Summer is a time to think about sun, surf and reading a good book (and chocolate … like that is different from any other season).
I have a chosen reading list 🙂 Yes, I chose them all … last year, when I only read one book! It was obviously a very dry summer! So, the pile of books has been awaiting my attention for over a year now, just inside my closet doors. And I am determined that this summer, no matter how busy, I will take the time to read.
Reading is not something that I have loved since childhood. As a matter of fact, I can only remember reading one or two books, from cover to cover, as a child. It wasn’t until I was about thirty (when I was still young) that I picked up my first fictional novel to read … and when I had finished it, in less than twenty-four hours, I was hooked! So I read everything that author wrote, and then started on another author, and another, and another.
Then I started to read books that my kids were reading, because I had never read them as a child. Books like the Narnia stories, by C.S. Lewis, and Little Women, and Anne of Green Gables, and Tom Sawyer, and Captain Underpants (obviously, I love my son … but it is brilliant, in a boy-sorta way).
I was transported to places all over the world. I was able to live in the past, the present and the future. I was to laugh, to cry and to sigh. I felt emotions while reading that made me feel that I was living in the story.
I could pick up a book, and escape the mundane of a regular day for the magical of the story within it’s covers.
The books I have read and loved, from various eras, various age ranges, various genres, all have one thing in common. This one part of each of my best loved reads is the glue that makes the story stick, it makes the story timeless, it makes the story sell.
This glue is the theme of the story, and it is one which will sell a book, or a movie. It is one that makes people recommend it, and re-read it. It is one that makes a simple grouping of words on a page (paper or electronic) a best seller. This glue is the theme of redemption.
Redemption is the act of deliverance, or rescue or salvation.
Maybe this theme sells because, in our busy, guilt-ridden, demanded upon lives, what we innately desire most is rescue. Maybe it provides that thing which we all need to survive … hope.
But maybe, it is also a great sell because, we are born with a need to be rescued, delivered, saved … redeemed. Maybe, just maybe, every fiber of our human being needs to be redeemed. Maybe we seek it in our literature, in our movies, in our jobs, in our families, because we cannot truly live without it. And, if we innately seek it out in our lives, it must be there for us to us to receive … just as our whole body struggles for air to breath, to live, and it is there.
“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have summoned you by name; you are mine.”
Isaiah 43:1b
itsawonderfilledlife 