Reading

Heartbreaking and Beautiful: My Journey with Vincent van Gogh

Rebekah MattLeave a comment

I’ve loved the paintings of Vincent van Gogh ever since I learned to love art, which was many decades ago. If you’re also someone who loves art, you’ll understand when I say that Van Gogh’s paintings speak to me on a deeply personal and emotional level.

For most of the past few months, I’ve been on a long, meandering journey with Vincent (I’ll call him Vincent here, as he usually identified himself, since his last name was difficult for those outside of the Netherlands to pronounce). My journey began with a jigsaw puzzle: this one, actually. I’ve put together several Van Gogh puzzles before, but this particular puzzle was 1500 pieces, and it took me a little longer than usual.

At the same time I was working on the puzzle, I was also reading a book that had been on my radar for years: Lust for Life, by Irving Stone. This 1934 book is the biographical novel that made Stone a famous writer for much of the 20th century. For a novel, the book is remarkably accurate; Stone talks about this in an Author’s Note, including the very few things that he made up versus what was verifiably true. Because he wrote the book only about 40 years after Vincent died in 1890 at the age of 37, Stone was able to interview people who actually knew the artist in real life.

continue reading
Faith

Your Simple, Unspectacular, Ordinary Life

Rebekah Matt3 Comments

Here’s something interesting to consider: who have been the most influential people in your life, and why? Who has always been a positive influence when you’ve dealt with troubles both big and small? Who has had the character qualities that you want to emulate?

When I think of these questions of influence in my own life, my thoughts immediately go to two of the quietest, most “hidden” people that I’ve known.

continue reading
Faith

The Pain and the Promise of Aging

Rebekah Matt2 Comments

I read a book by Mitch Albom once that had a scene when a character arrives in heaven. I don’t know which book it was, and I’m not going to look it up because I don’t want to encourage anyone to go to Mitch Albom to learn about heaven (go here instead), but nevertheless, this scene has stayed in my head for many years now.

In my memory, the scene goes something like this: a person arrives in heaven and finds himself in a large, green field or among grassy hillsides, something pastoral and lovely, with the sun shining and a fresh breeze and low humidity. Just a perfect day all around. He rises to his feet and finds that he feels surprisingly energetic and full of life. He looks around him at the wide expanse of green and he begins to move. Very quickly, his walk turns into a jog, and within moments he is running full-out, amazed at the strength and energy in his legs as they pump furiously and propel him faster than he’s moved in many decades. He is exhilarated by the sun on his face and the wind in his hair and the freedom to run fast with the joy and abandonment of a child.

When I read this scene more than twenty years ago, I had a hard time identifying with it. I understood that this character probably was rejoicing in having a new body, and was reliving the easy joy of running that he remembered from his own childhood, but I also remember thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what my biggest joy in heaven will be? I can’t image it’ll be running.” After all, the good Lord knew that I didn’t even enjoy running all that much here on earth, so probably that wouldn’t be a priority for me in heaven, either.

But even though I didn’t fully understand it, that scene in an otherwise forgotten book has stuck with me for all these years. And now I see that there’s a lot of truth in it, but that realization has come with time, maturity—and pain.

continue reading
Faith · Reading

C. S. Lewis vs. A. W. Tozer: Who Was Right?

Rebekah Matt6 Comments

Was it purely coincidence that out of thousands of books in the bookstore that day, I bought these two books? You be the judge.

Because my children know me well, I got a gift card to Barnes & Noble for Mother’s Day, so I went in person to take a look around. (Real bookstores are analog paradise, and I thank God that they still exist!)

With the gift card burning a hole in my pocket, I headed first to the Religion/Christianity section and was pleased to see that it was well stocked. Three or four large bookcases, front and back, were packed with Bibles and other Christian writings. I instinctively gravitated toward C. S. Lewis, like meeting up with an old friend, looking specifically for On Writing (and Writers): A Miscellany of Advice and Opinions. Sadly, they didn’t have this book, but they did have one Lewis title that I’d been wanting for a while: The Weight of Glory. Without even looking at the contents, I grabbed it and kept browsing.

The two books I bought that day. The back cover of the Tozer book convinced me to buy it … and turned out to be the key to this whole story.
continue reading
Faith

Hand Copying the Entire Bible: Where I Am, How It’s Going, and What’s Ahead

Rebekah Matt5 Comments

I didn’t set out to copy the entire Bible by hand. And yet, somehow I am. Here’s my story.

How It Started: Back in 2018, I was searching for a new way to engage with the Bible on a daily basis. A friend of mine had created 36 months of topical Scripture writing lists—three years’ worth!—and I figured that I’d give it a try for a month and see if I liked it.

I did indeed like it. So I completed the entire three-year collection of passages, rarely missing a day. (I’m so thankful to my friend Debbie at The Architect and the Artist, who has allowed me to make her Scripture writing plans available here on my blog. You can download them for free from this post.)

