A couple of weeks ago I mentioned some authors who had troubled adolescences but then went on to productive, happy lives. It didn’t seem appropriate to talk about them too much within the context of Sue Klebold’s book about her son, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading these authors and picked up quite a bit of useful information from them. So they’ll appear over the course of the next few weeks.
|
|
I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time by Laura Vanderkam, Penguin, 2015, available in several formats; go to her author’s website to see them all and to read her blog and take a look at her other books. I listened to this as an audiobook and plan to listen next to 168 Hours, her book on overall time management.I have to say that there were swathes of this book that I didn’t pay much attention to; had I been reading it instead of listening to it I would probably |
I think I may have written on this topic before, but I can’t find it in a website search. In any case, it’s a topic worth addressing again.
. . . We have done that which is our duty to do” (Luke 17:10).
I’m not going to try to give the full Scriptural background for this verse since I’m applying it in a very specific way. I will just say that this is something Jesus said to His disciples in a discussion about faith. You can read the entire chapter at Bible Hub.This verse came to mind this past week as I was congratulating myself on how much work I was doing to prepare for our upcoming Cherry Creek Chorale concert,
Cold Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace, published by David C. Cook, 2013. Available on Amazon in a number of formats, including an audiobook from audible.com, also from Christianbook.com. Visit the author’s website at Cold Case Christianity.
I’m always getting great ideas from my pastor! On Easter Sunday he mentioned a book that sounded so intriguing: written by a former police detective, applying the rules of evidence to the Resurrection of Christ.
A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold, Crown Publishing, available in several formats on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other sources (including, I am told, at Costco). Visit the author’s page at AMothersReckoning.com. She has also given numerous interviews since the book’s publication which are available online. All of her author’s profits are being donated to organizations dealing with mental health issues.
Doesn’t much sound like a book to be featured on a happiness blog, does it? And I would have to say that I’ve been haunted since reading this book, as
I wrote last week about my desire to keep a Christian Sabbath, with the spirit and not the letter of the law. Specifically I wanted to keep the Old Testament injunction “six days shalt thou labor” instead of my usual “six days shalt thou procrastinate,” and avoid the deadly “I’ll get up at the crack of dawn on Sunday and get it all done” mentality, which has been the cause of my being late to church many times, stressed, tired, under the gun, and totally without the ability to enjoy a day of rest and spiritual refreshment. (Just to be clear–this is only about myself and my personal activities. I’m not going to get all worried about whether or not it’s okay to go out to eat, or to stop at the grocery store because I genuinely forgot to buy something, or even to go to a movie. All of those activities do cause other people to work, but they’d be doing it anyway . . . so I think I’ll just concentrate on my side of the street, or the paper, or whatever figure of speech you want to use.)
I said yesterday that I’d be writing on some additional ideas I’ve gained from Smarter Faster Better, the new book by Charles Duhigg. Duhigg’s strength as a writer is in the stories he tells about real people and situations that illustrate his ideas. His investment of time spent gathering this information, specifically in interviews, must be enormous.
Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In other words, the concept of a day of rest wasn’t just an arbitrary rule imposed onto the Israelites but something for their good, something that served them, not something for them to serve. But, as I discuss in the “Time and Work” chapter of my Intentional Happiness book (see the sidebar), the concept of a day of rest is tricky, because you have to plan ahead to make it happen. I so often find myself under the gun on Sundays, the day set aside by Christians for worship, a new practice instituted because the resurrection of Jesus was on “the first day of the week.”
Smarter Faster Better: The Secret of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg, Random House, 2016. Available in several formats.
I found Duhigg’s ideas in his first book, The Power of Habit, so helpful and so interesting that I quoted from that source in my own book. Now his second book is out, and at first I was very disappointed with it. The thing of it is, he does something in his introduction that no writer or speaker should ever do: he raises an expectation that he never fulfills. (There’s a parallel principle in drama: “If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third.”)
