Book Review and Food for Thought

I recently read a book titled I Don't Wait Anymore by Grace Thornton (Zondervan Publishing, 2016).  It's caused my brain to do all sorts of thinking.  I generally don't mind thinking, but it's left me doing more of it than usual, I think.  There was a lot of good food for thought throughout, but some things really, and I mean really struck me.  Thoughts about the choices we make (how and why and when) and the perspective we take on our lives are rattling around in my brain like crazy.  I need to share a bit.

"So you see it comes down to one thing.  Every day I have a choice.  I can focus on how life doesn't look like I wanted it to, how it's moving at a crawl, the way the road's too slippery, the way the outlook on the ground is gross or frustrating or exhausting for miles and miles.  I can worry if something much worse is going to happen if I walk on into what's ahead of me.

Or I can choose a song.  I can choose to sip my coffee slowly and keep my eyes on the goodness tumbling down from the sky, choose to keep my heart in a place of total, unwavering praise."  (pgs 172-173)

Okay, so I can't relate to the coffee drinking, but the musician's heart in me was piqued.  Most importantly, though, it reminded me that I have the choice: frustration and worry, or peace and joy.

 "Ann Voskamp says that our time is precious, like diamonds.  It's short, friends.  It's short.  Even if you were to live a full ninety years.  If a .05 carat diamond were used to represent each week of those 90 years, they'd barely fill up a tablespoon.  That's a really, really small amount of very precious time. And we aren't even guaranteed that much.

We don't have time to settle.  We don't have minutes to just throw away.

It would be a sad way of spending our spoonfuls, she says, to waste eah diamond wishing we had a better one, thinking that this one wasn't good enough.  Thinking that God wasn't good enough.  Thinking everything would be better if..."  (pgs 187-188)

This passage had probably it's desired effect.  Three words: sense of urgency.  Time (and life) is too precious to waste.  It's frustrating in a way for me.  Now I'm thinking, "How much time have I wasted?  How many times should I have picked a different path?" and, the most plaguing thought: "Now what?"

"At every moment of the journey - not just the forks in the road - there's an opportunity, a choice.  There's the chance to choose the normal, and there's a chance to choose a story.  So often we don't even recognize that the choice is there."  (pg 204) 

And that word "choice" is back again.  It happens over and over and over.  Choices matter - some short term, some long term - but they matter nonetheless.  And I have frequently said I'm glad I'm not and don't really want to be "normal."  Not that there aren't days (don't get me wrong) when "normal" sounds nice because theoretically "normal" would be easier.  But I'd prefer having a good story with a happy ending, thanks anyway.

So the book is aimed at people along the lines of my demographic (being single and female), but there's something to offer for others as well.  I would highly recommend it for my single female friends, though.  And beg a level of forgiveness from the rest of you who wonder what has happened to my brain and attitude.  Must have been something I read.