Lots of Helpers

Book Review–Crisis in Jerusalem

April 16, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 3 Comments

About the Book:

Book: The Last Disciple: Crisis in Jerusalem

Author: Kurt Brouwer

Genre:Christian Historical Fiction

Release date: November, 2022

He was the Beloved Disciple…

…and he would be the last.

The mantle to tell the whole story has fallen on him.

From the cross, Jesus entrusted John, the youngest disciple, with the welfare of Mary, Jesus’s mother. Over thirty years later, as Jerusalem becomes a cauldron of explosive tempers, he receives a calling he doesn’t want.

Will he listen and follow?

And if he does, will it be too late?

In 62 AD, the Jewish high priest executes James, the brother of Jesus, triggering a bitter fight for power in Jerusalem that shatters the quiet life of John. The Jewish people he loves are making dangerous choices that will change the land of Israel forever.

Should he stay in Jerusalem and help hold off the Roman onslaught? Or is it time to reach out to those beyond Israel’s borders?

If he chooses to leave, what will be his message to these foreign believers? What new words of comfort could he possibly share?

Set against a backdrop of actual events, The Last Disciple: Crisis in Jerusalem is the first novel in a new series based on the Bible and Christian history.

Follow along while John faces multiple crises and comes to understand what it is to stand alone and lean on only the Lord.

Your heart will embrace The Last Disciple: Crisis in Jerusalem because John’s story is the story of our hope and promise.

My Thoughts:

When I read the description of this book, it sounded like one I would be interested in. I’m always a little wary of Biblical fiction, because quite often I have found books in this genre not accurate. I have come across some really good ones, though, so I was hoping this one would be. Rereading the description now, I see that I missed one phrase that would have clued me in that I would not be interested in this one. One line in the description says that John had to decide about helping “hold off the Roman onslaught”. Several times in the story, both John and Bartholomew either defend themselves or talk about defending themselves from physical harm threatened against them. John carried a staff to protect himself, and used it. At the same time, he occasionally thought about Jesus’ words about loving his enemies. These two attitudes do not go together. If you read the Bible carefully, and if you read early Christian records, you’ll see that the early Christians did not believe in self defence. Because of this, I cannot recommend this book. That makes me sad, because it is a period of history I would love to read more about. As far as the basic storyline, it was quite interesting to try to imagine the early Christian world this way, through the eyes of one of the disciples, who was travelling around to encourage the church. On the other hand, the writing style didn’t work very well for me. There are frequent incomplete sentences, and the punctuation made it difficult to tell who is speaking. So, while I appreciated this author’s attempt to bring to life the history of a tumultuous time in Jewish history, I won’t be reading any more in the series.

I received a review copy of this book from the author, and these are my honest thoughts about it. Links may be affiliate links, which will benefit Esther’s website if purchases are made through them.

About the Author:

It all started the morning I learned that the Gospel of John was published fifty years after Jesus died. Fifty years! What did John do all that time? Where did he live? Why did he wait? Frankly I got a little obsessive about this man who became the last disciple.

Living in Hawaii

For the past 20 years, I’ve been a member of a Bible-based Christian church in Hawaii. About eight years ago, our pastor, Kahu Billy Mitchell, challenged our Elders group to pray and read the Bible for one hour every morning.

It wasn’t as though we were not reading the Bible or praying every day, but he challenged us to take our devotions up a few notches. So, I did just that.

During one of those early morning sessions, I was studying the books of the New Testament in a broad sense. Who wrote them and when? What were the broad themes covered in each?

I found out that a huge gap of 50 years elapsed after the ministry of Jesus and the publication of the Gospel of John. That morning something else hit me–John outlived all the others to become the last disciple. I couldn’t stop thinking about how lonely it must have been to be the last one standing.

A few years later, I began writing The Last Disciple Series of Christian historical novels about the life of John.

