Lift Up Your Hearts!

Station X: Decoding Nazi Secrets by Michael Smith (TV Books, 1999)

Writers like Michael Pollan, John McPhee, and Rowan Jacobsen can take the oddest subjects and weave them into a riveting story.  Would that any of them had written Station X!  Michael Smith has a riveting story:  the long-kept secret of the codebreakers that revealed so much of Axis strategy and tactics during World War II.  The facts themselves kept me reading the book, but I'd have finished it in a day if it had been written as I'm sure it could be.  Without a doubt it's a story worth knowing, and you can get a taste of it from Wikipedia.

I had heard, of course, that the British had cracked the Germans' supposedly uncrackable Enigma Machine in WWII, a fact that only became known much later—the techniques were still being used in the Cold War—leaving participants from the lowest level to Winston Churchill unable to talk about what they did during the war.  Here are a few things I didn't know:

• The success was not due to a "big break" that solved the problem once for all, but to many little breaks that added up and to much tedious work—work and breaks that needed to be repeated and achieved every day.  In addition to serious mathematics, cracking the codes required intuition, imagination, guesswork, and persistence.  Old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood spying played a significant role, and good ol' human mistakes (such as starting a message with the very recognizable "Heil Hitler!") were essential.

Success depended very largely on German operators ignoring the rules.  "We could usually break things when we identified the human error and that was what it was all about," said Mavis Lever.  "If the Germans had kept to the rule book and done it properly, as they were instructed to do, then of course we wouldn't have been able to get it out."

Among his many achievements, Tiltman had helped to crack the cipher used by the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin, assisted by the latter's tendency to begin each of his reports with the phrase:  "I have the honor to report to your excellency that..."

• Cracking the codes began during World War I.
• The Poles made the first critical break, providing both irony and concern later, during the Cold War.
• Bletchley Park workers were a motley crew of brilliant and eccentric folks.  The initial group consisted mainly of liberal arts professors, on the grounds that codebreaking primarily required language skills.  When mathematicians were brought in they and their work were viewed with suspicion:  what could they possibly contribute? (More)

Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan, 2011)

I've reviewed three of Carolyn Custis James' books before (When Life and Beliefs Collide, The Gospel of Ruth, and Lost Women of the Bible); this is her most recent and I'm happy to say our library added it to their shelves at my request.  I'm not even going to attempt to rank the four, but just say that Carolyn James isn't losing any steam.  She continues fleshing out her discoveries concerning a Biblical view of the role of women, not only in the church but in all creation.  This time her vision was inspired and enhanced by her reading of Half the Sky (Kristof/WuDunn).

As usual, and despite her own assurances to the contrary, I think James underestimates both the difficulty and the importance of full-time, long-term motherhood, and is in danger of heaping still more burden and guilt on those who are already struggling.  I truly get her position that  "marriage and babies" is an insufficient—downright paltry—vision of God's overall plan for his daughters, implying that the young, the old, and those without husbands or incapable of bearing children are second-class citizens in God's Kingdom.  However, I believe that a vision of childrearing as only a short interlude in one's life is also deficient, and that James misses important contributions of those who have committed to large families (now defined as more than two children), childrearing as full-time work, and homeschooling.  She also appears not to understand how difficult and intellectually challenging it is to do well in such a profession, and how little such people are respected by society (including most churches). 

But that is not James' battle, and one cannot cover all bases in every book.  What she does cover, she handles superbly.

As usual, here are a few random quotations, to give you a feel for Half the Church, and to remind my future self of what's inside.

Literary experts tell us every good story has conflict. ... In fact without conflict a story has no plot. ... Which made me wonder, if God is the master storyteller—the creator of story—and if conflict makes the story, is there conflict before Genesis 3?  ...  If humanity had never fallen into sin, would we be living in a plotless story now?  For that matter, will heaven be plotless?  Is conflict only and always destructive and the result of fallenness?  Or is there a healthy, necessary, constructive variety of conflict that creates a gripping plot and is designed to make God's image bearers flourish and grow?  (pp. 66-67)

Conflict brings out the leader in us, transforms our lives from the mundane to the cosmic, and by God's grace forges us into more compassionate, selfless leaders.  Conflict in our stories isn't in the way; it is the way—to becoming better leaders, better image bearers, to creating a better story—to the fulfillment of the Story.  (p. 97)

 (More)

We're currently undergoing some home phone renovations, so if you need to contact us, please do so via e-mail, cell phone, Facebook, or here.  Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE 2/19:  The home phone is working now (thanks, Lime Daley!) but we'll be making changes now and then over the next week, so you can still resort to the above contact methods if necessary.  (You know I prefer e-mail most of the time, anyway.)

Our anthem, February 16, 2014:

Come, Christians, Join to Sing arr. Carlton R. Young

(Sorry, still no acceptable YouTube version.)

Thanks, Jon, for finding this.  From where I sit (the office next door) this is enough like Porter's frequent phone meetings to have me (almost) rolling on the floor laughing.  (No, I will not say ROFL.)

Our anthem for Sunday, February 9, 2014.

