this dream job. Not the way I handled my money back in high school. When I get back to civilization, I’m calling a reunion of the “The Counterculture Club.”
11:00 PM, Two Months Later, Hash Brown’s Breakfast Bar in Acworth, Georgia…
Second-shift manager Larry Wiersbe was experiencing a rare lull in customers until four rowdy twenty-somethings suddenly charged in, looking like they’d stepped straight out of a culturally-sensitive brochure: an Asian girl, an African-American guy, an alternative-looking Caucasian girl and a Hispanic guy.
Larry introduced himself, took their orders and retreated to the grill until a sudden movement forced him to glance at the crowd. The Asian had jumped up suddenly and was swinging her glass Ketchup bottle over her shoulder like the start of a tennis serve. Then, she brought it down forcibly toward the table. Before he could intervene, she stepped back just far enough to miss the table. Riotous laughter followed, until an elderly lady appeared in the entranceway. She pointed her cane at the small party and announced at the top of her lungs, “I christen thee, ‘The Counterculture Club!’”
“Mrs. Kramer!” the Hispanic shouted, as they sprang from their seats to hug their old mentor and friend. High fives, hand slaps and severely dated hand-shakes followed. After all the commotion, Larry half expected them to boost the old lady overhead and body surf her to the table. Instead, they led her gently by her hands, respectfully seating her at the head.
His curiosity piqued, Larry followed their loud conversation from the grill.
“You crazy kids!” Mrs. Kramer began. “What in the world have you been up to? You kept me up-to-date with e-mails and an occasional meeting for a few short years, but then you fell off the face of the earth, you ungrateful bums!”
“You were never one to beat around the bush,” Antonio said sheepishly. “I’ll be the first to plead guilty to the charge of not writing…”
“Enough with the boring confessional,” Mrs. Kramer broke in. “I’m dying to catch up with your lives!”
For the next hour, Larry listened intently to some incredible success stories. Although far from perfect, these people seemed to “get” something that Larry didn’t. They exuded vision, goals, purpose. Much of the conversation revolved around finances – refusing debt, making, saving and investing money. But then the conversation would move seamlessly to finding fulfillment in serving others with their time and money.
Larry knew he didn’t fit in. He shared their age, but that was it. The three credit cards in his wallet were stretched to the max. He worked two dead-end jobs just to keep his head above water. At this rate, he’d never own his own home, much less have the time and resources to help others. And he resolved to never marry a girl who was stupid enough to choose such a loser. Finally, he got the nerve to break in.
“OK guys, it’s midnight, closing time. But you’ve obviously got something I desperately need. Unless you’re all high or suffering from delusions of grandeur, you’ve achieved a freedom that’s eluded me all of my life. Can you tell me what you learned from this lady that made your lives into something I’m envying?”
They looked at each other and shrugged.
“I’ll cut a deal with you,” Larry continued. “If you’ll tell me in one hour how you’ve achieved this…“financial freedom” as you call it, I’ll let you hang out as long as you like. Plus, I’ll serve you whatever you want. No charge.”
“Why not?” said the old lady. Obviously the mouthpiece for the group, she seemed to enjoy taking charge once more. “It would be a hoot to reminisce about old times, and a helpful review for these slow learners. Keep that order pad handy, because you’ll need to jot some of this down.”
“And you’d better pull up your chair,” chuckled the black fellow, “because once you get us started, we’ll take more than your hour.”
In School Suspension
“I’ll start,” volunteered the alternative-looking blonde. “I remember that first day vividly because I’ve relived it in my mind a hundred times since. You wouldn’t have recognized me back then. As a fifteen-year-old, I didn’t have the cheek-ring or tattoos that today help jump-start conversations while volunteering at the Juvenile Center. Back then, I was a reluctant cheerleader. This unlikely group first met in ISS.”
“In School Suspension?” queried Larry.
“If you don’t know, you must have been one of the good boys!” teased the Asian.
“So, I walked in to find these three students, but no teacher. I’d hoped someone I knew would be there, but no such luck. An assistant principal broke the ice by stepping in and explaining that our teacher would arrive shortly. Then she asked for our names and wrote them on a legal pad:
Antonio, Amy, Akashi, James.
She took another sheet and began to read our crimes, something like this:
Flash Back to High School
“Antonio: Fourteen tardies? We’re only into the fifteenth school day!”
“I’m not a morning person,” Antonio offered.
“Akashi, sleeping through Algebra again? I figured you’d be good at Math.”
“Not all Asians can be Math geniuses, you know,” Akashi responded, showing more than a hint of attitude.
“James, caught in the hall without a pass.”
“The teacher wasn’t around, and when you gotta go, you gotta--”
“Spare me the details. And Amy, what’s with parking in the teacher’s lot?”
“I was late, and a visitor had taken my spot.”
“Typical teens: all victims, none responsible. Anyway, Coach Helms will be in shortly.”
As the door closed behind her, Akashi mocked, “typical teens…all victims, none responsible. And since I’m Asian, of course I sit around studying Math for fun. I’m so tired of this prison of a school. And here I sit in house arrest with a couple of jocks and a cheerleader.”
“So you resent being labeled a stereotypical Asian Math whiz but have no problem labeling us as stereotypical preps and jocks?” shot back Antonio. Can you say “hypocrite?”
“We’re getting off to a bad start,” offered James. “If coach Helms walks in and finds us in a rumble, we’ll be stuck in ISS the rest of the year. Obviously, none of us want to crack a book until we have to. Let’s break through the stereotypes and get to know each other a bit. Surely we have something in common. Amy, you’re a cheerleader, right?”
“I hate cheerleading,” complained Amy. “It’s not me at all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Antonio. “You so look the part.”
“I’m a rebel living in a preppie world. You see, my brother started dressing goth in high school about the same time as he discovered drugs. My parents, fearing the same would happen to me if I got with the ‘wrong’ crowd, won’t let me near a Hot Topic or thrift store. I understand their concern, but I’m not about to do drugs. I see what they’ve done to my brother. But I’m not comfortable with jocks and preps.
My parents want the best for me. I don’t want to hurt them. But I’m counting the days till I go off to college, shed these Abercrombies and join a punk band. Alone in my bedroom with my bass, I can keep up with almost any song you give me.”
“Amazing. And you guys probably think I play Soccer,” teased Antonio. “It’s never interested me. I’m more into weightlifting and wilderness adventures, like rock climbing and caving.”
“If you’re into stereotypes, I do like basketball and fried chicken,” offered James. “But I don’t like watermelon, and I’m not on the school basketball team. I spend my after school hours making money. My parents always fight about money, so I plan to make a million by the time I’m 40 so that it won’t be an issue in my family.”
“Parents with money problems, now that’s something we’ve got in common,” replied Akashi. “My parents are so obsessed with ‘getting ahead’ that they work day and night and weekends. We live in a nice neighborhood and have great cars, but they can’t enjoy life. They have to work all the time to pay the bills. I’d much rather live in a one room apartment and have time to travel and hang out with my family. Amy, what about your parents?”
“They’d love to teach at the University and write on the side, but they can’t quit their corporate jobs. They need the money. They’ve never been savers. They max out their credit cards over Christmas, pay them off by the end of summer and start the cycle over again the next Christmas.
When my brother went into drug rehab and insurance wouldn’t pay, Mom and Dad had absolutely no savings to draw from. They took out a second loan on the house and are now in worse financial shape than ever. It’s depressing. They’re always tired and worried. I can’t see how they’ll ever dig themselves out of this hole. Antonio?”
“Mom works day and night to support the family. Dad’s a deadbeat. He’s always either looking for a job or complaining about the job he has. Money’s definitely a big issue at home. Mom and Dad argue all the time about it. It gets so bad that I fear Dad will eventually pack up and leave.”
(Enter Coach Helms.)
“Okay class. Sorry to be late. I recognize all of you from previous suspensions, so I’ll dispense with introductory matters. Please open your text books and get to work.”
“Coach Helms, we’ve got problems,” interjected Akashi.
“Hello! That’s why you’re in ISS, Right?” offered Coach Helms.
“Not those problems,” explained Akashi. “I’m talking about family problems. Our parents suck with their money.”
“Tell me about it,” said Coach Helms. “I wish I had some answers, but I overslept this morning because I work a night job to make ends meet. I can’t seem to make it on my teacher’s salary.”
“Is everyone in this town hopeless with their money?” asked Akashi. “If you don’t give us some answers, we’ll end up just like our parents – broke, tired and whining all the time. You’re supposed to be our teacher. Give us some direction here.”
Coach Helms thought for a moment, tapping his pencil nervously on the desk. Without looking up, he said, “What about Mrs. Kramer?”
“Old widow Kramer, the Social Studies teacher?” asked James. “I had her for a class. She dresses worse than my grandma…and her car isn’t anything to brag about.”
“She may not look the part,” said Coach Helms, “but my banker says she’s the best money manager he knows. She’s got all kinds of investments going. Besides Social Studies and Business, she also teaches Money Management.”
“Come to think of it,” continued James, “I remember her being hyped about her world travels. I wondered how she paid for it on a teacher’s salary. Maybe she got a big life insurance claim when her husband died. But she can be a little scary…and those riddles….”
“Her personality…,” continued Coach Helms. “She’s definitely a work of art. More Picasso than Norman Rockwell. Been around students so long that I think she’s more comfortable with teens than adults. Hardly ever see her in the teacher’s lounge. Speaks your language.
She eats second lunch. How about this? I’ll let you eat second lunch. Try to connect with her. Until then, get out those notebooks. I want to see some progress.”
Hmmm…
1. What are your friends and relatives doing right with their finances that you’d like to emulate?
2. What are your friends and relatives doing wrong with their finances that you’d like to avoid?
3. What would you like to learn most about making and managing your money?
4. For more free discussions and activities for each chapter, visit www.enjoyyourmoney.org.
Old Widow Kramer
Fast Forward to Reunion
“So we met her for lunch, and she told us her story,” Amy continued. “Tell him about it, Mrs. Kramer.”
“At thirty years of age, my husband died of cancer, leaving me, not with a fat life insurance pay out, but with over $20,000 in credit card debt and funeral expenses. The monthly payments on those debts were killing me. Every time the phone rang, I knew a debt collector would be on the other end, hounding and threatening me.
So I sold my house and moved into a condo to pay down my debts and reduce my expenses (and avoid mowing that blasted yard). Then, I took a weekend job. The extra job also helped keep my mind off of my grief. I worked like a dog to dig my way out of debt and get those accursed creditors off my back. In a little over four years, I paid those debts in full, on a day I refer to as ‘one of the best days of my life.’ I felt soooo free!
From that experience, I got a bad taste in my mouth about debt. I avoided it like the plague. I vowed to never again make credit card payments unless it was absolutely necessary.
I still owed about $15,000 on the condo, so I kept my weekend job, putting all my extra money into paying it down. I was amazed at how quickly I paid it off. I was totally debt free! Nobody could take my home from me. It was mine.
With very few expenses, I quit my weekend job and divided the money I used to make in payments into investments, travel and giving to worthy causes. So far, I’ve saved up about $500,000 toward an early retirement.”
“From $20,000 in debt to $500,000 in savings!” reiterated Amy. “That was quite an impressive story – actually, a bit unbelievable at the time.”
Amy continued. “From that short lunch, we knew that there was a lot more wisdom where that came from. And it was more than book wisdom. It came from her experience. She had beaten the system that was killing our parents. If we could learn her lessons at age 18, she could save us tons of headaches along the way.”
“More than that,” added James, “I decided that she just might hold the key to my dream of making a million dollars by my fortieth birthday and taking early retirement.”
“My needs were more emotional,” admitted Akashi. “My older siblings were academic overachievers. My parents drilled into me that ‘A’s in school would set me up for an ‘A’ career and an ‘A’ life. But somehow I’d botch up every class with ‘C’s and ‘D’s, which I thought would guarantee me a ‘C-Minus’ life. I was a loser, and felt that everyone saw a huge ‘L’ tattooed on my forehead. I acted tough, but was scared stiff at the thought of meeting with Mrs. Kramer. Yet, I felt that she offered a glimmer of hope. I was desperate. What did I have to lose?”
“We asked her if she would meet us for breakfast once a week,” continued Amy, “to ask questions and learn more. She said that she’d love to, if we’d pay her $5.00 each per breakfast. She explained that it would be a good lesson for us to pay for wise counsel.
For the next year, we met with her every Saturday morning, here at Hash Brown’s. Sometimes, we’d discuss a book for a month of meetings. Other times, we’d just ask questions. We’ll just tell you about the meetings where she pulled out her notebook and covered new topics. Each week, she exposed us to stuff we’d never learned, either at school or at home. Those meetings changed our lives.”
Hmmm…
Was it really possible for Mrs. Kramer to go from $20,000 in debt to $500,000 in savings in a span of about 30 years?
What keeps most people from making such a dramatic turnaround?
What could have kept Mrs. Kramer from getting into her predicament in the first place?
Part One
Investing Money
Breakfast #1
Discover the Basics
“I remember that first meeting well,” volunteered Antonio, wincing. “I’ll tell about the first two breakfasts.
So, I stroll in at 9:04 to find everyone there, waiting on me.”
Flashback
Kramer: You’re four minutes late!
Antonio: I have a hard time getting places on time.
Kramer: When you’re late, you waste our time. Half of success, financial or otherwise, is showing up…on time. It’s so important that I’ll lay out some incentive. If you’re late next week, you pay for the entire breakfast by yourself.
Fast Forward to Reunion
“Everyone but me thought it a splendid idea, so my resistance was outvoted. I was more than a little ticked off, threatening that I just might not show up at all next week. Kramer nonchalantly replied that it was my choice. We learned quickly that if we wanted her advice, it would be on her terms, not ours. She ignored my pouty expression and continued.”
