Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Greg Johnson at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Try
- Becoming Brenda Starr
- Off Beat
- Scattered
- That’s It
- So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What?
- The Spoon
- Sciatica
- Sweetheart
- A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose
- However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time
- After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices.
- As with everything in life, balance is key.
- Slow down, you move too fast…
- Yeah, I know. I have issues.
Syndicate
E me at katy @ ngenius.com
Quaking
I haven’t blogged much during Lent, but people. If you’d just this morning finished reading Lisa Samson’s Quaker Summer, you’d have to blog about it, too.
Quaker Summer is the story of Heather Curridge, who—for many years—has exhibited more courage in the mall, plunking down huge chunks of change for stuff she and her hubby and son don’t really need or want, than she has anywhere else.
But all that changes when circumstances force her hand. Heather finds herself face-to-face with “the least of these,” the homeless, the addicted, the criminal. Slowly—and to the great consternation of the mothers at her son’s privileged Christian school, who just want her to head up the next tea—Heather begins spending more and more time with people whose needs will never be quenched, if what Jesus says about the poor being always with us is true.
Spiritual claustrophobic that I am, I kept hoping she’d find a permanent way out of God’s calling, that she could just go back to her house on the hill at the end of the day (or at least, at the end of the book!) and really find some lasting satisfaction in that Jacuzi of hers.
Here are the notes I wrote to myself as God spoke to me through this novel:
“Am I really making a difference, giving back, or proving somehow that I have a social conscience if I drive farther to drink my lattes in an artsy district in the city, rather than hand over my four bucks down in the suburbs? Sure, those joints are inhabited by patrons decidedly different from me, but is my heart truly changed by briefly mixing it up with the less fortunate? Or am I then not only out the cost of the latte, but the extra gasoline to drive that far, too?”
And later, this:
“Do I think I’ve done a good work—good enough, in fact, to absolve me of additional good works for perhaps months into the future!—if I merely take a ‘tour’ of a ministry in the inner city, just to see what God’s up to there? And if, after the tour, I write a big, fat check, Jesus WILL end up saying to me at the end of my luxurious life, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’—won’t He?”
Won’t He? I don’t know anymore, people. I’ve done something dangerous, reading Quaker Summer. If you’re feeling like taking a risk, go thou and do likewise.
If you’d rather play it safe all the days of your Christian life, run the other way. Now. Before Lisa Samson writes another amazing book like this one.
Either way, don’t say you haven’t been warned.
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