 The Lord's Prayer (Benjamin Harlan, Harold Flammer A8674)

I'm sorry for the lack of YouTube video, and even sorrier that you don't get to hear our own talented cellist, but you can hear the anthem, complete with cello part, at the JWPepper link above.

"I don't want to eat" has almost never been a problem in our family!  Nonetheless, this article on ending mealtime battles caught my eye, and it has some wisdom in it, so I'm passing it on.  I can sum up what I like about it in a couple of quotes.

It's dinnertime and my 4-year-old son is deep in play. When I announce that dinner is ready he makes his own announcement: "I don't want to eat, Mommy."

I tell him five words that avoid the food battle that he wants me to engage in: "You don't have to eat."

This is the rule in our house but it is followed by a second rule that everyone follows, regardless of wanting to eat or not. I tell him that family dinners are about being with family, and not just eating, so we all have to sit at the table.

What I like most about Ellyn Satter's Division of Responsibility in Feeding, is it gives parents and children very specific jobs in the realm of feeding. Parents are in charge of deciding what is served at meal time, when meals occur and where. Children get to be in charge of choosing what to eat and how much from what is offered to them.

So when my children complain about what I make for them, I always remind them that they can choose not to eat it. And I make sure to include at least one or two items they are likely to accept. This gives them some control, melts away the tension, and makes them more likely to try it....

This strategy puts more onus on the parents to make sure all the food offerings are nutritious:  if the meal on the table includes chips and soda, a strategy of letting your children decide what and how much to eat from the offerings appears a lot less wise.  Nor would I include anything not part of the family meal among the offerings, i.e. no chicken nuggets when the rest of the family is eating chicken tikka.  But letting them choose proportions (including nothing) from a good meal sounds like a reasonable strategy for giving children autonomy within secure boundaries.

I wonder:  if I had not been required to eat a portion of everything served, would I have learned to like vegetables sooner than I did?  Very early on I developed the tactic of swallowing my vegetable bites whole, with great gulps of water, like pills.  (Peas are particularly easy.)  My parents were willing to insist I eat the veggies, but would not go so far as to require me to chew and taste them.  If, instead, they had simply been offered as part of the meal, and I had observed my parents enjoying it all, might I not have tried them now and then, thus developing the taste for certain foods that eluded me until later in life?  I'll never know, but I like this strategy better.

... to point out to our Northern friends that our temperature was a record-breaking 86 degrees today.  Last week was winter.  I guess the groundhog thing doesn't work south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Our anthem for Sunday, February 2, 2014.

God Watches Over You (Joel Raney, Hope Publishing C5581)

Our anthem for Sunday, January 26, 2014.

Down to the River to Pray (arr. Sheldon Curry, Daybreak/Hal Leonard 08743261)

From LarkNews.com, one of the best 404 File Not Found errors I've come across.

In one way or another, we covered a lot of bases with our church music last Sunday.  It was a wild ride.  But that's one thing I like about our church.  From Deck Thyself My Soul with Gladness to Shout to the Lord, from What Star is this with Beams so Bright to How Great Thou Art, from There's a Wideness in God's Mercy to a couple I'll highlight:

First, our choir anthem, Praise His Holy Name by Keith Hampton (earthsongs).

We arrived early at church, and having discovered that the processional hymn was a new one to us, I plunked it out on the piano several times before the director arrived.  It may sound easy, but it is decidedly not if you've never heard it before.  Mercifully, he took it down a whole third from what is written in our hymnal.

I would never have guessed that Lift Every Voice and Sing was an African-American song, much less the "Black National Anthem" as it is sometimes called.  Not knowing the tempo at which it is apparently usually sung (judging by the YouTube recordings I listened to), I took it at a faster clip, and would have guessed it to be a World War I era song, or maybe something from the Salvation Army.  If you listen to it and note that the middle part sounds like the more militant parts of Les Miserables, be assured that this was written in 1899/1900 by James Weldon Johnson and his brother John Rosamond Johnson.

The experience reminded my very much of singing with grandson Joseph, who chooses hymns not by name, but by number, providing an interesting tour through the more obscure parts of the hymnal.  Fun!

UPDATE 11/2/19 Once again, the automated updating of Flash videos to iframe cut out a chunk of the post, but I don't have time to worry about it now.

Nunsense was written in 1985, but neither of us had seen it until Sunday.  We went to the performance at Sanford's Wayne Densch Performing Arts Center because our friend Linda was the music director for the show.  As it turned out, we knew one of the main cast members, too—a friend of Heather's from high school.  She played Sister Hubert and did a fantastic job.  Everyone did a great job, actually, though some had better enunciation than others, so we didn't always get the jokes because we didn't catch all the words.

A few of the jokes were less than family-friendy, but they'd probably go over the heads of anyone who shouldn't hear them, and compared with much of what can be seen today, the show is fitting for—well, for a convent!

Afterwards we had a (too) quick bite to eat at the Willow Tree Café.  German food is not normally my favorite out-to-eat meal, but this was excellent and I'd love to have an excuse to go back.

We had the Gourmet Potato Pancakes and the Sausage Sliders from this menu.  Both were worth repeating, although next time I may want to try the Reisen Bretzen.

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets, even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.  He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'here lived'.  — Martin Luther King, Jr.