The Last Disciple Series

The Last Disciple is a series of Christian novels based on the Bible and Christian history. The first in the series: The Last Disciple: Crisis in Jerusalem, begins in the year 62 AD. In it, you walk with John through the streets of Jerusalem. With him, you face multiple crises and come to understand what it is to stand alone and lean only on the Lord.

This book, The Last Disciple: Exile in Ephesus is the third in the series, following The Last Disciple: Escape to Antioch (book two) and The Last Disciple: Crisis in Jerusalem (book one).

To purchase your copy, click here.

To visit more of the blog stops on this tour, click here.

To enter a fun giveaway, click here.

Huka Falls

April 14, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

Our last stop that morning was Huka Falls. Now, what do you think about when you hear a term like that? I picture a vertical waterfall, and since this was such an attraction I figured it would be a very tall one. What a surprise, then, to walk through a row of trees from the carpark and see this! The first picture is the view upstream, and the second is looking downstream from the bridge over the falls.

I called Simon on a video call while we were on the bridge. He had tried to call me the night before and I missed him, so since this was his lunch break I got hold of him. That way, he got to see what we were seeing, in real time, and we could hear about what had just happened to him. The gear box on his truck had blown up the day before, and he was borrowing one of our vehicles, so we had some things we needed to discuss (no, it wasn’t a problem that he was borrowing a vehicle from us!).

Looking back upstream toward the bridge, after we walked down to another viewing platform.

At the end of the narrow gorge, the water leaps over a ledge and rushes away.

And, of course, we took a video of this, too! It has to be seen in action to be believed.

Huka Falls was not quite our last stop of the morning. Before heading back to our friends’ house for lunch, we stopped at an overlook from which most of the city of Taupo could be seen. My favorite part of the scene was the mountain that stands over the city and the lake.

Late that afternoon, Gayle took the children to swim in the lake. It was chilly, so they didn’t stay long, but they had a lot of fun collecting pumice that washed up on the shore. When they got back, we gave the girls a bubble bath–the first one in their lives! What fun!

Book Review–Perils of the Produce Patch

April 11, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

About the Book:

A boy hoping to relax. A harvest that needs to be sold. Will his discouragement blind him to the lessons God is teaching?

Gary Fitzpatrick is exhausted. After traveling across the country in a fruitless search for the surgeon who amputated his leg, the sensitive thirteen-year-old and his brothers just want rest. But they’re barely through the door at home when he learns their mom is busy caring for an abandoned baby and needs them to manage the community garden.

Further frustrated when their $500 prize money goes missing, the weary boy is mildly relieved after they get permission to sell their own goods in addition to the produce at market. But when they discover running a business isn’t as easy as it looks and an accident gets them kicked out in disgrace, Gary struggles to follow his father’s advice and focus on faith.

As the weeds of trouble grow wild, can he stifle his anger to remain strong and obedient?

My Thoughts:

We have been eagerly anticipating the release of Perils of the Produce Patch, Book 7 in the Brady Street Boys series. It finally came this week! I quickly read it so that I could write a review, and I will read it to the children as soon as we finish a different book that we’re in the middle of.

As with the previous books in the series, I have been quite impressed with the way Katrina Hoover Lee spins an exciting story, while making sure that her characters live by God’s principles. For example, when one of the boys made false accusations against someone, he apologized and made it right as far as he could. Throughout the story, the boys learned about faith in their summer project of studying the Fruits of the Spirit. I can recommend Perils of the Produce Patch, along with the whole series, for any family with children who enjoy exciting stories. These books are unashamedly Christian without being preachy.

To purchase your copy from Amazon, click here.

Craters of the Moon

April 10, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

While we were in Taupo, we wanted to see Craters of the Moon. This is a geothermal valley with steam vents everywhere you look. The walk through that valley was my favorite place to explore in that area! It started raining while we were about halfway through the walk, but that didn’t last long and we soon dried off afterwards. It did make it a bit confusing for me to sort through our pictures and put them in order, because I switched from taking pictures with my camera to my phone, as it is supposed to be waterproof.

