Grace Traces

As long as I was re-reading, To Kill a Mocking Bird , I also dove into Harper Lee's new book, Go Set a Watchman.   Caution...there may be some spoilers ahead.  The book picks up on Scout, now as an adult.  She lives in New York but comes home for a visit.  She has to deal with the fact that no human, no one, not even her father, is perfect.  While I enjoy Lee's long prose and rambling style, this book just did not quite get it for me.  Perhaps it was because the expectations were so high.  What I loved about Mockingbird were the exit ramps.  Atticus shooting a dog with rabies or the side story with Boo Ridley.   Watchman has few of those...and less characters too.  In some ways, this would have been a great short story as an epilogue to Lee's book, or the first chapter...then we set out with Scout to New York.  How would a Southern deal with Yankees in the 1950s and 60s?  How does she eschew and embrace her upbringing?  Sometimes those stories need to be explored outside

  "I wanted you to see something about her - I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his had.  {Courage} is when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what."   Atticus to Jem in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird  While on vacation, I re-read Harper Lee's book, To Kill a Mockingbird .  It had been awhile since I had encountered this very human story.  It really is about dealing with each other; as Atticus likes to say, "Walk around in another's shoes."  Jem and Scout growing up in a small Southern town dealing with issues of economic disparity, racism, sexism, and mental illness.  Being a community is not easy.  Or as Linus once said in a Peanuts cartoon, "I like humanity...it is people I can't stand."  Of course, great literature is timeless.  Today, we still deal with economic disparity, racism, sexism, and th

Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses.  But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.   Luke 5:15-16 Jesus has been baptized, began his ministry, called the disciples, and everything is ready to go.  We are a little more than two chapters into Jesus' ministry in Luke and he says, "Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed."  So, a couple of questions, who often is often?  Are we talking once a week kind of Sabbath?  Are we talking every night sitting on the sofa binge watching re-runs of The Golden Girls ?  Just how often is this?  What we can say is that Jesus did this with regularity, there was a patterned that was noticed.  How often do you withdraw?  For me, a Type-A/work-aholic, my often is not nearly as often as it should be.  I tend to have the pattern of running myself down and only when I can no longer move do I take that time away.  I am trying to be bette