Book Review with Sermon: Abiding in Christ

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Abiding in Christ

Author: Cynthia Heald

Date: 1995

Publisher: Navpress

ISBN: 08910-98879

Length: 110 pages

Quote: “We are the branches, and we must stay firmly connected to the Vine in order to mature.”

Daily devotional reflections are thought to help people stay firmly connected to God, and here is Cynthia Heald’s devotional—for only one month, not a year.

For a hardcover book, it’s an awfully little one. I’m aware of that littleness, from time to time, throughout this book. I wonder, now, whether the book’s small size is catching my attention because...actually it’s not that the contents are too small (some of these devotionals are substantial), so much as that they’re written for the wrong time of day.

Well—why should a hardcover book be so small? It’s not pocket-sized; the hard cover would be an awkward fit even in a coat pocket. It’s not written for children, although the subtitle “Becoming a Woman Who Walks with God” brings puberty to mind. It’s light enough for reading in a hospital bed, but if I had to spend a lot of time in a hospital bed I’d look for a book without firm corners.

When I read most of the individual passages in this book I don’t notice words like “little” and “lightweight” coming to mind, but when I try to describe this book as a whole, relative to other “Daily Devotional” books, I do. The sheer physical packaging suggests thoughts like “light enough for even your poor trembling hands,” and the whole style of this book...I like soft, pretty things like the images of the rose and the brook that blur together on the cover, but it’s possible for softness and prettiness to be taken Too Far. When I consider this book as a whole I don’t feel charmed with a soft, pretty little thing. I feel...coddled.

I think of pale, frail Victorian characters, not Poor Little Beth (in Little Women) so much as delicate sister Clara in Caddie Woodlawn. Clara isn’t dying, but she’s a wimp. She’s encouraged to be a wimp by the culture of her day. The story is mostly about Caddie exulting in the freedom of living in the country, roaring around with her siblings and their dog, because she’s being encouraged to grow up “brown and strong” rather than “pale and delicate” like Clara. Clara hardly ever speaks, in the story, but in each chapter there’s some reference to her “soft voice” and “slender shoulders” and the way she mopes around sewing all the time, even when Caddie and Tom and Warren and Hetty are out running and swimming and having fun. Abiding in Christ is a book for sister Clara, and no girl, however girly she wanted to be, ever read Caddie Woodlawn and wanted to be Clara.

Well...the mere fact of a book being short and thin does not usually affect me in that way. There are different ways to fold and cut a full-sized sheet of paper as it comes off a printing press, and some people like a short book. It’s the contents, too, in this one. Twirly-curly script headings and terribly tasteful general topics aren’t bad things. Topics like staying connected to God, taking time to pray, planning to read the whole Bible each year, living one day at a time, aren’t bad topics. Having a “personal relationship with God” gives a slight suggestion of a desperately lonely soul trying frantically to believe in God as Imaginary Friend, but that’s how some people talk about a sane and viable Christian practice...There is probably a tipping point, a precise number of times I can leaf through a book’s pages and see words like “calm,” “patient,” “trust,” “rest”—and it probably depends on how many words like “awake,” “decisive,” “firm,” “vigilant” occur in between them—before I ask myself, “Is this a guide for normal healthy young girls who are ‘becoming a woman,’ or is it strictly bedtime reading for hospital use?”

I don’t know. There does seem to be a market for the kind of Christian thought that is helpful when addressed to women in hospitals, but positively alarming when it’s handed out to women who are doing jobs and rearing children too. There is a difference between the “work” of recovering from chemotherapy and the work of managing an office or teaching a class. Blurring that difference may seem to publishers like a way to sell more books to more readers, but there’s also the danger of alienating readers.

Maybe some stressed-out yuppies, people trying to be extroverts, frustrated corporate ladder-climbers, etc., had their personalities and characters formed by spending their early years in day-care centers where somebody was always whining and as a result everybody else spent a lot of time kicking and screaming too. Maybe some of these people never had enough lullabies sung to them.

