Home Front

"Home Front" by Kristin Hannah

I told you I was going to read all her books.  I'm reading two a week!  This book was a little different from Winter Garden and The Nightingale in that it was about modern day times.  The story is about a family whose mother is a helicopter pilot in the Armed Forces and is deployed.  The book takes a real look at our service men and women and what they sacrifice to fight for our freedoms.  It also takes a hard look at PTSD and how much of a struggle it is for them to integrate back into their families.  Jolene, the pilot, is struggling with leaving her two children and the marriage that is already on the brink.  She does not know what she will come home to or even if she will come home at all.  When Jolene returns more broken than any of them could imagine it will take a battle of strength and love to bring their family back together again.  "Marriages go through hard times.  Sometimes you have to get in there and fight for your love.  That's the only way for it to get better."  All relationships are hard and most are worth fighting for.  "She was the one who took care; he was the one who took.  One-sided relationships are so very hard to overcome.  Sometimes we need to look at serving though instead of selfishness.  "But it's also my job to show you what kind of person to be, to teach you by example.  What lesson would I teach you if I ran from a commitment I made:  I I was cowardly or dishonorable?  When you make a promise in this life, you keep it, even if it scares you or hurts you or makes you sad."  A promise to love and cherish someone till death, a promise you don't just throw away.  What are we teaching our children if our marriage are so easily thrown away and not fought for?  "Saying good-bye to loved ones is the most difficult act for any soldier."  They've trained for battle but have no training to say good-bye to the people they love most in the world.  "The cost of war was here, in this room.  It was families being torn apart and babies born without their parents at home and children forgetting their mother's faces.  It was soldiers-some of them his age and others young enough to be his sons-who would come home wounded...or not come home at all."  I think we forget the humanity behind the men and women who serve.  Their lives are the cost of war.  "He'd made her happy; that was something he'd always known.  What he'd forgotten was how happy she'd made him."  We get so caught up in the irritations we forget to be grateful.  "We all knew it would be hard to have you gone, but no one told us how hard it would be when you came back.  We'll have to adjust.  All of us."  Our soldiers don't come back the same and yet we expect them to.  But how could they after what they have seen and experienced?  "They are heroes, our soldiers, the men and women who go into harm's way to protect us, our way of life.  It doesn't matter what you think of the war, you have to be grateful to the warriors, of whom we ask so much.  To whom we sometimes give too little."  I couldn't agree more.  "But how do you help someone deal with horrors you can't imagine?  And how does a soldier come home from war, really?  As a nation, these are questions we need to ask ourselves."  Really ask ourselves.  These are people, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, who have sacrificed so much.  We owe it to them to take a long, hard look on helping them return and integrate back into their families and society.  "There was so much training before one goes to war, and so little for one's return."  My heart is heavy with this statement, especially when the hardest part is probably the coming home.  Why do we do these heroes such a disservice?  "How could it be harder to come home than to go to war?"
I appreciated this book for its honest look at our soldiers and PTSD.  I have a soft spot for our military and am thankful for their sacrifice, something I am trying to pass on to my girls.  My girls wrote a thank you note for Veterans Day to our neighbor all on their own and he framed the notes and hung them in his garage.  Every time he sees my girls he gets teary eyed and thanks them for their kind words.  That's sometimes all it takes, a simple acknowledgement of their sacrifice and letting them know you are grateful.  I know we can all do something so simple.

The Light of the World

"The Light of the World" by Elizabeth Alexander

This is a memoir written about the loss of the authors husband.  It is a book filled with such love and joy admist the loss.  The author captivates her love with her husband so well in it's pages.  It is about treasuring that love and being able to go on and overcome the loss.  It is a deeply moving book that left me being so thankful for the time I have with my husband and family.  "In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard.  But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love."  That is what it is about.  We are fooling ourselves if we think there won't be struggle, but always returning to each other and being reminded of our love for one another is how to overcome those struggles.  "To be a parent is to be terra firma, to stand, is to be planted in the earth."  We have to be the strong ones, showing our kids courage even in fear.  We are our childrens examples that even when struggles come we will stand firm and we will overcome.  This firm foundation enables them to stand firm in their lives.  "You cannot stop your birthday from coming, so you might as well celebrate being alive."  "When I was with him, I felt that there was suddenly enough time: to talk, to read, to think, to sleep, to make love, to drink coffee or tea, to practice yoga, to walk.  I think that everyone felt that there was all the time in the world when they were with him."    I want to be this kind of person.  The kind of person where when people are with me they feel at peace, that time has stopped and they can just enjoy the right now.  I feel that this is a special gift we can give people in the hurriedness of this world.  I appreciated the book for the reality of struggles in all of our lives and that there is beauty in the midst of it all.  

