The Giver

I just finished The Giver by Lois Lawry. It is definately a book that I will have to ponder and think about. I'm certain that there are lots of gospel parallels especially in regards to the plan that Satan put forth. But also to God's plan specifically that there must be opposition in all things. To know joy there must be sorrow, to know comfort there must be pain etc. and how can we learn from experience if 1st there is none and second, there is no memory of pain/guilt/remorse etc. and for the reciever once he had those memories and experiences, there was no going back. As we mature and become adults, we can't go back and be the naive, carefree children we used to be--we are changed by the memories etched in our minds and by the choices we made because of our experiences.

the following is a response to a prompt I pulled from my journal jar.

"Describe your first home or apartment--as a young couple"
Marvin and I first lived in his parent's house, out on the family farm. His parents had not had much success for a number of years and were finally forced to give up the farm so they sold it for a dollar to Marvin's older brother Elden (to avoid foreclosure) and moved to Phoenix Arizona where there were good paying jobs for dad. It was a small rectangular pink brick house with two bedrooms and one bath on the main floor. The house faced west but all the activity was through the back door. There was also an unfinished (but framed out) basement. The living room was small, a fairly narrow rectangle with a couch across the north wall (which pretty much filled the whole width of the room, there was enough room for an end table I believe). The front door (west side) was rarely ever used because all of the parking and the rest of the farm (the garden, sheds, chicken coop, barnyard etc) was out back. The house sat on a "hill" which elevated it a little from the surrounding irrigated acres. It sat back away from the paved county road at least three or four hundred feet (a half a block or so) The narrow hard packed dirt lane that lead back to and circled the house mound was rendered impassable each spring when the rains fell and the snow melted and the ground thawed. It was easy to get stuck up the the doors of car in the mud. During those times the tractor was the only way in and out. Marvin moved to this farm when he was five years old. His father had been awarded the land in a homesteading give-away/drawing to veterans to open the north side of Rupert to farming. A great irrigation project/experiment was put in place and the land divided and distributed. It was nothing but desert, they cleared the sage brush, rocks, rabbits and coyotes off the land and spent the next fourteen years scratching out a living. The house was slow in coming but well appreciated when it was done. The basement held shelves filled with hundreds of jars of canned goods preserved by the sweat of the brow. One section held the freezers and the meat processing equiptment because hunting and butchering livestock that was raise to sustain the family was part of everyday life on a farm. The boys slept in the unheated basement as the bedrooms upstairs were for their parents and little sister. After we were married, Elden let Marvin and I take the master bedroom and he slept in the smaller one. We lived there until our daughter Danelle was born at which time Elden had found the girl he was going to marry and with his wedding coming soon, Marvin and I started looking at apartments. In a small town there wasn't a lot to look at, but we were very lucky to find a nice two bedroom duplex. (Believe me after one of the other apartments I looked at, it was the fabulous.) But that is another story.