Personally, I had all the lullabies and snuggle-up-for-naps time a child could possibly want, and more...and because my mother had increasingly severe hypothyroidism, I saw firsthand that there’s a point at which calmness and soothing and naps are good things, and then there’s a point at which they literally, physically make people sick, even disabled. I inherited a tendency to be slightly hyperthyroid, big-eyed, skinny, fast-moving—when I’ve been walking or exercising fast or drinking too much coffee, positively jittery—which is the reverse pattern produced by the same genetic quirk that allowed Mother to become hypothyroid, dull-eyed, fat, sluggish, and bland. I also observed firsthand that being fat, sluggish, and bland was not normal or comfortable for Mother, that she felt miserable about it and fought hard against it, that when she might have seemed mellow and lovable to other people she was in fact ill. Maybe that’s why I can tolerate a little feminine "soothing" behavior, but then that sound, or image, starts to set off alarm bells. “You’re not calm, you’re sick! Get up! And move!” Too much snuggling and soothing made Mother more sluggish and me more restless; in all the mornings of our lives both of us will always need physical movement, not “calm.”

If you are medically underweight, if your blood pressure is routinely over 140/100, if your resting pulse rate is over 90 beats a minute, if you don’t sleep at all for three nights in a row...then, dear sisters, there’s probably some more serious medical reason for this, but what you need is probably not to try to lull yourself into that false appearance of “calm.” You need vigorous aerobic exercise! Trust me on this—both hyperthyroid and hypothyroid tendencies need to be checked before they become a serious medical problem, and usually the way to check them at that point is to make sure you stay active! “Calm” comes naturally after movement!

On the spiritual level, too...in real life it’s not particularly difficult to know the difference between the genuine peace of mind people have when they have done what they needed to do, and the pseudo-calm people have when they are not doing what they ought to do and can’t bear a single hint that they may need to get their minds off their feelings and start doing something different. Not at all. But Christian women’s groups can be confusing for new Christians, because they tend to be Dead Seas of spiritual sluggishness. Some middle-class American women (enough of them that even Deborah Tannen was able to mistake this minority of Earth’s women for “women” as a whole) have been socialized into a pattern of “We don’t actually want to change or improve our lives in any way, we just want to clump together, grumble and giggle about them, and go on doing exactly what we’ve been doing.” And this is not entirely bad; sometimes, as when mothers of toddlers get together, that cozy whining routine can be a helpful way for everyone to remind herself that the years when children are neediest and most draining are also the years when they’re most adorable. But it is not the way Christians build character—or achieve real peace of mind. Sometimes, instead of “Let’s all just focus on calming down all of our emotional feelings,” Christian women really need to be narrowing their focus and attacking the specific things that provoke unpleasant emotional feelings.

Jane Doe does not need to try to feel calm about the fear of having another baby. She needs to be taking steps to make sure that, preferably without giving up her marriage, she’s not placing her faith in unreliable pills and gadgets but is making sure she’s not starting any more babies.

Mary Smith does not need to try to feel calm about being unemployed and on the dole. She may not need any more emotional grief and guilt about that situation than she already feels, but she needs to focus on getting herself off the handouts by productive self-employment, and her women’s group need to be guiding and supporting her in that.

Susan Brown does not need to try to feel calm about her fear that she’ll develop breast cancer at age forty just as her mother, sister, aunt, and grandmother did. She needs to learn more about the carcinogens to which they were exposed and the antioxidant factors in her diet. If she’s going to develop cancer in any case, if the best she can do is postpone it until she’s fifty, at least she could be working toward the peace of mind that comes from knowing she did the right thing, rather than the false calm that comes from denying unpleasant reality.

If you and your friends are drinking too much, popping pills, shopping compulsively, gossipping, hoarding, tossing, neglecting your children, cheating on your husbands, cheating your customers, participating in an unethical business, getting sucked into TV soap operas, stuffing down anger at other adults and then yelling at children or kicking your pets, consciously opposed to a lot of things you've heard about in the news but not even so much as shopping or tweeting in conscious opposition to those things...don't worry about "calm" just now. Fix the facts first, and a feeling of calm will follow.