Leaving Before the Rains Come

"Leaving Before the Rains Come" by Alexandra Fuller

This was an interesting book and a different read than my normal.  I didn't realize till about 3/4 of the way through the book that the author was writing about her life.  It is about her life living in Africa and then marrying a man from Wyoming and how much her life changes after marraige and her move to the states.  It is a book with tragedy and overcoming that tragedy.  The book tells how drastically different life in Africa is compared with to life in the U.S.  "The problem with most people is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live."  It's so true, we all get lost sometimes and forget what living is really about.  We all get caught up in the supposed to's or have to's and forget the beauty of connection and family and love.   "...there is nothing like the profound loneliness of early motherhood to make a person ache to be embraced by their person of origin."  Motherhood makes us all long for our mothers I believe.  Those early days of motherhood can be scary and make you feel all alone.  Yet becoming a mother makes us appreciate the woman we call mom and forms a bond that wasn't previously there.  "Easy is just another way of knowing you aren't doing much in the way of your life."  God doesn't call us to easy and really most things that are worth while take work.  These are the times that we have to have the biggest faith, when things are hard.  It is when we see God work and truly feel Him.  I don't agree with all of this book but it was an intereting read and I liked learning more about Africa and life there.  I appreciated the authors look at tragedy and being willing to overcome.

Dogwood

"Dogwood" by Chris Fabry

This author might be a new favorite.  This is his first novel for adults and it is a good one.  Will is determined to start his life over after getting out of prison in the only place he calls home but the town isn't forgiving.  He is also determined to persue the only woman he has ever loved but Karin is determined to be faithful to her emotionally distant husband.  Ruthie is an old woman who decides that the past shall not lay in the past but all shall be brought to the light so that Will and Karin can have a future.  This book will surprise you, it has a twist I never saw coming.  "Life isn't pretty, so you've got to hug the ugly out of it."  It takes a lot sometimes to find the good in life and its troubles, but it's there if your willing to try.  "Good things can come from pain."  Healing comes from pain and strength you might have never known.  "Most people think the struggle means failure.  It's actually the best thing that could happen.  That struggle will pull you out on the other side a lot stronger, a lot deeper."  It's hard and it's good.  I'm currently learning this.  Don't struggle against the trial but sit in it, learn what God is teaching you and thank Him for the beauty you do find in the midst of it.  The struggle is important, it shapes us.  "When you surround yourself with good people, it doesn't really matter where you are."  The people matter not the place, that is why home is where our heart is, with the people we love.  I highly recommend this book.  It will surprise, encourage and entertain you.  The ending is the best.

Amity & Sorrow

"Amity & Sorrow" by Peggy Riley

I'm not sure about this book, it was definitely interesting.  It is about a mother and her two girls who flee from a polygamous compound.  The girls know nothing of the world outside and are scared and confused why they have been taken from all they have ever known.  Amity finds freedom and joy in her knew life but Sorrow wants nothing more than to return to what she has known.  It is about a mothers struglle to justify her choices and undo what has been done.  "You either made a vow or your didn't."  We try and complicate things, we either said I do or we didn't.  Sometimes we just need to break it down and keep it simple.  Life is complex, especially relationships but it comes down to the fact that we either made a vow or we didn't.  "They say God is knocking on your heart, all the time, and you only have to open it for Him."  God pursues everyone of us, we just have to be willing to hear His knock.  "Life is just seeds.  You know, you plant in the dirt you're given.  It's all you've got.  You water, you tend, and sometimes seeds don't take.  Sometimes it all goes away from you."  We do the best we can with what we have, that's all we can do.  That's hard to accept sometimes.  We do what we can and ask God to do the rest.  This book was an interesting and informative read.  

