Roseanna White - Roseanna M. White

Thoughtful About . . . Spiritual Fullness

by Roseanna White | Mar 5, 2020 | Thoughtful Thursdays

We’ve recently decided to read some of the writings of the early church fathers–things that aren’t included in our Bible because they weren’t written by an apostle, but which are still very early. We began with I Clement, written somewhere around 90 AD, from the church of Rome to the church of Corinth, which had gone through a huge upheaval.

Clement takes a full two chapters to talk about all the Corinthian church had been doing right. They’d been earning the rightful praise of the other churches with their devotion, their giving, their piety, their love. But then…

But then…

Chapter three launches with this:

Every
kind of honour and happiness was bestowed upon you, and then was fulfilled that
which is written, “My beloved ate and drink, and was enlarged and became
fat, and kicked.” Hence flowed emulation and envy, strife and sedition,
persecution and disorder, war and captivity.

We all agreed from the start that the writer probably wasn’t just talking about a physical thing here, right? I mean, sure, the Corinthians were a wealthy people and were known for their appetites for all things corporeal–anything that brought bodily pleasure, including food. But we didn’t think it could be just that. No, this kind of falling away–this kind of WAR within a church–had to have its root in spiritual things. Spiritual conflict. Spiritual problems.

What, though, would it mean to be spiritually fat?

My husband and I were talking about this on our way home from church. Our bodies get fat from eating too much…of the wrong thing. So what is the equivalent for our souls? It isn’t just having too much of the virtuous, right? You can love above and beyond, and it’s not going to damage you. You can be as gentle, good, faithful, peaceful, as you ever could manage, and it’s not going to lead to envy and strive and sedition.

No, this sort of fat is talking about something different. It’s talking about spiritual muscles going flabby with complacency. It’s talking about being full of thoughts of self instead of thoughts of others. It’s talking about getting to that point where you’re so comfortable in where you are that you forget to stretch toward something higher.

That’s when we start comparing ourselves to others. That’s when we start wanting what they have. That’s when we start bickering and fighting among ourselves. That’s when chaos sneaks in. That’s when our churches dissolve into civil war.

But as we were talking about this spiritual fatness, we were also talking through what the alternative would be: spiritual fullness.

I’ll never forget a lesson my French teacher taught us in high school–that when you’ve had enough to eat in France, you don’t ever want to say the equivalent of “I’m full.” That, in fact, means “I’m pregnant.” LOL. Which popped into my mind as I was considering this spiritual fullness.

Because isn’t that a perfect example? Pregnancy isn’t fatness, because it isn’t just your body storing up what it doesn’t in fact need. It’s new life. It’s creation. It’s your body becoming literally full with someone else.

And that is what our spirits should be experiencing. They should be FULL, but not fat. Full of good things. Full of life. Full of fruit. Full of Him.

This fullness is the state of health. Not scraggly and thin and weak–just like our physical eyes recognize that in someone’s body as unhealthy, so too do our spiritual eyes recognize the same state in our brothers’ and sisters’ souls. But not spiritually fat and engorged and enlarged either–because that means we’re resting on our laurels, growing lazy and complacent, no longer working our spiritual muscles.

We need to strive for that balance. When we are well fed by the Vine, producing good fruit, full of Him, but never content to remain just where we are. Striving always to reach a little farther, stretch a little more, run our race with full commitment.

What do you see when you look at the Church today? Are we spiritually starved…spiritually full…or spiritually fat?

Word of the Week – Just Kidding!

by Roseanna White | Mar 2, 2020 | Word of the Week

Originally published November 2011

I like the word “kid.” I use it with my children (do you know how hard it was for me to write that sentence without using the word “kid”? LOL), I use it for jests. It’s a standard part of my vocabulary. But I’ll never forget the substitute teacher in high school who said something about how his children were not young goats,
so thank you not to use that word. And one of my critique partners recently caught me using it in the joking sense well before it would have been.

It seemed time to look it up. 😀

“Kid” entered English with the
meaning of “a young goat” round about 1200. It began being applied to
children in 1590, though it was still slang at that point. It was
accepted usage, however, by 1840 . . . and had in fact been a word used
to describe skillful young thieves for 30 years before that. (One I
didn’t know!)

The meaning of “playful tease”
is from 1839 (which proves that it was a well-accepted slang by then)
and comes from the idea of “making a kid of, treating as a child.”
Though those thieving youngsters used it to mean “coax, wheedle, hoax.”

So there you have it–a brief explanation of why we now kid our kids. 😉

Thoughtful About . . . Fruit

by Roseanna White | Feb 27, 2020 | Thoughtful Thursdays

We love fruit in our family. Fresh fruit, canned fruit, dried fruit, jammed fruit, fruit from our own garden, or fruit from the other side of the world. We love citrus fruit, stone fruit, berries… Fruit can be a taste of the familiar or the tang of the exotic. We love to eat it raw, to bake it into recipes, to puree it into smoothies. Last week, I even learned to make homemade fruit roll-ups. With a kiddo who despises vegetables, fruit is often the way I get much-needed nutrients into all of us. And a much-appreciated taste of yumminess too.

Fruit is a pretty amazing thing. As a homeschool mom, I’ve had the opportunity to study it with my kids in our science classes. And as a Christian, I of course read about it a lot in the scriptures. For instance, take this passage from Colossians 1:3-6

3 We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, 4 since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of your love for all the saints; 5 because of the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, of which you heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel, 6 which has come to you, as it has also in all the world, and is bringing forth fruit, as it is also among you since the day you heard and knew the grace of God in truth… (NKJV, emphasis mine)

Photo by Heather Barnes on Unsplash

To take out some of the phrases there for focusing purposes, that says “because of the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, which you heard in the gospel, which is bringing forth fruit.”

