Thanks Charlie St. Cloud.

Tim Keller is pretty great.

But yeah, Lewis and L'Engle are fantastic departed writers.

First one: They Might Be Giants, my freshman year of college. Wonderful show. They did three encores.

Conga lines! :D

Thanks for tweeting this. I needed to read it.

Facing the Giants was a nice movie, but honestly I think I would have liked it better if the barrenness weren't healed on top of everything else that starts going right. It just seemed like the message was "Tell God you trust Him and He'll give you the stuff you want for your life," when real life is more like "Put your trust in the Lord, and He'll show you what amazing things He can do for your life." There's a distinction, and I feel it's important.

I'm on the team of prayer leaders at my local InterVarsity chapter, so I attend the general leadership meetings. Sometimes people get discouraged, because they work and work and it just never seems to make a difference.

I remind them that, this time last year, I did not have Christ in my life. We may not pull in a huge number of conversions, but, speaking as the fruit of ministry and outreach, it made a big freaking difference to me.

Your husband is awesome. Good catch.

I purchased the book.

Looking forward to reading it.

I'm an Orthodox Christian, so our Lenten tradition is less of a "okay, give up a thing of your choice for this period" and more "you know that fasting from certain foods you theoretically do Wednesday and Friday? Yeah, now do that for six-seven weeks, kthx." It's essentially veganism - no meat, no fish, no dairy or eggs. In theory, we're supposed to also fast from alcohol and oil. I'm under 21, so the former is easy, but I live on a college campus, so the latter is nearly impossible. I just do my best to avoid stuff cooked with oil and focus my fasting on the previous stuff. I absolutely love eggs and fish (never had caviar, though - seems like a natural intersection of my tastes. hmmmm), so this is proving somewhat aggravating.

That said, I'm also giving up World of Warcraft for Lent (bet you didn't see that one coming!). I found that the place in my life it occupied was as a mental downtime sort of thing, which is all right in itself, but because it was a fun thing I found myself taking more and more time as mental downtime, which is wasteful. So I gave it up for Lent and I'm using the time I would use on that reading Christian literature.

I sometimes feel like this as a student on a secular campus - the first day of my classes is always spent peeking around the room and trying to identify known believers. There was an extremely awkward moment on the first day of game theory - the professor gave us an example game to think about, and his first words on the subject were, "So, we've got a Christian and a bunch of lions..." and I and the person in the class I knew to be a Christian exchanged frantic looks of "what have we gotten ourselves into?"

For the record, the scenario under consideration had a Christian wandering onto a foggy, narrow bridge, in which are n hyper-rational lions arranged one by one along the bridge, and we had to figure out whether the first lion would eat the Christian or not. It was incredibly awkward, but we rolled with it.