Christmas in the Castle Library

by Ann Swindell

Oh my.  This may very well be my favorite, FAVORITE book of 2024.  I LOVED the story, the author's choice of words swept up my mind and heart until I felt like I was nestled into one of the cushy armchairs that old castle libraries simply MUST have.  Watching Ellie knee deep in research in the Letherby castle library, as she learns how to live and love and trust God, all over again, has been the best thing I have read in a long, long time.

I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend this book.  It is AMAZINGLY beautiful and the perfect Christmas read.

Brighter Winter 2025

Registration Opens Today!!!!!!!!  There are three bonus packages available - BUT - you can still do the challenge for free if you don't want to sign up for bonus packages.

Click on the picture or simply google Brighter Winter Reading Challenge 2025.  💖

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!!  🦃

Our theme for what some people term "Christmas School" is The Nutcracker.  My husband and I spent many Christmas seasons rehearsing and performing in The Nutcracker ballet, so, I was a bit surprised when I realized for all the themes we have covered through the years, we have never once chosen The Nutcracker as our Christmas school theme.  We have a lot of fun activities lined up and lots of great books, I CANNOT wait!  But I also wanted to read a re-telling in my personal time, and so I chose Winterdream by Chantal Gadoury.  

I was initially a bit disappointed because I could not find this book in print or on kindle, so I had to listen to it through audible (which means the only time I have to do this is at night, it is not as easy to tuck reading time throughout the day when you only have audio as an option).  BUT - the narrator did a FANTASTIC job!  I liked the backstory, the different ways that Chantal Gadoury chose to unfold the story,  yet I was thankful that she chose to keep many of the common points that most Nutcracker stories contain.

I cannot believe that we only have one month of the year left.  The days have been REALLY long this year, but the weeks and months have sped by.  

(Well except for the summer: the HOTTEST days tend to crawl  by and leave such a horrible memory that it feels like that is the LONGEST part of our year.  I DO NOT like the summer.)

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend!  

One of my very favorite verses in the Bible

This morning I was prepping one of my husband's stocking stuffers - it is a journal with Bible tabs for each book of the Bible with a small synopsis - author, date, setting and what the book is mostly about with a small chapter outline.  And in doing that I remembered this verse from Genesis that I absolutely LOVE.

Genesis chapter 50 verse 24-26 says this:

Then Joseph said to his brothers, "I am about to die.  But God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land He promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."  And Joseph made the Israelites swear an oath and said, "God will surely come to your aid, and then you must carry my bones up from this place."

So Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten.  And after they embalmed him, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt.

and THEN the fulfillment in Exodus 13:19 😍😍😍

Moses took the bones of Joseph with him because Joseph had made the Israelites swear an oath.  He had said, "God will surely come to your aid, and then you must carry my bones up with you from this place." 

THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD blows my mind.  

Can you even imagine this?  Joseph has been the favored child, the despised brother, sold, enslaved, accused but innocent, imprisoned, released, promoted to a position second only to pharaoh, reunited, forgiving, and at the end still trusting in God's promises to such an extent that he makes his brothers = the people of Israel, swear an oath to carry his bones out from Egypt when God rescues them (while currently living in Egypt as a form of God's rescue from starvation).  Can you even imagine?  Blows. My. Mind.

God is SO so good.  He is faithful.  His Word is truth.  It will happen and unfold JUST like He says it will when He desires it to.  

Read this and wished I hadn't

This past week I decided to make a sort of table of contents for my kindle.  There are so many books on there that I have no idea what I have and what I don't.  How am I supposed to read it if I don't know it's there?  Anyway, I found a book Cinderella in Skates by Carly Syms that I didn't even know that I owned.  I love ice skating, so I figured why not?  

I will tell you why I wish I had skipped this book: (SPOILER alert below - do NOT read this review if you plan on reading this book)

Shane - the main love interest guy was a JERK.  I don't think he should have been a redeemable character after about the fifteenth chapter.  Seriously.

There was a girl who was a girlfriend of a teammate and she obviously had a thing for Shane.  It built it up in one chapter, but never even mentioned her again?  That was weird.

BUT the worst part?  Natalie (the main character) finally gets some ice time, crumbles under the pressure and her recent heartbreak and the dad's reaction?  HORRIBLE.  Seriously WHO says that to their kid?  

This could have been a cute story, but the relationship dynamics killed it for me.  Wish I could get the time back I wasted reading this.

The Ruins of Gorlan

by John Flanagan

This is one of my favorite, favorite books of 2024.  My youngest and I listened to it early in the mornings and it was AWESOME.  The narrator does SUCH a great job.

Will and Halt and Horace are my favorite favorite favorite characters!  It is SUCH a great story, you HAVE to take the time to listen and/or read this book!  I cannot wait to start book two.  

Another piece to the puzzle

A few weeks ago I was SOOOOO frustrated and discouraged after a Bible study class.  (my last post was about the conversations I have had with my teacher this fall - a kindness of God!)

