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Worth Your Time (October 2024)

On October 4, 2024

In Book Recommendations, Worth Your Time

I haven’t been consistent in posting these, and it’s been a few months since I’ve done one. But here are a few recommendations for you!

Articles:

The Meaning of ‘Weird’ by Jake Meador

If the other side of the political spectrum seems “weird” to you, this article helps to explain how both sides interpret the meaning of that word differently. I once wrote, “People act in a way that makes sense to them. Find out why it makes sense.” Read this.

Confessions of a Loner by Sophia Lee. I hope you can access this piece–such a poignant exploration of the loss of community and how to find it. I resonated with much of what she wrote.

The Dutiful Introvert by Tim Challies “A dutiful introvert is one who….will not allow his personality to excuse any failure to fulfill the opportunities God presents to him.”

Emptying the Nest in Hope, Not Fear by Gretchen Ronnevik, who is rapidly becoming my favorite parenting writer.

“After launching two of our six kids into adulthood, I’ve been astounded at the things other adult Christians have said to my children as they left our house to pursue the vocations God had prepared for them. There’s a consistent theme of fear and discouragement: If you go to that college or move to this place or aren’t super careful, you’ll lose your faith.

These statements come from a place of genuine and justified concern. Many young Christians go to college and never return to church. We’ve all heard of a young person who’s moved out of the house, begun dating an unbeliever, and rejected their faith to live a different life. We know the data. We know the stories. And we are filled with fear. So we impress that fear on our children, urging them to draw their apologetic swords. But however good the intent, these warnings communicated something more to my kids: Have fear, not hope. Your faith is delicate. It’s fragile. It’s glass. At any moment, it could shatter forever. Talking with my kids, I found I had to push back on that implicit teaching—because it pushed them toward a false and lesser understanding of God, his mission for each of them, and his role in preserving their faith.”

Movies:

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things on Amazon video. Grace and I watched this movie recently and found ourselves surprisingly moved by it. It starts out seeming to be a teen version of Groundhog Day, but ends with a meaningful twist that had both of us crying happy tears. Great movie for older teens.

The Pod Generation. I watched this on the plane to Tanzania but looks like it’s available on Hulu. It’s a super thought-provoking movie on what it means to be human and turns out to be (probably unintentionally) quite pro-life. I found this so ironic since the female lead (Emilia Clarke) also stars in Me Before You, which is the most (deceptively) pro-death film I’ve seen. I don’t think there’s anything objectionable in this one, but since I watched it on a Muslim airline, I could have seen an edited version. This movie would be another great discussion starter for older teens.

Books:

God of All Things: Rediscovering the Sacred in an Everyday World by Andrew Wilson

I love how this delightful, fascinating book helped me to see God in all sorts of ordinary things.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt

I may write more about this one at some point, but for now I’ll just say that this is a must-read for everyone who interacts with children, which is, probably, just about everyone.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I wrote about this one here. If you’ve never read it and you are looking for a riveting but also thought-provoking novel, you’ll want to pick this one up.

The Waiting: The True Story of a Lost Child, a Lifetime of Longing, and a Miracle for a Mother Who Never Gave Up by Cathy LaGrow

The subtitle tells it all–and doesn’t disappoint. If you want a heartbreaking but redemptive, extraordinary story, this one is for you.

Worth Your Time (April 2024)

By Amy Medina

On April 30, 2024

In Worth Your Time

It’s that time of year when school is at its craziest! Maybe you’ve got a moment or two to read some good stuff. Here are my recommendations from this month.

Articles:

Why Do You Do What You Do? (And Not Something Else)? By Tim Challies

I love asking people good questions, and this is one I hadn’t thought of before. “When I ask others why they do what they do, I’m often blessed to hear them describe their love for things I’ve never considered lovable: crafting beautiful smiles from misaligned teeth, bringing order from numerical chaos, instructing children in the basic skills of life. As I listen and ask follow-up questions, I learn—I learn to appreciate what I have often never considered before and even what doesn’t especially enthuse me.”

Human Adoption is Like and Unlike God’s Adoption by Duke Dillard

I used to be an enthusiastic teacher of how human adoption mirrors God’s adoption of us. As I’ve raised my children and come to know the complexity of their experience, I am much more careful to say this. This article by an adoptee explains it well. “We look at the Bible’s picture of God adopting us and are grateful. Adoption as a theological truth is glorious. But we ought to be careful to not overplay the parallel with human adoption. There are important, inglorious differences that hinge on the experience of the adoptee.”

Gretchen Ronnevik with more wise advise to parenting teens: “Your teen is mad at something they can’t even put words to yet. And you know what? You actually weren’t a perfect parent. Forgiven in Christ, you are free to admit that.”

