Sometime ago, I learnt to distinguish between devotional times and devotional living. The writer who made this clear to me was Sally Clarkson, homeschooling  mother , writer and women’s groups’ speaker. She wrote that we are to ever live before God- being conscious of His presence as we go about our daily activities of working, cleaning, interacting with colleagues at the office and driving on the roads.  Another Singaporean pastor put it succinctly when he mentioned that “doing devotions” aren’t imperative to the Christian life.  What we need to return to, he mused, is  a life that is consciously lived out in God’s presence.

The autobiographical work, Nine Jewels, is a book that tells of such devotional living.  The writer tells her tale of a childhood in politically stressful times in Indonesia and of her coming of age as a young girl who hears God’s call to service. She writes about  the transplantation from her beloved homeland with its familiar smells, sounds and close-knit community to the Discipleship Training Centre in Singapore.  She writes about  her journey as a pastor’s wife, mother of two daughters and her work as Bible translator, speaker and writer.

God is depicted as the One who is sovereign over all events, weaving His purpose into her life through the ordinary rather than the dramatic. In this sense, this book is every person’s story, because the same God also works into the ordinariness of our lives to bring about his purpose for us- conformity to the image of His Son.  At the same time, Nine Jewels is Lydia’s Story as she describes in rich detail the unfolding of her journey from child to girl to woman. Her voice, at once both traditionally Asian and modern, gentle and powerful,  speaks of the loss of a  mother, the fierce love of a father who defies tradition and social pressure when he sends a daughter to college,  the birth pangs of a nation emerging from colonialism and her personal journey for belonging and for identity as a woman.

The writer employs the motif of jewelry to narrate her tale.  You can almost picture her holding each article up before you as she unravels her tale much like in the oral tradition of Asian storytelling. Each piece of jewelry is like a memorial stone, remembering a beloved  and marking a life-changing .

The narrative is held together by themes of identity and family.   Her father’s poignant reminder to her when she tells him that she has to leave their home to pursue to Singapore is to follow “the voice which is calling you” but also that she must remember where her homeland lies. Lydia writes of her father who reared his children with his mother-in-law when her mother dies, defied social mores by bringing his daughter to deep-sea fishing expeditions and football matches and who adamantly withstood the disapproval of relatives when  he sent his daughter to college.    She writes of her marriage to a deeply thoughtful man and of motherhood that came with much anticipation and joy.

The writer’s love for her homeland resounds in her detailed descriptions of her motherland.  She recounts the historical turmoil of post-colonial Indonesia: skirmishes with government soldiers ferreting communist guerrillas,  a failed coup and  violence against the Chinese. Her observations are interspersed with more personal  portraits of daily life as seen through the eyes of a  Javanese-Chinese child: watching Papa cut glass sheets,  grandmother’s medicine shop that smelt like a curry house, offering fruits and tea  to  her deceased mother on All Souls’ Day, kopitiams where locals discussed politics.

She also writes of loneliness that came with frequent relocations as a pastor’s wife.  In times  of loneliness, we are often tempted to plunge into a circus of activities to keep ourselves entertained and occupied. The writer suggests something quite the opposite. Let God  change the “seeds of loneliness” to  “positive aloneness”, exhorts Lydia.

In the preface to her book, Lydia writes that Nine Jewels was birthed from her desire to pass a legacy on to her own two daughters who were born and grew up in Malaysia.  “Though my homeland is foreign to them, I want them to feel the pulse of the nation. Its people, its struggles and its customs shaped the person I am, “she writes.  This book is indeed a legacy, not only to her daughters, but to every Christian who  is intent on seeing God’s hand in each bend in the road, in each dark thread and dry season. Without sermonizing, the writer ‘s story tells of a God who can be trusted with both the big and the small, the dramatic and the mundane. All of life is hallowed when we live deliberately before Him.

I wish that someone would buy this book for me.  I read McMinn’s  “Growing Strong Daughters” some time back and gained a new perspective on how we can condition our daughters to the ways of the world when we could be nurturing them to be the unique strong individuals that God has created them to be.