Love Lifted Me

"Love Lifted Me" by Sara Evans with Rachel Hauck

Sara Evans is a favorite country singer of mine so this book caught my eye.  I'm not sure how much she contributed to this book but I liked it.  Max and Jade have a marraige that has been tested by infidelity, drugs and a blended family.  They decide to take a risk and have a fresh start in a new town.  Believing that the trouble is behind them and they are stronger for it.  They didn't know that there was one more test coming.  Will they be able to sustian their love and faith in God through yet another trial?  

I really did enjoy this book.  It is real with the trials of this life but has a happy ending.  Don't we all want a happy ending?  I love a book that shows God's faithfulness through trials.  We all have them and we all need to be reminded that He is with us and will see us through, exchanging beauty for ashes.  

The Longest Ride

"The Longest Ride" by Nicholas Sparks

I got this book for my birthday.  It is his newest book published in September and I think this is the soonest I've gotten one of his books.  I was so excited to read it, he never disappoints.  I dob't know how he continues to write such good books.  This book was a change up from what I have been reading.  It was nice to read something a little lighter.  The story is about an old man at the end of his life, reliving precious memories of the years with his wife and of another young couple just starting out on this road of life.  The couples come from two different eras but soon their lives will connect in ways no one saw coming.  "You kissed me, yes, but it was not just good night.  Even then, I could feel the promise in it, the promise that you would kiss me just like that, forever."  Isn't Nicholas a great writer?  "I think that the point is that people rarely understand that nothing is ever exactly what you think it will be."  That's one of the hardest things to comes to terms with in this life.  We think we will be happily married or we will have well behaved children, or children at all.  We think we will always be healthy or strong.  Often times what we envision our lives to be is rarely what actually is.  But remembering that God has plans even when things aren't what we thought they would be, even in the hardest of times, gives us hope and a rock to stand on.  "For it is one thing to declare one's love for someone and quite another to accept that loving that person requires sacrificing one's dreams."  We say we love but when it comes to sacrificing what we want, that's when love gets real.  That's when love gets hard.  "Your heart is still beautiful.  Your eyes are still kind, and you are a good and honest man.  This is enought to keep you beautiful forever."  Doesn't matter what we look like on the outside, even the most beautiful face will age, what matters and what lasts is the beauty within.  "At night, the space between us in the bed felt like the Pacific, an ocean impossible for either of us to swim across."  Sometimes it feels that way, doesn't it?  A chasm so wide we cannot cross or a wall so big we cannot climb it?  But with God all things are possible and sometimes we just have to show up and be willing to take the first step towards the other person, even if they were in the wrong.  It's sacrificing, putting away our pride-hard love.  "A truth emerges in any long marriage, and the truth is this: Our spouses sometimes know us better than we even know ourselves."  "I know you miss me terribly.  I miss you, too.  But we still have each other, for I am-and always have been-part of you.  You carry me in your heart, just as I carried you in mine, and nothing will ever change that."  Oh I love that.  When you truly love you become a part of each other and when that person is gone a part of you is missing but they are in your heart, forever a part of you.  Another great Nicholas Sparks book, another great read.

Half Broke Horses

"Half Broke Horses" by Jeannette Walls

This was a great book.  At first I wasn't too sure, thought it might be a little boring and man the writing was small, but once I started I just kept on reading.  It is a true-life novel written about the authors grandmother.  Her grandmother, Lily was tough and loving and kind and hardworking.  She was a go getter and refused to let being a woman stand in her way.  It is a great story of triumph and courage.  "It seemed to me that when you were in the middle of something, it was awful hard to figure out what part of it was God's will and what wasn't."  "Most important thing in life, is learning how to fall."  You learn how to fall you can learn to get up and try again.  "When God closes a window, He opens a door.  But it's up to you to find it."  Theres a way, He always makes a way, sometimes it just takes a little work.  "Every kid was good at something, and the trick was to find out what it was, then use it to teach him everything else."  Just need to find what a person is good at and build on that.  We all have our gifts.  "When someone's wounded, the first order of business is to stop the bleeding.  You can figure out later how best to help them heal."  First you have to meet the immediate need then you can tell them about Jesus.  If they are hungry or cold how can they really hear you?  Show them Jesus first, then tell them.  "When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind."  "I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all.  There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things-though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart."  I think we get our needs and wants mixed up a lot.  We forget how much we really do have and what really does matter.  "The problem with being attached to an anchor is it's damned hard to fly."  "She might not have turned out like you planned, but that don't mean she turned out wrong."  That's a good one for us parents to remember.  Just because our kids didn't say, do or think they way we wanted doesn't mean they said, did or thought wrong.  I bet we didn't turn our quite the way our parents thought we would either.

