by Roseanna White | Mar 26, 2015 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
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| The Black Sea coast in Bulgaria |
Since we began using Sonlight curriculum for our homeschooling when Xoe was in 1st grade, we’ve read a lot of missionary stories–and honestly, those stories are some of the best things we’ve read (in my opinion), even amidst all the literature I absolutely adore.
Maybe it’s because I love hearing how the light of Christ has been shone around the world. Maybe it’s because I’m always awed at hearing how He protects and provides for those living out the Great Commission. Maybe it’s because even the losses and sacrifices and martyrs still portray His greatness.
I’ve never felt the call to go into foreign missions myself, much as I admire those who do. My mission field is behind a computer, using the written word, and it’s something I’m passionate about–passionate in the true sense, something I’m willing to suffer for (which is where passion comes from). But I take great Joy in supporting those missionaries who do go out into the world.
Today, I’m sending off my husband on a missions trip. He’s traveling with a family that has long been friends of mine. They were full time missionaries for much of my growing-up years, and now the couple feel the call to return to Bulgaria, where they served for several years before. David is going along to try to help them find business opportunities to help employ the people in the gypsy village they hope to call home, and to provide resources for this couple too.
You may recall my post a few months ago about Stolen Blessings–these are the same people, the same general area in Bulgaria.
And so, I ask today that you pray. Pray for smooth travels into Eastern Europe. Pray for open doors where they’re meant to stride through and closed doors where they’re not. Pray for supernatural understanding. For wisdom. For knowledge. For the glory of the Lord to show up in ways no one expected. For divine appointments and blessings unforeseen. And of course, for safe, uneventful travels back home again.
The kids and I will be here, carrying on with business as usual. And praying. Lots. =) Thanks so much for joining me in those prayers!
by Roseanna White | Mar 19, 2015 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
I’ve always known there was a distinction between wisdom and knowledge. There is, after all, a reason they’re listed as two separate spiritual gifts. A reason they have two different words. And while I’ve long had a basic idea of that difference, I hadn’t fully thought it through until this past weekend.
It started when a list I belong to invited everyone to take a look at this blog, which claims that the church is largely anti-intellectual. The part I found most interesting was more than America as a whole can be anti-intellectual. By which I mean, we put great stock in experts, in facts, in hard knowledge…but not so much, anymore, in those who pursue knowledge for its own sake. That we love experts put pooh-pooh scholars.
I consider myself a scholar–I love learning, and I don’t love learning just a particular field for a particular purpose. I just love learning. I love the discovery process, I love the way knew information makes me pause and think and reflect and reexamine all I once thought I knew. But that certainly isn’t the way most schools teach kids to think these days, and so it’s not where society’s focus has turned. We as a whole aren’t interested anymore in the what ifs, we’re only interested in the Cold, Hard Facts.
But that’s what led me to this distinction–there’s no such thing as Cold, Hard Facts. Facts can change as knowledge grows. (Hello, eggs. Are you good for me this year or not?? And Pluto, I do so miss counting you as a planet…) As definitions change. As new information comes to light.
Knowledge is supposed to change as it grows. That’s the beauty of it. That because we can stand on the shoulders of those who came and discovered before, we can reach new heights. New understanding. We can challenge old “facts” and find new ones. In my sophomore year of college, we read a lot of Aristotle, and one of the translations of the Metaphysics that most stuck with me was by one of our tutors [professors], Joe Sachs. He translated a certain line as “All men by nature stretch themselves out toward knowing.”
That really hits the truth of the human condition, and it really captures what Aristotle was trying to say. It’s not that we all know. It’s not that we all reach toward knowledge. But we do all, naturally, stretch ourselves toward the process of figuring things out. But when society starts pooh-poohing the process and instead only emphasizes the “facts”…
It ain’t good, folks. Discovery grinds to a halt, and you end up with a generation of parrots, capable only of telling us what other people thought and unable to think for themselves.
So that’s knowledge. But wisdom…wisdom is something altogether different. Wisdom does not change with time. You can’t shed new light on moral Truths and have them change. Right is still right. Wrong is still wrong, even after millennia of changing facts.