Flashback
Kramer: So you want to learn how to handle your money. Well, if I talk the entire time, I don’t get to eat. So let’s do it this way. We order our food. While we wait for it to come, I tell a story or throw out five to ten minutes of advice while you think and jot down notes.
After the food comes, everyone throws in their thoughts. I want to know your experiences with the concept, good or bad. Take your best shots at my ideas. Too much education these days is merely transferring a set of notes from the teacher to the students, without it going through the minds of either.
I’m not easily offended. Tell me why it won’t work for you. Your objections and comments will help us distill each concept into something that will work for you. At the end of each session, tell us what you want to deal with the next week. That way, we stay practical. Sound good to you?
(Everyone agreed as the waiter arrived to take our orders.)
Kramer: First, I’ll pass out a sheet that should help you to lighten up on your parents. I know that you think they’re totally incompetent buffoons with finances. I want you to understand the bigger picture of our culture, a big part of the reason for their money issues. Your parents’ neighbors, friends and relatives probably handle their money the same way. They’re just doing what their culture has taught them. When everybody’s doing it, it’s hard to question your way of life.
James: You’re saying that if I were to live with my neighbors for awhile, I’d likely find the same financial problems that Mom and Dad have? I’ve assumed that their nice cars and smiling faces meant that they were better off than me.
Kramer: Wrong assumption. Here’s the way many of your friends and neighbors manage their money.
Personal Finances in America
According to surveys:
Ninety-seven percent of workers over 45 say they regret how they spent their money, in light of how much they could have saved.1
Almost one in four adults live paycheck to paycheck.2
Fifty-nine percent of Americans don’t save regularly.3
We’re getting worse and worse at saving.4
Twenty-five years ago, Americans saved over ten percent of their income.
Ten years ago, we saved 4.5 percent.
By 2005, for the first time since the Great Depression, we spent more than we earned.
Approximately 1,500,000 Americans declare personal bankruptcy each year.5
The average college student graduates with over $20,000 in debt.6
Most Americans haven’t even calculated how much money they need to retire.7
Personal debt is reaching record highs, and personal savings is reaching all time lows.8
James: That’s insane! I'd hoped that retirement would be the time for me to say goodbye to the eight to five grind and relax at a beach house. If I follow the crowd in finances, I’ll be worrying about money the rest of my life!
Akashi: One in four adults living paycheck to paycheck? Talk about risky living! And adults complain about teens’ risky behaviors! A short-term job loss or illness could put them in serious debt and make them lose their houses.
Amy: The scary side of it for me is that if we don’t do something different, we’ll all be over $20,000 in debt in about six years. Then we’ll go to work and live paycheck to paycheck, until we retire in a low rent district, watching Wheel of Fortune on one of our four antenna stations, constantly whining about how we regret the way we lived our lives and don’t have enough money to have any fun.
Akashi: Our kids will probably hate our visits, assuming we’re there to ask for another handout!
Kramer: Exactly! Somehow, you’ve got to break loose from a culture that’s gone crazy with its finances. Many dig themselves into a deeper hole every day, enjoying life less and less as they spend everything they’ve got to pay off past debts. In the land of the free, they’ve become financially enslaved.
(Kramer gets a wild look in her eyes, more animated with each sentence as she rises from her seat.)
You’re already different from the mainstream. That’s why I relate to you. I challenge you to extend your independent thinking and counterculture attitudes to your finances.
And to that end (she pulls back a glass ketchup bottle high overhead with both hands, waving it menacingly in the air), I christen this group (she brings the bottle back down with increasing speed, aimed directly at the table), THE COUNTERCULTURE CLUB!
(She pulls back the bottle at the last second, missing the table, but sending her students scattering all directions. Kramer erupts into laughter.)
Amy: You scared me to death! Did you really have to embarrass us in front of all these people to make that point?
Kramer: A little adrenaline is good to help cement points in your memory. You’ll never forget this moment. Plus, if you never get over the “Oh my gosh, what’s everybody gonna think?” thing, you’ll find yourself living everyone else's life, the life of your culture, rather than your own life. I like a little drama now and again to spice things up. Later today I’ll get a good laugh out of picturing your faces as you envisioned ketchup exploding all over the restaurant.
James: (Settling back into his chair.) A good laugh at our expense! Don’t be surprised if you find toilet paper in your yard from your favorite club to test your own embarrassment index. So where were we? Something about how our culture sucks at finances?
Kramer: From the stats on my handout, you know how NOT to handle your finances - the way most others handle their finances. You’ve seen it in your parents and now in the culture at large. Let’s transition to how we can do finances right. This being the first breakfast, let’s start with an overview - some basics of financial wisdom. In the coming weeks, we’ll devote entire breakfasts to each principle.
But instead of handing out the list, I want you to draw out the basics from a real person who went counterculture with her finances. From decades of teaching, I’ve found that students remember stories better than lists; plus, stories are more interesting. As I tell the story, jot down the principles that you think made the person successful.
Oseola Enjoys Life and Saves a Fortune
Some of us might fear that we'll never have enough money to make ends meet and enjoy life. What if your job doesn't pay well, and you can't seem to get ahead? I want to introduce you to Oseola, who has a lot to teach us. She didn't have the advantages of most of us, yet she enjoyed life and saved a ton.
Oseola grew up in a simple house with her grandmother, mother and an aunt. As an eight-year-old, she would wash clothes after school to help make ends meet. Her school education ended at age 12, when she dropped out to care for her sick aunt and work full time at washing.
So far, she's not on anyone’s “most likely to succeed” list.
Her work was hard, but she enjoyed it. She washed the old-fashioned way: building a fire under her wash pot, then soaking, washing and boiling a bundle of clothes. Rub. Wrench. Rub again. Rinse. Starch. Hang out to dry. She worked Monday through Saturday, for 75 years, until arthritis forced her into retirement at age 86. She never got to finish school, never had a car and owned few possessions. Her TV received only one station. But that didn't bother her because she never watched it very much anyway.
I can hear you thinking, ''Get a life, woman!'' But, you see, Oseola did have a life - a great life. She didn't desire travel or possessions. She loved her God, her family and her work. Singing and storytelling filled her days with joy and laughter.
She never bought on credit so that she would be financially free. And since she didn't need money for a lot of possessions or travel, she invested it, a little each month. By July 1995, a half year after her retirement, she had saved - get this - $280,000. That’s over a quarter of a million dollars! Then, she stunned the world by giving away over half of it, $150,000, to establish a college scholarship for needy students, offering others the education she never had.
Until recently, Oseola McCarty referred to herself as a ''poor little old colored woman who walked everywhere.'' No one paid her much attention when she was out. But when the word leaked out about her donation, the world took notice.
She has since received numerous awards, been interviewed on ABC, CNN, NBC, BET and MTV. She's been featured in Newsweek, The New York Times, People, Life, Ebony, Essence and Jet. But all that recognition never changed her simple life. You see, she didn't need all the recognition. In her own words, ''I think my secret was contentment. I was happy with what I had.''9
Now, compare her to most Americans. Many with huge salaries haven't managed to save a cent. Many are worth less than nothing, worrying constantly about their debts. But Oseola shows me that if she can save over a quarter of a million dollars by washing people's clothes in boiling water over a fire, I can save money as a schoolteacher.
So, what do you think?
Reflections on Oseola
Akashi: I’ll start. I think her life sucked. She spent her entire life in a hovel working the same crappy job day in and day out, with only one TV channel for entertainment. She didn’t even own a car. What kind of life is that?
Antonio: Akashi! Mrs. Kramer is trying to help us out here. Don’t be so hard on her!
Kramer: I’m the one who sets the ground rules, and I challenge you to be just as outspoken as Akashi. If you other three sit there smiling at each other and sipping your juice while disagreeing in your gut, we’re getting nowhere. Say what you think. Be ruthless.
Jack Welch, one of the greatest business leaders of our time, devoted an entire chapter of his book Winning to push for candor.10 He observes that we usually don’t tell it like it is, fearing we’ll hurt people’s feelings. He thinks lack of candor is deadly to business.
Lack of candor may be easier in the short-run, but it hurts us in the long-run. Without candor, we don’t face reality. Be honest, guys! Do you agree with Akashi?
Antonio: I’ll be candid with you, Akashi. In ISS you complained about your parents being so wrapped up in their work and living in a ritzy neighborhood that they didn’t have time for the important stuff, like family.
Oseola chose relationships over things. She enjoyed working at home, spending time with her relatives and helping others. She didn’t secretly desire to get the latest version of Halo or go to Disneyland. She lived life the way she wanted to, had lots of fun and can look back with the satisfaction of knowing she helped others along the way.
Think of Einstein. He never drove a car. He enjoyed thinking more than mansions and hot cars.
Akashi: You nailed me. As much as I complain about my parents’ obsession with things and money, I’m pretty hooked on some of my things, like always upgrading to the latest cell phone, playing online games till late at night and the freedom that my car gives me.
But fun is different for everyone. I do admire Oseola for bucking the crowd, choosing her own path, finding financial freedom and putting people first.
Kramer: We don’t have to adopt everything about her life. But what can we learn from her financial success?
James: I’m astounded that she could accumulate such wealth from what must have been a pitiful salary.
Amy: I think it’s actually pretty simple. She spent less than she made. With no car, low-cost housing and no frivolous spending, she could save more than a lawyer who has a great salary but spends it all on his ritzy house and payments on his Porsche. The first thing I learned from Oseola is: Live beneath your means. All of our parents make tons more than Oseola, but I’ll bet you that everything they get on Friday is spent by the next Thursday. You can’t save if you spend all that you make.
Akashi: Look not only at what she did, but what she didn’t do. She didn’t own even one credit card. Whereas most of us spend outrageous money in interest, she waited till she could pay cash. I’ll bet that one habit saved her thousands and thousands of dollars.
Kramer: You bet right, Akashi. In Oseola’s own words,
''I save my money till I can buy something outright.''11
Akashi: So, principle number two is: Avoid paying interest.
Antonio: Principle number three: Save for the future. If she had a medical emergency, she wouldn’t have to sell her house to pay for it.
James: She took the money that she would have been paying the credit card companies and invested it, so that she was receiving interest rather than giving it away. Over time, it all added up. Principle number four: Invest over time.
Antonio: She worked hard at something she enjoyed. Even a small salary adds up when you put in the hours.
Kramer: I think you’ve summed up the basics of financial wisdom. Think about those principles this week, and see how they apply to your personal finances. In future weeks, we’ll talk in much more depth about each principle. What do you want to cover next week?
James: I’m fascinated with how Oseola multiplied her money. I want to be financially independent as quickly as possible. How can investments multiply my money so that I can retire in my 40’s?
Kramer: Is that okay with everyone else?
(Nods all around.)
Hmmm…
What facts from the “Personal Finances in America” sheet bother you the most? Why?
Why do you think Americans struggle with their finances?
How would your personal finances be different if you handled them more like Oseola?
Are you living above or below your means? How could you begin living below your means and saving some money each week?
What can you do this week to start handling your money better?
Assignment
This week, ask your parents to tell you what they know about investments. Go on the Internet and read some basic articles on stocks and mutual funds. You’ll need to bring your calculators. What I’ll tell you is so extraordinary that you won’t believe it unless you see the numbers yourselves.
One more thing! I have a riddle for you to solve:
To some I’m their greatest nightmare
To others their greatest friend.
Neither spirit nor flesh
I’m not hard to comprehend.
I increase the wealth
Of both paupers and kings,
Rewarding the wise,
Robbing fools of their dreams.
I work when you work
Just as hard when you sleep.
With me Buffett made billions
If you sow, you can also reap.
I’m slow at the beginning
‘Till my power is unfurled.
It’s why bankers and investors say,
“You’re the eighth wonder of the world.”
Resource to Take You Deeper
Read Oseola McCarty, Simple Wisdom for Rich Living, (Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1996).
*********************************
Please do not construe this book as the author’s or publisher’s prescription for your personal finances. Only a qualified financial counselor who knows your specific life circumstances, your personality, your goals and your objectives might be qualified to advise you in these matters.
Enjoy Your Money! Copyright © 2008 by Wisdom Creek Press, LLC. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for brief reviews. For information contact Wisdom Creek Press, LLC, 5814 Sailboat Pointe, Acworth, Georgia, 30101, www.wisdomcreekpress.com.
Cover design by Carole Maugé-Lewis
Front Cover Photography by Rasmus Rasussen
Author Photo by Christina Cosenza
Typesetting by Callisa Ink & Co and Carole Maugé-Lewis
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, J. Steve, 1957-
Enjoy Your Money! : how to make it, save it, invest it and give it : the adventures of the Counterculture Club/ by J. Steve Miller.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
LCCN: 2008941060
ISBN-13: 978-0-9818756-7-5
ISBN-10: 0-9818756-7-X
1. Finance, Personal. I. Title.
HG179.M4919 2009 332.024
QB109-200015
This book will help you to:
get out of debt and accumulate wealth.
get ahead, even when the work you love doesn’t produce big bucks.
find your strengths and passions and make a living with them.
live a more fulfilled life.
You'll discover the wisdom of the great makers and accumulators of wealth, presented in a story form to help you understand, internalize and have fun in the process. You’ll learn investing from Warren Buffett, the world’s greatest investor and wealthiest man in the world. You’ll learn principles of business success from Sam Walton, the uber-successful founder of Wal-Mart. You’ll find advice on landing and succeeding in a dream job from experts in career guidance.
Is This Book for Me?
You're never too young or too old to discover these ageless principles. They apply to the seasoned business executive as well as the entrepreneur with his first lemonade stand. Warren Buffet caught his vision at age five and started investing at age 11. My grandmother started multiplying her money in her mid-60's. At age one hundred and two, with her sharp mind intact, she's accumulated a small fortune.
What's Unique About This Book?