It’s pretty amazing to look out over a valley and see steam coming up everywhere! As Miss Joy said in the first clip I included in the video tour in this post, it looked like a lot of fires–she thought it was houses burning!

The children were getting goofy!

Miss Joy wanted to take a picture of the three of us.

Esther wanted one of the three sisters.

Part of the track went along the top of the hill at the edge of the valley.

Aratiatia Rapids

April 7, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We spent two nights at the home of some dear friends in Taupo the first week of February. The morning of the day we were there was spent doing some sightseeing in the area. Our first stop was the Aratiatia Rapids on the Waikato River. A dam was built there to produce hydroelectricity; because there is such a drop in the river at that place, the dam does not have to make a very big lake. The gorge below the dam has very little water in it because of the dam, but several times a day, at set times, water is released so that tourists can see the gorge fill. That was fascinating to watch! When we first arrived, one of the gates was open a little, so there was some water in the gorge, and that was beautiful. Then, the gate was closed for ten minutes, and almost all the water drained out of the top of the gorge. Soon, the siren started going periodically, to warn people who might be in the gorge below that the water would be coming soon. Then, both gates were opened, and we watched the river fill up. What a sight!

I put together a few video clips to show some of what we experienced here. Warning: this starts with a loud siren, which is intended to warn people to get out of the gorge before the water starts coming.

On our way to the next attraction, we passed this plant which produces electricity from geothermal energy.

On the Road

March 31, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We didn’t take a lot of pictures while we were driving, so here are the few we got between Auckland and Wellington.

This first group of pictures were from the day we traveled from Drury, just south of Auckland, to Rotorua. We had a lot of fun, as we drove through Morrinsville, spotting the statues of cows. They were all painted differently, and there were a lot of them! This is the only picture I managed to get, though.

The Waikato is a beautiful area!

I can’t remember which town this statue was in. It seems like a lot of towns have statues along the main road.

These next pictures were taken the next day, as we traveled from Rotorua to Taupo.

That is not a nuclear reactor. It is a geothermal power station, if I understood right.

After two days staying in Taupo with friends, we drove to Wellington. It was chilly and dark a lot of the day, but we enjoyed the scenery anyway. First, we drove around Lake Taupo.

Someone was feeling carsick, so we stopped for a few minutes. That few minutes turned into more minutes when blackberries were discovered! Gayle and the younger children ended up picking several cupfuls of blackberries for our lunch.

I believe this next area is what is known as the Desert Road. It certainly looks like a desert!

We saw several of these statues in the town of Bulls.

Toward the end of the day, the younger children were getting quite crazy. I challenged Mr. Imagination and Little Miss to see who could spot five interesting things in five minutes. After the first round or two of that, I handed out notepads to them, and a piece of paper to Mr. Sweetie and told them to draw or write a few words about every interesting thing they saw in ten minutes. This was Mr. Sweetie’s notes; the other two each had a lot of little bits of paper which I couldn’t really photograph, given where we were. That activity really helped keep them going!

The Green and Blue Lakes

March 27, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

On our way to Te Wairoa, The Buried Village, we passed the Green and Blue Lakes. They are in the Tikitapu Bush, which is mentioned in Fire in the Sky, a book we read on our way. We stopped and walked down to the Blue Lake, and enjoyed the beautiful scenery. This first picture is the Blue Lake, seen from the road.

The sign at the beginning of the track.

Someone grabbed a couple of pictures of Miss Joy, showing two facets of her personality, while we were there.

Book Review–A Hope Fulfilled

March 26, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 3 Comments

About the Book:

Book: A Hope Fulfilled

Author: April W Gardner

Genre: Biblical Fiction (Obadiah)

Release Date: November, 2023

One Hebrew slave’s courage and faith opens the gate on Edom’s demise.