Wisdom is what God most often supernaturally reveals to people. Oh, we see in Daniel where He gave him the gift of knowledge, and it’s listed in the New Testament among the gifts too. I think that’s really, incredibly awesome. But when we pray, it’s rare that God plops a new fact into our laps. What He does give us, regularly, is understanding of the human condition. Of moral truths. Of spiritual precepts.
This is wisdom. And this is deserving of all sorts of capital letters. Truth. Justice. Right. Wrong. Ideals. Principles.
But there’s a very real difference between biblical wisdom and worldly wisdom, which is addressed many times in the Bible. Worldly wisdom says, “Might equals right. If you suffer, you’re being punished. If you prosper, you must be just and good.” Godly wisdom says, “Even when my enemies have me hemmed in all about, even when my world crumbles around me, I’ll trust in my Salvation. I will follow His will, even when the world calls me a fool.”
Worldly wisdom says, “There is no Right and Wrong. There’s right for me, right for you…live and let live.” Godly wisdom says, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
The Bible, beautifully, isn’t a treatise. It’s not filled with knowledge alone–if it was, it would expire. It would go out of date. It could be termed wrong. But it can’t, and it isn’t, because it deals with the unchanging and unchagable.
Oh, the world tries to change that too. They try to claim that wisdom is like knowledge–mutable and shifting. And when the world tries to do that…
It really ain’t good folks.
But understanding the distinction is our first step toward preserving each in its rightful place. And hey, when we do that…we’ve all got a bit of the scholar going on. 😉
by Roseanna White | Mar 12, 2015 | Remember When Wednesdays, Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
Last week we wrapped up the Bible study we’d been doing on Sacred Parenting–and the last session was on how parenting is all about sacrificial love, which teaches us what it is. A crucial step in the Christian faith, which is built on sacrifice. It was a great study, and in our discussion afterward, we touched on a lot of great aspects of the subject.
But what really struck me the most is the idea that our idea of sacrifices change over time. The author of the book used the example of a tired dad walking through the mall with his small daughter, who said, “Will you carry me, Daddy? My legs are tired.” He could tell the dad was tired too, but sighed and picked up his little girl. Gary (the author) found himself longing for those days–his youngest was 12. That time of his life was over, and though it was exhausting at the time, he missed it.
How true is that, so often?
It made me think of when my babies were still babies. Rowyn especially would wake up every night. I’m talking, for four years. Every night, at some point or another, he would cry. Every night, I would have to tromp, exhausted, down those stairs to his room. I’d scoop him up. I’d ease down into the old, creaking rocking chair. He’d cuddle in. I’d close my eyes.
There were nights I was so tired that I fell asleep sitting up in that old wooden rocker (not the soft, plush kind with cushions, mind you–the wooden kind). There were nights when I cried along with him because I just needed sleep, and he wouldn’t grant me that. There were nights when I seriously wondered if this kid would ever sleep through the night.
But now I think back on how many times God met me there in the hushed bedroom of my little boy, in the soft shadows of night. I remember how many times I crawled up into the lap of God, just as Rowyn crawled up into mine. I remember how many times I held him, praying him back to sleep…and then, after I saw his eyelids were firmly closed, I held him just a little longer–because I wasn’t ready yet to put him back down, even though that was what my goal had been.
And I realize that those things that were a sacrifice–of our time, our energy, our very sanity–became a blessing. It wasn’t that a blessing came from them, though certainly that happens sometimes. But it’s the thing itself, that action, that act of sacrificing, that we miss when the season has passed by. We miss the time spent giving to another. We miss the act of giving of ourselves.
It doesn’t stop the next sacrifice from hurting. It’s supposed to hurt, to cost us something. That’s why it’s a sacrifice. It grows us, it stretches us, it makes us ache with it. But it’s necessary. Because without sacrifice, what is our faith? If we don’t give to others, why did Jesus give up everything for us?