Many books teach personal money management. Some of them are good. But, as Paul A. Samuelson (MIT Professor of Economics and Nobel Laureate) said:
"The same surgeon general who required cigarette packages to say 'Warning, this product may be dangerous to your health' ought to require that 99 out of 100 books written on personal finance carry that same label. The exceptions are rare." 1
I strove to be one of those exceptions by basing my advice not just upon years of personal experience, but upon the knowledge and experiences of well over one hundred wise people. In the process, my house at times bore more resemblance to the famed library of Alexandria than to a home. But each new book or interview seemed to offer new angles or fresh insights, often pointing to new paths just begging to be traveled. 2
After writing my first draft, I put it into the hands of over forty smart people I respect, asking them, "If you could put a lifetime of financial wisdom into a book, is this what you'd say? Be ruthlessly honest!" Their input proved invaluable.
Essentially, I distill the wisdom of the wise on working hard, working smart, saving, investing and giving - all the ageless basics - applied to today's world. I was especially fascinated with the counterintuitive nature of so much of their advice. The more you study the successful, the more you see why most people aren't very successful. The path to financial freedom isn't the path that initially appears obvious. Thus, the need for books to challenge the conventional thinking of popular culture.
I cover critical topics often left out of books of this nature. For example, the excellent studies of millionaires by professors Thomas Stanley and William Danko found that character traits such as integrity, diligence and thrift are shared by most who accumulate wealth.3 The massive Gallup study of managers and people at work helps us discover our passions and strengths and put them to work in a fulfilling career.4
Finally, people usually seek money, not as an end in itself, but as a way to find peace and happiness. Funny that so many money books assume that lots of money will automatically cure our ills and put smiles on our faces. When does money help lead us to happiness? When does it hinder our happiness? Social scientists have studied happiness extensively and drawn some fascinating, counterintuitive conclusions.5 Isn't happiness important to consider in handling your money?
Money management can be exciting! I believe that this story of Antonio, Akashi, James, Amy and their mentors can build some of that excitement. It's fun to beat the system. It’s fun to see your money grow. It’s fun to feel successful. It’s fun to have enough money to help others. To this end, I hope you have fun reading my book.
Table of Contents
Page
Preface…………………………………………………………………………
Introduction……………………………………………………………………
Part One – Investing Money
Breakfast 1 – Discover the Basics……………………………………………
Breakfast 2 – Catch the Vision………………………..…………………
Breakfast 3 – Don’t Lose Money in Stocks……………………………………
Breakfast 4 – Make Money in Mutual Funds……………………………
Breakfast 5 – Diversify with Real Estate and Prepare for Hard Times ……
Breakfast 6 - The Breakfast that Almost Wasn’t…………………………
Part Two – Saving Money
Breakfast 7 – Live WAY Beneath Your Means…………………………
Breakfast 8 – Save on Food and Clothes ………………………
Breakfast 9 – Save on Cars…………………………………………
Breakfast 10 – Save on Houses……………………………………
Breakfast 11 –Ten Popular Ways to Lose Loads of Money………………
Part Three – Making Money
Breakfast 12 - Find Jobs You Love………………………………………
Breakfast 13 – Excel at Your Job…………………………………………
Breakfast 14 – Invest in your Mind………………………………………
Part Four: Enjoying Money
Breakfast 15 – Look for Happiness in the Right Places…………………
Epilogue: Where Are They Now?
Web-Based Complementary Resources
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………
Bibliographical References
Index
Introduction
From Cliff Hanger to Hash Brown’s Breakfast Bar
August 15, 2005, Somewhere in the Montana Rockies…
Dangling off the edge of a massive rock, something had to give. Antonio could no longer hang on to both his well-chalked handhold and his struggling, neophyte climber - a Down ’s syndrome teen named Chad.
Antonio shot a piercing glance directly into Chad’s fear-filled eyes. “I’ve got to let go of ya, Chad! Trust in what you’ve learned and hang on to that rope!”
After the briefest silent prayer, Antonio let go….
Chad let out a blood-curdling scream, which quickly shifted into quiet concentration as he relaxed his death-grip on the rope and let it slide through the carabineers. He pushed off of the rock and began bouncing down the cliff. Rappelling with newly found confidence and his own distinctive style, his silence erupted into laughter. Chad had conquered yet another challenge during his week-long retreat with Extreme Wisdom Wilderness Adventures.
Antonio free-climbed his way down the adjacent rock, shouting triumphantly to the cloudless sky, “What a job! The wilderness is my office. My clients love me. I’m changing the world, one person at a time!”
Then, he chuckled to himself as his mind rewound to a decade earlier, to “In School Suspension,” “The Counterculture Club,” and that loony old Mrs. Kramer, who turned out to have more sense than anyone he’d ever met.
“Without them,” Antonio thought, “I could have never landed this dream job. Not the way I handled my money back in high school. When I get back to civilization, I’m calling a reunion of the “The Counterculture Club.”
11:00 PM, Two Months Later, Hash Brown’s Breakfast Bar in Acworth, Georgia…
Second-shift manager Larry Wiersbe was experiencing a rare lull in customers until four rowdy twenty-somethings suddenly charged in, looking like they’d stepped straight out of a culturally-sensitive brochure: an Asian girl, an African-American guy, an alternative-looking Caucasian girl and a Hispanic guy.
Larry introduced himself, took their orders and retreated to the grill until a sudden movement forced him to glance at the crowd. The Asian had jumped up suddenly and was swinging her glass Ketchup bottle over her shoulder like the start of a tennis serve. Then, she brought it down forcibly toward the table. Before he could intervene, she stepped back just far enough to miss the table. Riotous laughter followed, until an elderly lady appeared in the entranceway. She pointed her cane at the small party and announced at the top of her lungs, “I christen thee, ‘The Counterculture Club!’”
“Mrs. Kramer!” the Hispanic shouted, as they sprang from their seats to hug their old mentor and friend. High fives, hand slaps and severely dated hand-shakes followed. After all the commotion, Larry half expected them to boost the old lady overhead and body surf her to the table. Instead, they led her gently by her hands, respectfully seating her at the head.
His curiosity piqued, Larry followed their loud conversation from the grill.
“You crazy kids!” Mrs. Kramer began. “What in the world have you been up to? You kept me up-to-date with e-mails and an occasional meeting for a few short years, but then you fell off the face of the earth, you ungrateful bums!”
“You were never one to beat around the bush,” Antonio said sheepishly. “I’ll be the first to plead guilty to the charge of not writing…”
“Enough with the boring confessional,” Mrs. Kramer broke in. “I’m dying to catch up with your lives!”
For the next hour, Larry listened intently to some incredible success stories. Although far from perfect, these people seemed to “get” something that Larry didn’t. They exuded vision, goals, purpose. Much of the conversation revolved around finances – refusing debt, making, saving and investing money. But then the conversation would move seamlessly to finding fulfillment in serving others with their time and money.
Larry knew he didn’t fit in. He shared their age, but that was it. The three credit cards in his wallet were stretched to the max. He worked two dead-end jobs just to keep his head above water. At this rate, he’d never own his own home, much less have the time and resources to help others. And he resolved to never marry a girl who was stupid enough to choose such a loser. Finally, he got the nerve to break in.
“OK guys, it’s midnight, closing time. But you’ve obviously got something I desperately need. Unless you’re all high or suffering from delusions of grandeur, you’ve achieved a freedom that’s eluded me all of my life. Can you tell me what you learned from this lady that made your lives into something I’m envying?”
They looked at each other and shrugged.
“I’ll cut a deal with you,” Larry continued. “If you’ll tell me in one hour how you’ve achieved this…“financial freedom” as you call it, I’ll let you hang out as long as you like. Plus, I’ll serve you whatever you want. No charge.”
“Why not?” said the old lady. Obviously the mouthpiece for the group, she seemed to enjoy taking charge once more. “It would be a hoot to reminisce about old times, and a helpful review for these slow learners. Keep that order pad handy, because you’ll need to jot some of this down.”
“And you’d better pull up your chair,” chuckled the black fellow, “because once you get us started, we’ll take more than your hour.”
In School Suspension
“I’ll start,” volunteered the alternative-looking blonde. “I remember that first day vividly because I’ve relived it in my mind a hundred times since. You wouldn’t have recognized me back then. As a fifteen-year-old, I didn’t have the cheek-ring or tattoos that today help jump-start conversations while volunteering at the Juvenile Center. Back then, I was a reluctant cheerleader. This unlikely group first met in ISS.”
“In School Suspension?” queried Larry.
“If you don’t know, you must have been one of the good boys!” teased the Asian.
“So, I walked in to find these three students, but no teacher. I’d hoped someone I knew would be there, but no such luck. An assistant principal broke the ice by stepping in and explaining that our teacher would arrive shortly. Then she asked for our names and wrote them on a legal pad:
Antonio, Amy, Akashi, James.
She took another sheet and began to read our crimes, something like this:
Flash Back to High School
“Antonio: Fourteen tardies? We’re only into the fifteenth school day!”
“I’m not a morning person,” Antonio offered.
“Akashi, sleeping through Algebra again? I figured you’d be good at Math.”
“Not all Asians can be Math geniuses, you know,” Akashi responded, showing more than a hint of attitude.
“James, caught in the hall without a pass.”
“The teacher wasn’t around, and when you gotta go, you gotta--”
“Spare me the details. And Amy, what’s with parking in the teacher’s lot?”
“I was late, and a visitor had taken my spot.”
“Typical teens: all victims, none responsible. Anyway, Coach Helms will be in shortly.”
As the door closed behind her, Akashi mocked, “typical teens…all victims, none responsible. And since I’m Asian, of course I sit around studying Math for fun. I’m so tired of this prison of a school. And here I sit in house arrest with a couple of jocks and a cheerleader.”
“So you resent being labeled a stereotypical Asian Math whiz but have no problem labeling us as stereotypical preps and jocks?” shot back Antonio. Can you say “hypocrite?”
“We’re getting off to a bad start,” offered James. “If coach Helms walks in and finds us in a rumble, we’ll be stuck in ISS the rest of the year. Obviously, none of us want to crack a book until we have to. Let’s break through the stereotypes and get to know each other a bit. Surely we have something in common. Amy, you’re a cheerleader, right?”
“I hate cheerleading,” complained Amy. “It’s not me at all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Antonio. “You so look the part.”
“I’m a rebel living in a preppie world. You see, my brother started dressing goth in high school about the same time as he discovered drugs. My parents, fearing the same would happen to me if I got with the ‘wrong’ crowd, won’t let me near a Hot Topic or thrift store. I understand their concern, but I’m not about to do drugs. I see what they’ve done to my brother. But I’m not comfortable with jocks and preps.
My parents want the best for me. I don’t want to hurt them. But I’m counting the days till I go off to college, shed these Abercrombies and join a punk band. Alone in my bedroom with my bass, I can keep up with almost any song you give me.”
“Amazing. And you guys probably think I play Soccer,” teased Antonio. “It’s never interested me. I’m more into weightlifting and wilderness adventures, like rock climbing and caving.”
“If you’re into stereotypes, I do like basketball and fried chicken,” offered James. “But I don’t like watermelon, and I’m not on the school basketball team. I spend my after school hours making money. My parents always fight about money, so I plan to make a million by the time I’m 40 so that it won’t be an issue in my family.”
“Parents with money problems, now that’s something we’ve got in common,” replied Akashi. “My parents are so obsessed with ‘getting ahead’ that they work day and night and weekends. We live in a nice neighborhood and have great cars, but they can’t enjoy life. They have to work all the time to pay the bills. I’d much rather live in a one room apartment and have time to travel and hang out with my family. Amy, what about your parents?”
“They’d love to teach at the University and write on the side, but they can’t quit their corporate jobs. They need the money. They’ve never been savers. They max out their credit cards over Christmas, pay them off by the end of summer and start the cycle over again the next Christmas.
When my brother went into drug rehab and insurance wouldn’t pay, Mom and Dad had absolutely no savings to draw from. They took out a second loan on the house and are now in worse financial shape than ever. It’s depressing. They’re always tired and worried. I can’t see how they’ll ever dig themselves out of this hole. Antonio?”
“Mom works day and night to support the family. Dad’s a deadbeat. He’s always either looking for a job or complaining about the job he has. Money’s definitely a big issue at home. Mom and Dad argue all the time about it. It gets so bad that I fear Dad will eventually pack up and leave.”
(Enter Coach Helms.)
“Okay class. Sorry to be late. I recognize all of you from previous suspensions, so I’ll dispense with introductory matters. Please open your text books and get to work.”
“Coach Helms, we’ve got problems,” interjected Akashi.
“Hello! That’s why you’re in ISS, Right?” offered Coach Helms.
“Not those problems,” explained Akashi. “I’m talking about family problems. Our parents suck with their money.”
“Tell me about it,” said Coach Helms. “I wish I had some answers, but I overslept this morning because I work a night job to make ends meet. I can’t seem to make it on my teacher’s salary.”
“Is everyone in this town hopeless with their money?” asked Akashi. “If you don’t give us some answers, we’ll end up just like our parents – broke, tired and whining all the time. You’re supposed to be our teacher. Give us some direction here.”
Coach Helms thought for a moment, tapping his pencil nervously on the desk. Without looking up, he said, “What about Mrs. Kramer?”
“Old widow Kramer, the Social Studies teacher?” asked James. “I had her for a class. She dresses worse than my grandma…and her car isn’t anything to brag about.”
“She may not look the part,” said Coach Helms, “but my banker says she’s the best money manager he knows. She’s got all kinds of investments going. Besides Social Studies and Business, she also teaches Money Management.”
“Come to think of it,” continued James, “I remember her being hyped about her world travels. I wondered how she paid for it on a teacher’s salary. Maybe she got a big life insurance claim when her husband died. But she can be a little scary…and those riddles….”