But as I approached the end of her three-year plan, I began to panic just a wee bit. Scripture writing had become an important part of my day, and an integral part (sometimes the only part) of my daily time in the Word. I was about to run out of my three-year supply of topical verses, so I asked Debbie what she did after she completed her own Scripture writing plans. She told me that she just started copying out entire books of the Bible. (My jaw dropped, and you can find more about that story in my very first post on Scripture writing here.)

But I gave it a try. I started easy (Philippians, only four chapters), then challenged myself to see if I was really serious about this (Psalms, 150 chapters). Those two books took me about eight months, and by then I was completely hooked.

Where I Am Today: I began copying entire books of the Bible in September 2021. Four and a half years later, here’s where I am:

continue reading
Faith · Other Topics

Here’s to Christian Movie Characters Who Live Like Real Christians

Rebekah Matt2 Comments

Early on in the movie A Great Awakening (Sight & Sound Films, 2026), there’s a scene that unexpectedly brought tears to my eyes. The characters are a young Ben Franklin, around age 12, and his father, a candle maker. Mr. Franklin tells Ben (who is helping with the candles even though it clearly bores him) that among his 17 children, Ben’s birth order is special to him. He says something to him like, “Ben, you are my tenth son, my tithe given to the Lord. When you were born, I dedicated you to God.” By which he means that he’s hoping Ben will become a minister or preacher, but Ben doesn’t want to do this. Soon after, Ben is offered the chance to move to Boston to work in his brother’s print shop—and the rest is quite literally American history.

I cry pretty easily at movies, but even so, I wondered as I watched this scene: Why am I even getting weepy over this? It wasn’t because of the tender, well-acted incident between father and son, or the fact that Ben would soon be allowed to “follow his heart,” or that his father was kind and understanding rather than harsh or domineering.

continue reading
Faith

Three (Hard) Quotes for the Christian Life

Rebekah Matt2 Comments

When I became a Christian at age thirty, I knew I needed a lot of work, so I looked forward to the ways that I would surely be changed as a result of my new life in Christ. Some changes came easily—cleaning up my speech and stopping swearing, for example. But most of the other changes that happened to me (and there were many) took much more effort and much more time, such as finally being able to forgive family members for past hurts. As I grew in Christian maturity, I realized that all of these changes and challenges are a part of the lifelong sanctification process.

And of course, that sanctification process isn’t over yet. I still need a whole lot of refining, as we all do, in order to be holy, or set apart for God: “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’” (1 Peter 1:14-16).

Recently I was reminded of three challenging, life-changing quotes that aren’t from the Bible, but are particularly convicting in terms of how Christians are set apart for God. They touch on areas of our lives that we don’t especially like to think about or talk about freely with others:

continue reading
Faith · Reading

A Grown-Up Visits Narnia, and What She Found There

Rebekah Matt2 Comments

I never read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child. In fact, I don’t think I had ever even heard of C. S. Lewis until I read Mere Christianity when I was nearly thirty.

Ten years later, I had three (almost four) children, and I read The Chronicles of Narnia aloud to them during lunch, as a part of our homeschool day—one of a very long line of lunchtime read-alouds with my kids. When I read Narnia that first time, my brain was partly engaged in the story as you would expect, but partly I was in teacher mode as I was with all read-alouds: Do they know the meaning of this word? Do I need to explain this scene? Is this sentence something I need to verbally edit as I go? Can we get to the end of this chapter before the 5-year-old runs out of food? When I close the book, is there anything we ought to talk about before they leave the table?

So yeah, I was distracted. I remember appreciating the story, though, and discussing the Christian allegory aspect with my children.

In the Narnia books, grown-ups are not allowed to enter Narnia from our world (the exception is that when Narnia is created, two adults are a part of that). When Narnia needs help, certain children from our world are called by Aslan to assist; then around the time they reach adolescence, they are told that they can’t return. How wonderful to be a child reading Narnia for the first time, imagining what it would be like if you, too, were one day called to assist this magical place of Talking Beasts, naiads and dryads, centaurs and fauns, and High Kings and Queens.

But alas, at my age, I’m too old for those kinds of dreams, in more ways than one. Still, I wanted to revisit Narnia as a grown-up, just for myself. Not as a teacher, not as a mom, but just for me. My questions going into this reading were (1) What would I think about the books as an adult, and (2) What affect, if any, would the reading experience have on me?

continue reading
Reading

Heaven Is Probably More (and Better) Than You Think

Rebekah MattLeave a comment

How much do you know about Heaven? And how much do you think about Heaven in your everyday life?

I’ve been a Christian for about 30 years, and I’ve been aware of how little I really knew about Heaven for most of that time … but I believed that no one knew much about Heaven with any degree of real certainty, so that was okay. “Heaven,” even for Bible-reading Christians, is one of those words that gets mentioned enough in a sort of vague way that you feel pretty comfortable with its fuzziness and uncertainty after a while.

As for how often I thought about Heaven, well … when someone close to me passed away, I thought about it. Other than that, unless I was specifically studying a section of the Bible or listening to a sermon that was about Heaven (both of which are more infrequent than you’d think), I didn’t think about it much in my daily life.

continue reading