![]() Gil reflects on his volunteer friends from before, one who swore like a sailor and was in the military, the other a devout Catholic. In his friendship with Tom’s parents, he is slowly entangled in their own marital challenges besides their lives, as he partners with Sarah despite his earlier attempts to maintain a friendship. He becomes a babysitter-friend to Tom, exerting a parental protectiveness throughout a stifled world - picking him up from a martial arts class early upon seeing an instructor’s swastika tattoo, helping him navigate the neighborhood’s anti-skateboarding rules, and standing up to his bully, and his bully’s bully. Ardis, a psychotherapist, is married to Ted, a developer of sorts, and they have two children - angsty adolescent Clem, and sweetly boisterous Tom. He also gives his time to the next door family, which becomes an extension of his. Narrating between his past in New York and his present in Arizona, readers follow Gil’s previous charity at a refugee center, where fellow volunteers became some of his only friends and the language barrier satisfied his avoidance of interaction, to his current position as a bodyguard for traumatized women at a women’s shelter. It’s the least he can do for the legacy that earned his family billions on others’ backs and for all the suffering that exists around him. This search for redemption is rooted in the inheritance he received from his oil baron grandparents, and his attempt to earn it manifests in a philosophy of charity. Never a choice or a sacrifice, unless you give up your time. You never feel the cost, so you live like everything is free. Norton)īesides moving on from a bad breakup, Gil, the protagonist of Lydia Millet’s “Dinosaurs,” walks from New York to Phoenix because he “wanted to pay for something.” He explains this to his new next-door-neighbor, Ardis, and her best friend, Sarah, over drinks later into this resettlement, saying, “When you have a lot of money, you never pay for anything. Norton shows "Dinosaurs," by Lydia Millet. Imprisoned repeatedly, he is currently serving a four-year sentence.This cover image released by W. Now, 20 years later, James has been serving Christ as a modern-day Apostle Paul in the land of his birth, where another religion is still a stronghold but the gospel is piercing the darkness. That “book on the shelf” was the Bible, which James, like many devout leaders in his religion, respected and owned, but nonetheless ignored and certainly didn’t read. Yet some 20 years ago, the gospel penetrated the darkness when James, a devout religious leader, was awakened by the voice in the middle of night. Every family Nick and Erica met had at least one immediate family member who had been slaughtered at the hands of the wicked regime that, until recently, ruled them. They met James soon after arriving for a two-year StoryRunners assignment in a Central Asian country where one of the most persecuted people groups today live. ![]() Nick and Erica had met in college and felt a calling to bring the gospel to unreached peoples. Jesus became irresistible to James and in the quiet of one of those nights, James surrendered to him. He gradually quit practicing his religious rituals, and his family and the community took notice. Night after night, James was awakened by a voice that said, “Read the book on the shelf.” So he began to read, and each night as he read more and more of God’s Word, his heart was touched.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |