Bookish Blog Format
Once a week I share snippets from my novel in progress, and passages highlighted from the books I’m reading. Enjoy the (non-spoiler) sneak peeks from my as yet Untitled 9th Historical Novel set in Scotland and Colonial Virginia, 1730s. Be sure to check out the books I’m quoting. I highly recommend them!
From My Reading
New Morning Mercies, Paul Tripp, Feb 6: [O]ur peace of heart does not rest on how much we know, how much we have figured out, or how accurately we have been able to predict the future. No, our rest is in the person who holds our individual futures in his wise and gracious hands. We have peace because we know that he will complete the good things that he in grace has initiated in our lives. He is faithful, so he never leaves the work of his hands. He is gracious, so he gives us what we need, not what we deserve. He is wise, so what he does is always best. He is sovereign, so he rules all situations and locations where we live. He is powerful, so he can do what he pleases, when he pleases.
Heaven, Randy Alcorn, p464: Every belief that would make our resurrection bodies less physical than Adam’s and Eve’s, or that makes the New Earth less earthly than the original Earth, essentially credits Satan with victory over God by suggesting that Satan has permanently marred God’s original intention, design, and creation… Christ did not die to give disembodied people a refuge in the spirit realm. He didn’t rise to offer us a mere symbol of new spiritual life. On the contrary, he died to restore to us the fullness of our humanity–spirit and body. He rose to lay claim to and exemplify our destiny, to walk and rule the physical Earth as physical beings, to his glory. He died to lift Earth’s curse and rose to guarantee that the earth itself would rise from misery and destruction to be a realm ruled by righteous humanity, to God’s eternal glory.
From My Writing
Excerpt from: Untitled 9th Historical Novel, Copyright 2024 Lori Benton (all rights reserved; do not copy or share without my permission). Note: To avoid spoilers, sometimes I’ll replace character names with X, Y, or Z but I’ll keep them consistent. X is always a particular character, as is Y, and Z.
One of the shay’s wheels clipped an obstruction, jostling its passengers. With the skirts of her plain dun gown demanding more than her fair share of the cramped space, Y braced her shoulder against the conveyance’s paneled frame and wished, not for the first time, that her papa didn’t count being astride a horse one of his chief anxieties. Christopher Wilde suffered more than his fair share of those, though not as many as the ruts and stumps pocking the road between Clayfield House and the port at York Town, for which they were bound, despite Y’s prayers to never again have cause to set foot in the town. Her papa knew of those prayers, but his need for her that morning outweighed other considerations. Even grief.
Normally their cousin, Lucy Many-Beads, served as buffer to the daily obligations that daunted Christopher, obligations men of his station normally took in stride, such as hiring a shay to convey him to the ship that had brought their new indentured man to take over the managing clerk’s position at his brickyard, now six months vacant. Y could cast accounts ably enough, but the sort of men requiring good red brick to build the sundry edifices being raised in Williamsburg and surrounding plantations tended to balk at transacting business with a female scarce out of her teens. A man was needed for the job. Since their former clerk had been a Scotsman, she and Lucy had agreed that another such might occasion a smoother transition for Christopher. At least his manner of speech would be familiar, provided he was no Highlander lacking proficient English.
Let him also be kind, Y silently beseeched as the shay bore them toward this stranger whose name was noted, along with the ship he was to sail on, in a letter received from Uncle John Wilde’s Glasgow agent. Let him be forbearing—
The shay bucked with a wrenching squeak, rattling the door on her papa’s side as though the latch had been half-sprung. The curtains had been buttoned against the morning’s rain when the shay arrived at Clayfield House. The dim interior now felt as close and damp as a cave. Y doubted her papa noticed, not while he had his lute—smallest of his collection, the ancient descant—cradled in his arms. Since boarding the shay, Christopher’s slender fingers had barely ceased to move across the instrument’s doubled strings, plucking intricate scales that trilled in place of conversation, shadows no hindrance to a skill long-mastered.
Now at last he paused his plucking. His voice, normally soft as the instrument he adored, strained to carry above the clatter of wheel and hoof. “F-f-fo…”
With a patience as mastered as her papa’s musical skill, Y waited while he coaxed his tongue to form the word he sought.
“Forgive me f-for this?”
Dimness masked his gaze, yet she knew her papa awash in shame as old as his earliest memories. It garbled his speech as surely as it shredded his heart, reminding Y she wasn’t the only one who dreaded seeing York Town again.
“Thee cannot help it, Papa. I know.”
There was just light enough in the buttoned-down shay to catch her papa’s crooked smile, sad but grateful, before he bent to his lute—though how he could pluck a single note between their jostles Y could but wonder. The man seemed little moved by the push and pull of earthly forces that entangled others in their tides, be those forces social, political, or meteorological. His was a world fashioned of music. Music on paper. Music flowing from his fingertips. His soul. Few had the power to intrude into that world in any meaningful sense.
If that was a skill one could learn, Y hadn’t mastered it. She suspected her papa had been born to it, this bubble of a life some called a prison, but which she deemed a shelter. A fortress.
