Land of books

One great thing about being in Canada is the access to good books. After Janey and I took Robert to the airport last week, we had to stop by a friend's house to pick up a bag of books stashed in her barbecue. This friend, who wasn't home today, had just the day before, during our visit, picked them out for me and made a stack, which I put right beside my purse and, of course, chemo brained that I am, left behind. I love it when friends recommend books, because how else am I going to find all the good ones? And if you need a list, let me know: I have one. The top title is Orphan Master, in case you were wondering. It's a dystopian novel set in North Korea, and the protagonist is Jun Do (John Doe, a sort of North Korean Everyman) to whom all the horrors of North Korea happen, yet he creates a hilarious and beautiful love story out of the mess. It's Forrest Gump set, impossibly, in North Korea.

The books I like best are the Moving to Oz ones, the ones where people find themselves in unexpected places. People moving to Oz notice things you would never see. They find out there's more to the world than home. The first book my friend lent me was called Americanah, about a Nigerian woman who flees a repressive political regime to become a college student in the USA. She discovers racism for the first time. She realizes that her American black friends are from a different world than her African black friends, and she uses a blog to chart the differences.

The Invention of Wings is historical fiction about the two youngest sisters of a slave-holding family in the south, who decide as small children they want nothing to do with slavery. They refuse to accept the slave girls assigned to them as maids, and the oldest borrows a law handbook from her father's office and writes out a certificate of freedom for her maid, but her father, a minister, rips up the document and banishes her from the library forever. As adults, the girls escape the system, join the Quakers, one as a minister, and the two become America's first and most notorious abolitionists and feminists. Talk about a cultural shift. How did they have such courage?

The one I'm tackling now is Little Bee, about a fourteen year old Nigerian girl who flees for her life as a stowaway on a British container ship, is discovered by the captain and turned over to a refugee detention center in present-day London, where she teaches herself the Queen's English and wonders at how its words divide into unrelated definitions. When she is released, she walks to the address of the one family she knows in Britain, a couple whom she has met in Nigeria under horrifying circumstances. Meet Little Bee, Sarah, and Batman, a four year old boy, as they blend lives and family cultures that have fallen apart.

These kinds of books make you revisit your values. Make you see the world in a new way. And a question comes to my mind as I read them, how do we move other people to Oz? I mean whole groups of people? Like classrooms of kids, or congregations of Christians? Sure, handing them books is one way, and I do this in my classroom all the time, but are there other ways?

I recently had a conversation with a young father who held a drowsy daughter dangling on his arm, her soother slipping from her mouth. This man runs his own business and heads a family of five. I asked him if he was ever interested in becoming part of the leadership of a church. He said no way; that was a dead-end job. So I started the what-if game. What if you were part of a team of leaders who were brainstorming how to create a very cool congregation? What if you could be creative and could sit down with leaders of other churches who seemed to be getting some things right, and you brainstormed with them and took some of their ideas and tweaked them and made things happen that excited all of you? What if you were part of a group where older people mentored younger ones so that there was always young blood at every level, bringing in new ideas? What if you could move a group of people to a new place they had never been before? His eyes lit up. “I am creative,” he said, “I would like that.” But in the structures of the congregations I see around me, I don't see an easy way for young, innovative leaders like this to take part in leadership. Instead, sometimes, their gifting lies dormant, like the drowsy child on this young father's arm. Is there a book to change this?