The Pain of Being Single; the Love that Holds Me Fast by Olivia Davis. This is beautiful and heart-wrenching and may help us who are married to see into the hearts of our single friends.

Are you WEIRDER? 68 question by Nicholas McDonald

This book was already on my list to read, but after reading this article, it’s moved higher on the list!

“After the test was finished, most of these students agreed that they’d checked over 90% of the above statements.

Then I unveiled the big shocker (spoiler ahead!) from Wilson’s chapter: every single one of these statements would NOT have been true for almost everyone before 1776.

So, I told them, “You’re WEIRDER. You’re Western, Educated, Industrialized, Democratic, Ex-Christian and Romantic. And that means your thoughts, assumptions, values and experiences are far more culturally specific than you realize.”

A Book:

The Gospel Comes with a Housekey by Rosaria Butterfield

I wish this wasn’t as radical as it feels in America, because really, radical hospitality is the way we were created to live. This engaging book left me encouraged and inspired.

Our Home Group went on a weekend retreat together…we rented the biggest AirBnb we could find for the cheapest price we could find…which meant we ended up out in the middle of nowhere. But it was awesome!

Worth Your Time (March 2024)

By Amy Medina

On March 27, 2024

In Book Recommendations, Worth Your Time

Hey readers,

Here’s my recent round-up of books and articles to read. If you do, let me know what you think!

Keep Complaining to God. Just Don’t Ignore Him by Drew Dyck

“What explains why some leave while others stay? Sometimes the only difference I could see is what they did with their trials. The first group ran away from God while the second ran toward him. Instead of letting doubt and disappointment fester in darkness, they dragged it into the light. They joined the great biblical tradition of prophets who expressed their grievances to God, often in harsh and accusatory language.”

Make Your Life Count: 12 Rules for Teens by John Piper

7 Parenting Errors That Can Influence Adult Children to Leave the Faith by Q. O. Helet

“I can easily identify many things we did—or did not do—that may have contributed to our sons’ departure from the faith. I hope to see others avoid such an outcome. In that light, here are seven parenting errors that can influence adult children to turn their back on Christ.”

The State of the Culture, 2024: Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it’s not pretty) by Ted Gioia

Whoa, this is fascinating and scary and super important: “The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity. The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.

It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined. Everything is getting turned into TikTok—an aptly named platform for a business based on stimuli that must be repeated after only a few ticks of the clock.”

Who Would I Be If I Was Happy? By Trevin Wax

“We live in a time of self-creation. The traditional markers of identity that once came from outside ourselves—from our family or friends or community or past—are viewed as subpar, even repressive. We’re supposed to chart our own course, to look deep inside to discover our desires and define ourselves as we determine.

This way of life sounds exhilarating at first, but the result is fragility. What happens when we adopt the therapeutic assumptions of our age, when we look into our hearts and find only failures and frailty? Many of us begin to define ourselves by our maladies, to base our identities in suffering.”

Books:

What White Adoptive Parents Should Know about Transracial Adoption by Melissa Guida-Richards

This was such a helpful, insightful book–it really is a must-read for anyone who has adopted transracially (or is thinking about it).

Being Elisabeth Elliot: Elisabeth’s Later Years by Ellen Vaughn

I wrote about Part 1 of this biography a couple of years ago here at A Life Overseas. Part 2 did not disappoint. What a fascinating look into what was going on in Elisabeth’s life during the time she wrote the books that influenced me so much.

My garden has started blooming. Happy Spring to you all!

Worth Your Time (December 2023)

By Amy Medina

On December 28, 2023

In Book Recommendations, Worth Your Time

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! Below are some articles and books I’ve recently collected. I would be happy to hear your thoughts on them.

Articles:

Blessed Are the Thrifty? by Susan Mettes
As a very thrifty person, this one was so thought-provoking for me. I read it a month ago and keep thinking about it.

“As Christians around the world live through a period of discomfort—or worse—in their household budgets, even thrift can bring them dangerously close to the errors often attributed to greed. Any perspective that filters reality through money distorts our ideas of worth. And isn’t seeing worth as God sees it an enormous part of discipleship?”

There’s another Christian movement that’s changing our politics. It has nothing to do with whiteness or nationalism By John Blake
“The victory not only reinvigorated an emboldened labor movement in the US, it also marked the revival of another movement in America: the Social Gospel. Fain’s sermonette was remarkable because labor leaders don’t typically cite the Bible in such detail to justify a strike. But they once did. Fain’s decision to blend scripture with a strike is straight out of the Social Gospel playbook.”

The Impact of Social Media on Youth Mental Health: A Summary of the 2023 US Surgeon Report
We have got to pay attention to this: “95% of youth ages 13-17 use social media with many using it “almost constantly.”

Why I Am Now a Christian by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
“Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?”

