Works In Progress

My friend Susan Meissner’s stunning new book, The Shape of Mercy, is a blend of contemporary and historical fiction, mystery and romance. Set in present day Santa Barbara and also in colonial America during the Salem Witch Trials, the book follows a young college student as she transcribes the diary of a young woman falsely accused of witchcraft in 1692.

“The story in a nutshell is this,” Susan says. “Lauren Durough is a West Coast English major at the proverbial age of discovery. Sheltered in her growing up years by family wealth, she is just beginning to grasp how people judge other people by what they want to believe about them, and particularly for her, how the poor view the wealthy. When she opts out of her family’s financial support, she takes on a job as a literary assistant to Abigail Boyles, an 83-year-old reclusive East Coast transplant. Abigail tasks Lauren with transcribing the diary of her ancestor, Mercy Hayworth, hanged for witchcraft in 17^th-century Massachusetts. The lives of these two very different women converge as they jointly piece together the life — and death — of a third woman, Mercy Hayworth, who lived three hundred years earlier, and who also struggled against undeserved cultural stigmatization, but lost.”

Susan says the title has dual meaning. “Those who testified against the accused in Salem in 1692 often claimed their tormentors “took shape” in their bedrooms and tortured them as they slept. My fictional character Mercy was also accused of taking shape and torturing another young girl of the Village. She was innocent of course, as all those accused were, but in her last act before death, she shows that love has a shape. And its shape is mercy.”

Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review and offered these insights. “Meissner’s newest novel is potentially life-changing, the kind of inspirational fiction that prompts readers to call up old friends, lost loves or fallen-away family members to tell them that all is forgiven and that life is too short for holding grudges… Meissner’s prose is exquisite and she is a stunning storyteller.”

You can learn more about Susan and her books at www.susanmeissner.com. The book is available at bookstores everywhere and online.

This week I debated with myself – drive through Starbucks? save money? – and Starbucks won out. So I scooped up the change in the bottom of my purse and picked through the pennies in the ashtray of my car and ordered my coffee. When I got to the drive-through window, the barista told me that the woman in the car ahead of me had paid for my drink.

Wow! This was the second time this has happened to me in a month!

Then I drove to mail some packages at the automatic machine at my post office, and on the way out noticed that someone had left a stack of unwanted magazines for anyone who might be interested in taking one home to read. I took one I knew my daughter would be interested with a silent thanks to the anonymous giver.

So often we hear about how selfish our country has become. How me-oriented, how greedy, how overextended, how busy, busy, busy with thoughts about ourselves. These two incidents reminded me that the generous American spirit is still alive and well. If it takes so little to really lift someone’s day, a $3 coffee, some magazines, a well-timed compliment or an encouraging word, why do I do it less often? I determined to be a part of the positive flow and not a part of the negative drain.

I went to the Farmer’s Market and bought more fresh tomatoes than I needed and brought some to several neighbors. I gave away a jar of my favorite homemade jam. I cut flowers from my fading garden for someone else. Nothing took too much time or effort.

What can I do next week to lift someone’s spirits?

Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life. 1 Timothy 6:18-19

Last month my husband and I joined a gym. After three years of writing about French pastries it was time to work off the brioche.

Most of the time our work schedules are such that we work out at different times, always checking in with one another to make sure that we actually broke a sweat that day. Some days we get to work out together.

Our work out plan consists of both aerobic and weight training, and for aerobic, we’ve been doing the kind-to-your-knees elliptical. The ellipticals are lined up in a long row, and we choose two next to each other. He’s usually watching the TV on the machine and I’m usually listening to something pumping on the iPod so we don’t actually talk. But I noticed something.

If I slow down to fix my music or grab a towel, he’ll automatically slow his stride to keep in time with me. And if he speeds up, trying to make a caloric breakpoint, I would find myself pushing a little hard to meet his stride. Even if we weren’t directly looking at one another we’d adjust to keep in perfect rhythm.

Isn’t that a picture of what we’re aiming for in marriage? Sometimes I am tired of life, of the struggles and the pain and the worries, and my man slows down his pace long enough to listen to me and to encourage me for the continuing road ahead. Sometimes he’s racing toward something, pushing us to a goal that seems out of reach – but really isn’t – and I speed up to make sure we both grasp it at the same time. Whatever we do, we are one, and we need to always work in tandem if our marriages are to be healthy and in good shape.

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. ‘So they are no longer two, but one. Mark 10:7-8

I remember finding a pair of 3-D glasses when I was a kid. When you put them on – one blue lense, one red – you could look at a picture or a movie and it came alive in a whole new way. In the back of comic books, they offered X Ray Vision lenses, promising (falsely) that you’d be able to see right through skin and clothing to the skeleton of all of your friends.

Recently, I ran across a contest in a magazine. In order to decipher if you were a winner or not you had to hold up a piece of red film or cellophane. When you did, it blocked out all of the “noise” and allowed the true picture underneath to be found. Was I a winner? Not that time. But in that contest my husband found an important lesson.

So often as people we think about how we fail – what we do wrong. Besetting sins we constantly struggle with, never seeming to fully overcome. Bad decisions, choices we regret. If we let them, these kinds of sorrows will drag us under, and that’s not at all what God wants for us. When I get caught in that cycle my husband reminds me that after I repent God looks at me through a set of red glasses, the red is the blood of Christ. When He sees me, He doesn’t see the sins He’s forgiven and forgotten nor the flesh I wrestle with. He sees the true me, without all of the noise.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!

2 Corinthians 5:17