She was 16 or 17 when she left home, and 23 when she was murdered, according to the Ottawa Sun.  It doesn’t matter what she was doing to survive on the streets.  She was made in the image of God, and her life was precious, and someone took it.  It matters.

Erwin Raphael McManus is a new author for me.  (One of the reasons I like being a reviewer for Booksneeze is that I can try authors that I might not otherwise come across).  The wikipedia article on him says he is an “influential American pastor”, whatever that really means.

I like the book.  It is a call to a radical discipleship.  The thesis of the book is that modern western Christianity is too safe;  that it has become an institution instead of a movement.  He calls his vision of radical discipleship “the barbarian way”, and uses the metaphor throughout the book.  A sampling:

 A description of “civilized Christianity”:

…Jesus died adn rose from the dead so that you can live a life of endless comfort, security and indulgence.  But really this is a bit too developed.  Usually it’s mroe like this:  if you’ll simply confess that you’re a sinner and believe in Jesus, you’ll be saved from the torment of eternal hellfire, then go to heaven when you die.  Either case results in our domestication.  One holds out for life to begin in eternity, and the other makes a mockery out of life” (p.32).

A description of what he calls the “barbarian way”:

“God’s ultimate end for our transformation is to unleash the untamed faith within.  When His Spirit is poured into our lives, we are inspired to an extraordinary level of living.  Barbarians never exist simply to survive.  Barbarians never just get through the day.  Barbarians wake to live and live life fully awake.  To be filled with the Spirit of God is to be filled with dreams and vision sthat are too compelling to ignore.  Live or die, succeed or fail, barbarians must pursue and attempt such dreams and visions.  The barbarian spirit dreams great dreams and finds courage to live them” (p.100)

If your experience of the Christian faith is more like the first paragraph than the second one, you should pick this book up and give it a read.  It might enliven your faith and make you think about it in a different way.

I loved this book.  Lucado has taken questions he has recieved over the years, from his readers and parishoners, and put them into a question and answer form in this book.  He says that some of the answers have appeared in his other books, but I have read them all, and nothing seemed all that familiar.  I don’t like books that are rehashes of earlier books, so that would be a drawback for me, but it wasn’t particularly noticeable. 

From the introduction: We’ve created a question mark to highlight our questions.  It’s stooped and bent, perhaps because questions can leave us in the same shape, burdened and weary.  We have deep, heavy questions. 

We crave answers.  straighten  this mark, and let it stand.  Replace the cowering curl with a confident exclamation point.

Easier said than done.

Maybe so, but he has done it admirably well in this book.  Questions, especially unanswered ones about evil and heartache, can be very hard to deal with for Christians.   Many of us use the pat “It must be God’s will” or something similar in answer to people’s heartaches.  There is none of that here.  Max Lucado tackles the hard questions, and answers them with tenderness and grace.

 ¹³But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. ¹⁴For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him  those who have fallen asleep. ¹⁵For this we declare to you  by a word from the Lord,  that  we who are alive, who are left until  the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. ¹⁶For  the Lord himself will descend  from heaven  with a cry of command, with the voice of  an archangel, and  with the sound of the trumpet of God. And  the dead in Christ will rise first. ¹⁷Then we who are alive, who are left, will be  caught up together with them  in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. ¹⁸Therefore encourage one another with these words. (1 Thess 4 ESV)

This books was ok.  Not really any more than just ok.  I was disappointed in the amount of American content (as in, there was way too much).  Christian history didn’t start in the USA.  It does have some interesting articles, though.

1. Go to the grocery store.
2. Arrange to have your salary paid directly to their head office.
3. Go home.
4. Pick up the paper.
5. Read it for the last time.

Lesson 2

Before you finally go ahead and have children, find a couple who already are parents and berate them about their…

1. Methods of discipline.
2. Lack of patience.
3. Appallingly low tolerance levels.
4. Allowing their children to run wild.
5. Suggest ways in which they might improve their child’s breastfeeding, sleep habits, toilet training, table manners, and overall behavior.
6. Enjoy it because it will be the last time in your life you will have all the answers.

Lesson 3

A really good way to discover how the nights might feel…

1. Get home from work and immediately begin walking around the living room from 5PM to 10PM carrying a wet bag weighing approximately 8-12 pounds, with a radio turned to static (or some other obnoxious sound) playing loudly. (Eat cold food with one hand for dinner)
2. At 10PM, put the bag gently down, set the alarm for midnight, and go to sleep.
3. Get up at 12 and walk around the living room again, with the bag, until 1AM.
4. Set the alarm for 3AM.
5. As you can’t get back to sleep, get up at 2AM and make a drink and watch an infomercial.
6. Go to bed at 2:45AM.
7. Get up at 3AM when the alarm goes off.
8. Sing songs quietly in the dark until 4AM.
9. Get up. Make breakfast. Get ready for work and go to work (work hard and be productive) Repeat steps 1-9 each night. Keep this up for 3-5 years. Look cheerful and together.

