Gravel Road Musings

HOW to LIVE SENT in the PLACE YOU CALL HOME "What we do in our land is what the next generation will inherit. What is seen and unseen. What we build, shape, and create will be what others step into." Sobering words they are. What legacy am I leaving? What faith journey am I writing for others to read and follow? Shauna and her pastor husband left family and comfort in the Midwest and moved to San Francisco to start a church. Now she is surrounded by concrete and people and working to reach out and touch lives where ever she goes. They work to make their home a hub for their community, a safe place for people to go. Shauna says to do this you need seeing eyes and listening ears. These eyes and ears must first look up and listen to the True Voice then they will be able to see out to the needs and hear the stories being told all around them. Be willing to step out of your comfort zone to reach out. And probably the chapter that challenged me the most because of the tim...

I think this is my last fiction post for the month and I'm glad. I feel like I really overindulged in fiction this month and while it's a good break from deep reading, too much is too much back to back, especially such light fluffy reading. This also falls into the caliber of fun, light reading, but I did really enjoy it. I loved reading about the food aspects as well because I am intrigued by fancy pastries and also by owning my own cafe/pastry shop. So watching Melody and Rachel work together to get it up and running was interesting as well, even though the author admits that she way expedited the process to make the book more interesting. I can appreciate that in a fiction novel because reading pages and pages of red tape and prolonged hunting for the perfect building would have been boring. Anyway, Melody, the pastry chef meets Justin, the airline pilot and you know how the story ends. Of course, there are twists and turns in the way, but I don't need to go into d...

Okay, it's official. I've never been a person to just gush over a season. I can't tell you that I just love Fall or Winter or Summer or Spring. I think I just like the changing seasons and have no real preference for anyone. However, I have concluded, I don't really like Spring. Yes, I just said that. Oh, I know, spring is a time of new growth, greening grass, and tender shoots of whatever bulbs were buried in the ground. But, let's face it, here in northern Wisconsin, spring is yucky. It's mud. This year it is lots of water as warm weather and rain combine to melt the snow faster than it can soak into a frozen earth. It is lots of lovely slippery ice on driveways making it treacherous walking. And it is dirty, oh so dirty. The snowbanks lose their whiteness and become grey and brown and rocky, depending on your winter snow plow.  But then again, I suppose it isn't technically spring yet, but let's face another fact about living in northern Wisco...

The third and last in the Cimarron Creek Trilogy Cimarron Creek is a small town in Texas where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone's business too or so it seems. I like the town, the main characters have been friendly and kind and fun to read about. This book has helped renew my faith in the "Christian fiction" genre, though that might just be my classification system. This book features a midwife, a knife-wielding gangster woman, an abandoned, orphaned woman, and, of course, the handsome Ranger. I don't have to tell you what happens, you can probably figure it out. But it provided the right amount of suspense for me to keep me reading and engaged. So I confess, I may have skipped ahead just to make sure everything turned out okay, but.... It also included the story of Aimee, a girl from France, who had traveled all the way to Texas to find someone important to her. That part was also interesting as well as the day to day life stories of the to...

I don't know if you've ever had that feeling of putting down a book and going, "Oh, I really don't know what I think of this book I just finished, what just happened?" That's kind of my thoughts on this book, I experienced a range of emotions during the reading of this book and ended the book on a laugh, a laugh that was more like, "Oh really, are you serious?" And yet, I'm not sure why. And then I saw that the genre above the bar code was labeled contemporary romance and that explains a few things to everyone, now doesn't it? So to be fair, I think I've read a few too many predictable Christian fiction books while hankering to branch out a bit. And I have read a few of Melody's books that are pretty old, particularly Armando's Treasure and recall it as being an amazing, completely non-romantic story. Now granted, it's been a few years since I read it, so maybe I am all wrong, but I have high regard for the book in my mind...

Sophia, still reeling from the death of her fiancee, not so much because he died, but because he had strangled a part of her and she kept hearing his voice in her head, she kept beating herself up for the decisions she had made. Ginny, also stuck in a rut when her husband takes off to go find himself and she stays home to try to survive and make his dream continue to thrive. Emily, from the 1800s, forced to become a governess after her father dies, forced to give up her only true love, yet she chooses to surrender to God and let Him work in her life. What do these three ladies have in common? They "meet" in England when Sophia discovers a notebook journal and goes on a quest to find out more and that is where I need to stop because I don't want to give away spoilers, but Sophia and Ginny become good friends, each battling their own wars, each trying to do it on their own. Of course, William, Ginny's brother-in-law is happy to help Sophia, you knew there was gonna ...

A lovely, heartwarming story. Set in Alabama during World War II, Little Mama's house becomes a boarding house where a group of strangers meets and live and become best of friends. Was this house really built by a river pirate? And what became of them? And is there a treasure to be found? Questions you will have to read the book to find out what the answers are. Dolly and Si are genuine, down-to-earth people that seem to exemplify the phrase, "Southern Hospitality." They open their homes to the down and out young couple from Illinois, the older professor couple from Chicago, an old war vet and a young war vet who is fighting demons still. It's a story of friendship and love and loss. Yes, there's a bit of romance, of course, but to me, the story is so much bigger than that. It's about a young couple learning to find each other again, it's about an older couple fully settling on what's really important, it's about generosity. It's so hard ...

Someday I'm gonna be good at life. Someday I am going to update this blog with recent pictures which mean that... Someday I am going to upload my camera pics to my computer in a timely fashion. Someday I am going to catch up on all my reading and read a whole bunch of books for fun. Truthfully I'm trying that this year and I'm enjoying it, but I still have the pressure of needing to get books read to write a review about them. Someday I will laugh at myself and how easily disturbed I got over the smallest little details that didn't matter anyway. Someday I will enjoy having my children not take naps. Or will I? Someday I will be caught up on all my hobbies and I will be at a loss for what to do. Okay, I'm already laughing at that big fat lie. Someday I will love being disturbed in the middle of a project or a chapter or nothing and will gladly go run an errand for someone. Someday I will make supper without se...

How Imperfect Parens can Raise Resilient, Loving, and Wise-Hearted Kids "When we begin to accept that clumsy is the best we get - like giraffes on ice - we can begin to offer what our children really need from us: heartfelt relationship." Doesn't that turn the typical parenting book on its head? This is not a what-to-do parenting book. First, this book addresses the parents and how they need to live from their heart if they ever expect their kids to be able to do the same. Do I project my bad childhood or good childhood on to my children and try to live vicariously through them? Do I push my agenda for my children on to them even though it is not anything that they would like to do or pursue? Do I let my issues get in the way of a real relationship with my children? Are my children able to come to be about anything knowing I'm not gonna fly off the handle or totally abuse what they say? This book was challenging. One of the things that stuck out to me was the ...

What Friendship with a Syrian Refugee Taught me about Loving My Neighbor "The book I thought I might write embarrasses me now. "Instead, I wrote a book in which, at first glance, nothing happens. At least not on the outside. I feel like I should have a disclaimer on the cover: 'No one was harmed in the creation of this book.' But something was harmed. Something happened." These two paragraphs describe it quite well for me. When I started reading the book I was like, wait what? I thought this was going to be about Mohammad's journey from fleeing his home to landing in the US, but instead, Shawn is writing a fair amount about himself and his life? Huh? But the writing was so good and it pulled me in and I kept on reading. And then I went and reread the title and was like, oh yeah, this is supposed to be about friendship and not bombs and close calls. The story starts with Shawn's initial decision to write a book about a Syrian refugee and it follow...