There are times when I really, really don’t feel up to fulfilling that obligation I agreed to. There are times when I really, really don’t want to pause my work to make another cheese sandwich. There are times when I really, really don’t think I have the strength to give up one more thing.
There are times when I don’t want to sing to the Lord. When I don’t want to worship. When I don’t want to praise. Because it hurts.
That’s when we bring the sacrifice of praise. Of money. Of time. Of energy.
And God meets us there. He takes our sacrifices, and He returns them to us filled up with love. So that, looking back, we realize that that obligation became the thing we looked forward to. That we love cooking for our families. That we had just as much without that money as we would have had with it. That through praising God, the empty places inside were filled up.
The sacrifices didn’t just yield blessings. They are blessings.
What are you sacrificing today? For me, it’s time. And I’m going to stop right now and praise Him for asking it of me. Knowing that the sacrifice is sweet.
by Roseanna White | Mar 5, 2015 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
It’s been a crazy-busy week (aren’t they all?), and I wanted to take today to regroup, draw your attention to some things, and…well, frankly, go teach the canal class at my kids’ homeschool group. 😉
First of all, I want to announce the launch of the website for Roseanna White Designs! I finally bit the bullet and built a page specifically for my designing business. My favorite feature of the website is on the homepage–if you scroll down, there’s a testimonials section where the quote pops up as you hover over the thumbnail image that it goes with. Super fun!
Another fun aspect that I hope will set it apart from some other websites is my Behind the Design blog that’s attached–and which will have all the behind-the-scenes posts I do here too. =)
But there was something else that launched this week too–Dauntless, the young adult medieval romance/adventure written by my good friend, critique partner, and fellow editor at WhiteFire, Dina Sleiman!
To celebrate the launch, Bethany House is offering a truly awesome giveaway, which includes as first prize a cute heart-and-arrow necklace and a $250 Amazon gift card (woot!), and as second prize, a bow and arrow set and a leather backpack! Check out the giveaway!
by Roseanna White | Mar 4, 2015 | Uncategorized
I’ve been having a blast with designing–no secret, I know–and I owe a lot of my new business to one person: Sandi Rog. Sandi has been a friend for years, though we’ve only met in person once. We met through a historical group that shot off from ACFW, focusing on books set in Europe. Became friends. When Jewel of Persia was about ready to debut, I asked Sandi if she would edit it for me, knowing she was a freelance editor. That was, unfortunately, right about the time she discovered she had cancer. She hadn’t been diagnosed yet, but the symptoms were appearing. She persevered on that edit and had her best friend (a fellow editor) help out too, because she takes her promises seriously.
Since those days, WhiteFire has published one of Sandi’s books, her best friend has become our non-fiction editor, and that simple online friendship has deepened and grown. And Sandi has become one of my most vocal cheerleaders when it comes to my designing. She recommends me to absolutely everyone, and quite a few of those everyones follow her advice. So a big, big thanks to Sandi!
Naturally then, when she asked if I would design a cover for a novella she was working on–the first book she’s written since cancer–I said, “Of course!”
And so we got to work. =) The book is set in the late Victorian era and is called Out of the Ashes–those ashes being from the Great Chicago Fire. Sandi described her heroine for me and said she wanted her in a nice dress.
Sometimes I start with a model. But in this case, I knew the tricky part would be clothing, so I actually started with a public domain image of a dress from the correct era.
I really liked the detail on the back of this, and the dress has a nice sheen, which denotes it as an evening gown, despite the long sleeves. I knew Sandi wanted the dress to be blue, but for now, I was just happy to find a gown. I flipped it and deleted the background.
Then came the process of making the dress blue–Sandi had specified royal blue, so I knew what my goal was. I did this by going into Layer / Adjustments / Color Balance…several times. Increasing the “blue” each time until I ended up with this.
Then came finding a person to put into the dress. =) As usual, I searched for a bride that fit her heroine’s description, since they often have their hair up. I also needed one in a very particular pose, to fit into the dress. I found this one relatively quickly.
As usual, my first step with her was to delete all the background–and in this case, her dress.