“Her personality…,” continued Coach Helms. “She’s definitely a work of art. More Picasso than Norman Rockwell. Been around students so long that I think she’s more comfortable with teens than adults. Hardly ever see her in the teacher’s lounge. Speaks your language.
She eats second lunch. How about this? I’ll let you eat second lunch. Try to connect with her. Until then, get out those notebooks. I want to see some progress.”
Hmmm…
1. What are your friends and relatives doing right with their finances that you’d like to emulate?
2. What are your friends and relatives doing wrong with their finances that you’d like to avoid?
3. What would you like to learn most about making and managing your money?
4. For more free discussions and activities for each chapter, visit www.enjoyyourmoney.org.
Old Widow Kramer
Fast Forward to Reunion
“So we met her for lunch, and she told us her story,” Amy continued. “Tell him about it, Mrs. Kramer.”
“At thirty years of age, my husband died of cancer, leaving me, not with a fat life insurance pay out, but with over $20,000 in credit card debt and funeral expenses. The monthly payments on those debts were killing me. Every time the phone rang, I knew a debt collector would be on the other end, hounding and threatening me.
So I sold my house and moved into a condo to pay down my debts and reduce my expenses (and avoid mowing that blasted yard). Then, I took a weekend job. The extra job also helped keep my mind off of my grief. I worked like a dog to dig my way out of debt and get those accursed creditors off my back. In a little over four years, I paid those debts in full, on a day I refer to as ‘one of the best days of my life.’ I felt soooo free!
From that experience, I got a bad taste in my mouth about debt. I avoided it like the plague. I vowed to never again make credit card payments unless it was absolutely necessary.
I still owed about $15,000 on the condo, so I kept my weekend job, putting all my extra money into paying it down. I was amazed at how quickly I paid it off. I was totally debt free! Nobody could take my home from me. It was mine.
With very few expenses, I quit my weekend job and divided the money I used to make in payments into investments, travel and giving to worthy causes. So far, I’ve saved up about $500,000 toward an early retirement.”
“From $20,000 in debt to $500,000 in savings!” reiterated Amy. “That was quite an impressive story – actually, a bit unbelievable at the time.”
Amy continued. “From that short lunch, we knew that there was a lot more wisdom where that came from. And it was more than book wisdom. It came from her experience. She had beaten the system that was killing our parents. If we could learn her lessons at age 18, she could save us tons of headaches along the way.”
“More than that,” added James, “I decided that she just might hold the key to my dream of making a million dollars by my fortieth birthday and taking early retirement.”
“My needs were more emotional,” admitted Akashi. “My older siblings were academic overachievers. My parents drilled into me that ‘A’s in school would set me up for an ‘A’ career and an ‘A’ life. But somehow I’d botch up every class with ‘C’s and ‘D’s, which I thought would guarantee me a ‘C-Minus’ life. I was a loser, and felt that everyone saw a huge ‘L’ tattooed on my forehead. I acted tough, but was scared stiff at the thought of meeting with Mrs. Kramer. Yet, I felt that she offered a glimmer of hope. I was desperate. What did I have to lose?”
“We asked her if she would meet us for breakfast once a week,” continued Amy, “to ask questions and learn more. She said that she’d love to, if we’d pay her $5.00 each per breakfast. She explained that it would be a good lesson for us to pay for wise counsel.
For the next year, we met with her every Saturday morning, here at Hash Brown’s. Sometimes, we’d discuss a book for a month of meetings. Other times, we’d just ask questions. We’ll just tell you about the meetings where she pulled out her notebook and covered new topics. Each week, she exposed us to stuff we’d never learned, either at school or at home. Those meetings changed our lives.”
Hmmm…
Was it really possible for Mrs. Kramer to go from $20,000 in debt to $500,000 in savings in a span of about 30 years?
What keeps most people from making such a dramatic turnaround?
What could have kept Mrs. Kramer from getting into her predicament in the first place?
Part One
Investing Money
Breakfast #1
Discover the Basics
“I remember that first meeting well,” volunteered Antonio, wincing. “I’ll tell about the first two breakfasts.
So, I stroll in at 9:04 to find everyone there, waiting on me.”
Flashback
Kramer: You’re four minutes late!
Antonio: I have a hard time getting places on time.
Kramer: When you’re late, you waste our time. Half of success, financial or otherwise, is showing up…on time. It’s so important that I’ll lay out some incentive. If you’re late next week, you pay for the entire breakfast by yourself.
Fast Forward to Reunion
“Everyone but me thought it a splendid idea, so my resistance was outvoted. I was more than a little ticked off, threatening that I just might not show up at all next week. Kramer nonchalantly replied that it was my choice. We learned quickly that if we wanted her advice, it would be on her terms, not ours. She ignored my pouty expression and continued.”
Flashback
Kramer: So you want to learn how to handle your money. Well, if I talk the entire time, I don’t get to eat. So let’s do it this way. We order our food. While we wait for it to come, I tell a story or throw out five to ten minutes of advice while you think and jot down notes.
After the food comes, everyone throws in their thoughts. I want to know your experiences with the concept, good or bad. Take your best shots at my ideas. Too much education these days is merely transferring a set of notes from the teacher to the students, without it going through the minds of either.
I’m not easily offended. Tell me why it won’t work for you. Your objections and comments will help us distill each concept into something that will work for you. At the end of each session, tell us what you want to deal with the next week. That way, we stay practical. Sound good to you?
(Everyone agreed as the waiter arrived to take our orders.)
Kramer: First, I’ll pass out a sheet that should help you to lighten up on your parents. I know that you think they’re totally incompetent buffoons with finances. I want you to understand the bigger picture of our culture, a big part of the reason for their money issues. Your parents’ neighbors, friends and relatives probably handle their money the same way. They’re just doing what their culture has taught them. When everybody’s doing it, it’s hard to question your way of life.
James: You’re saying that if I were to live with my neighbors for awhile, I’d likely find the same financial problems that Mom and Dad have? I’ve assumed that their nice cars and smiling faces meant that they were better off than me.
Kramer: Wrong assumption. Here’s the way many of your friends and neighbors manage their money.
Personal Finances in America
According to surveys:
Ninety-seven percent of workers over 45 say they regret how they spent their money, in light of how much they could have saved.1
Almost one in four adults live paycheck to paycheck.2
Fifty-nine percent of Americans don’t save regularly.3
We’re getting worse and worse at saving.4
Twenty-five years ago, Americans saved over ten percent of their income.
Ten years ago, we saved 4.5 percent.
By 2005, for the first time since the Great Depression, we spent more than we earned.
Approximately 1,500,000 Americans declare personal bankruptcy each year.5
The average college student graduates with over $20,000 in debt.6
Most Americans haven’t even calculated how much money they need to retire.7
Personal debt is reaching record highs, and personal savings is reaching all time lows.8
James: That’s insane! I'd hoped that retirement would be the time for me to say goodbye to the eight to five grind and relax at a beach house. If I follow the crowd in finances, I’ll be worrying about money the rest of my life!
Akashi: One in four adults living paycheck to paycheck? Talk about risky living! And adults complain about teens’ risky behaviors! A short-term job loss or illness could put them in serious debt and make them lose their houses.
Amy: The scary side of it for me is that if we don’t do something different, we’ll all be over $20,000 in debt in about six years. Then we’ll go to work and live paycheck to paycheck, until we retire in a low rent district, watching Wheel of Fortune on one of our four antenna stations, constantly whining about how we regret the way we lived our lives and don’t have enough money to have any fun.
Akashi: Our kids will probably hate our visits, assuming we’re there to ask for another handout!
Kramer: Exactly! Somehow, you’ve got to break loose from a culture that’s gone crazy with its finances. Many dig themselves into a deeper hole every day, enjoying life less and less as they spend everything they’ve got to pay off past debts. In the land of the free, they’ve become financially enslaved.
(Kramer gets a wild look in her eyes, more animated with each sentence as she rises from her seat.)
You’re already different from the mainstream. That’s why I relate to you. I challenge you to extend your independent thinking and counterculture attitudes to your finances.
And to that end (she pulls back a glass ketchup bottle high overhead with both hands, waving it menacingly in the air), I christen this group (she brings the bottle back down with increasing speed, aimed directly at the table), THE COUNTERCULTURE CLUB!
(She pulls back the bottle at the last second, missing the table, but sending her students scattering all directions. Kramer erupts into laughter.)
Amy: You scared me to death! Did you really have to embarrass us in front of all these people to make that point?
Kramer: A little adrenaline is good to help cement points in your memory. You’ll never forget this moment. Plus, if you never get over the “Oh my gosh, what’s everybody gonna think?” thing, you’ll find yourself living everyone else's life, the life of your culture, rather than your own life. I like a little drama now and again to spice things up. Later today I’ll get a good laugh out of picturing your faces as you envisioned ketchup exploding all over the restaurant.
James: (Settling back into his chair.) A good laugh at our expense! Don’t be surprised if you find toilet paper in your yard from your favorite club to test your own embarrassment index. So where were we? Something about how our culture sucks at finances?
Kramer: From the stats on my handout, you know how NOT to handle your finances - the way most others handle their finances. You’ve seen it in your parents and now in the culture at large. Let’s transition to how we can do finances right. This being the first breakfast, let’s start with an overview - some basics of financial wisdom. In the coming weeks, we’ll devote entire breakfasts to each principle.
But instead of handing out the list, I want you to draw out the basics from a real person who went counterculture with her finances. From decades of teaching, I’ve found that students remember stories better than lists; plus, stories are more interesting. As I tell the story, jot down the principles that you think made the person successful.
Oseola Enjoys Life and Saves a Fortune
Some of us might fear that we'll never have enough money to make ends meet and enjoy life. What if your job doesn't pay well, and you can't seem to get ahead? I want to introduce you to Oseola, who has a lot to teach us. She didn't have the advantages of most of us, yet she enjoyed life and saved a ton.
Oseola grew up in a simple house with her grandmother, mother and an aunt. As an eight-year-old, she would wash clothes after school to help make ends meet. Her school education ended at age 12, when she dropped out to care for her sick aunt and work full time at washing.
So far, she's not on anyone’s “most likely to succeed” list.
Her work was hard, but she enjoyed it. She washed the old-fashioned way: building a fire under her wash pot, then soaking, washing and boiling a bundle of clothes. Rub. Wrench. Rub again. Rinse. Starch. Hang out to dry. She worked Monday through Saturday, for 75 years, until arthritis forced her into retirement at age 86. She never got to finish school, never had a car and owned few possessions. Her TV received only one station. But that didn't bother her because she never watched it very much anyway.
I can hear you thinking, ''Get a life, woman!'' But, you see, Oseola did have a life - a great life. She didn't desire travel or possessions. She loved her God, her family and her work. Singing and storytelling filled her days with joy and laughter.
She never bought on credit so that she would be financially free. And since she didn't need money for a lot of possessions or travel, she invested it, a little each month. By July 1995, a half year after her retirement, she had saved - get this - $280,000. That’s over a quarter of a million dollars! Then, she stunned the world by giving away over half of it, $150,000, to establish a college scholarship for needy students, offering others the education she never had.
Until recently, Oseola McCarty referred to herself as a ''poor little old colored woman who walked everywhere.'' No one paid her much attention when she was out. But when the word leaked out about her donation, the world took notice.
She has since received numerous awards, been interviewed on ABC, CNN, NBC, BET and MTV. She's been featured in Newsweek, The New York Times, People, Life, Ebony, Essence and Jet. But all that recognition never changed her simple life. You see, she didn't need all the recognition. In her own words, ''I think my secret was contentment. I was happy with what I had.''9
Now, compare her to most Americans. Many with huge salaries haven't managed to save a cent. Many are worth less than nothing, worrying constantly about their debts. But Oseola shows me that if she can save over a quarter of a million dollars by washing people's clothes in boiling water over a fire, I can save money as a schoolteacher.
So, what do you think?
Reflections on Oseola
Akashi: I’ll start. I think her life sucked. She spent her entire life in a hovel working the same crappy job day in and day out, with only one TV channel for entertainment. She didn’t even own a car. What kind of life is that?
Antonio: Akashi! Mrs. Kramer is trying to help us out here. Don’t be so hard on her!
Kramer: I’m the one who sets the ground rules, and I challenge you to be just as outspoken as Akashi. If you other three sit there smiling at each other and sipping your juice while disagreeing in your gut, we’re getting nowhere. Say what you think. Be ruthless.
Jack Welch, one of the greatest business leaders of our time, devoted an entire chapter of his book Winning to push for candor.10 He observes that we usually don’t tell it like it is, fearing we’ll hurt people’s feelings. He thinks lack of candor is deadly to business.
Lack of candor may be easier in the short-run, but it hurts us in the long-run. Without candor, we don’t face reality. Be honest, guys! Do you agree with Akashi?
Antonio: I’ll be candid with you, Akashi. In ISS you complained about your parents being so wrapped up in their work and living in a ritzy neighborhood that they didn’t have time for the important stuff, like family.
Oseola chose relationships over things. She enjoyed working at home, spending time with her relatives and helping others. She didn’t secretly desire to get the latest version of Halo or go to Disneyland. She lived life the way she wanted to, had lots of fun and can look back with the satisfaction of knowing she helped others along the way.
Think of Einstein. He never drove a car. He enjoyed thinking more than mansions and hot cars.
Akashi: You nailed me. As much as I complain about my parents’ obsession with things and money, I’m pretty hooked on some of my things, like always upgrading to the latest cell phone, playing online games till late at night and the freedom that my car gives me.
But fun is different for everyone. I do admire Oseola for bucking the crowd, choosing her own path, finding financial freedom and putting people first.
Kramer: We don’t have to adopt everything about her life. But what can we learn from her financial success?
James: I’m astounded that she could accumulate such wealth from what must have been a pitiful salary.