When I left I was fighting back tears, praying quietly in my heart, and the sweetest lady approached my girls and I as we were walking out the door - saying how glad she was that we were there and asking if we needed help to our car.  I KNOW that was God's kindness - His love and attention - right there in front of me.  Letting me know He sees, He knows, and that He cares.  

Immediately when I got home, I called my mom to ask her why this was so hard.  Why am I circling the same issues over and over and over again?  Why are our days so hard?  Why are simple things (like going to a Bible study) so hard for us?  Through the course of our conversation I realized how often my mom was encouraging me to stop and pray.  Struggling?  PRAY!  Become aware of your failures and/or blatant sin?  PRAY.  Confess immediately.  Repent.  Pray.  There He was again.  God showing me, answering me - right there.  In a somewhat ordinary moment with a somewhat ordinary conversation.

Right after I got off of the phone, I had to go pick my husband from work for lunch, and I relayed my frustration and sadness to him.  As I was finishing up and he was getting ready to leave for work, I opened my email to find a blog post from Kari Denker (she is the author of the workbook for Sermon on the Mount - as well as other AWESOME Bible study material) and she posted something that went hand in hand with what I was struggling through in 1st John, so I reached out by email to ask if I could ask her a question about it.  

One thing that I REALLY appreciate about Kari (and I do not know her personally, just through her blog and her published material) is that she is always, ALWAYS, willing to answer questions.  This time though, she went a step further and sent me an exercise to work through - another kindness of God - right there on display.  

As a result of I have spent the last week realizing three things about God.

1) I MISS His presence and His answers.  I don't pay careful attention to His work in my life and as a result I often times lose hope and face discouragement.

2) I fail to pray.  Regularly.  And because of that - I fail to lay ahold of all that God promises us in Christ.  And as a result of this, again, I lose hope, face discouragement, and trip over habitual sins.

3) This last one is a bit of an irony.  This is what I realized : I am either abiding in faith or I am abiding in fear.  But never not one or the other (does that make sense?)  

And here is how I realized this :

OK, so I never noticed how often we are encouraged to remain (aka abide) in Christ in 1st John.  Whenever I think of the word abide I think of John 15.  But here John is again, right here in his letters tucked at the very end of the New Testament, encouraging us to abide in Christ and abide in the love of God.  

I began to ask myself - well what exactly does that look like walked out?  And I could not, for some reason, think of a single, concrete, practical answer to that question.  And from that question I began to ask myself, how do I apply the cross of Christ to my life? Literally what does that look like, ESPECIALLY when I become aware of  something that I am supposed to do (and are not doing that) , after I confess that (come into agreement with God's Word), how do I not get stuck in that sticky, icky, yucky spot of "I did (or did not) do __________ (fill in the blank with the sin - intentional or not)" and all of the guilt and shame that comes along with that?

Well, after completing Kari's worksheet, I was very, VERY aware of what abiding is and what it isn't.  I realized that I was literally abiding in worry.  I thought about it, talked about it, worried about worrying about it.  I meditated on it - it literally was my constant companion through the day.  Immediately upon realizing this, I realized something else.  This is a direct result of not praying.  I am talking to myself instead of talking to God.  And as this realization began to unfold, Kari talked me through where to go from here, and as I thought about what she shared, two things happened.  

Literally the very next week in Bible study our teacher shared a quote from Martyn Lloyd Jones at the beginning of class.  And as I thought through that, God showed me what Hebrews 4:16 means.

But to get the full impact of this, I have to tell you the whole story.  Because this was DEFINITELY God answering me and thankfully I was paying attention and didn't miss it.

The first thing that happened was our class began (the week after I was really discouraged) and the teacher went back (she did not teach the week before, she was there, and wrote the study, but she wasn't the leader of the discussion the previous week).   And as she went back to she addressed this specific verse : 1 John 3 vs 20.  "whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and He knows all things."

And as she dove into what this verse meant for those of us who feel discouraged - she shared this quote from Martyn Lloyd-Jones :

“The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ‘Why art thou cast down’—what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ‘Hope thou in God’—instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: ‘I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God’.”

― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures

She went on to say that we spend far too much time listening to ourselves instead of preaching to ourselves!  And as I thought about what she shared, over the next week I began to understand the verse Hebrews 4:16 in a whole new way.  God was showing me that when I become aware of falling short that I am not to feel discouraged - NO - I am to come boldly before His throne BECAUSE that is what the cross accomplished for me.  That is how I apply the cross to my life.  That is how I cling to Him and let everything else go.  And how do I do that?  PRAY PRAY PRAY.  Commune with God all day long.  When things are going ok and when things are not.  When I am doing well in my walk and when I am not.  And you know what that is?  That is abiding in Him!  

God is SO so SO awesome!  He hears us when we ask.  He answers us when He has our hearts prepared.  And I am SO SO SO thankful He is so patient.