Don’t you just love this step? So funny to see someone missing their body, LOL. So then we play dress up, and I put the girl behind the now-blue dress to see how they line up.
At this point I also sized her to fill the page but leave room for a background. Of course, we were missing a hand…a problem, but I would deal with that later, I decided. For now, I was just pleased that the head and neck were at the right angle to be coming out of that dress. Yay! So I went searching for a background. I didn’t know how literal the “ashes” part was, but I decided to go for some nice ruins and chose this background.
Then made it more mysterious (woooooo) by making it night.
Not bad…but I added some smoke effects. ‘Cause you know. Fire. Ashes. Smoke…
(This is just a free smoke texture that some lovely designer offered to other designers.) I liked how this obscured the background…but she looked weird in front of it like that. So I duplicated the layer, moved it in front of her, and deleted all but a wisp.
Better! I really liked this, other than the still-missing hand. 😉 So I added a title in the font hilariously called “The Last Font I’m Wasting on You” (with a script for the “little words”). And Sandi’s name, which combines two fonts–The Alistaren Beta for the first letters, and plain ol’ Times New Roman for everything else.
The hand was still missing, but I went ahead and sent this to Sandi for an initial reaction. Which was that she loved it–and wanted me to save that background and smokiness for a later book in the series–but this one needed to be in a ballroom. Brightly lit. Oops, LOL. She gave me some direction on said ballroom–she wanted stairs–and off I went to search it out. You’d be surprised how few of these there are! But I eventually found this one.
Quite a different feel, eh? 😉 Quick substitution, and I got this.
In this version, I did a quick alteration on the dress, just to see what we could do about that hand…and make it look more traditionally “evening.” By simply deleting the sleeves and the part of the dress covering her arm, I suddenly had a realistic pose. I sent it again to Sandi, who asked me to keep the background out of the blue tones and wanted some more alterations on the dress.
In hunting down other dresses from the era I love, I came across my all-time favorite Worth gown.
I’m not sure I can adequately express how much I adore this dress, LOL. And it’s even from a similar angle. So I decided to borrow some of the styling queues for my adjustments and created a similar arm/neckline area.
This looked promising! So I redressed my lovely lady, kept the original tones of the photos, added just a touch of bluing at the bottom to make her name stand out, a glow around “Ashes” for the same reason…and we had it.
Sandi was in love, and so was I. Absolutely adore how this one turned out…even if redesigning that dress did stretch my abilities. =) Feedback thus far has been very positive, and everyone agrees that it screams “Christian historical romance!” which is exactly what we want it to do.
Sandi posted a description of the story here.
Whatcha think?
by Roseanna White | Feb 26, 2015 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
There seems to be an idea today (okay, for quite a while),
that faith and science are at war. I’ve heard scientists say only fools believe
in God as the Bible paints him. But what concerns me more is that lately, from
every direction, I’ve been bombarded with Christians who say that science can’t
be trusted because it doesn’t agree with the Bible. I’ve seen tracts that point
out where science is wrong and the Bible right. I’ve seen videos, heard
interviews, and been debated on Facebook about the “dangers” of science.
I’ve even heard people claim that if you believe in
evolution to any degree, you’re not a real Christian. (So…what do you call dog
breeding, dude? Are you aware that that
is what Origin of Species is actually
addressing, not ape-becoming-man?? Have you read it, or are you just judging it on what others have told you about it?) I’ve had people tell me
that if I even let my kids hear about evolution, I’m introducing evil into
their lives. And if a Christian doesn’t believe the earth is 6,000 years old? Watch out—you
might get excommunicated.
Now, I’m not a scientist. I’m not going to get into the
nitty-gritty of the specific arguments, because they usually make my eyes glass
over. I won’t judge the scientists for their erroneous claims about faith,
because that’s not my place—Paul’s pretty clear on that. He warns us that we’ll
be called fools by the world’s “wise.” But I will say this:
Too many Christians today are turning into Pharisees over
science.