Amy: I think it’s actually pretty simple. She spent less than she made. With no car, low-cost housing and no frivolous spending, she could save more than a lawyer who has a great salary but spends it all on his ritzy house and payments on his Porsche. The first thing I learned from Oseola is: Live beneath your means. All of our parents make tons more than Oseola, but I’ll bet you that everything they get on Friday is spent by the next Thursday. You can’t save if you spend all that you make.
Akashi: Look not only at what she did, but what she didn’t do. She didn’t own even one credit card. Whereas most of us spend outrageous money in interest, she waited till she could pay cash. I’ll bet that one habit saved her thousands and thousands of dollars.
Kramer: You bet right, Akashi. In Oseola’s own words,
''I save my money till I can buy something outright.''11
Akashi: So, principle number two is: Avoid paying interest.
Antonio: Principle number three: Save for the future. If she had a medical emergency, she wouldn’t have to sell her house to pay for it.
James: She took the money that she would have been paying the credit card companies and invested it, so that she was receiving interest rather than giving it away. Over time, it all added up. Principle number four: Invest over time.
Antonio: She worked hard at something she enjoyed. Even a small salary adds up when you put in the hours.
Kramer: I think you’ve summed up the basics of financial wisdom. Think about those principles this week, and see how they apply to your personal finances. In future weeks, we’ll talk in much more depth about each principle. What do you want to cover next week?
James: I’m fascinated with how Oseola multiplied her money. I want to be financially independent as quickly as possible. How can investments multiply my money so that I can retire in my 40’s?
Kramer: Is that okay with everyone else?
(Nods all around.)
Hmmm…
What facts from the “Personal Finances in America” sheet bother you the most? Why?
Why do you think Americans struggle with their finances?
How would your personal finances be different if you handled them more like Oseola?
Are you living above or below your means? How could you begin living below your means and saving some money each week?
What can you do this week to start handling your money better?
Assignment
This week, ask your parents to tell you what they know about investments. Go on the Internet and read some basic articles on stocks and mutual funds. You’ll need to bring your calculators. What I’ll tell you is so extraordinary that you won’t believe it unless you see the numbers yourselves.
One more thing! I have a riddle for you to solve:
To some I’m their greatest nightmare
To others their greatest friend.
Neither spirit nor flesh
I’m not hard to comprehend.
I increase the wealth
Of both paupers and kings,
Rewarding the wise,
Robbing fools of their dreams.
I work when you work
Just as hard when you sleep.
With me Buffett made billions
If you sow, you can also reap.
I’m slow at the beginning
‘Till my power is unfurled.
It’s why bankers and investors say,
“You’re the eighth wonder of the world.”
Resource to Take You Deeper
Read Oseola McCarty, Simple Wisdom for Rich Living, (Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1996).
*********************************
Please do not construe this book as the author’s or publisher’s prescription for your personal finances. Only a qualified financial counselor who knows your specific life circumstances, your personality, your goals and your objectives might be qualified to advise you in these matters.
Enjoy Your Money! Copyright © 2008 by Wisdom Creek Press, LLC. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for brief reviews. For information contact Wisdom Creek Press, LLC, 5814 Sailboat Pointe, Acworth, Georgia, 30101, www.wisdomcreekpress.com.
Cover design by Carole Maugé-Lewis
Front Cover Photography by Rasmus Rasussen
Author Photo by Christina Cosenza
Typesetting by Callisa Ink & Co and Carole Maugé-Lewis
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, J. Steve, 1957-
Enjoy Your Money! : how to make it, save it, invest it and give it : the adventures of the Counterculture Club/ by J. Steve Miller.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
LCCN: 2008941060
ISBN-13: 978-0-9818756-7-5
ISBN-10: 0-9818756-7-X
1. Finance, Personal. I. Title.
HG179.M4919 2009 332.024
QB109-200015
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FALL INTO FICTION WINNER!!!
This week's winner is Katy!
I'm going to get books in next week's mail...battling health and some other issues lately.
Going on a bit of a blog break over the weekend. Have some personal stuff to sort out. Would greatly appreciate prayers for the family and for me...in desperate need of wisdom and joy right about now.
See you in a few days!
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Squeezing Good out of Bad by James N. Watkins
From the engaging cover art to the humorous contents, "Squeezing Good Out of Bad" will put a new perspective on your 'life lemons'. James N. Watkins has had his share of lemons to squeeze good out of, and his writing rings with first hand knowledge.
The book shares ten things we should consider doing when faced with a souring situation, from checking the packing slip to make sure it's our situation, to painting smiles on our lemons to cheer ourselves and others up.
But the book isn't all light-hearted: James recognizes that sometimes we are faced with serious trials, and some need help that goes beyond painting faces on lemons. His book is geared toward humor and lightening our load...and our viewpoint.
He offers other suggestions and references in the appendix of the book. For those who need professional help in coping with issues in life, they too will be blessed with James' book.
My only issue was with the printing. At times I felt as if I was reading an unedited draft, longing for a smoother look to the pages. That might seem nit-picky to some, but with my eyesight, at times the words felt as if they were coming at me instead of laying flat on the page.
But, in spite of that glitch, I'm giving "Squeezing Good Out of Bad" four out of five bookmarks, with a lemon peeler as a charm...that way we can get more 'zest' out of life! Sorry...blame it on the book!
My thanks to Kathy Carlton Willis for my copy!
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Dinosaurs For Kids by Ken Ham
Ken Ham loves three things: God, kids and DINOSAURS! And you'll find ample evidence to support all in his new book, "Dinosaurs For Kids", published by MasterBooks (my thanks for my copy!)
Filled with rich, full color illustrations, "Dinosaurs For Kids" is over sixty pages of pure enjoyment for anyone curious about these creatures. Ken's book follows a seven point layout of dinosaur history: formed, fearless, fallen, flood, faded, found and fiction.
Included in Ken's book is a glossary of dinosaur names, some little known dinosaurs, and LOTS of fast facts. Anyone needing information for a report or an essay will have a goldmine of statistics and details (just remember to put it all in your own words!).
The drawings are very realistic and you'll find nothing cartoonish about this book! Ken obviously takes dinosaurs very seriously, and he takes Scripture seriously as well. You'll find lots of Bible passages quoted in his book.
Best of all, Ken teaches everything from a Biblical point of view, and he backs it all up with facts and not fiction. In an age where believing anything goes, it's refreshing to find someone who only teaches truth and doesn't follow popular myth.
You'll also find fossils and information on evolution--but from a proper perspective. Ken busts down the myths and legends and lays it all side by side with concrete evidence and simple logic.
I'm giving "Dinosaurs for Kids" five out of five bookmarks, with an archaeologist's hat as a charm--think Indiana Jones for Jesus!
Happy Reading!
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FIRST Presents "The Source Of Miracles" by Kathleen McGowan
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card author is:
and the book:
Fireside (November 3, 2009)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kathleen McGowan is the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers The Expected One and The Book of Love, which are the first two novels in The Magdalene Line fiction series. This series is based on 20 years of research on four continents into the history of women in Christianity and their long-forgotten role in the development of global spirituality. Kathleen McGowan has been interviewed frequently on network and international television, including segments with Diane Sawyer, CNN, Fox News and the BBC. She has appeared on radio programs worldwide and has been profiled in hundreds of publications, including the New York Times and USA Today. She lives in Los Angeles. Visit the author's website.
Product Details:
List Price: $22.00
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Fireside (November 3, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 143913765X
ISBN-13: 978-1439137659
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
I
Introduction—The -Lord’s Prayer
On Easter Sunday in the year 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that two billion people worldwide were united by one powerful common denominator: the -Lord’s Prayer. On that date, nearly one third of the -planet’s population recited that prayer in their native languages as an expression of faith.
While Christianity has been divided since its inception into factions with theological differences, this single prayer unifies all of them. The content of the -Lord’s Prayer cannot be affected by dogma or politics. Even while different denominations may make minor variations, the essential words and the teachings they impart remain unchanged since the day that Jesus first taught them to his followers. The two billion souls who call themselves Christians often differ in more ways than they are alike, yet this single prayer is the common ground for all of them. Jesus gave us a prayer so universal and impactful that it would endure for thousands of years and against the harshest odds. It is not only indelible, it is eternal.
The -Lord’s Prayer is now, as it was when Jesus lived, the incorruptible formula for personal and global transformation.
Most Christians learn the -Lord’s Prayer in early childhood and can recite it by rote and without effort. It is so ingrained in our memories that we -don’t even have to think about it.
And therein lies the problem. We -don’t even have to think about it.
While most of us can rattle off this greatest of prayers and know that it is a cornerstone of Christianity, the full extent of our understanding often ends right about there. Many of us have forgotten the extraordinary power and meaning behind the words, if we ever thought about them to begin with. I learned the -Lord’s Prayer when I was three years old, in preschool, many years before I would ever know what words like hallowed, trespasses, or temptation meant. There -wasn’t a child in my class who could have told you the meaning behind the prayer, and yet we were all able to recite it flawlessly on Parents’ Night. We were taught to speak it on cue, like obedient little parrots who could make the appropriate sounds come out after endless repetitions but had no ability to understand the somewhat exotic--sounding syllables.
I can assure you that we were not taught the origins of the prayer as children, and even if someone had tried to explain it to us, we were far too young to understand it as a dynamic spiritual practice and a foolproof recipe for creating a joyous and fulfilled life.
So we grow up never knowing that, with the -Lord’s Prayer, Jesus was giving us the formula for manifesting miracles—not only when we most need them, but on a very regular basis.
While interviewing a random selection of Christians from different denominations, I was stunned to find how few of them even knew that this prayer came directly from Jesus. “Wait a minute—Jesus created the -Lord’s Prayer?” was the shocked question I heard over and over again. Even some truly devout churchgoers looked at me in surprise when I said this prayer was the work of Jesus. Some -didn’t believe me, even when I cited the gospel accounts that attest to this origin. One replied, “But they -didn’t teach us that in school,” as if such an omission in our spiritual education were unusual!
But Jesus was, in fact, the author of this most perfectly constructed blueprint for spiritual change. In the New Testament, the -Lord’s Prayer can be found in the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 6, verses 9–13, as a component of his Sermon on the Mount, and then again in Luke, chapter 11, verses 1–4, when one of the disciples asks Jesus to “teach us to pray.” And teach us he did. In doing so, he gave us this priceless treasure: a set of simple and unchangeable directions, in the form of a prayer, for discovering the real secret of how to have the life you truly desire: a life filled with love, happiness, and yes, even wealth. The prayer shows us that all these wonderful gifts come about through an increase in faith: faith in God, faith in ourselves, and faith in our fellow humans—in that order.
The -Lord’s Prayer addresses the issues that hurt us, confound us, and impede our progress, and illuminates the way in which we can overcome these obstacles. The prayer is our guide to purifying our spirit of anything that troubles it and holds us back from being “fully realized” human beings—which is to say, human beings functioning at our highest potential, a potential that leads directly to happiness and abundance. Using this prayer regularly as a spiritual practice creates real and lasting change at the soul level, change which becomes manifest in very earthly, visible ways.
When spoken with faith and intention, these are literally magic words.
On the eve of my thirtieth birthday in the spring of 1993, I became an ordained minister as an expression of my commitment to studying and understanding the teachings of Jesus. Fifteen years, thousands of pages of reading, and hundreds of hours of spirited discussions later, I have come to what some may consider a simplistic, and therefore perhaps controversial, view of Christian teachings. I believe that if you study and hold tight to the -Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes, a handful of parables, and what Jesus tells us in Matthew 22, verses 37–39—love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and love thy neighbor as thyself—then you pretty much have everything you need to live a perfect life and encourage peace on earth. But foremost of these gifts, the center from which all blessings spring, is the -Lord’s Prayer. While the other elements teach us valuable spiritual lessons, this great prayer is the tool that connects us immediately and directly to the source that is within each of us: the source of faith, the source of love, the source of for-giveness. And in combination, those things are the source of very real miracles.
My own life has been transformed dramatically by utilizing the -Lord’s Prayer as a regular spiritual practice. As a result, I have witnessed the most miraculous events, including wonders of life and death. I have been blessed with extraordinary abundance and joy. But this was not always the case.
To show you how I came to truly know the -Lord’s Prayer as the perfect formula for dramatic transformation—and how you can do the same—I must first take you with me into the past, through the once locked doors of a secret society and into the heart of a medieval mystery school.
I must first introduce you to the Mystery of the Rose with Six Petals.
Introduction—The -Lord’s Prayer
On Easter Sunday in the year 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that two billion people worldwide were united by one powerful common denominator: the -Lord’s Prayer. On that date, nearly one third of the -planet’s population recited that prayer in their native languages as an expression of faith.
While Christianity has been divided since its inception into factions with theological differences, this single prayer unifies all of them. The content of the -Lord’s Prayer cannot be affected by dogma or politics. Even while different denominations may make minor variations, the essential words and the teachings they impart remain unchanged since the day that Jesus first taught them to his followers. The two billion souls who call themselves Christians often differ in more ways than they are alike, yet this single prayer is the common ground for all of them. Jesus gave us a prayer so universal and impactful that it would endure for thousands of years and against the harshest odds. It is not only indelible, it is eternal.
The -Lord’s Prayer is now, as it was when Jesus lived, the incorruptible formula for personal and global transformation.
Most Christians learn the -Lord’s Prayer in early childhood and can recite it by rote and without effort. It is so ingrained in our memories that we -don’t even have to think about it.
And therein lies the problem. We -don’t even have to think about it.
While most of us can rattle off this greatest of prayers and know that it is a cornerstone of Christianity, the full extent of our understanding often ends right about there. Many of us have forgotten the extraordinary power and meaning behind the words, if we ever thought about them to begin with. I learned the -Lord’s Prayer when I was three years old, in preschool, many years before I would ever know what words like hallowed, trespasses, or temptation meant. There -wasn’t a child in my class who could have told you the meaning behind the prayer, and yet we were all able to recite it flawlessly on Parents’ Night. We were taught to speak it on cue, like obedient little parrots who could make the appropriate sounds come out after endless repetitions but had no ability to understand the somewhat exotic--sounding syllables.