McMinn  (professor of sociology at George Fox University in Oregon ) doesn’t dance around the feminist-vs- SAHM tree(haven’t we had enough of that?), but clears the underbrush and helps us see the path . This book is for women who are bent on being, well, women.

Women’s discourse has long been held up against the communication patterns of men, often as inferior or in the case of the r-feminist-superior. In both cases however, women’s discourse is seen as the Other -significant no doubt, as postmodern pc-ness would have it be.   But why be an Other? Why not just BE ?

I overheard several  women sometime back in church, extolling the virtues of  “the objectivity of men’s minds” versus the subjectiveness of women’s thinking  i.e.mushy minds.  This line of thinking shows ignorance of the power of women’s discourse : the sustaining of cultural heritage through storytelling,  the perpetuation fo medicinal knowledge through culinary traditions, the art of community-making in post-industrial age urban spaces.  Women’s discourse with the richness of  personal narratives is so much a part of our lives. Furthermore the division between objectivity and subjectivity is farcical : how can one tell the difference between the two without imposing one’s personal and therefore subjective opinion upon that division?

If objectivity means being empirical, there’s still that niggling problem of the interpretation of “soft” sociological data.

McMinn validates the way women are made and discusses debates on men-women differences .The conclusion? She suggests that we are different in some ways and similar in some ways.  That comes as no surprise. Yet what is new in what McMinn is saying is that we shouldn’t even be thinking in terms of raising our daughters to be career women or homemakers who stay at home.  Each woman and girl has her God-  gift -whether it be sewing gorgeous clothes or pushing the buttons in corporations or blazing the race tracks. As mothers, our delight is in nurturing her to be that person God has meant her to be.

Do  we train our girls to “maximize their potential”  at the cost of family ? McMinn cites the examples of strong women who choose to stay at home to raise her children nad are accused of wasting their talents; of strong women who go to work in order to feed their families and of strong women who have to do a bit of both in order to keep their families afloat.  In short, she goes to the very heart of the SAHM-vs.-working mom debate :  does our motivation stem from  selfishness  or by that desire to use our gifts for others, for family.

She writes about the pressures young girls face due to  media and society that tell them how they should look, dress and behave.  We mothers have to be that rock, to be their strength and by being strong, help them wade through the bombardment of information and propaganda. A woman can’t do that if she’s not even sure of who God has meant her  to be.

This is great news. I’m just so glad that I don’t have to force her to wear either a dress or denim trousers. Clothes maketh not the woman. So what does? She draws on Scriptures to answer that question. So , go read.

Oh, and about that first book?  Buy it.

I’d read “When Life and beliefs collide” earlier by Carolyn Custis James which looked at women and theology. That book, I would say, is THE book of the year for me, the book that I think every woman ( and man) shold read. It made me want to shout out the good news from the pulpit or street corners, “woman, your name is ezer!” Ezer, writes Carolyn, was the word the God used when He described Eve as a “help meet” and not “help mate” as commonly thought. The word “ezer” is used in the Bible to describe God as “deliverer”, “helper”. It is a word that conjures meanings related to strength, to boldness and to faith. I love the way this definition informs my understanding of submission, homemaking and parenthood. I love the liberation this understanding unleashes upon debates concerning women and work, women and the church, women and influence.

I have yet to finish Lisa G.M.’s book and when I do, I suspect I will want to shout it from the mountaintops too- this is good news!

“My name is Fara. I read about a book titled Mary Bunyan. It’s about Mary, a blind girl, who refuses help from her family and friends. She does not change until she realizes that she gets further and further from God, her creator.

Mary has a hard life. Before her father is taken to Bedford Gaol (Bedford Jail) her father asked Mary to care for the family.

She tires herself out by trying to care for her family.

I like this book because it’s very touching. ”

This is one pessimistic book. Like most pessimistic books, it’s also a thought provoking one.

I read Elkind’s “The Hurried Child” some years ago and it spurred me to make some decisions about the way we’d raise (and not raise) our kids. Writing from the vantage point of a child psychologist, Elkind argues that children are being pushed to grow up, and are suffering for it. He identified the media and the highly competitive trend in education and parenting as the primary culprits of this epidemic. By imposing our expectations on our children too soon, parents set our children on the road to burnout and to a lifelong angst for lost childhoods, lost innocence.

