My Life in Books

Shortly after becoming a Christian I was on holidays with my parents and the place where we were staying had some books for sale. I realized that one of them was a Christian book so I bought it with my own pocket money. It was Norman Vincent Peale's, A Tough Minded Optimist.

This is probably not the book you would recommend to a teenage girl who had just become a Christian. Yet it began a journey of reading Christian books. These days I wouldn't agree with all of Norman Vincent Peale's theology but back then I knew nothing about theology. I had not grown up in a Christian family but had come to faith through a church youth group.

The book, A Tough Minded Optimist, gave me the one thing I desperately needed at the time, hope. I was a deeply depressed teenager and I read and reread this book, filled with story after story of people who had turned their lives around by trusting God and changing the way they thought.

I had always been an avid reader; it was a way of escaping the real world and getting lost in another. Now I had found a whole new genre of material. I stumbled across John Powell, David Seamands, and when I had my children, James Dobson.

However the next life changing book moment came when a friend gave me a copy of Selwyn Hughes' quarterly devotional, Every Day With Jesus. For the next 20 years I read these devotions. I also read Selwyn Hughes' other books and went to one of his conferences when he was in Australia.

From Selwyn Hughes I discovered Neil Anderson who wrote along similar themes, then there was Larry Crabb, Dan Allender, R.C. Sproul and Mark Buchanan. I said to someone recently I can't give my books away because, although I won't read them again, they have sentimental value because they changed my life. They replied, "If you gave them away they might change someone else's life." Ouch!

I am grateful to each and every one of these authors yet none of them know they changed my life. It motivates me to tell my story through the things I write when I realize how much other people's stories have impacted me.

We may never know whose lives we touch, encourage and motivate with our writing. However if we seek God as we write we know that God will use our written offerings to bless others.

*****

Susan Barnes likes to write inspirational articles, book reviews, and reflections on Bible passages and regularly blogs at abooklook.blogspot.com.au. She is also a librarian.

Readers are like Pickled Onions

That's us, everyone. Pickled onions. Writers and blog-visitors alike are also readers. I'm sure many of us have been avid readers since our childhood. The longer we've been reading, the more pickled we are. Let me explain the analogy in more detail.

You peel your raw onions and soak them in a delicious, briny solution that you've made up with yummy ingredients such as vinegar and brown sugar. Eventually, a chemical reaction takes place. The onions you take out are nothing like the hard onions you put in. They are soft enough to bite chunks straight out of in a way you'd never manage with the original raw onions. Some people think they are a delicious treat. Whether you like them or not, one thing is clear. They can never go back to being the same hard, raw onion they started as. They've been changed to the core.

Books are like the delicious brine and readers are like the onions. We get to soak in stories, biographies, reflections, inspired thoughts and knowledge. These are the ingredients that make up the brine. We come out better and different. We're spicier people with softer hearts. We can have more interesting conversations. We're more creative than we would have been, more clued-up about the world, more empathetic, less inclined to be self-focused.

From the time we were young, the brine has been working its special chemical reaction on us. We get to wonder, 'Would I have succombed to the White Witch's turkish delight if I had been Edmund?' We see Milly Molly Mandy living with all her relatives in that thatched roof cottage, loving their simple lifestyles even though they had hardly any money. Like Beauty, we grow to understand the Beast's many great qualities, fall for him too, and realise that judgment based on first impressions is limited. We follow the whole process of the work on Marilla Cuthbert's heart until she decides to keep Anne at Green Gables. And how could Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy end up together after the bad start they had?

We're pickled onions, and we wouldn't have it any other way. We have softer hearts. We've been given insight into human nature which makes us more understanding than we might otherwise have been. We're simply nicer people, based on our reading history. And those of us who are also writers have the fun of making up our own special brine recipes to help pickle more onions.

Paula Vince is a novelist and homeschooling mother who lives in South Australia's beautiful Adelaide Hills. Some of her contemporary adventure romances have won awards. She has loved soaking in the brine of wonderful books since her childhood, and her aim is always to pay it forward. Visit her at www.paulavince.com or www.justoccurred.blogspot.com