Ever After

"Ever After" by Karen Kingsbury

This is the second and last book in the Lost Love series. It's another good one by Karen. I don't think she ever fails to deliver. She has a gift I tell you. Emily finds a man who changes everything for her. Their relationship is built on Jesus. Emily's parents who are recently reunited after many years are struggling to over come their differences. Tragedy strikes and the question is can they over come? "Whenever people are praying there is always hope." Prayer storms the gates of heaven and with God there is always hope, even in the darkest of nights. "The cost was high, and too often the cost had a face, a name, a history." This is talking about the cost of war. There is a cost to defending our freedoms and people are paying those costs with their lives every day. "The Bible had much to say about peace. But almost always the picture Scripture presented wasn't one of God calming the storm. Rather He calmed the person caught in the storm." Trouble is going to come, guaranteed but with God there is hope and peace. "Sometimes life is so hard you can only do the next thing. Whatever that is, just do the next thing. God will meet you there." Sometimes that is all we can do, take one step. And when we do God meets us there to hold us up and light our next step. Somehow they were going to survive without him. And deep inside, Emily knew they would. They would survive, but without Justin, how were they ever going to live?" When someone we love dies its hard to even breathe. You know you have to keep going but you don't know how. You don't know how to live without that person you love so much. Again, God meets us there. He knows our pain, our sorrow and our deepest hurts. He is there to comfort. "Love never has enough time." When you love someone there is never enough time to be with that person, to show them how much you love them. "Love and sacrifice. It is impossible to have one without the other." Love is sacrifice. Sacrifice is love. The greatest example of this is Jesus dying on the cross for us, for you. "Most of all, I promise to lean on God through life's trials and tragedies and triumphs. Because if I lean on Him, you can always lean on me." I love that. If we are leaning on God then those around us can lean on us because our strength is from Him.

Home Front

"Home Front" by Kristin Hannah

I just happened to pick this book up at the Library. I loved this book. Of course it had a bit of tragedy, you know I am a sucker for that, real life struggle but best of all(*spoiler*) it all ends well. Michael and Jolene's marriage is starting to unravel. But they must hold on for dear life when Jolene is deployed. Michael must be a single parent to their two girls. War changes Jolene and Michael. Now they must fight for everything that matters. "In the army, she'd found herself; in the air, she'd found her passion. But it wasn't until she met Michael that the missing part of her began slowly, cautiously to fill back in." "I don't love you anymore. Five words to change a world, to dissolve the ground beneath a woman's feet. It was a tidal wave, that sentence, whooshing in without warning, undermining foundations, leaving homes crumbled in the aftermath." Words are so powerful, they build up or destroy. How careless we are with them. "Here's what you need to know: some cliches are true, and war is definitely hell. It's being afraid all the time, and when you're not afraid it's because you're so pumped full of adrenaline you could literally burst. It's watching people who you love-really profoundly love-get blown to pieces right next to you. It's seeing a leg lying in the ditch and picking it up to put it in a bag because no man-or part of a man, your friend-can be left behind. It's the dark night of the soul, Michael. There's no front line over there. The war is all around them, every day, everywhere they go. Some handle it better than others. We don't know why, but we do know this: the human mind can't safely or healthily process that kind of carnage and uncertainty and horror. It just can't. No one comes back from war the same." Powerful words, powerful description. I believe it, no one comes back from war the same. How could they? "He'd lived with her, slept with her, and still somehow had forgotten the woman he'd married." We all take for granted to people we live with, the people we love, our families. They will always be there we say. We will hug them tomorrow, tell them that we love them later. But what if later doesn't come? Right now, right now is the moment we need to appreciate and show our family we love them. Right now. "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us." Oh those journeys, I so wish someone could walk it for me oftentimes. "Heroes. They are heroes, our soldiers, the men and women who go into harms way to protect us, our way of life. It doesn't matter what you think of the war, you have to be grateful to the warriors, of whom we ask so much. To whom we sometimes give too little. How do you help someone deal with horrors you can't imagine? And how does a soldier come home from war, really? As a nation, these are questions we need to ask ourselves." A really good read. I highly recommend. It makes me appreciate what our soldiers do, what they sacrifice, and their families. I think our nation needs to do so much more to help them when they come back from war. We do so much to prepare them for the war but they come back changed and unprepared.