Lesson 4

Can you stand the mess children make? To find out…

1. Smear peanut butter onto the sofa and jam onto the curtains.
2. Hide a piece of raw chicken behind the stereo and leave it there all summer.
3. Stick your fingers in the flower bed.
4. Then rub them on the clean walls.
5. Take your favorite book, photo album, etc. Wreck it.
6. Spill milk on your new pillows. Cover the stains with crayons. How does that look?

Lesson 5

Dressing small children is not as easy as it seems.

1. Buy an octopus and a small bag made out of loose mesh.
2. Attempt to put the octopus into the bag so that none of the arms hang out. Time allowed for this – all morning.

Lesson 6

Forget the BMW and buy a mini-van. And don’t think that you can leave it out in the driveway spotless and shining. Family cars don’t look like that.
1.Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment.Leave it there.

1. Get a dime. Stick it in the CD player.
2. Take a family size package of chocolate cookies. Mash them into the back seat. Sprinkle cheerios all over the floor, then smash them with your foot.
3. Run a garden rake along both sides of the car.

Lesson 7

Go to the local grocery store. Take with you the closest thing you can find to a pre-school child. (A full-grown goat is an excellent choice). If you intend to have more than one child, then definitely take more than one goat. Buy your week’s groceries without letting the goats out of your sight. Pay for everything the goat eats or destroys. Until you can easily accomplish this, do not even contemplate having children.

Lesson 8

1. Hollow out a melon.
2. Make a small hole in the side.
3. Suspend it from the ceiling and swing it from side to side.
4. Now get a bowl of soggy Cheerios and attempt to spoon them into the swaying melon by pretending to be an aplane.
5. Continue until half the Cheerios are gone.
6. Tip half into your lap. The other half, just throw up in the air. You are now ready to feed a nine- month-old baby.

Lesson 9

Learn the names of every character from Sesame Street , Barney, Disney, the Teletubbies, and Pokemon. Watch nothing else on TV but PBS, the Disney channel or Noggin for at least five years. (I know, you’re thinking What’s ‘Noggin’?) Exactly the point.

Lesson 10

Make a recording of Fran Drescher saying ‘mommy’ repeatedly. (Important: no more than a four second delay between each ‘mommy’; occasional crescendo to the level of a supersonic jet is required). Play this tape in your car everywhere you go for the next four years. You are now ready to take a long trip with a toddler.

Lesson 11

Start talking to an adult of your choice. Have someone else continually tug on your skirt hem, shirt- sleeve, or elbow while playing the ‘mommy’ tape made from Lesson 10 above. You are now ready to have a conversation with an adult while there is a child in the room.

From here: (h/t to the Essentials blog)

Well, that didn’t take long.  ANiC lost the appeal, and Ingham has moved against the ANiC priests, even though ANiC has 60 days to consider the verdict and decide what they are going to do.  These are the very same trustees that he tried to fire, and now he wants them to cooperate in replacing their priests??  Ingham emphasized that he doesn’t want the conservative parishioners to leave.  Well, of course he doesn’t.  They are the ones who pay the bills for the buildings, after all.  He doesn’t seem to understand that the people have also left the Anglican Organization of Canada.  I give it five years before the buildings are sold off.

By Patrick B. Craine

OTTAWA, Ontario, November 16, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Carleton Lifeline, the campus pro-life group that made headlines last month after several of its members were arrested by Ottawa’s Carleton University, now faces decertification unless they renounce the pro-life beliefs expressed in the club’s constitution.

“We are being discriminated against because of our political and ideological values,” said Ruth Lobo, president of Carleton Lifeline.  “We have been a club for 3 years, so why now?”

Khaldoon Bushnaq, Vice-President of Internal Affairs for the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA), wrote the club by e-mail on Thursday saying they would not be recertified because their constitution violates CUSA’s Discrimination on Campus Policy, which purports to uphold “a woman’s right to choose.”

The offending paragraph in the club’s constitution, which Bushnaq quoted, states that the club “believes in the equal rights of the unborn and firmly believes that abortion is a moral and legal wrong, not a constitutional right. Therefore, Carleton Lifeline shall work to promote the legal protection of the unborn and their basic human rights to life.”

Bushnaq gave the club until November 18th to submit an amended constitution.

Carleton Lifeline’s lawyer, Albertos Polizogopoulos, wrote CUSA on Monday saying the Discrimination on Campus Policy is “incongruous in that it purports to protect individuals from discrimination but in effect, calls for the discrimination of some.”  He said the policy violates CUSA’s own constitution, university policy, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms because it discriminates against the students based on their pro-life beliefs.

He also said that CUSA violated their own protocols in decertifying the club.  CUSA’s by-laws, he noted, require that they bring a motion and notify the students in writing ten days before the vote.

“Our constitution has not changed since our club was first certified in 2007,” said James Shaw, vice-president of Carleton Lifeline. “We have always received funding and status whenever we applied, and were always re-certified as a club from year to year.”

“We simply want the same status as other clubs without viewpoint discrimination,” stated club member Nicholas McLeod. “This decision clearly violates CUSA’s own procedures on certification and re-certification.  As a student, I am forced to give money to CUSA when I pay my tuition which means that I am paying CUSA to discriminate against me.”

“Our group is going to challenge this,” added McLeod.

LifeSiteNews did not hear back from Carleton University or CUSA by press time.