I can assure you that we were not taught the origins of the prayer as children, and even if someone had tried to explain it to us, we were far too young to understand it as a dynamic spiritual practice and a foolproof recipe for creating a joyous and fulfilled life.
So we grow up never knowing that, with the -Lord’s Prayer, Jesus was giving us the formula for manifesting miracles—not only when we most need them, but on a very regular basis.
While interviewing a random selection of Christians from different denominations, I was stunned to find how few of them even knew that this prayer came directly from Jesus. “Wait a minute—Jesus created the -Lord’s Prayer?” was the shocked question I heard over and over again. Even some truly devout churchgoers looked at me in surprise when I said this prayer was the work of Jesus. Some -didn’t believe me, even when I cited the gospel accounts that attest to this origin. One replied, “But they -didn’t teach us that in school,” as if such an omission in our spiritual education were unusual!
But Jesus was, in fact, the author of this most perfectly constructed blueprint for spiritual change. In the New Testament, the -Lord’s Prayer can be found in the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 6, verses 9–13, as a component of his Sermon on the Mount, and then again in Luke, chapter 11, verses 1–4, when one of the disciples asks Jesus to “teach us to pray.” And teach us he did. In doing so, he gave us this priceless treasure: a set of simple and unchangeable directions, in the form of a prayer, for discovering the real secret of how to have the life you truly desire: a life filled with love, happiness, and yes, even wealth. The prayer shows us that all these wonderful gifts come about through an increase in faith: faith in God, faith in ourselves, and faith in our fellow humans—in that order.
The -Lord’s Prayer addresses the issues that hurt us, confound us, and impede our progress, and illuminates the way in which we can overcome these obstacles. The prayer is our guide to purifying our spirit of anything that troubles it and holds us back from being “fully realized” human beings—which is to say, human beings functioning at our highest potential, a potential that leads directly to happiness and abundance. Using this prayer regularly as a spiritual practice creates real and lasting change at the soul level, change which becomes manifest in very earthly, visible ways.
When spoken with faith and intention, these are literally magic words.
On the eve of my thirtieth birthday in the spring of 1993, I became an ordained minister as an expression of my commitment to studying and understanding the teachings of Jesus. Fifteen years, thousands of pages of reading, and hundreds of hours of spirited discussions later, I have come to what some may consider a simplistic, and therefore perhaps controversial, view of Christian teachings. I believe that if you study and hold tight to the -Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes, a handful of parables, and what Jesus tells us in Matthew 22, verses 37–39—love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and love thy neighbor as thyself—then you pretty much have everything you need to live a perfect life and encourage peace on earth. But foremost of these gifts, the center from which all blessings spring, is the -Lord’s Prayer. While the other elements teach us valuable spiritual lessons, this great prayer is the tool that connects us immediately and directly to the source that is within each of us: the source of faith, the source of love, the source of for-giveness. And in combination, those things are the source of very real miracles.
My own life has been transformed dramatically by utilizing the -Lord’s Prayer as a regular spiritual practice. As a result, I have witnessed the most miraculous events, including wonders of life and death. I have been blessed with extraordinary abundance and joy. But this was not always the case.
To show you how I came to truly know the -Lord’s Prayer as the perfect formula for dramatic transformation—and how you can do the same—I must first take you with me into the past, through the once locked doors of a secret society and into the heart of a medieval mystery school.
I must first introduce you to the Mystery of the Rose with Six Petals.
Happy Reading!
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
FIRST Presents "Healing for Victims of Sexual Abuse" by Paula Sanford
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card author is:
and the book:
Healing Victims of Sexual Abuse
Charisma House (August 4, 2009)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paula Sandford is cofounder of Elijah House ministries. Throughout the past fifty years, she has ministered to countless number of people in the areas of inner healing and transformation as an ordained minister and counselor. Many around the world consider her to be their personal counselor and spiritual mother. With her husband, John, she has coauthored more than twenty books. Paula and John have been married for over fifty years. They have six children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.Visit the author's website.
Product Details:
List Price: $14.99
Paperback: 146 pages
Publisher: Charisma House (August 4, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1599797534
ISBN-13: 978-1599797533
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
Chapter 1
Eyes to See and Ears to Hear
Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember?
Mark 8:18
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Romans 8:1
We . . . shall assure our heart before Him, in whatever our heart condemns us; for God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.
1 John 3:19–20
I
can't believe it!" "How could I have been so blind?" "How
can I ever forgive myself for letting such a thing go on? I left my child so vulnerable!" "Where was I? How could I have failed
to see?"
Questions such as these have arisen from the bleeding and bewildered hearts of thousands of parents who have just discovered that their child, who they felt had been so safe in their love, nurture, and protection, has been sexually molested by one they trusted. There are no simple answers that can instantly take away the pain.
Dealing With Self-Condemnation
As parents or loved ones of an abused child, we must begin by dealing with our own self-condemnation for our failure to be what we so desperately wanted to be and overcome the need to punish ourselves by wallowing in the misery of "what-ifs" and "if-onlys." It is a fact that Jesus bears our grief and carries our sorrows (Isa. 53:4), but we have to release to Him the burden of our woundedness, anger, and hate. The first step is to choose to forgive ourselves. With the support and, if needed, the coaching of a prayer partner or prayer minister, we should pray, confessing both our feelings and our faith:
Lord, I am overwhelmed by my grief. My heart condemns me for my failure to protect my child. I don't know what to do; it seems like the whole world is crashing in on me, and I'm spinning in confusion. O God, I need some answers! I know that in You there is no condemnation at all. I don't know how to forgive myself, but by an act of my will I make that choice. And I choose to trust You to deal with my heart and set me free from condemning self-accusation or any other way in which I might punish myself.
The prayer minister or prayer partner needs to respond, strongly affirming:
Thank You, Lord, that You weep with and for Your children. You have heard this prayer, and Your heart is full of compassion. Thank You for Your forgiveness, love, and healing balm that You are pouring into this wounded and repentant heart right now. (Person's name), in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are forgiven. Receive that forgiveness. Lord, lift off the weight of guilt. Bring all thoughts and feelings of condemnation to death on Your cross. Quiet the inner storms, and comfort (person's name) in this time of fear. Lord, we stand together in the strength of Your Spirit and choose to put our trust in You. We invite You to take charge of us and every aspect of this difficult situation we face. Let us do all things in Your wisdom, according to Your grace, love, and power.
Following the prayer, we need to walk in a continual discipline of reckoning self-accusation and condemnation as dead on the cross each time we recognize that we are beginning to entertain such thoughts and feelings. If we do not, the process of healing stops. Each time we can say to the Lord, "Here I go again, putting myself under guilt. In Your name, Jesus, I renounce that and choose to walk in Your forgiveness." And then go on with whatever tasks we have to do.
Understanding Why We Had No Eyes to See
Beyond choosing to forgive ourselves, we need answers to the question, "How could I have been so blind?"
By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches. A wise man is strong, and a man of knowledge increases power.
—Proverbs 24:3–5
The first answer is that we did not want to believe it possible that a trusted friend or loved one, especially a father or stepfather, could have abused our child. If we suspected at all, we probably resisted the idea, feeling guilty that such a thing would even cross our mind. If suspicion persisted, fear of possible consequences of discovering truth overcame our ability to confront the issue. And so we suppressed our thoughts and feelings to the point of total denial. Unwittingly we became literally blind, deaf, and insensitive to reality.
Linda was a lovely, gentle woman whom John and I had known well for many years. Her marriage to Bill was written in tension, dictated by his frequent explosions of violent, unexplainable temper and punctuated by her tearful but persistent and often placating attempts to gather the broken but still workable pieces of their home life together for the sake of their children. Though Bill professed to be a born-again, Spirit-filled Christian, he had fallen into adultery numerous times. He had begged for forgiveness and had declared vehemently on each occasion that he was truly repentant, had learned his lesson, and would never fall again.
Finally, when he was caught seducing a teenage babysitter, Linda recognized that he could never change until he dealt with deep issues in his heart. But he stubbornly avoided taking the initiative to submit himself to a prayer minister, even though friends and family strongly encouraged him to do so. It was not until Linda obtained a legal separation that he relented by agreeing to receive extensive prayer ministry, that being the prerequisite for any thought of reconciliation. John and I had ministered to the two of them from time to time as much as Bill had been able to allow. But we had seen that he was always more interested in patching a quarrel than in truly healing his marriage or transforming his life. Knowing that we were too close to Linda to minister to them with sufficient objectivity, we recommended that they go to a couple we knew who are among the finest counselors available in either the Christian or secular community.
During the ensuing seven months, Bill faced many of the root causes for his insecurities and for his need to defile women. He dealt with a number of basic sources for his anger. His counselors determined that he had progressed far enough to return to his family. For a period of time he was able to manifest the effects of his healing, and Linda for the first time began to celebrate real hope for a stable marriage. It was at this point that Bill decided he could sustain his new life on his own—without counseling or a support group—and the healing process was aborted. He continued to play the role of the new man, making all the right sounds, but allowed no one to relate closely enough to know him or to haul him to account when he began to fall back periodically into former patterns of irritability and temper.
Bill's and Linda's fourteen-year-old daughter, Karen, who had always been a responsible, sensitive, loving child and good student, began to exhibit rebellious, irresponsible behavior. Truancy and unexplained absences from home grew in frequency. Often Linda would arrive home from work to discover that Karen was nowhere to be found. Attempts to enforce discipline elicited angry, defensive outbursts. When anyone invited Karen to talk about her problems, she defiantly rejected every attempt to reach her and retreated into sullen moodiness.
Finally and with great difficulty she came to her mother with a horrible story of sexual abuse. Her father had been molesting her since the time of her parents' separation, which meant that she was being abused all during the time of their counseling and reconciliation!
Shattered, torn, fearful, and confused, Linda confronted her husband. Bill adamantly denied all accusations, claiming that Karen's imagination was running away with her, that she had been unduly influenced by the stories of friends who had been abused. He went on, dramatically playing the role of the injured party. Linda didn't know whom or what to believe. Finally, after repeated questioning, he confessed to having "touched" her "once or twice." As Karen's behavior progressed more and more to the extreme, however, it became evident that he was guilty of much more than he had been willing to confess.
Realization of what had been taking place for years within her home overwhelmed Linda with the force of a tidal wave. She had wanted so desperately to believe that Bill was changing and had so set herself to celebrate every little sign of his improvement that she had shut out the little signals that might otherwise have alerted her to the presence of trouble. Now she had no alternative but to put him out of the home in an effort to protect Karen. If she had not, the state would likely have taken her children from her. She and the children proceeded with family counseling throughout most of the next year and received a great deal of healing from that source as well as through support groups within her church.
Bill received counseling for sexual rehabilitation while serving a term in prison. He and Linda are divorced. She and the children have rebonded, and the Lord is blessing and redeeming their lives as only He can.
Equipping Our Eyes to Recognize Symptoms of Sexual Abuse
A second answer to parental blindness may lie in the simple fact that few people have either the experience or the knowledge that would equip them to identify (in the behavior of their children) the symptoms that commonly result from sexual abuse.
Educating oneself to recognize sexual abuse symptoms "after the fact" might seem to some to be too late and somewhat useless. This is not the case at all. An important part of healing begins as we are enabled to identify in right perspective the painfully mystifying behaviors of our children. As we realize clearly and specifically that their strange, out-of-control, and often hurtful responses proceed from woundedness and fear, we can begin to relate to them easily with tenderness and compassion rather than with frustration and anger. We can seek their forgiveness not only for our failure to protect them but also for many wounds and unbearable pressures we inflicted on them in the blindness of our desperation to rescue them from self-destructive patterns.
Most victims of sexual abuse have worried about themselves and have struggled with feelings of guilt they haven't known how to handle. Children have felt they were "bad"; teenagers have seen the bewilderment and hurt in their mother's eyes and have felt responsible for injury to younger siblings; they may have wanted to stop running, cease punishing, and ask for help but couldn't. An enlightened and empathetic parent can help them to know that their feelings and behavior were normal reactions to the abuse they experienced, that they were not terrible or crazy. A prayer minister can help victims to see these things, but a parent who is an affirming part of the process can lay an effective foundation for reconciliation and rebonding.
An informed parent of an abused child can also help to provide immeasurable encouragement and healing to others who suffer similar heartbreak.
The following lists of symptoms are not intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive. Rather they serve to provide signposts that point to possible abuse. It is important to realize that children who exhibit some of these behaviors might not be victims of abuse but could be acting out other pressures, upsets, and influences in their lives. This information is a composite of John's and my own experiences in prayer ministry that we found confirmed in varieties of written material and in conversations with parents, other prayer ministers, and preschool instructors.
Behavioral Symptoms in Toddlers and Preschool Children
Anxiety in the presence of persons with whom they used to be comfortable; being ill at ease around particular people or types of people; for instance, tense and/or tearful withdrawal from the presence of men and boys
Sudden unaccustomed fear of bathrooms or shower rooms, or nervous resistance to being undressed
Masturbation that exceeds curious exploration and discovery: preoccupation with excessive sexual manipulation or rubbing themselves against chair arms, pillows, dolls, etc.; sex play with other children beyond the normal "playing doctor" games: inserting objects into the vagina or anus, imitating aspects of adult love play. (In some homes pornographic movie scenes will have made disturbing impressions.) One preschool teacher reported that she had observed several children who tended to group together in a corner of the schoolyard playing a game of pulling down one another's pants. On one occasion she discovered a child trying to initiate oral genital stimulation.
Sleeplessness, disturbed sleep, nightmares
Excessive crying, clinging to a parent, not wanting to leave the house, unusually fearful responses to being left with a babysitter
Sudden personality changes: i.e., a normally quiet child becomes hyperactive or negatively aggressive toward other children.
