Tolle, lege!

I have been reading a number of fantastic books lately. In the Great Books course I'm teaching, we've been reading Augustine's Confessions and Dorothy Sayers' The Nine Tailors. I've read the Confessions at least three times (that's what you get when you study ancient/medieval history in college). It  is an absolutely beautiful book; I can't recommend it enough. Surprisingly enough, my 13 year old student says he'd rather read Augustine than The Nine Tailors, which is a murder mystery novel! Sweet music to my ears!

In our women's Bible study we've been working through the book Respectable Sins by Jerry Bridges. Talk about convicting! The book covers sins such as gossip, lack of self-control, irritability, selfishness, envy, discontentment, and anxiety. Every week we come to the study, announce the topic of the week - "All right, ladies, we're talking about judgmentalism!" -- and every week without fail we laugh uncomfortably, joke that "we've got this one covered, let's skip this week!" and then delve into some serious heart searching and goal-setting to overcome these rampant, subtle sins. This is a fantastic book for a group study (and there is a study guide available).

Other books I'm dawdling in at the moment: On Being a Missionary by Thomas Hale, Cords of Love, a story of pioneer missionaries to Ethiopia, Non Campus Mentis, a hilarious look at college students' take on the history of the world according to the ridiculous things that have been collected from exam books and papers from several universities, and GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy.

Most of all, though, like Augustine, we need to tolle lege  -- take up and read -- the Scriptures. I've been consistently reading my Bible every morning (using the Bible reading plan I mentioned a few posts back) but lately I've been checking Facebook and Gmail before I read. Yesterday in Bible study we talked about Lack of Self Control, and several of us admitted that we have a problem with spending more time on the computer in the morning than in the Word. So our commitment for this week is no internet before devotions (which I'm adding to my previous commitment of "no Bible, no breakfast"). Please pray for diligence in this. We need the spiritual strength gained from daily time in the Word in order to face the challenges of living in such a spiritually dark place (and so do all of you living in America!).

God bless you as you take up and read. May He open your eyes to see the beauty and grace that are found only in Christ, just as He opened the eyes of Augustine so many years ago in the garden and allowed the spiritual scales to fall from his eyes for the first time.

Emily