A GLIMPSE OF GOD

Name: A GLIMPSE OF GOD
Author: Debra Niswander
ISBN: 978-1-4908-2730-8

by Debra Niswander ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 2014

An accessible and appealing scriptural tour through the numerous ways Christians can interact with God.

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A debut Christian work explores the many aspects of God.

Niswander opens her book by declaring some very straightforward hopes. “I want you to meet God,” she writes, “know God, talk to God, and have God talk to you.” She constructs her volume as a series of concise meditations on the many ways Christians know God and Jesus. She opens each chapter with a quote from Scripture, elaborates a bit on that item, and then finishes with three things: a series of suggestions for related Scripture passages to read, a “take action” call to implement those segments, and ruled space to write down both prayers and answers. Using these exercises, she works her way through a wide variety of human mind frames and moral stances in relation to the state of the praying life. Probably the most significant revelation each Christian faces, she writes, “is that it is not what God gives us or does for us, but God Himself and what He alone embodies” that becomes all the faithful need. Niswander looks at dozens of roles God can play in the lives of believers, and she writes with consistent optimism and humility, reflecting on the very fallible characters described in the New Testament. “I think Peter’s story was written for me,” she writes, “because even though Peter failed Jesus, Jesus didn’t fail Peter.” This combination of humility and optimism is underscored by the thread that runs through the volume describing Niswander’s own spiritual evolution. She recounts growing from the kind of Christian who focused on waiting for answers to her prayers to the type of Christian who concentrated more on God himself. “I fight hard not to revert back to needing the answer rather than just being in God’s presence,” she writes. This personal stratum adds an effective warmth to the series of interpretative reflections on all the ways God, through Scripture, “makes each of us a new creature.” The author’s clearly intended audience of fellow Christians will find a great deal of sympathetic reading in these pages.

An accessible and appealing scriptural tour through the numerous ways Christians can interact with God.

Pub Date: March 26, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4908-2730-8

Page Count: 210

Publisher: Westbow Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

CHILDREN'S RELIGION

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THE LIFE OF OUR LORD

by Charles Dickens ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1999

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Dickens rivals Uriah Heep at his —umblest in this mawkish rehearsal of the Christ story. The Victorian master novelist wrote it for his children in the late 1840s, when he was composing David Copperfield, and read it aloud to them every Christmas. His handwritten manuscript was passed down after Dickens’s death in 1870 to his descendants, who also read it at Christmas and, at the author’s request, delayed publication until the last of his children died (which happened in 1933). Though a bestseller at the time, it is way down on the list of rewrites of the life of Jesus that an adult would ever care to read. (One can imagine Dickens’s grown-up sons and daughters suffering through it each Christmas.) Phrased with deliberate artlessness meant to woo children, the text pales in comparison to A Christmas Carol as a piece of holiday storytelling—not a fair comparison, perhaps, but it is fair to note its puzzling lack of any of the strengths Dickens is noted for. Well, that’s not quite true. He decorates the Resurrection with Roman soldiers fainting as the earth trembles and shakes, while an angel, whose “countenance was like lightning,” rolls away the rock sealing the tomb. Piety for mopheads.