Why I No Longer Support the Death Penalty by Matthew T. Martens
I came to this conclusion myself after reading Just Mercy. This article sums up my thoughts as well.

Books:

The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes by Nancy Pearcey
Nancy Pearcey has yet to disappoint me with anything she writes. In the past several years, I’ve read a number of books on Christian gender roles, trying to wrap my head around the current debate in light of Scripture. This one made a lot of things so much clearer for me. Pearcey does a dive into American history and shows convincingly how the Church has been influenced by culture — and not in positive ways.

Here’s a taste: “Compared to secular men, devout Christian family men who attend church regularly are more loving husbands and more engaged fathers. They have the lowest rates of divorce. And astonishingly, they have the lowest rate of domestic violence of any major group in America… [In contrast], The numbers are staggering: They tell us that men who claim the Christian label often exhibit worse behavior than men who are outright secular. Nominal men skew the statistics, creating the false impression that evangelical men as a group are abusive and domineering.”

Dangerous Territory: An Inquiry into Everything I Thought I Knew about Faith, Love, and Saving the World by Amy Peterson
This is a page-turning memoir about the idealism of missions and learning God’s sovereignty the hard way.

The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World by Rosaria Butterfield
The Butterfields do hospitality so well that it was hard not to be totally overwhelmed by what I’m not doing. But as I read on, I was encouraged. Rosaria is quick to show her family’s own mistakes and failures and how they grew into an ability to love their neighbors well. I finished the book feeling inspired.

Video:
Christmas is over but it’s not too late to listen to this wonderful rendition of Joy to the World from Uganda!

Medina Family Life:

Gil’s extended family plays Wiffle Ball every time we are together!

Worth Your Time (October 2023)

By Amy Medina

On October 29, 2023

In Worth Your Time

I’m currently in Minnesota for ReachGlobal training and interviews, and I’m enjoying the gorgeous fall colors that can’t be matched in Southern California.

Here are some articles and books from the last month that I recommend:

Why Americans May Spend $12 Billion on Halloween in 2023

“This spending is largely recession resistant, and continues during tough economic, political and social climates. Wood says spending on ritual artifacts, such as costumes, is “fairly price insensitive”; consumers will continue to shop, even if times are bad.”

Addressing the Housing Shortage: A California law could make it easier for churches to build low-income housing

“If Newsom signs the YIGBY bill into law, churches wouldn’t have to go through this drawn-out process. The law gives churches the right to build low-income housing…’It clears a pathway for churches to know, with certainty, that they can build housing on their property.'”

Playing to Win: Why Africa is the new prize in the struggle for global power

Most people don’t realize that colonialism in Africa is still happening — but in this century, from China and Russia. We saw this firsthand in Tanzania.

“Beijing has become Africa’s largest creditor with total borrowing at around $160 billion. The terms of these loans are not publicly available, but some analysts believe Beijing will insist on being paid in full. That’s not good for Africa, and it might not be good for global democratic interests if China uses that debt as a bargaining chip.”

How Joni Eareckson Tada Blessed Me (Forty Years Ago)

This is such a cool story! “All the way back in the early 1980s, Joni ministered to my grandmother after the loss of her daughter. Forty years later, she ministered to me after the loss of my son.”

Retirement: The New Afterlife? (https://gentlereformation.com/2023/10/17/retirement-the-new-afterlife/)

“The fastest growing metro area in the United States is called The Villages. It’s a retirement community that takes up eighty square miles of central Florida and is home to one hundred and forty thousand people. It contains nine state-of-the-art hospitals, a dozen sprawling shopping centres, over one hundred bars and restaurants, and more than fifty golf courses.

Retirement is certainly big business. The US has a total GDP of twenty-three trillion dollars, but the assets of all American pension funds are nearly fifty percent larger, making them easily the biggest players in the financial markets. In the words of journalist Sam Kriss, ‘mass consumer pensions have turned our entire adulthood into a preamble to old age. You work for three, four, five decades—all so you can enjoy those few, brief, useless years between retirement and death’. He goes as far as to say that ‘the entire global economy is now a machine for producing satisfied retirees’.

The Villages attempts to sell people the thing they have been working for all their lives – perfect leisure before they die. Sounds ideal? Kriss visited the Villages and says that it’s the worst place he’s ever been to.”

I referenced You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and How That’s Good News by Kelly Kapic in my previous post. His book not only challenged my perfectionism, but also my desire for independence. I also really appreciated what he had to say about identity — especially since I’m trying hard to help my transracially adopted kids figure this out. It’s an excellent, thought-provoking book on a subject I’ve never heard explored before.

And pictures from this month…

Gil took Grace’s senior pictures this month. Here’s a couple fun ones of my wonderful girl!