I’m not supposed to judge the world for being…well, the
world. But I am supposed to call out
Christians for not being Christ-like (I Cor 5:9-13). But only if I can do it as Christ would—with love. I sure don’t
feel any love from someone who says I’m not a Christian if I’m not willing to
sign a statement of belief that says the world was created in 6 24-hour days,
period. (I’m using Young Earth and Evolution as my two examples because they’re
the ones that have come up for me so often lately.)
To them, I’d like to ask this. Do you believe that there’s
an ocean above the skies? Not moisture in the atmosphere, but a body of water?
Do you? Well if you’re going to read Genesis literally, you should. And it was
a big, hot-topic debate about 150 years ago. Moses is pretty clear that God
divided the firmament from the waters, and there were waters above and waters
beneath. Today, we assume that’s just pretty-talk for water and sky. That’s an understanding that has come by
reconciling our understanding of science to our reading of the Word. It
wasn’t always so. Theologians in the 1800s got fired up over this, and those
who dared to say, “No, there isn’t water above” were branded as heretics by
those who wanted to stick to the very-literal meaning.
We can see who ultimately won that argument.
Does it mean that God has changed? That the Scriptures are
fallible? No! It means our understanding is fallible and changing.
That’s the thing that really gets my knickers in a bunch.
All these people who seem to think that if they can’t reconcile an idea with
their traditional understanding, then they should just accuse the idea of being
wrong and ungodly. Yo, dude. Maybe your
understanding is faulty. Can we please
stop pigeon-holing God into the narrow slip of the world that we can understand
and instead praise Him for being so much greater than we can understand?
I get that it’s hard to challenge the way you’ve always
thought of a thing. I do. But just look at how many different interpretations
there are of Scripture. Once-saved-always-saved sure isn’t accepted worldwide. How
about beliefs about baptism? Communion? Evangelism? Hell? Speaking in tongues?
The other gazillion issues that have divided one denomination from another?
Why not accept that thoughts on science are similar? Science
as a whole knows that its
understanding is incomplete. And while, sure, you’re going to get adherents to
a specific theory that will argue with that theory’s detractors until they’re
blue in the face, science as a whole will readily admit that there’s much they
don’t know. To them, that’s what fuels discovery. That’s what makes them
stretch themselves out toward new knowledge.
Why are Christians so ready to claim that “new” is evil?
That leads me back to my statement about us turning into
Pharisees, which I sure hope got a rise from you. Pharisees knew the Law and
the Prophets. They could quote it backwards, forward, and upside-down. They
were kings of saying But God said… “But
God said ‘keep the Sabbath holy,’ Jesus. Why are you healing on it?” What did Jesus say? That He’s Lord of the
Sabbath.
The Pharisees said, “But Moses said we can divorce our
wives!” What did Jesus say? That Moses was writing to the hardness of man’s
heart, but that was never what God wanted.
You get that? Moses
was writing to fallen, limited man. But
Jesus challenged us to open our eyes to the God behind the words. The intent
behind the Law.
Maybe God did
explain the universe to Moses in terms of atoms and neutrons and black holes
and cellular functions. But Moses was still a man, and one without the
scientific base that we have. Moses had limited words. Ever try explaining a
dream? You can see it, but there just aren’t always words for it. So you end up
saying, “I flew to LA, but when I got there, it was London.” They’re the best
words you have…but they’re not enough to explain what you really saw and experienced in that dream. They’re not enough to make it make sense. I daresay Moses
experienced something similar. I mean, seriously. Can you imagine having
eternal truths revealed you and then having to put them into words?
I’m not saying Moses explained it wrong. I’m not saying the
Word of God wasn’t inspired. I’m just saying that it was crafted with human
tools, and that those are limited. I’m saying that God is bigger than any
explanation. I’m saying that though the
Bible is the inspired, infallible word of God, it isn’t all of God. He’s too big to be constrained to 66 books.
You know what? The
Pharisees didn’t much like Jesus challenging them to expand their
understanding. They stuck with what Moses said, thank you very much. And
then they killed him for his trouble.
