Shane recommended How to be Good by Nick Hornby. I really enjoyed the book. I thought that it touched on an important question – how good is good enough? What makes one good? Should every person be “good” in the same ways?
It was so intriguing and fit so well that I preached on it last Sunday. But I’m still contemplating parts of it – especially the end. As a person being ordained a priest, I’m called to do good things. But, as I’ve already experienced in life, I cannot do all the good things that I want to do. There are so many needs that I can easily get overwhelmed thinking about them – and then I freeze up and don’t actually do anything. I take a dream list and pick practical things that I can do.
The book has a tension between people doing good. The wife thinks that she does good work – she’s a doctor – but also sees the sin in her life. The husband is converted from a “bad” person into a “good” person. This doesn’t really make the wife happy. Instead, she is miserable as she tries to figure out how to relate to this newly converted husband. She is also not pleased with the ways that he wants to do/be good. It seems that by the end, they had just negotiated themselves out of doing good to make the wife happy.
I understand the tension between wanting to help and self care. I know that one must care for self and family and then others. What’s the trick of negotiating that?
I have lots of notes about it, but that’s the general idea. Any thoughts?
Posted by Heather Voss at August 19, 2004 08:57 AM