Day #29 of Being Thankful

I read voraciously. By that, I mean, if I am awake and not eating or spending time with family and friends, you can find me reading. In my love of reading, I have found the insidious creeping of the enemy into books. At first, there were only a few books with swear words. Now, it is almost all of them. I feel like I need a black marker to go through and mark out the bad words, but for some authors there would not be much left. Then, there was the insistence that those of us who are conservative Christians accept the lifestyle of being gay, transgender or one of the other alphabetical letters that have come to mean sin to me. Again, there were few characters in books that were so identified, so it didn’t bother me overly much. I figured it was a swing of our culture towards sin and that at some time it would swing back the other way, as God got hold of their lives. But last night, I was innocently reading a book by an author that I have read for over four decades, little suspecting what was coming. You got it! A gay couple… for no reason that I can figure other than to appeal to that aspect of the culture. Having access to a computer and search engines, I looked up the percentage of the alphabetical acronym to the heterosexuals in the U.S. Did you know that these who are lost in sin represent less than 5% of the total population in the U.S.? Yet, the books that I read, sometimes for pleasure and sometimes just to review, are increasingly including this very small, sinful minority, making everything seem “normal” and, in my opinion, trying to get the whole sinful action accepted by more of us. Anyway, off my soapbox and on to what I am thankful for. I am grateful for authors who do not sway with the wind, those who hold true to their values regardless of how society’s norms change. I am grateful for those that I can call a totally clean read…no foul language, no sex scenes, nothing that I would object to recommending to others for any reason. The world is becoming such an evil place that the encroachment on traditional values has been creeping in slowly, but I have noticed it in my books and I’m not at all happy about it. I praise God for the ability to read and understand and for the pleasure that I take in reading! I thank Him for the authors who are towing the line and meeting His standard of excellence. I pray that if you enjoy reading that you have discovered some of the Christian authors who will lead you closer to Him and not farther away. Of course, the best book of all time is the Bible and I read and study that daily, sometimes for pleasure, but usually for what God has in it to teach me each day. It is in learning more about Him that I take pleasure. Blessings for a day filled with words that God wants your ears to hear and your eyes to see!