Excessive and chronic itching and/or tenderness in genital areas
Behavioral Symptoms in Children From Primary School Age to Preteens
Decline in consistency and quality of schoolwork: inability to concentrate, assignments not completed, truancy, tardiness, falling grades
Disturbed sleep, nightmarish dreams, inability to sleep; wearing multiple layers of clothing to bed
Decline in energy level due to anxiety, exhaustion, and/or lack of sleep
Fear of being alone with men or boys; avoidance of particular people with whom the child used to be comfortable; withdrawal from friends and activities previously enjoyed
Change in eating habits: nervous or distracted picking at food, compulsive overeating for comfort
In girls: poor personal hygiene in a girl who normally cares about her appearance (attempting to make herself unattractive)
Exaggeration of normal personality traits: i.e., a daydreamer becomes even more out of touch with the world, an energetic child becomes hyperactive, etc.; sudden dramatic swings to opposite personality poles
Invention of irrational excuses not to participate in school or extracurricular activities that formerly inspired enthusiasm
Sudden inordinate modesty, self-consciousness about the body; fear of restrooms and showers
Sudden cessation of conversational sharing
Bed-wetting when it was not a problem previously. A child can be so wounded by sexual abuse that he/she suppresses awareness of sex organs, and thus fails to respond to the body's signals that would normally awaken the one who needs to urinate.
Increasing inability to relate well to peers
Unexplained anger and aggressive behavior
Reluctance to go home after school
Running away: boys tend more to run by withdrawing. Girls tend to literally run away from home.
Behavioral Symptoms in Adolescents
Running: A girl may leave school in the middle of the day to go riding with a friend. She may go to a friend's home, fail to notify her family of her whereabouts, and perhaps spend the night. She may disappear for a number of days, fleeing from the home of one friend to another. When she returns, it is with irrational excuses or often with no excuse at all. When challenged, she "can't remember" what her friend's address is, or she "doesn't have a phone." She may exit by a window in the middle of the night.
She tends to keep company with friends who are several years older than she, and many of the crowd she chooses are dropouts with no responsibility to occupy their time, with no visible parental support or supervision.
She may take with her no change of clothes, no cosmetics, not even a coat for her periodic excursions.
When questioned or confronted, her response is evasive and emphatic: "I'm OK. I can take care of myself."
We have observed such behavior in girls as early as the seventh or eighth grades, intensifying wherever molestation continues to be a threat. Usually the abuser is the father or stepfather, though similar responses may be made to avoid someone in the home who is not that closely related.
The victim may have experienced the initial molestation several years earlier. The first violation inflicted the deepest wounding and established a base of confusion and fear. Subsequent experiences reinforce the wounding, even though the child may have learned to fantasize in an effort to shut them out of her consciousness. If the molestation consisted only of fondling, she may have sensed in her spirit the wrongness and uncleanness of the act, but the one who touched her was Daddy (or some other trusted adult). Children are trained not to say no to adults, especially to their parents. She needed to be loved and affirmed. He represented authority. He said everything was all right. But it didn't feel right. She struggled with conflicting emotions and began to manifest avoidance patterns. She no longer wanted to sit on his lap. She resisted his hugs that earlier she had sought. She no longer wanted her daddy to tuck her in at night. She wanted to sleep with her door closed. If her mother worked, the girl would play at a neighbor's house until she was sure her mother had returned home. These changed patterns develop gradually into more easily recognizable running patterns as she grows to adolescence.
The true reasons for an abused child's behavior are seldom obvious. In the story I shared earlier (Bill, Linda, and Karen), it was easy to attribute Karen's earlier rebellious actions to her father's increasing temper tantrums. Teenagers will not stay around to be yelled at if they can help it! In the best of circumstances, neither do teenagers respond as well to the responsibility of chores, rules, and regulations as they did when they were children. Even well-adjusted teenagers naturally become self-centeredly involved in their own world of activity and forget to come home on time. Unfortunately, Karen's behavior was ascribed to a normal process of individuation aggravated and exaggerated by her father's temperament—until it exploded into frantic rebellion out of all proportion to the known facts of the father's temper and tension in the home.
Drug and alcohol abuse
Inability to sleep: desperate attempts to crowd out anxious thoughts by reading in bed until the early hours of morning; futile attempts to lose self in the sound of loud rock music through earphones; nightmares; exhaustion
Inability to concentrate or stay awake in class; unfinished school assignments; failing grades
Increasing disrespect of authority; intolerance of normal flaws in adult behavior; spasmodic acting out of parental roles, as if to "show them" how they should conduct themselves
Promiscuity
Going to bed fully dressed
Obesity
Pervasive anxiety
Self-mutilation; suicidal talk or attempts
Notifying the Authorities
When a sexual abuser has been identified, he must be reported to the proper authorities. This is not to be understood as taking revenge. In most states it is a requirement of law. It is also a matter of facing facts. Abusers are compulsive and will repeat the crime until the root causes for their propensity to act in such a way have been brought to death on the cross and they have been completely healed. If an abuser is the father or the stepfather of the abused, he must be separated from the home until he has been declared safe by those who are qualified to discern. Even then, he needs continuing supportive counsel until resurrection life in the Lord Jesus Christ has been securely built into the fiber and structure of his being. Let the Christian understand that such wisdom and love are for the abuser's sake as well as for the victim's. "The advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the lives of its possessors" (Eccles. 7:12).
There are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood sexual abuse that have never been reported. What has happened in the lives of those people? I have seen a great deal of what I call "crippled coping" in many we have ministered to. Some who have sought out ministry were already aware that their present problems were rooted in early experiences of molestation. But a large number have come, having only perplexing symptoms. Suppressed memories then spontaneously surfaced in the prayer ministry process.
The following list from an article titled "Long-Term Effects of Unresolved Sexual Trauma" is a valuable and, for us, a confirming diagnostic guide I wish we had discovered long ago:1
Characteristics of Women Who Were Victims of Childhood Sexual Trauma
Recurrent and intrusive recollections, dreams, or "reliving" of experiences
Generalized anxiety, mistrust, and/or social isolation
Difficulty forming or maintaining nonexploitive intimate relationships
Sexual dysfunction (aversion, anorgasmia [inability to achieve orgasm], vaginismus [vaginal tightness that can prevent intercourse])
Chronic depression, self-blame, and poor self-esteem
Acute anxiety or depression related to symbolically important life changes or anniversaries
Dissociative features (memory problems, confusion, depersonalization)
Vague somatic complaints without objective findings
Phobic avoidance, often generalized to apparently unrelated situations
Diminished self-protection, masochistic strivings, and repeated victimization
Identity focused on a sense of "badness" and stigmatization
Contempt for women, including themselves
Tendency to fear men yet overvalue and idealize them as well
Tumultuous adolescence (early pregnancy, running away, substance abuse)
Pseudoresponsible, caretaking role applied inflexibly ("parental child")
Passivity and unassertiveness
History of promiscuity or prostitution
Impulsive or self-injurious behavior (suicide attempts, self-mutilation, substance abuse)
Chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (emotional numbing, hyperalertness, etc.)
Inappropriate guilt, underlying resentment
Intergenerational transmission (abusing own children or marrying a man who does)
Defection from family's religion
History of childhood learning problems
In our years of ministry we have observed all of the above characteristics in people who experienced sexual abuse as children. We have also seen that helping women to identify their hurts, understand and express their feelings, and develop ways of coping are only the beginnings of healing.
Fullness of healing is accomplished by the person of the Lord Jesus Christ as He is invited through prayer to enable forgiveness, to transform the inner man, and to do a work of renewal in the mind (Rom. 12:2). Whether diagnosis is made and healing is begun in childhood or many years later, no one has to be consigned to live in a wounded, crippled state forever. "For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus" (Phil. 1:6).
Eyes to See and Ears to Hear
Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember?
Mark 8:18
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Romans 8:1
We . . . shall assure our heart before Him, in whatever our heart condemns us; for God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.
1 John 3:19–20
I
can't believe it!" "How could I have been so blind?" "How
can I ever forgive myself for letting such a thing go on? I left my child so vulnerable!" "Where was I? How could I have failed
to see?"
Questions such as these have arisen from the bleeding and bewildered hearts of thousands of parents who have just discovered that their child, who they felt had been so safe in their love, nurture, and protection, has been sexually molested by one they trusted. There are no simple answers that can instantly take away the pain.
Dealing With Self-Condemnation
As parents or loved ones of an abused child, we must begin by dealing with our own self-condemnation for our failure to be what we so desperately wanted to be and overcome the need to punish ourselves by wallowing in the misery of "what-ifs" and "if-onlys." It is a fact that Jesus bears our grief and carries our sorrows (Isa. 53:4), but we have to release to Him the burden of our woundedness, anger, and hate. The first step is to choose to forgive ourselves. With the support and, if needed, the coaching of a prayer partner or prayer minister, we should pray, confessing both our feelings and our faith:
Lord, I am overwhelmed by my grief. My heart condemns me for my failure to protect my child. I don't know what to do; it seems like the whole world is crashing in on me, and I'm spinning in confusion. O God, I need some answers! I know that in You there is no condemnation at all. I don't know how to forgive myself, but by an act of my will I make that choice. And I choose to trust You to deal with my heart and set me free from condemning self-accusation or any other way in which I might punish myself.
The prayer minister or prayer partner needs to respond, strongly affirming:
Thank You, Lord, that You weep with and for Your children. You have heard this prayer, and Your heart is full of compassion. Thank You for Your forgiveness, love, and healing balm that You are pouring into this wounded and repentant heart right now. (Person's name), in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are forgiven. Receive that forgiveness. Lord, lift off the weight of guilt. Bring all thoughts and feelings of condemnation to death on Your cross. Quiet the inner storms, and comfort (person's name) in this time of fear. Lord, we stand together in the strength of Your Spirit and choose to put our trust in You. We invite You to take charge of us and every aspect of this difficult situation we face. Let us do all things in Your wisdom, according to Your grace, love, and power.
Following the prayer, we need to walk in a continual discipline of reckoning self-accusation and condemnation as dead on the cross each time we recognize that we are beginning to entertain such thoughts and feelings. If we do not, the process of healing stops. Each time we can say to the Lord, "Here I go again, putting myself under guilt. In Your name, Jesus, I renounce that and choose to walk in Your forgiveness." And then go on with whatever tasks we have to do.
Understanding Why We Had No Eyes to See
Beyond choosing to forgive ourselves, we need answers to the question, "How could I have been so blind?"
By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches. A wise man is strong, and a man of knowledge increases power.
—Proverbs 24:3–5
The first answer is that we did not want to believe it possible that a trusted friend or loved one, especially a father or stepfather, could have abused our child. If we suspected at all, we probably resisted the idea, feeling guilty that such a thing would even cross our mind. If suspicion persisted, fear of possible consequences of discovering truth overcame our ability to confront the issue. And so we suppressed our thoughts and feelings to the point of total denial. Unwittingly we became literally blind, deaf, and insensitive to reality.
Linda was a lovely, gentle woman whom John and I had known well for many years. Her marriage to Bill was written in tension, dictated by his frequent explosions of violent, unexplainable temper and punctuated by her tearful but persistent and often placating attempts to gather the broken but still workable pieces of their home life together for the sake of their children. Though Bill professed to be a born-again, Spirit-filled Christian, he had fallen into adultery numerous times. He had begged for forgiveness and had declared vehemently on each occasion that he was truly repentant, had learned his lesson, and would never fall again.
Finally, when he was caught seducing a teenage babysitter, Linda recognized that he could never change until he dealt with deep issues in his heart. But he stubbornly avoided taking the initiative to submit himself to a prayer minister, even though friends and family strongly encouraged him to do so. It was not until Linda obtained a legal separation that he relented by agreeing to receive extensive prayer ministry, that being the prerequisite for any thought of reconciliation. John and I had ministered to the two of them from time to time as much as Bill had been able to allow. But we had seen that he was always more interested in patching a quarrel than in truly healing his marriage or transforming his life. Knowing that we were too close to Linda to minister to them with sufficient objectivity, we recommended that they go to a couple we knew who are among the finest counselors available in either the Christian or secular community.
During the ensuing seven months, Bill faced many of the root causes for his insecurities and for his need to defile women. He dealt with a number of basic sources for his anger. His counselors determined that he had progressed far enough to return to his family. For a period of time he was able to manifest the effects of his healing, and Linda for the first time began to celebrate real hope for a stable marriage. It was at this point that Bill decided he could sustain his new life on his own—without counseling or a support group—and the healing process was aborted. He continued to play the role of the new man, making all the right sounds, but allowed no one to relate closely enough to know him or to haul him to account when he began to fall back periodically into former patterns of irritability and temper.
Bill's and Linda's fourteen-year-old daughter, Karen, who had always been a responsible, sensitive, loving child and good student, began to exhibit rebellious, irresponsible behavior. Truancy and unexplained absences from home grew in frequency. Often Linda would arrive home from work to discover that Karen was nowhere to be found. Attempts to enforce discipline elicited angry, defensive outbursts. When anyone invited Karen to talk about her problems, she defiantly rejected every attempt to reach her and retreated into sullen moodiness.
Finally and with great difficulty she came to her mother with a horrible story of sexual abuse. Her father had been molesting her since the time of her parents' separation, which meant that she was being abused all during the time of their counseling and reconciliation!
Shattered, torn, fearful, and confused, Linda confronted her husband. Bill adamantly denied all accusations, claiming that Karen's imagination was running away with her, that she had been unduly influenced by the stories of friends who had been abused. He went on, dramatically playing the role of the injured party. Linda didn't know whom or what to believe. Finally, after repeated questioning, he confessed to having "touched" her "once or twice." As Karen's behavior progressed more and more to the extreme, however, it became evident that he was guilty of much more than he had been willing to confess.
