chris and becka warner

Mine is on the left and Becka’s is next to it.

I love reading books about God, but not just any books about God. There are some great books out there, but sometimes it takes some effort to find them. I generally avoid Christian bookstores, for the same reasons a person may choose to avoid professional wrestling, Six Flags, or the hot dogs sold at gas stations. There are undoubtedly some good books in there, but the collateral damage inflicted by having to wade through all the crap is enough to make me very thankful for Amazon.com.

I guess we all have our own tastes, but for the past few years mainstream evangelicalism in America has not been mine. Jesus often seems to be buried beneath a lot of consumerism, bad theology, and just plain weirdness. Most Christians I know aren’t into all this, but nonetheless this is often what gets communicated by those who decide to speak for the rest of us. A lot of the recent Christian books reflect this, but I just finished a great book that gives me hope that I’m just being overly pessimistic. It’s called The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, and it may just be one of the best books I’ve read on the Christian life. The bulk of the book is an exploration of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, but a huge range of topics are touched on with a wisdom and a Christ-centered perspective that seems all too rare in our Christian culture. So if you are feeling a little burned out with Christianity these days, give this book a try. Like me, you may find it to be refreshing and inspire your faith in new directions.

When we visited my friend Amber this weekend, she made this great chicken salad. I couldn’t get enough of it. Here’s the “recipe”. There’s no measurements, but if you just add the ingredients to taste it should turn out great.

Ingredients:

Cooked chicken: cubed or shredded

Mayo

Apples: peeled & diced finely

Walnuts, pecans, or almonds: chopped finely

Fresh basil or parsley: diced (I highly recommend the fresh basil!)

Salt & pepper

One of my favorite Google applications is Google Book Search. It’s like any other Google search, but it only searches books. Why is this useful? Personally, I like it because I will often want to find a passage or particular quote in a book, but I won’t remember where it is, and sometimes I won’t even remember the author or title of the book. Of course, there are many more uses than just compensating for a bad memory-like research and finding books that relate to subjects you are interested in. It’s like having all the benefits of searching the internet, but refining the search just to books. Obviously a lot of books are still copyrighted and the text may not be accessible, but I’ve been surprised at how many you can actually read online, or at least the page you are interested in.

We’re a little behind in posting! It’s been a busy few weeks. We made it back to IL just long enough to unpack our bags and repack them for a weekend trip to Kentucky. My good friend and her husband moved there from California a year ago, so we stayed with them for a few days. They took us to the natural land bridge, near Red River Gorge, where we did a short hike. She makes the BEST chicken salad, so in another post, I’ll add her recipe.

Next, we drove to Versailles. In KY, Versailles is NOT pronounced like it should be in French but they say it just like it’s spelled: “ver-sails”. It was beautiful countryside, with some expensive horses wandering their huge meadows and the leaves turning orange, yellow and red. There, we visited Chris’ cousin, and then his good friend from High School. Chris’ cousin blessed us with a van load of clothes, toys and useful items for baby. I nearly cried when I sorted through all of it; we won’t need to buy anything for a long time! Our dinner with Chris’ friend and fishing buddy was great too. We met his wife and ate some authentic Mexican food. It was so authentic that I was pulling out bits of bone and cartilage from my meat, but man, was it good! A little embarrassing moment occurred just after I had explained that I was having trouble getting in and out of restaurants booths with my big belly. I went to stand up but my efforts pushed back the booth all the way to the next (thankfully empty) table, resulting in some laughter from other diners!

Lastly, we spend Sunday evening and Monday with my sister and her family. We got to meet our 4 month old niece, Anastasia. She’s gorgeous, with beautiful eyes, a ready smile and a 2-T bottom! (For those of you who aren’t baby savvy, that means she’s wearing pants and diapers that most 2 year olds fit into!) Chris and I also spent the day with our 4 year old nephew, Abraham. The boys wrestled all afternoon, and though Chris was exhausted, the little guy was still going strong. If only you could sell that sort of energy!

It was a whirlwind visit, but we had a great time. We’ve really enjoyed catching up with family and friends in different places these last few weeks-we are truly blessed by all the special people God has surrounded us with.