Tikvah, a Hebrew slave in Edom, lives in hope of once again seeing Jerusalem, the Holy City. When a Babylonian general and his dashing Jewish liaison arrive at her master’s house, whispering plans of Edom’s destruction, she senses Yahweh at work. After all, there’s a prophecy foretelling His justice upon the kingdom. Tikvah clings to that promise while obediently following the call of service into the heart of danger. If only there were a promise she would come out the other side alive.

My Thoughts:

I have been seeing books by April Gardner for awhile, and wondering what her books were like, so I decided to read this book when I had the chance to. I found it quite an interesting “what-if” about the fall of Edom to the Assyrians. I had to cringe at the description of how one of the main characters was mutilated, and the slaughter of people by the Assyrians—but that was reality for the people of that time. I loved the strong faith of several of the main characters. What I did not care for was the romance in this book. It just wasn’t my style. I prefer the romance to be low-key, not the main point of the book. So, those who love Biblical romance will like this book; it just didn’t quite work for me.

About the Author:

April W Gardner is an indie author whose great passion is historical romance with themes of Native American and Southeastern U.S. culture. Copyeditor, mother of two grown children, and non-trad college student, April lives in South Texas with her husband and two German Shepherds. In no particular order, April dreams of owning a horse, learning a third language, and visiting all the national parks.

More from April:

So…Obadiah? Who ever heard of Obadiah as the backdrop for biblical fiction? I hadn’t. But that’s not where A Hope Fulfilled began…

In late December 2021, while deciding on a Bible reading goal for the upcoming year, I pondered which sections of the Bible I knew least. The minor prophets came to mind right off, then camped there as I asked myself what I knew about these little books.

I’d heard a million sermons preached from one or another of them over the years, but could I give even a one-sentence summary on any of the twelve? That question required a moment’s thought, which produced Jonah and the big fish, Hosea and his harlot wife, Joel and the locusts, Amos and… Uh, er, uh…

This was a problem. After burning some brain cells on the matter, I finally hung my head and admitted I was a minor failure. If I’d been tested right then on the minor prophets, I would have received a big red F.

How was this possible? I’m a missionary’s kid who never missed a church service, for goodness’ sake. This was unacceptable. I had an MK reputation to uphold.

Kidding, kidding. But the point remains. After 4.5 decades in church, I should be able to state every book’s title and theme. At a minimum. Anything less is spiritual laziness.

With that challenge in mind, I hitched up my trousers and set to work. My task? One minor prophet a month. I would read each one again and again, really drilling them home, absorbing their messages and banishing my spiritual “shame.”

By April, and my fourth read of Obadiah, I stared at my Bible, the verses swimming before me, and admitted to a second problem—despite my faithful rereading, the first four books were all running together in a mental smear of prophety messages.

Warning, judgment, doom, gloom. There was hope in there, too, of course. Praise God. And a harlot wife. I had that one down. But I was no closer to being able to distinguish them, to really understand the books with any kind of true ownership.

Since I’m a goal-girl, it made me a little sad to set aside my twelve-prophet year, but there was no getting around it. If this was going to work, I would have to go deeper, get messier, put on my work gloves and knee pads, and start digging.

New goal! Understand Obadiah. I’d worry about the rest once I had this one down. Fifteen months and three written books later, here we are, celebrating the release of my first biblical fiction, A Hope Fulfilled.

So, how did I get from studying a minor prophet to writing biblical fiction? The journey from point A to point B wasn’t very long. The series (A Fire and a Flame) started out as a Bible commentary for women, but when I got to exploring the history around Obadiah, my fiction brain kinda took over. It does that sometimes. Silly brain.

I did finish the commentary, but as soon as I allowed myself to ponder all the what-ifs of the event, the novella practically wrote itself.

Obadiah gives a fiction writer almost no details to build on. So, A Hope Fulfilled is what one might call an artist’s rendition of what might have happened during the fall of Edom. There were probably Hebrew slaves in Edom. One of them probably knew the prophecy of Edom’s doom. And that somebody might have, just might have, longed to help God’s justice play out.