Realization of what had been taking place for years within her home overwhelmed Linda with the force of a tidal wave. She had wanted so desperately to believe that Bill was changing and had so set herself to celebrate every little sign of his improvement that she had shut out the little signals that might otherwise have alerted her to the presence of trouble. Now she had no alternative but to put him out of the home in an effort to protect Karen. If she had not, the state would likely have taken her children from her. She and the children proceeded with family counseling throughout most of the next year and received a great deal of healing from that source as well as through support groups within her church.
Bill received counseling for sexual rehabilitation while serving a term in prison. He and Linda are divorced. She and the children have rebonded, and the Lord is blessing and redeeming their lives as only He can.
Equipping Our Eyes to Recognize Symptoms of Sexual Abuse
A second answer to parental blindness may lie in the simple fact that few people have either the experience or the knowledge that would equip them to identify (in the behavior of their children) the symptoms that commonly result from sexual abuse.
Educating oneself to recognize sexual abuse symptoms "after the fact" might seem to some to be too late and somewhat useless. This is not the case at all. An important part of healing begins as we are enabled to identify in right perspective the painfully mystifying behaviors of our children. As we realize clearly and specifically that their strange, out-of-control, and often hurtful responses proceed from woundedness and fear, we can begin to relate to them easily with tenderness and compassion rather than with frustration and anger. We can seek their forgiveness not only for our failure to protect them but also for many wounds and unbearable pressures we inflicted on them in the blindness of our desperation to rescue them from self-destructive patterns.
Most victims of sexual abuse have worried about themselves and have struggled with feelings of guilt they haven't known how to handle. Children have felt they were "bad"; teenagers have seen the bewilderment and hurt in their mother's eyes and have felt responsible for injury to younger siblings; they may have wanted to stop running, cease punishing, and ask for help but couldn't. An enlightened and empathetic parent can help them to know that their feelings and behavior were normal reactions to the abuse they experienced, that they were not terrible or crazy. A prayer minister can help victims to see these things, but a parent who is an affirming part of the process can lay an effective foundation for reconciliation and rebonding.
An informed parent of an abused child can also help to provide immeasurable encouragement and healing to others who suffer similar heartbreak.
The following lists of symptoms are not intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive. Rather they serve to provide signposts that point to possible abuse. It is important to realize that children who exhibit some of these behaviors might not be victims of abuse but could be acting out other pressures, upsets, and influences in their lives. This information is a composite of John's and my own experiences in prayer ministry that we found confirmed in varieties of written material and in conversations with parents, other prayer ministers, and preschool instructors.
Behavioral Symptoms in Toddlers and Preschool Children
Anxiety in the presence of persons with whom they used to be comfortable; being ill at ease around particular people or types of people; for instance, tense and/or tearful withdrawal from the presence of men and boys
Sudden unaccustomed fear of bathrooms or shower rooms, or nervous resistance to being undressed
Masturbation that exceeds curious exploration and discovery: preoccupation with excessive sexual manipulation or rubbing themselves against chair arms, pillows, dolls, etc.; sex play with other children beyond the normal "playing doctor" games: inserting objects into the vagina or anus, imitating aspects of adult love play. (In some homes pornographic movie scenes will have made disturbing impressions.) One preschool teacher reported that she had observed several children who tended to group together in a corner of the schoolyard playing a game of pulling down one another's pants. On one occasion she discovered a child trying to initiate oral genital stimulation.
Sleeplessness, disturbed sleep, nightmares
Excessive crying, clinging to a parent, not wanting to leave the house, unusually fearful responses to being left with a babysitter
Sudden personality changes: i.e., a normally quiet child becomes hyperactive or negatively aggressive toward other children.
Excessive and chronic itching and/or tenderness in genital areas
Behavioral Symptoms in Children From Primary School Age to Preteens
Decline in consistency and quality of schoolwork: inability to concentrate, assignments not completed, truancy, tardiness, falling grades
Disturbed sleep, nightmarish dreams, inability to sleep; wearing multiple layers of clothing to bed
Decline in energy level due to anxiety, exhaustion, and/or lack of sleep
Fear of being alone with men or boys; avoidance of particular people with whom the child used to be comfortable; withdrawal from friends and activities previously enjoyed
Change in eating habits: nervous or distracted picking at food, compulsive overeating for comfort
In girls: poor personal hygiene in a girl who normally cares about her appearance (attempting to make herself unattractive)
Exaggeration of normal personality traits: i.e., a daydreamer becomes even more out of touch with the world, an energetic child becomes hyperactive, etc.; sudden dramatic swings to opposite personality poles
Invention of irrational excuses not to participate in school or extracurricular activities that formerly inspired enthusiasm
Sudden inordinate modesty, self-consciousness about the body; fear of restrooms and showers
Sudden cessation of conversational sharing
Bed-wetting when it was not a problem previously. A child can be so wounded by sexual abuse that he/she suppresses awareness of sex organs, and thus fails to respond to the body's signals that would normally awaken the one who needs to urinate.
Increasing inability to relate well to peers
Unexplained anger and aggressive behavior
Reluctance to go home after school
Running away: boys tend more to run by withdrawing. Girls tend to literally run away from home.
Behavioral Symptoms in Adolescents
Running: A girl may leave school in the middle of the day to go riding with a friend. She may go to a friend's home, fail to notify her family of her whereabouts, and perhaps spend the night. She may disappear for a number of days, fleeing from the home of one friend to another. When she returns, it is with irrational excuses or often with no excuse at all. When challenged, she "can't remember" what her friend's address is, or she "doesn't have a phone." She may exit by a window in the middle of the night.
She tends to keep company with friends who are several years older than she, and many of the crowd she chooses are dropouts with no responsibility to occupy their time, with no visible parental support or supervision.
She may take with her no change of clothes, no cosmetics, not even a coat for her periodic excursions.
When questioned or confronted, her response is evasive and emphatic: "I'm OK. I can take care of myself."
We have observed such behavior in girls as early as the seventh or eighth grades, intensifying wherever molestation continues to be a threat. Usually the abuser is the father or stepfather, though similar responses may be made to avoid someone in the home who is not that closely related.
The victim may have experienced the initial molestation several years earlier. The first violation inflicted the deepest wounding and established a base of confusion and fear. Subsequent experiences reinforce the wounding, even though the child may have learned to fantasize in an effort to shut them out of her consciousness. If the molestation consisted only of fondling, she may have sensed in her spirit the wrongness and uncleanness of the act, but the one who touched her was Daddy (or some other trusted adult). Children are trained not to say no to adults, especially to their parents. She needed to be loved and affirmed. He represented authority. He said everything was all right. But it didn't feel right. She struggled with conflicting emotions and began to manifest avoidance patterns. She no longer wanted to sit on his lap. She resisted his hugs that earlier she had sought. She no longer wanted her daddy to tuck her in at night. She wanted to sleep with her door closed. If her mother worked, the girl would play at a neighbor's house until she was sure her mother had returned home. These changed patterns develop gradually into more easily recognizable running patterns as she grows to adolescence.
The true reasons for an abused child's behavior are seldom obvious. In the story I shared earlier (Bill, Linda, and Karen), it was easy to attribute Karen's earlier rebellious actions to her father's increasing temper tantrums. Teenagers will not stay around to be yelled at if they can help it! In the best of circumstances, neither do teenagers respond as well to the responsibility of chores, rules, and regulations as they did when they were children. Even well-adjusted teenagers naturally become self-centeredly involved in their own world of activity and forget to come home on time. Unfortunately, Karen's behavior was ascribed to a normal process of individuation aggravated and exaggerated by her father's temperament—until it exploded into frantic rebellion out of all proportion to the known facts of the father's temper and tension in the home.
Drug and alcohol abuse
Inability to sleep: desperate attempts to crowd out anxious thoughts by reading in bed until the early hours of morning; futile attempts to lose self in the sound of loud rock music through earphones; nightmares; exhaustion
Inability to concentrate or stay awake in class; unfinished school assignments; failing grades
Increasing disrespect of authority; intolerance of normal flaws in adult behavior; spasmodic acting out of parental roles, as if to "show them" how they should conduct themselves
Promiscuity
Going to bed fully dressed
Obesity
Pervasive anxiety
Self-mutilation; suicidal talk or attempts
Notifying the Authorities
When a sexual abuser has been identified, he must be reported to the proper authorities. This is not to be understood as taking revenge. In most states it is a requirement of law. It is also a matter of facing facts. Abusers are compulsive and will repeat the crime until the root causes for their propensity to act in such a way have been brought to death on the cross and they have been completely healed. If an abuser is the father or the stepfather of the abused, he must be separated from the home until he has been declared safe by those who are qualified to discern. Even then, he needs continuing supportive counsel until resurrection life in the Lord Jesus Christ has been securely built into the fiber and structure of his being. Let the Christian understand that such wisdom and love are for the abuser's sake as well as for the victim's. "The advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the lives of its possessors" (Eccles. 7:12).
There are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood sexual abuse that have never been reported. What has happened in the lives of those people? I have seen a great deal of what I call "crippled coping" in many we have ministered to. Some who have sought out ministry were already aware that their present problems were rooted in early experiences of molestation. But a large number have come, having only perplexing symptoms. Suppressed memories then spontaneously surfaced in the prayer ministry process.
The following list from an article titled "Long-Term Effects of Unresolved Sexual Trauma" is a valuable and, for us, a confirming diagnostic guide I wish we had discovered long ago:1
Characteristics of Women Who Were Victims of Childhood Sexual Trauma
Recurrent and intrusive recollections, dreams, or "reliving" of experiences
Generalized anxiety, mistrust, and/or social isolation
Difficulty forming or maintaining nonexploitive intimate relationships
Sexual dysfunction (aversion, anorgasmia [inability to achieve orgasm], vaginismus [vaginal tightness that can prevent intercourse])
Chronic depression, self-blame, and poor self-esteem
Acute anxiety or depression related to symbolically important life changes or anniversaries
Dissociative features (memory problems, confusion, depersonalization)
Vague somatic complaints without objective findings
Phobic avoidance, often generalized to apparently unrelated situations
Diminished self-protection, masochistic strivings, and repeated victimization
Identity focused on a sense of "badness" and stigmatization
Contempt for women, including themselves
Tendency to fear men yet overvalue and idealize them as well
Tumultuous adolescence (early pregnancy, running away, substance abuse)
Pseudoresponsible, caretaking role applied inflexibly ("parental child")
Passivity and unassertiveness
History of promiscuity or prostitution
Impulsive or self-injurious behavior (suicide attempts, self-mutilation, substance abuse)
Chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (emotional numbing, hyperalertness, etc.)
Inappropriate guilt, underlying resentment
Intergenerational transmission (abusing own children or marrying a man who does)
Defection from family's religion
History of childhood learning problems
In our years of ministry we have observed all of the above characteristics in people who experienced sexual abuse as children. We have also seen that helping women to identify their hurts, understand and express their feelings, and develop ways of coping are only the beginnings of healing.
Fullness of healing is accomplished by the person of the Lord Jesus Christ as He is invited through prayer to enable forgiveness, to transform the inner man, and to do a work of renewal in the mind (Rom. 12:2). Whether diagnosis is made and healing is begun in childhood or many years later, no one has to be consigned to live in a wounded, crippled state forever. "For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus" (Phil. 1:6).
Happy Reading!
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Monday, November 9, 2009
Taking Tuscany by Renee Riva
Are you looking for a new author to love? Look no further! Renee Riva made a huge mark with her debut novel, "Saving Sailor", and now she and A.J. are back, and they are "Taking Tuscany" by storm!
Leaving her beloved dog Sailor in the care of her best friend, Danny, A.J. and the rest of the Degulio family travel to Italy for a family vacation...and end up deciding to stay.
Much to A.J.'s dismay, her parents decide to renovate an old, crumbling castle into a stylish old country inn...which puts A.J. in an awkward state. Turning fourteen in the land of the dark and beautiful is pure torture for the blonde and slightly off-beat teen.
Only her love of animals--specifically a horse and a new dog--keep her sane. That, and her writing. And the nuns, with their secret habit (pun intended--blame it on A.J.). And her letters home to Idaho.
Oh, and the hope that her family will soon come to their senses and take her home to her island, her friends, and her dog, Sailor. Until then, A.J., Nonna and her lookalike mother Sophia will either take or torment the good people of Tuscany.
Thank goodness Daddy has a sense of humor! I'm giving "Taking Tuscany" five out of five bookmarks, with chewing gum and a bottle of olive oil as charms. Be watching for "Heading Home", due out next year from our friends at David C. Cook (thanks to Audra at B&B Media for my copy of Renee's second novel).
Happy Reading
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FIRST Presents "A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions" by Katharines Hayhoe and Andrew Farley
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card authors are:
and the book:
A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions
FaithWords (October 29, 2009)
ABOUT THE AUTHORs:
Katharine Hayhoe is a professor in the Department of Geosciences at Texas Tech University and CEO of ATMOS Research, a scientific consulting company. She contributed her research to and served as Expert Reviewer for the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Katharine's work has been presented before the U.S. Congress, highlighted by state and federal agencies, and featured in over 200 newspapers and media outlets around the world.Visit the author's website.
Andrew Farley is the lead teaching pastor of Ecclesia (www.EcclesiaOnline.com) and co-hosts Real Life in Christ, a 30-minute program that airs every week on ABC-TV in the West Texas area. Andrew served as a professor at the University of Notre Dame for five years and is now a tenured professor at Texas Tech University. Andrew has coauthored three textbooks and more than a dozen journal articles. He is also the author of The Naked Gospel: The Truth You May Never Hear in Church.Visit the author's website.
Product Details:
List Price: $22.99
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: FaithWords (October 29, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0446549568
ISBN-13: 978-0446549561
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
Happy Reading!
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