The Big Book of Christians around the World Review

In a time when everyone needs to feel even more united than before, I was delighted to receive the book, “The Big Book of Christians around the World” by Sophie de Mullenheim and Solenne & Thomas.

My whole family enjoyed this book, from the age of 6 to 45, we each learned something new and different.  The book has 1-2 pages on each country with small paragraphs of facts, stories and more.  Each region has a “journal entry” written from the perspective of two children about something special that happens in that area.  While the book does a great job at highlighting unique practices in each country and region, it also does a fantastic job at showing how the Faith unites us all.  While the book says it’s “The Big Book of Christians,” I found that it was heavily focused on Catholics.  Obviously, I have no problem with that!  I did kind of think twice though about sending it to my non-Catholic Christian friends as it may be a little “too Catholic” for them.  I was happy to send it to some other families I know that share the faith and they were excited to receive it.  There was only one segment in the book that I found parental guidance was needed for.  There was a small paragraph about a robin hood type folk hero and I had a talk with my son that while giving to the poor is laudable, stealing is not Ok.  Otherwise, I found the values in the book to be part of our foundational beliefs and a great way to open all of our eyes to the beauty of our faith around the world.  Even though we are all different and may express our love for our faith differently, Jesus unites us.  What a great message for our times!



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Update

I'm sure I have a problem many people would love to have right now... I'm way busy!  What I thought would be a lull that would allow more time for projects around the house and spending more family time together with my husband has instead  become one where it seems like we are working multiple full-time jobs.  As one mom put it, "We are all in the same storm, but we are not all in the same boat.  Some of our boats have more people in them than others or are having to work from home, or having to work outside the home.  Some of us have additional stressors and some times there feels like a giant hole in the boat."  So true.

I had originally lost a lot of work at the beginning of this crisis, but now I'm getting a decent amount of it back.  Add on the change in situation where my husband is at home and my hours and flexibility have changed.  Moreover, my sister brought a great blessing to us in recruiting me to teach classes online, and I now have lesson planning and trying to fit in more and more classes.  (It originally was helping out with grocery money and now it has taken off and I kind of feel pressured into doing more because I keep getting requests to teach more classes.)

As my husband said, "It's not really like we are working from home, it's more like we are sleeping at the office."  Add on my husband and I trying to split task-mastering our son into his schoolwork (which he has a fair bit of) and I almost feel like homeschooling him would be easier than this online hybrid we are navigating.

At one point I also had to remind my husband that I'm used to having "pleasant" coworkers, so it would be appreciated if he could try to attempt to be friendly throughout the day.  He took my feedback and adjusted accordingly.

Navigating how we do things is also difficult.  I can't go into too many specifics, but I've had to draw lines for some people.  No, I'm not entering your car in a busy parking lot to see your pet.  No, I don't want to be in a small room with you when you just came from a hot spot area (apparently a lot of people are still traveling around the country).  Fortunately, I haven't seen any cases that have looked like coronavirus in pets, but it sounds like that may be something we need to keep our eyes out for.  It's a strange world and a strange time.  A lot of people are talking a lot more on the phone with me- even my son's specialist doctor who always rushes when we are in for appointments seemed thirsty for conversation.  He wanted to talk about wearing a bike helmet, COVID and more when we just wanted to hear from him whether my son's tonsils are ok (they are).

Hopefully I'll get back into blogging soon, but right now my family is busy praying and trying to hold it together.  In some ways it reminds me of initiation when I was on my varsity team in college.  It was something that involved spray painting from a river/bay.  As we were working on our "project" we realized that the boat we were in had a leak, at the same time a police officer above was alarmed by our noise and then looked down, "Oh, just spray-painting, carry on then."  He knew our graffiti was good-natured.
 Yep- we will all just carry on and when you have a hole in your boat, teamwork help gets you through.