Reading, Writing & Pondering

  Are you a bird watcher? Or do you know a bird watcher? In the Shadow of His Wings by Roslynn Long is a simply gorgeous devotional book with forty uplifting devotionals inspired by birds.  Long is an author whose photography has been featured in Birds and Blooms magazine, Minnesota Weatherguide calendars and other publications. Her beautiful bird pictures grace each and every devotional throughout In the Shadow of His Wings . Eagles, ducks, owls, bluebirds, Indigo Buntings and many other birds are featured throughout the book. The pages are thick and shiny making the photos really stand out nicely. Each of the forty readings throughout In the Shadow of His Wings are two to three pages long and based on Bible verses. Each reading also ties in to birds and our modern life today through a variety of subjects: Obeying God, Patience, Fruits of the Spirit and more. Long's readings are all short but also thought-provoking. I also felt a sense of peace as a nature and bird lover in...

  Are you grieving or do you know someone who is? A Hole In the World by Amanda Held Opelt may be just the book to read right now. Opelt is the sister of New York Times' bestselling writer, Rachel Held Evans, who passed away in 2019. Opelt also had three miscarriages nad her grandmother passed away shortly before her sister. This writer suffered a big season of loss and she chose to write about it in this book. A Hole In the World is a mix of her personal stories along with some history of the rituals of grief in both our modern world and through the ages from Bible times forward.  The book begins as the author navigates Ash Wednesday after her sister died. She is struggling to understand her own grief process and what it means to grieve well. As she struggles to find those answers, she takes the reader through the rituals of grief through the ages: Keening, Covering Mirrors, Sitting Shivah, Wearing Black, Sympathy Cards and more. I found a lot of this information to be fasc...

  Heirlooms by Sandra Byrd is a split time story with both the modern-day story and the story from the late 1950s showing the value of friendship. Navy Widow Helen Devries received a call from Choi Eunhee, also a widow, who needed help after her husband passed away. Eunhee is a Korean woman who married an American. Together, they learn and grow through both life's challenges and everyday adventures.  Cassidy Quinn's mother passed away when she was a young girl. After she passed, Cassidy spent the summers with her grandmother, Helen, at her farmhouse and finds her passion for flowers and gardening. When Helen passes away, Cassidy inherits her home and garden--along with a task Helen asks her to do with Grace Kim, Eunhee's granddaughter and her friend. Together, the girls discover some of their grandmothers' secrets. Both women also have love interests and challenges in their own modern lives that they can help each other through. Heirlooms is a character-driven novel. ...

  Friends make up a very important part of our lives. I like I Can Be Your Friend from VeggieTales in so many ways! This book features all your favorite veggies and offers a lot of great advice on both having and being a good friend. I Can Be Your Friend is a fairly small board book measuring about six by six inches and is about twenty pages long. This is a great size for kids to hold themselves. Aimed at children under four years old, the board book pages are easy for that age to turn on their own. It would also be a fun book to read out loud with family or at Sunday School with the great rhyming verse and brightly colored-illustrations of the personified vegetables.  I Can Be Your Friend helps children learn that to be good friends we need to take turns, share, use kind words and forgive when others goof up. As a Veggietales fan, I think this is one of their best books. I like how inclusive it is--"friends welcome new friends of all colors and shapes!" as well as how the...

  Critical Alliance by Elizabeth Goddard is a suspense book--focused on cyber crimes. . .with some action and adventure between real people thrown in. This book is the Third book in the Rocky Mountain Courage series. You could read this book alone but it would be a better read in order with the other books in the series. In Critical Alliance , Mackenzie Hanson is a professor of cybersecurity at a Michigan university. When she finds out her father's company is under cyber attack, she heads home to help--even though she isn't sure her family will want to see her.  Alex Knight is also back home in Montana on a leave from his job in Diplomatic Security Services. He is supposed to relax but then he is drawn into the mystery facing Mackenzie as they renew their friendship. I enjoyed the mysteries in Critical Alliance . I figured out a few things but there were also some I didn't know until it was revealed in the book. Some of the implications of what the hacker could do were pr...