Now, anyone who knows me even a little knows that hope and I are good friends. I’m not only an optimist, I’m a see-the-good-in-everyone sort of person, a cling-to-hope-at-all-costs sort of girl. So any time the word is mentioned in the Bible, my spiritual ears perk right up. As we were discussing this passage in our Bible study last week, my mind kept circling around those particular words. Hope comes from the Gospel…the Gospel brings forth fruit.

As we talked about what this fruit is, it’s easy to come up with the usual answer: spreading that same Good News to others so that they can believe too. Yes, absolutely.

But, with memories of strawberries and blueberries and mango and peaches still fresh in my mind from my fruit roll-up making adventure a couple days before, I had to look at this a little more closely.

In other passages, we hear of the Gospel message as a seed. It’s planted, watered, fed. As it sprouts, the seed itself passes away and becomes a plant. It’s no longer a seed at all–it’s changed. Transformed. Why? So that it can become something more.

I love that it’s likened to a fruit-bearing plant though. Because part of the very nature of a plant is to spread its seeds. WHY do we bear fruit? Love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control? For OTHERS.

One of the things I learned in our science class is that the plant itself doesn’t benefit at all from the fruit it bears. The sole purpose of it is to be delicious. Alluring. To appeal to animals so that they come, eat it, and thereby transport the seeds elsewhere, so that they’re deposited far and wide and the plant can find new life somewhere else.

Photo by Brian Jimenez on Unsplash

So what is the purpose of us learning to produce those fruits of the Spirit? Not for our own sake–for His. So that others come, smell the fragrance of His peace, see the beauty of His love, taste the perfection of His Joy. Our job as Christ followers is to share those things with anyone who walks by hungry. So that they eat of it, and the seed nestles deep inside. So that He can water it and it can grow. And so that then that person too can experience the transformative power of God and turn from fallow ground with a dried up seed inside to a life-giving, thriving tree spreading out their limbs and offering His love to others.

I’d always considered the Fruits of the Spirit to be things we should want for our own sakes; or for their own sakes. Because they’re, well, good. Because they’ll make us better people. Holier. More worthy of Him. And that’s certainly true…

But that’s only half the story, isn’t it? The other half isn’t about us at all. It’s about THEM. The other people in our world. Our spouses and children, our parents and grandparents, and our aunts, uncles, and cousins. Our friends, our neighbors, the strangers in the grocery store. The drivers who cut us off and the customer service rep who won’t listen. The homeless man begging for money on the street corner. The mother desperate for clean water in Africa.

Each and every one of them needs the fruit–because that fruit carried the seeds of the Gospel, and that’s where our hope is found.

I don’t know about you, but that changes my perspective a bit on why I should be working hard to be the person He wants me to be.

And it makes me look at my beloved fruit differently too. My daughter and I joke that the orange marmalade we made is “sunshine in a jar” (because seriously!)–but it’s not only that. In a way, it’s hope in a jar too. A reminder that the goodness of others is our nourishment…and that our own ought to be theirs in return.

Announcing Tote Bags!

by Roseanna White | Feb 26, 2020 | Announcements, Bookish Tees and Totes

Actually, I’m not just announcing totes, I’m announcing a whole cute little division. 😉 Bookish Tees and Totes will soon be a store on Etsy as well (once I get lovely photos taken) and for now directs to the T-shirt page on my website. Y’all have already been introduced to my Codebreakers T-shirts…I’ll be adding general bookish tees as well, not specific to my books, and–as the subject line suggests–TOTE BAGS!

Right now I have 6 bag designs–the 4 Codebreaker ones you’ve already seen on t-shirts, and two bookish ones, which read:

It’s Not That I Have TOO MANY BOOKS

It’s Just That I NEED MORE SHELVES

and

TODAY I

Saved the World / Fell in Love / Won the War / Beat the Bad Guy / Lived Happily Ever After

READ A BOOK

All of these tote bags are and will remain

$8.99

(I do still have the Library card tote bag available as well, which is a higher priced item–I’m down to a couple of these in stock and will not be ordering me, so when they’re gone, they’re gone.)

Pre-order now!

Also, do note that t-shirts are now all on the same 3 colors:

Raspberry, Aqua, and Banana

Word of the Week – Cameo

by Roseanna White | Feb 24, 2020 | Word of the Week

I’m having so much fun going through my old Word of the Week entries and redoing some of the oldest ones. I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember all these tidbits I’ve looked up in the past! LOL. This one comes to you from 2011. Appropriate, again, since I’m editing the book I mention below, Dreams of Savannah, to release in the Winter 2020/21 season from Bethany House!

I can’t tell you how much time I spent
chasing rabbits down trails (literarily speaking) for a one-line
mention in my books. Like, did they have bells over the doors in 18th
century New York? Hard to discover.

This last week, one of my random
questions was, thankfully, easily answered. I wanted a character to
mention a cameo necklace, which I was pretty darn sure were around and
popular by the 1860s, but I’ve been wrong before. So I looked it up.

I was pleased to see that cameo,
by which I mean a carved stone with two layers of color, has been
around since the 16th century. Cameos maintained a steady popularity for
centuries–Elizabeth I had a sizable collection, as did Catherine the
Great. And since Queen Victoria favored them, they even stuck around
during the fast-changing fashion of the 19th century.

In 1851 the word was attributed
to “a short literary sketch or portrait.” Very much related to the
pendant, which commonly depict a bust or figure (though not always). And
so this sense was also transferred to the stage/film in 1928, when it
came to mean “a brief role that stands out from other minor parts in a
performance.”

I have a cameo necklace I
inherited from my great-grandmother, and I love it. =) There’s something
so very romantic about those treasures from times past . . .