Here’s the thing. I don’t know how the earth was created—I just
know God created it, and then He rested. Were the days 24-hours long? [Insert
shrug here.] Strict readers of Genesis would tell me they were, of course they were, and then some would
look at me with profound sorrow in their eyes for doubting the word of God.
I’m not. But I am
realizing that I sure don’t read “day” as “a literal 24 hours” in chapter 2
when God says “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you
eat of it you shall surely die.” We’re happy to call that one metaphorical (though
it’s the same word used in “On the first day…”) because we can see the evidence that Adam and Eve did not die on that day.
But we can’t see Creation. We can’t see any particular step
of evolution (though duck-billed platypuses do make some wonder, LOL). We can
just look at the evidence left behind and try to understand it.
If we’re not married to a literal understanding in chapter
2, though, why are so many married to it in chapter 1? Why are we willing to
alienate an entire generation over it? I’m not saying it couldn’t have been 6
literal days. I’m just saying it’s not
worth arguing about. I’m saying
that the most profound thing you can admit is that our understanding is limited, incomplete, and fallible.
I’m saying that my faith isn’t so weak that it hinges on a
particular understanding of a particular verse. Why should it, when I
intimately know the unlimited God? When I can see how He’s bigger than the
average man in the Old Testament believed Him to be? God hasn’t changed,
nosirree. But man has. And oh, how
glad I am to have the Spirit dwelling within me, guiding me through new
discoveries!
You know what I took from Origin of Species when I read it? Wow, God is so awesome! He made His
creation so adaptable, because He knew change would come! Know what I generally
think when I hear physicists musing about a big bang versus an eternal universe
(new theory), expanding versus contracting? Wow, look at God’s fingerprints on
the universe! How awesome and vast and unknowable it is—and how comforting to
know that though I’ll never know the
Truth of it, He does.
He created us with curious minds. Minds that long to know
more. Do we latch onto beliefs about our world that are wrong? Absolutely. But
it’s not just science that does that. It’s
us.
We’re not at war with science, Christians. We created it,
after all. Modern science was based on the idea that the world must be orderly,
since God made it, and so we have a hope of understanding it. Sure, plenty have
gone astray from that. Too many scientists try to reason away God.
But maybe that’s because too many Christians have deemed
science evil instead of letting go of their own limited understandings.
Science, in its purist form, shouldn’t be trying to prove
God-or-no-God. It shouldn’t be trying to prove evolution-or-creation. Science shouldn’t have an agenda, and
that goes for a “Christian” agenda as much as an atheist one. It should just be
observing, and then wondering about the observations. That should make us questions
our understanding. That doesn’t mean
we have to question our faith.
Jesus proved that faith is so much bigger than the words
Moses penned. Those words are meant to be a guide toward God, but they cannot
get us to Him, otherwise Jesus wouldn’t have had to come. So why are so many
Christians today clinging to an Old Testament understanding about the world?
Why are they ready to crucify any who say that maybe there’s more to it?
If you got in a time machine and showed up in medieval
Europe with a cell phone, you would be burned at the stake for witchcraft. If
you told that early church that man would walk on the moon and the earth was
round, you’d be labeled a heretic. Not by science (our idea of science–modern science–didn’t even exist
then), but by the church.
Prove to me we’ve changed, people. Prove to me that our
faith is stronger than this. Prove to me that you’re capable of seeing that, no
matter whether you’re debating photons as particles or waves or some
combination or are happy to leave it at “Let there be light,” God is the
ultimate authority, not you. Science
is just trying to understand the world. Faith is trying to understand the
creator. Most of the time, they use very different language, and there’s
nothing wrong with that.
When you put them together, it isn’t war. It’s beautiful…at
least until the Pharisees (anti-science Christians) and Sadducees (atheist
scientists) show up. But let’s not let them ruin it for the rest of us. It’s a
beautiful day, folks. A day when we can get a bit more of a glimpse than ever
before into the wonders that are our God. Let’s not ruin it with our
limitations…let’s just look to the Unlimited One and thank Him for leading us
toward a fuller understanding. Even if that means letting go of our previous
one.
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 
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