🐊🧹🦎🌸🏡🐦‍⬛🌎🎶❤️Two Orphan Girls and Theology

This week I read two splendid books about orphan girls who make the world a better place.

    Jordan Ifueko accomplishes something difficult in The Maid and the Crocodile. She crafts a captivating story with compelling characters and action, while also challenging my thinking about how societal norms around economics operate. Small Sade is an orphan who has aged out of the orphanage. At seventeen, she must find work and a place to live. With one look at Sade- crippled by a child labor accident, with unusual patterns on her skin- it will be difficult to find a maid position. By misfortune, she accidentally binds herself to the Crocodile god, believed to eat young women. Sade has secret strengths and a will to help those like her.

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    I remember discovering Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery and loving it. I think I was in my thirties and dived into everything I could find written by Montgomery. Then came the TV series with Megan Follows. Chef's kiss.

     The Grace of Wild Things by Heather Fawcett is a tip of the hat to Anne. A twelve-year-old orphan keeps getting returned to the orphanage. Because she's a witch. Her solution is to become an apprentice to a real witch--who eats children. The no-nonsense witch is more interested in eating Grace than training her. They strike a bargain. Grace has to complete all the spells in the witch's grimoire before her favorite cherry tree blossoms. Can Grace complete such a difficult task while making new friends, battling arch-enemies, and bullies? 

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    When it comes to books on theology, I don't read them in a week like most other books. It takes me months. After many months of 2-3 pages each night, I completed Gavin Ortland's Why God Makes Sense in a World that Doesn't: The Beauty of Christian Theism. I think the title echoes Timothy Keller's book,  Making Sense of God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. Keller's book is excellent; Ortland's is, too. He approaches the proof-of-God argument in ways that were new to me. Ortland looks at the elegance of mathematics, the splendor of music, and the strength of love. Some of his arguments sailed over my head — he quotes some heavy hitters on both sides of the intellectual fence — but overall I closed the book encouraged in my belief in a God who created a predictable, sophisticated world with delightful transcendence out of his deep, abiding love.

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