Postman’s tome, written in the early-80′s, looks at the same phenomenon of a lost childhood from the perspective of a social critic. In “Disappearance of Childhood”, he deconstructs the idea of childhood as a biological category and traces its development from the Classical World to America in the late 20th century,

Postman sees childhood as a social construct, with it roots (though not necessarily its origin, says he) in Athens, specifically in Athenian schools. The word for school then denoted “leisure” for it was based on the (noble) assumption that leisure time was used for thinking and learning. Schools functioned as ‘keepers’ of childhood in the sense that they reinforced the idea that children inhabited certain ‘worlds’ that were different from that of adults’. The concept of childhood was further developed by the Romans. The barbarian invasion and subsequent collapse of the Roman Empire plunged Europe into the Dark Ages, followed by the Middle Ages. With this gargantuan upheaval, childhood came to an end.

Postman identifies three phenomena in the Middle Ages that led to this decline: the loss of literacy as a culture, the loss of education (formal schooling with literacy as its focus) and the loss of shame. Education was usurped by apprenticeship or “on the job learning” and the emphasis on literacy was replaced by an oralist culture. Children and adults therefore shared the same symbolic worlds and the same physical spaces.

The advent of the printing press again changed the landscape of the continent by consolidating the centrality of literacy as a prerequisite for achieving the status of adulthood. The printing press therefore revived the idea of childhood as a distinct category. Learning became synonymous with “book learning” and knowledge, once openly accessible to children, was now invariably tied to literacy and hence, to the adult world.

Postman traces the development of childhood through the Enlightenment, going into some detail about the philosophical treatises of John Locke, Rousseau and Hume.

The second part of the book focuses solely on America from 1850-1950, with an emphasis on the 50′s.

As technology had , in the guise of the printing press, then ushered in a new age of information, knowledge and ideas of society in the Middle Ages, new communication inventions in the early-mid 20th century– “ the rotary press, the camera, the telephone, the phonograph, the movies, the radio, television”- signaled the beginning of the end of the concept of childhood. Postman pinpoints 1950 – the year when television assumed a central role in American homes- as the year when childhood became “obsolete”. Print culture was replaced by a “graphic revolution “(Postman citing Boorstin) of images and icons.

Postman embarks on a persuasive and lengthy discourse on how, in this ongoing revolution of images, information is undifferentiated, chaotic, depersonalized and decontextualized. The effects of this “free-flow” of information creates similar conditions that precipitated the obliteration of childhood in the Middle Ages: the loss of literacy as central to education, the usurping of literacy by other means of communication –whether oral or visual, and the loss of shame that is caused by the blurring of distinctions between the worlds of the child and the adult.

As in his other books, Postman exposes the role of technology in reconfiguring the way we think about relationships, our identities and the way things should function in society.

While Postman offers his observations, he extends no promising cure for the demise of childhood. This book was written in the early-80′s. Now in the infancy of the 21st century, the tome reads almost like a history book of what has taken place. This book, as I said earlier, is a pessimistic one.

I disagree with some of Postman’s opinions about childhood. Postman authoritatively claims that childhood is a social construct, in the same way, I suspect, that gender is viewed purely as a social construct. If childhood was purely a social construct, then why defend it? A social construct rests on principles of convenience- of its use to the society which builds it, shapes it and redefines it. A social construct is bereft of absolute values and is ever-shifting with the trends and mores of society. Based on this, a social construct cannot be defended purely on the grounds of absolute values. This makes the book therefore, merely a record of observations. Perhaps that is what makes Postman’s book so hopeless in its outlook when compared to Dr. Elkind’s “The Hurried Child”. While he notes the circumstances (and the great ogre-culprit TECHNOLOGY) that propel the disappearance of childhood, he falls short in making a case for preserving it.

This is less a book on parenting and the importance of childhood than a persuasive argument against letting technology have a free hand in shaping society. It is therefore a book that must be read because it makes us more aware about the power that we unwittingly absolve to others within the confines of our homes, in deciding the courses of family, children’s upbringing and thinking.