New Dimensions

As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.

Since I had NO idea what the title was going to be today, coming across this quote from Henry Van Dyke whom I know better as the author of The Fourth Wise Man, the story of Artaban who kept following the Magi in order to see Jesus but kept missing Him but ended up using his gifts over thirty-three years to help others and thereby fulfilling Jesus' own commandment to love one another. was such a blessing for me. Since the Gospel account in Matthew (NOT in Luke, that's where the shepherds come to see Jesus born in the stable) doesn't specify how many magi came, there could have been four or more. So who knows if there really was an Artaban character in this big world?




Besides, into the depths of his sleep had wound a skein of mocking laughter.


I read this line last night in The Trojan War written by Bernard Evslin and illustrated by William Hunter (ISBN 059041626X) and I think I fell in love. Of course I know the story -- first contact between Europe and Asia precipitated in Greek myth by shepherd boy and Trojan prince Paris choosing to have the most beautiful woman in the world as his wife; too bad Helen was already married and all the kings of Greece who'd initially vied for her hand pledged to fight anybody who dragged her off. Ten years of war -- we're treated to a month and a half of Year Nine and a capsule summary of the rest in Homer's Iliad -- that got Helen back, but was she really worth it?




What began with an apple must end with a horse.




So Europe and Asia are maybe still not the best of friends, we begin to realize, and even an Independence Day-style invasion will likely not change that. The whole ten years does get a great treatment here ... and you also realize what jerks the gods can be. Despite and maybe because Zeus the king of the gods forbade them taking sides in the war (Paris, see above, had to judge between three goddesses to decide who was the "most beautiful") ... let's just say the two who weren't judged to be took the Greek side and all the others took sides too for they didn't want to feel left out. It makes me SO thankful that my Father Who art in heaven is not part of a pantheon!




Even when she was a very old lady looking back over a life that had never again been an easy one,




So let's get in my causality violation machine and jump forward ... let's see, Trojan War's first decade, twelfth century BC ... to the days after the American Revolutionary War had ended, AD eighteenth century, eighty-third year. Charlotte written by Janet Lunn and illustrated by Brian Deines (ISBN 0887763839) truly gave me the feels. How the end of the war affected one person, specifically the ten-year-old title character who snuck out of her family's house to visit her cousins one last time before they and their Loyalist family went into exile in Canada and got her dad to kick her out of their Patriot household so she had to go with them ... ouch.




she could not remember a day more dreadful.


From Charlotte's afterword: "Charlotte Haines grew up along the Saint John [Newfoundland] River and became a hardworking, cheerful woman. . . . Charlotte and [her husband] William had fifteen children and one hundred and eleven grandchildren. One of these grandchildren was Sir Samuel Leonard Tilley who became premier of New Brunswick in 1861 and one of the Fathers of Confederation in 1867. . . . Throughout all her long life she lived to be seventy-eight years old -- no one ever said of Charlotte Haines Peters that she ever turned anyone away from her door."




The one hundred eleven grandchildren figure made my eyes pop,



David