At the end of a day of facing reality, engaging with reality, taking responsibility for the reality around you and doing what you can do to change it, then it’s appropriate to think calm, restful thoughts before bed. Abiding in Christ consists of sweet, soft, pretty little thoughts that are appropriate for bedtime reading...except that too many of them are written for morning reading, and morning is the time when we need to get out of that cozy warm bed, when that feeling of chilliness is nature’s way of telling us to move our bodies.

And later in the day, a feeling that hard work is unappreciated may be nature’s way of telling us to stop working so hard to please the unappreciative and do what we want; a feeling of “struggling...striving and straining...to live the Christian life” may be nature’s way of telling us to stop sinning; a feeling of “anxiety about the ‘what-ifs’ of our lives” may be nature’s way of telling us to work harder toward material security, or to give up some insecure material “goods” that aren’t all that good, depending on where we are, but either way that feeling needs to be acknowledged as part of our reality and not swept under an inadequate little rug of illusive “calm.”

For some of those hypothetical readers in hospital beds, it is too late to do things differently, and all they can do really is to say prayers of penitence before they die. And the only way they can be said to abide in Christ is to lie down and die quietly. Life does come to an end.

However, in nature...abiding in Christ the way branches abide on a vine does not mean just passively moaning, “Calm...calm...” while our lives fall apart. It means growing, developing, sometimes even pushing other things out of the way...

How often in the last few years somebody who wants credit for being a Christian has oozed up to me to whine piteously, “I worry about you walking alone in the heat/dark/cold/rain/snow, but I couldn’t share my car with you because I don’t have passenger insurance and my money is so tight with all the other expenses that...” that the person knows very well I’ve been living without, in some cases for all my life including the years of financial prosperity. And any mention of that fact would be likely to trigger a more painful pre-programmed wail, “Everybody wasn’t born ‘smart’ like you and can’t be happy writing and reading and working all day! Everybody wasn’t born ‘strong’ like you and can’t walk everywhere they feel inclined to go, any time of any day or night! Everybody wasn’t born ‘pretty’ like you and can’t just wear what feels comfortable and let her real face show!” I was born with abundant reasons to consider myself anything but “smart” or “strong” or “pretty,” probably less so than the whiner; when people decided I was those things it was the result of my working through and around a lot of the same mental garbage that is impeding the function of her brain as she speaks, so if the conversation does go there nobody is having fun any more... 

Deep breath, please. You do not have to become a self-actualizer all at one plunge, although that is what, deep down, your mind is trying to tell you—that you too could be the woman or man you're meant to be. All the Spirit is calling you to do, with that one little feeling of discomfort you’ve identified, is deal with it as reality rather than trying to smother it under insanity.

Listen to yourself. Your worry is telling you what you ought to be doing. If you’re worried about me walking in extreme weather, that’s nature’s way of telling you that you need to share your car—either forgetting about the passenger insurance, paying for it, or working to make it a mandatory part of all motor vehicle insurance with no exemptions. If you’re worried about the victims of the latest natural disaster, that’s nature’s way of telling you something else; whether it’s to offer beds to people, or send money to people, or something other than those likely possibilities. If you’re worried about your parent, child, your dog for that matter, that could indicate that you need to be a better daughter, mother, dog owner. You may have imagined that self-actualizers—the type of people who, in any religious group to which they belong, are recognizable as the “good, mature” ones—were born “worry-free,” or else given the “gift” of worry-freedom during a dramatic spiritual moment...No such. Studies of the lives of self-actualizers, of all faiths or none, have been made, and they’ve shown that if anything we tend to be born worry-prone. This worry-proneness is likely to be what forced us to address the realities and eliminate the anxiety triggers.

Once you’re doing those things, you will know it, and then there is no spiritual danger (or feeling of disgust) in reading a book like this one that has just a little bit too much to say in praise of calmness-as-such, early in the morning. There’s a time for sleeping, and you’ll know it when you come to it.

If you're looking for a one-month bedtime devotional and don't mind the occasional reference to morning in it, send $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment to the appropriate address, as discussed in the Greeting post and shown again at the bottom of the screen. Probably eight or ten more books of this size, if you happened to find them, would fit into a package along with Abiding in Christ. It's a Fair Trade Book; we'll send $1 per copy sold to Heald (yes, she's still alive and active) or a charity of her choice.