April Book Report

First off…Happy May Day!

If wishes were wings, I would have made some construction paper cones and filled them with a few of the flowers blooming around our yard. I would have taped some pipe cleaner handles to the sides and you would find one on your door handle this morning. I would have taken them to friends and family who don’t even read this and all the wonderful people God has blessed me with to love and be loved by. 

Unfortunately, I didn’t plan well and not a single May Day basket will be delivered except in my heart.

So for us here on the Journey, all we have is the April Book Reviews.

And, speaking of wishes and wings and such…I actually didn’t finish one single book. But I have a good chunk of these two read and I am logging them in as April reads. One is a library book that I will finish soon and need to return, so here we go:

The first book is one I have read before and had underlined profusely. Studies in the Sermon on the Mount by Oswald Chambers is basically a commentary and application teaching on Jesus’ great sermon recorded in Matthew. 5-7. 

For years I read through Chamber’s “My Utmost for His Highest” as part of my morning devotions. I never tired of it and I don’t know why I stopped. Reading this little book has me on the hunt for where it got tucked away. If you are a fan of Oswald Chambers, you know that his words pack a punch like no other. 

For this read through, I used a small notebook and jotted down phrases and impact teachings so that I could let them sink in more deeply. The whole theme of the book is a continual reminder that Jesus expectations are impossible to keep unless He is able to transform us in our inner man. 

And the good news is, He can and He does. As we look at each line of these four chapters in Matthew, we should be aware that the simple instructions He gives are the most complicated things in the world to be asked to measure up to…if not for the Holy Spirit entering into us and changing us to make us more and more like Him. 

Oswald reminds us near the final pages of this short, but powerful work, that because we are saved by grace and grace alone, we have no right to look at anyone as beyond hope of redemption. He also presses home the point that we were given grace when we didn’t deserve it, so we have no right to only help those who we deem deserving of help. 

My toes were stepped on regularly as I have worked through this book a second time. This is a classic and one I highly recommend. I will be going back through the notes I took and studying those side by side with the Scriptures as a summer project. 

The other book I read caught my eye as we were leaving the library one day. The Age-Proof Brain is written by Marc Milstein, PhD. It has been interesting and somewhat encouraging to read. Don’t let the PhD fool you. This is not a difficult read. 

Milstein has managed to give a lot of information about how the brain works, ages and what we can do to enhance these years through diet, exercise and proper rest in a way that even I could understand. I am a slow reader and when material is particularly scholarly, I have to go back over and over passages. 

This book has been interesting and informative while being fairly easy to read. He even throws in some corny humor. I could have actually done without the jokes, but overall I recommend this one to all ages as the good habits he promotes would benefit any of us. It is never too early to think about how you can maximize your health as you age. 

After all…we are all aging. Some of us are just more advanced…har har.

Dr. Milstein, you are not the only one who can employ corny humor.

Let me know what you are reading!