Thus, Tikah and her story, A Hope Fulfilled, were born.

To purchase your copy, click here.

To visit more of the blog stops on this tour, click here.

To enter a fun giveaway, click here.

The Buried Village

March 24, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

A week or so before we left home for our big North Island trip, I spent a little time one afternoon online, checking out things we could do around Rotorua. When I stumbled upon the website for The Buried Village, I knew that was a place we wanted to go. We have a book (supposed to be on the shelf, but I couldn’t find it today to take a picture) titled Fire in the Sky, a fictional diary of a boy who visited the Pink and White Terraces days before they were destroyed in the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886. We read the book once, probably about 12 years ago. Esther and I decided we should take it with us and read it aloud before we went to Rotorua. She read the entire book to us as we drove on our first few days. When we visited the archeological site, which has been partially reconstructed, it really came to life, since we had read the book, which is set in the village of Te Wairoa. This was the entrance to the village. There were signs set up along the path, each of them displaying a fictional letter written by someone who had visited the area around the time of the eruption.

This is scoria, or volcanic ash, from the eruption. All the paths are covered with it.

The rock in this picture is volcanic ash, which covered the ground two meters (about six feet) deep.

This was the site of one of the hotels, which has been excavated down to the original ground level. The case holds items found on the site.

A reconstructed Maori whare, or house, on its original location. A lot of the buildings collapsed under the weight of the volcanic ash.

From the village, the track led into the bush and along a beautiful creek.

Along the creek was a shelter holding an old waka, or war canoe. The children were reading a sign posted on the ceiling, part of a treasure hunt they had been doing throughout the village. Because they found the end of the hunt, here in this shelter, and were able to repeat what it said to the woman at the desk in the office, they were each given a chocolate coin.

Just after the waka, the track divided. Gayle was tired, so we took the easier fork and were treated to this view, with the sign that explained what we saw. During the eruption, the hill in the distance shielded Te Wairoa to a certain extent from the ash; everything that landed on the village had to come all the way over that hill.

The other branch of the track went to this waterfall; the older children walked around there.

After leaving the village, we drove up the road a short distance to an overlook and were able to see Mount Tarawera. What a view! It is the flat-topped mountain on the right side of the picture beyond the lake.

Right after I published this post, I received an email in response to it. The reader commented: I doubt if you would have read of the Christian man killed at the village you visited the Buried Village. He was a young Englishman who was at the hotel when the eruption began all those years ago. When the eruption began he gathered the people together with awful danger increasing by the seconds he shared the Gospel urging the people to get right with God. After sharing the Gospel an attempt was made by the people to seek better shelter. Sadly this young man was not successful and crushed to death under the weight of the ash on the collapsing hotel. Many years ago I visited his grave in a cemetery outside Rotorua. Actually, we did hear about this person. There is a museum attached to the village, which we wandered through before exploring the site. The only exhibit in the museum which is not a still display is a room with a man sitting at a desk. When you enter the room, lights start flashing in the window, and the room rumbles and shakes. The man starts talking, saying the words the Christian man (Reverend Bainbridge, if I remember right) wrote just before he died, calling people to repentance. And then, suddenly, all goes dark and quiet after a final crashing and rumbling as the hotel collapsed.

Rotorua

March 17, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

One place we were looking forward to visiting was Rotorua, where we wanted to see some of the hot, bubbling mud and steaming hot pools we had heard about. We had lunch at Kuirau Park and then started walking around to look at the sights. At first we were quite disappointed. The first track we walking around had a few spots where bubbles came to the top of the water and popped, but that was it. Then, as we wandered on farther, we started seeing more of what we had heard about. The farther we went, the hotter things got! And, the more strongly the air smelled of sulfur. We ended up spending two or three hours wandering around that park from one fenced-in area to another, seeing more and more amazing spots. Be sure to watch the video if you can; it gives you a much better idea of what we saw than the still pictures.