A Time To Mend

"A Time To Mend" by Sally John & Gary Smalley

A picture perfect marriage. A family that has it all together, a beautiful home and four wonderful children. But it isn't really picture perfect. Claire, the wife is tired of living the lies, she is tired of being silent. Sometimes healing begins with hurting and sometimes the truth just has to come out. I enjoyed this book. I thought it was written very well and gave lots of depth to the characters. "I'm tired of pretending things don't hurt. I'm tired of acting like I've got it all together. Of giving the impression that I feel safe and secure." Don't we all pretend? And doesn't it get old? We try so hard to appear we have it together but who really does? I think we all long to be more real and I think if we were all more real we would feel better about being real. I admit, I am so far from having it together and when I hear someone else admit it too I feel so much better. God wants us to be real and when we are real He can step in and heal. "But I realize I've tried my whole life to be perfect. And you know what? It hasn't worked." It doesn't work, nobody is perfect no matter how much we try and it is just exhausting trying anyway. Why is it so hard to just be ourselves, our messy, don't have it all together selves? "The secret your mother and I have learned is to make each other feel safe. So safe we don't have to hide anything. We can be mad, sad, happy, and say whatever we want, even if it's wrong, because we know nothing can kill our love for each other." Feeling safe to be who you are is priceless, especially in a marriage. If we can't be who we are with our spouse then who can we be our true selves with? That's the key, feeling safe to be who we are so we don't have to pretend we are perfect or have it all together. We all long for that safe place. The safest place of all to feel that is with God because He is perfect. The book has a happily ever after ending, in case you were wondering. Good read, real stuff, good advice.

Sisters

"Sisters" by Kathleen Thompson Norris

This book was free for my Kindle! And yes, I actually liked it, bonus. It was about two sisters and their differences and their similarities. Their mother died in child birth and they were raised by their father. It is about loss, expectations, romance and marriage. This book is not a happily ever after book and that is probably why I liked it. It is not a typical romance novel by any means. One sister marries too young and finds herself in a marriage without love. The other sister marries to please her father. I appreciated the honesty in this book. Some reviews said this was the most depressing book they ever read but I just found it to be honest and more like life instead of a fairy tale. So if you like happy endings, be warned, don't read this book.

The Heart of Rachael

"The Heart of Rachael" by Kathleen Thompson Norris

This book is about a woman who finds herself married for all the wrong reasons. She has stuck it out for 7 years and decides to get a divorce. She then falls in love again and realizes that marriage is what you put into it and it is never easy. She ends up risking it all to save her second marriage and comes to terms with her part for the first marriage failing. It took a few chapters to get into this book but once it got going it was good. "She had not expected to be happy in this house, she had expected to be rich and envied, and secure, and she was all of these things. That they were not worth attaining, no one knew better than Rachael now." Rachael married for all these things and came to find out the hard way how much they were really worth, nothing at all. "We are not perfect ourselves,' said the clergyman benevolently, 'yet we expect perfection in others. Before we will even change our own lives we look around and see what other people are doing." Isn't this so true? So easy to judge others rather than look at what we might change in ourselves. "But she said to herself that she knew now the worst evil of divorce. She knew that it coarsened whomever it touched, that it irresistibly degraded, that it lowered all the human standard of goodness and endurance, and self-sacrifice. However justified, it was an evil; however properly consummated, it soiled the little group it affected." I can't think of a better way to describe divorce or its affects. "It's the one vow we take with God as witness; and no blessing ever follows a broken vow!" "It cannot be reconciled to law; it defies law. Right on the face of it, it is breaking a contract. Are any other contracts to be broken with public approval?" I thought it was an interesting explanation of divorce and how are society does it so easily. "Life is mistakes, after all, and paying for them, and doing better next time." Yes, there are consequences for our mistakes but there is always a next time to do better. "The wonder of marriage came to her, the miracle of love rooted too deep for disturbance, of love fed on faults as well as virtues; so light a tie in the beginning, so powerful a bond as the years go by." I remember thinking I couldn't love Matthew more than when I did on the day we married but as you go through life together, all the ups and downs, good things and disappointments the bond grows deeper and the love stronger.