Make A Joyful Noise
Usually when I hear that phrase I start into Psalm 100 ("Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye, all ye lands") and may even sing it for that's how I first learned it, over two or three summers of Vacation Bible School when I was growing up in Florida -- see, music is good for getting these ingrained in your memory! I expect not for nothing were the psalms originally intended to be sung.
I refer to a book of poetry that I finished last night, Joyful Noise by Paul Fleischman and illustrated by Eric Beddows (ISBN 9780060218522) that won the 1989 Newbery Medal. Even if you're reading it just by yourself, it's fun! Taking the perspectives -- well, what the author imagines to be the perspectives -- of several different insects, the poems run down the page and ... well, I'll show you.
Sap's rising
Ground's warming
Grasshoppers are Grasshoppers are
hatching out hatching out
Autumn-laid eggs
splitting
Young stepping
into spring
Grasshoppers Grasshoppers
hopping hopping
high
Grassjumpers Grassjumpers
jumping jumping
far . . .
(from "Grasshoppers")
The idea's for one person to read the left side and one the right, and when there's text on both sides for both to read at the same time, which sounds great! I started some of these with my kids when I first opened the book a few months ago, but after "Mayflies" they found it a drag, and quite honestly I found it one too, so I didn't come back to the book until yesterday. Now if one of MY books gets a Newbery Medal I'd be astonished! Children's literature is not quite (yet) my specialty, but we'll see.
Thirteen days before school begins, I'm finding myself finishing quite a few books I'd put down a while ago (Strettam and Meeting The Winter Bike Rider I referred to yesterday among them) that I found such a slog for one reason or another. Maybe because I haven't taken -- there is NO. SUCH. THING. as not having -- the time to look for more volumes, or none have really jumped out at me that I don't already have. (You know I'll find something when we go on vacation.)
Today I also finished reading through 2 Timothy (say that "Second Timothy" or "Paul's second letter to Timothy" if you're feeling really audacious) on my third chapter by chapter Bible read-through. I don't say that to show off, but I was amazed at the end of this that even though we call 2 Timothy a book along with the other sixty-five of the Bible, it's really a letter. Of course I knew that it was a letter but occasionally you have to get jarred past the spiritual-ness, the fighting the good fight,
finishing the course, [and] keeping the faith (2 Timothy 4:7), and realize that Paul's first intent was not that this get read and quoted and interpreted thousands of years later.
But it has, and one wonders about the reps (personal reputations, not weightlifting prowess) of the people he cites at the end -- all eighteen of them in verses nine through twenty-two, and not all favorably. Of course, after I've been dead two thousand years I expect I won't be in a position to care. Just be careful, preachers and students who cite them ... we've no way of knowing if some of them were reconciled to God (the last person's Jesus Christ, so for Christians HE'S a given) or slid again.
We have until our very last breath to be reconciled to God, and to make a joyful noise about it!
David
I refer to a book of poetry that I finished last night, Joyful Noise by Paul Fleischman and illustrated by Eric Beddows (ISBN 9780060218522) that won the 1989 Newbery Medal. Even if you're reading it just by yourself, it's fun! Taking the perspectives -- well, what the author imagines to be the perspectives -- of several different insects, the poems run down the page and ... well, I'll show you.
Sap's rising
Ground's warming
Grasshoppers are Grasshoppers are
hatching out hatching out
Autumn-laid eggs
splitting
Young stepping
into spring
Grasshoppers Grasshoppers
hopping hopping
high
Grassjumpers Grassjumpers
jumping jumping
far . . .
(from "Grasshoppers")
The idea's for one person to read the left side and one the right, and when there's text on both sides for both to read at the same time, which sounds great! I started some of these with my kids when I first opened the book a few months ago, but after "Mayflies" they found it a drag, and quite honestly I found it one too, so I didn't come back to the book until yesterday. Now if one of MY books gets a Newbery Medal I'd be astonished! Children's literature is not quite (yet) my specialty, but we'll see.
Thirteen days before school begins, I'm finding myself finishing quite a few books I'd put down a while ago (Strettam and Meeting The Winter Bike Rider I referred to yesterday among them) that I found such a slog for one reason or another. Maybe because I haven't taken -- there is NO. SUCH. THING. as not having -- the time to look for more volumes, or none have really jumped out at me that I don't already have. (You know I'll find something when we go on vacation.)
Today I also finished reading through 2 Timothy (say that "Second Timothy" or "Paul's second letter to Timothy" if you're feeling really audacious) on my third chapter by chapter Bible read-through. I don't say that to show off, but I was amazed at the end of this that even though we call 2 Timothy a book along with the other sixty-five of the Bible, it's really a letter. Of course I knew that it was a letter but occasionally you have to get jarred past the spiritual-ness, the fighting the good fight,
finishing the course, [and] keeping the faith (2 Timothy 4:7), and realize that Paul's first intent was not that this get read and quoted and interpreted thousands of years later.
But it has, and one wonders about the reps (personal reputations, not weightlifting prowess) of the people he cites at the end -- all eighteen of them in verses nine through twenty-two, and not all favorably. Of course, after I've been dead two thousand years I expect I won't be in a position to care. Just be careful, preachers and students who cite them ... we've no way of knowing if some of them were reconciled to God (the last person's Jesus Christ, so for Christians HE'S a given) or slid again.
We have until our very last breath to be reconciled to God, and to make a joyful noise about it!
David
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