Sitting by the Fire with Agatha Christie

 

Today I sat by the fire with Agatha Christie.

Sometimes the world outside seems like a wild, cold, noisy place. There are days where I feel like I have to mentally shut the door on it all. That’s how it was for me when I started The Body in the Library. As though I had fought to close the door on all the chaos of life and had turned round to find Agatha Christie getting settled in an arm chair by the fire.

You know it can’t be bad if you’re going to spend an evening in the company of Agatha Christie, even if the fire is only imaginary. And also any conversation I may or may not have had with her! So I sat back and let her tell the story.

This isn’t my first experience of The Body in the Library so I was trying to guess/remember the outcome. It showed me just how tired I was, because I couldn’t really be bothered to try and work it out, but just sat there waiting for the plot to unravel itself.

The truth, the partial truth, and anything but the truth.

One of the key ideas that Miss Marple throws out towards the end of the book, is that everyone was too trusting - they believed what people told them, even when they were being lied to.

Which got me thinking. