Ruth Buchanan's Blog, page 29

Truths I've Learned from Romantic Comedies

As everyone knows, Romantic Comedies are completely realistic and utterly true-to-life. I'm very glad I've taken the time to learn from them, because despite the fact that my entire life has failed to conform to the reality that I've witnessed, these movies have had a huge impact on how I see the world.
Truths I've Learned from Romantic Comedies:
1. If I argue with a guy literally every time I see him, and listening to him talk just makes me want to bash his head in with a tire iron, we're prob...

How to Fill Your Life

As a career single, I learned early on the value of keeping a busy schedule. Not only did keeping busy help me to sleep well at night, but it also lent a sense of vitality and zest to what could have otherwise been seen as a humdrum existence. I spent my twenties and early thirties in an endless whirl of work, travel, social functions, volunteerism, and many, many other activities. 
But just because my life was busy didn't mean that it was full. 
Busy doesn't always mean full, and ful...

Why I Don't Make New Year's Resolutions

God makes all things new.
Revelation 21:5A few years ago, a student interviewed me for a school publication and asked me what my New Year's resolutions were going to be. He quoted me later as having said, "I don't make New Year's Resolutions because when I see something that needs fixed, I try to fix it immediately."
I realize in retrospect that this statement sounds sort of pompous. But it's true.
The world in which I live is all-or-nothing, black-or-white. When I feel convicted that change is...

My Year in Books: The 2013 Reading Roundup

2013 turned out to be a remarkable reading year!
According to my Goodreads page, I read 186 books during the calendar year, but that number isn't entirely accurate. Unless I were to go in and manually change the dates on books I've re-read (which I haven't done), those books were not counted toward my 2013 total. 
I know for a fact that I re-read Connie Willis's entire Oxford Time Travel sequence in 2013, plus there were some books that I read aloud to my classes year after year which didn...

Stop Worrying about Who You Are

The Apostle Paul had rather impressive credentials. He was extremely well-educated, well-connected, well-read, and well-traveled. A man of letters, Paul could speak with power and write effectively. He had status and prestige, and God used him to do amazing things.
The Apostle Peter did not have the same qualifications. He was a relatively uneducated, unconnected fisherman from the sticks. A man of action, Peter was constantly ready to jump the gun and often had to be held back. He had neither...

What We Remember and What We Don't

If I think of Christmases gone by, a few memories stand out.
What I Remember
I remember lying under the tree as a child, looking up through the branches to watch the lights reflect off the ornaments. Which was a fine idea, until a stray needle fell into my nostril and went like a tiny dart straight up my nose until it lodged high in my sinus cavity.
I remember the year I first realized what the fuss was about yellow snow.
I remember the year soon after we moved to Florida when we had a Christmas...

Here in This Pregnant Pause

All through Advent, I have been held captive by the idea that for nine months, Mary literally carried God around inside. 
To the Christian, this concept is nothing new. We know what the Bible says: that Mary, a young Hebrew virgin, was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and thus birthed the Messiah into the world. 
For some reason, this seemed to strike home with surprising force this year. I don't really know why. Although I am a woman, I have never been pregnant, nor have I been a moth...

The Running Diaries

  
I've never been particularly sporty.
If you know me at all, then you know that even that sentence is somewhat of an understatement. Poor balance and some health concerns often made physical activity difficult for me, and for the majority of my adult life, I’ve led a somewhat sedentary existence. 
Not that that I'm inherently lazy, but I do have some limitations--the management of chronic pain being one of them. I decided a year ago, however, that with a little help from some fr...

These Tracks of Time Are Not Signs of Disgrace

Tomorrow I turn thirty-five.

If we take seventy years as an average, that means I'm about halfway through life. I've decided to celebrate this auspicious occasion by trying to write a villanelle, one of my favorite fixed forms of poetry.

As you will shortly see, I have not been overburdened with poetic gift, but I enjoyed the challenge of giving the repeated lines different connotations in each stanza while still meeting the metric patterns and communicating an overarching idea.

I may or may not...

In Defense of Wanderlust: The Mosaic of Mankind

(a Theology of Travel, Part 2)
The world is beautiful and amazing. It teaches us about God. The people in it fascinate, and since they are made His image, each one bears a different lesson for us. If you wallpaper your heart with maps and groan that checking off your bucket list would require an eternity, take heart and read on.
The World Is Full of the Image of God
Or, I should say, images. 

Because humankind uniquely bears the image of God, only through a proper view of all of humanki...