Category Archives: GENERAL INTEREST

SELAH: PAUSE & CONSIDER by Lois M. Tupyi (Pacific Press, 2009)

Selah: Pause and Consider is a daily devotional book written by Idaho author, Lois Tupyi, director of Love, Inc., a Christian business that helps people with reconstructing specific areas in their lives. This devotional book is worth purchasing just for the pictures! Each reading features a seasonal photo from rural farming, family life, or the Idaho countryside. The viewing is a pictorial collage of joy. Each day’s reading consists of five features: A photo, an encouraging spiritual thought, a four-line hymn verse, a question, and a follow-through challenge. I have read through Tupyi’s devotional book two different years, with a couple of years between the two, as part of my daily quiet times. For some reason, the second time I found it more enjoyable, uplifting, and encouraging. Tupyi’s love for God, music, family, and service to others are themes that run through this book’s offering. She is an overcomer who has grown and learned, and now shares her journey with the rest of us. This book is quiet and non-flashy. It is well-designed and is nicely constructed.

END OF THE SPEAR, A True Story by Steve Saint (Tyndale House, 2005)

A book you will enjoy reading in which you will find the collision of two cultures and the plan of God. When two worlds collide one family faces its ultimate challenge. Before reading this book, I did some researching. I was looking for a book for my book dinner ladies that would be authentic and entertaining, spiritual and thought-provoking. End of the Spear was the right book to choose. It was all of the above.

Steve Saint takes us on a personal journey. We get to see how he thinks and what he contemplates. The choices are hard. Would we make the choices he makes? Can a person return and live with a “savage” culture among people who murdered your own father? That is what he is asked to do. It’s the unthinkable. Yet, he knows they have changed. The lives of these Waodani warriors have changed. They have turned away from their vengeful “I’ll get you before you can get me” cultural mores, at least in many ways they have.

Saint wrestles with this idea, and his wife joins in the personal struggle. Then the family makes the jump. They enter the wild unknown, returning to a stone-age culture. This story has many sad and happy moments in it. One thing that Saint does well, he shows how to appreciate another culture without ruining it. He sees the seeds of destruction coming their way which will destroy their land and lives. He makes the hard decisions and becomes part of a bigger process than himself.