Saturday's Old Photo

In this photo taken in 1927, you have my father’s first family. He’s the baby and the tot is his brother Elton. His dad, Bruce Russell, is on the left and his mother Mary is holding him. The other man isn’t identified, so I can’t tell you who he is.

It looks like they’ve been fishing—maybe camping—and the trailer the car is pulling suggest a trip, yet the horizon is the flat of Kansas, so they haven’t gone far. I’ve never thought of Kansas as good fishing territory, but that catch would satisfy anyone.

Don’t you think my grandma looks pert, even a little flapperish? What she didn’t know—couldn’t know—is that before the year was out, she would lose her young husband to a ruptured appendix.

She wouldn’t have to rear her children alone for long. This is, remember, my father’s first family.

In Light of the Conversation*

….I found this post at Justin Taylor’s Between Two Worlds interesting.

*Find the tail end of the exchange here, and if you’re a glutton for punishment, go backwards from there.

Book Review: Hearing Jesus Speak into Your Sorrow

by Nancy Guthrie

Nancy Guthrie and her husband lost two of their children—two babies—to the same genetic disease. This book, she says, is “the culmination of my search for deeper understanding that has come with the perspective of years and further study of the Scriptures since writing my earlier book Holding On to Hope.”

Guthrie has built her book around eleven statements of Jesus that speak to the experience of sorrow and grief. What that give us is a thorough, biblical answer to the questions raised when we suffer, and when we’re experiencing the worst things in life, we need the full answer. It’s a wonderful thing to trust that there will be a glorious resurrection when all that hurts us is made right and whole in a way it never could be in this life, but it’s even better when we can understand that there is meaning in our sufferings themselves. We draw comfort, too, in knowing that our Saviour understands our sorrow because he experienced deep suffering. And there’s more, for those are the main points of just three of the chapters in Hearing Jesus Speak into Your Sorrow.

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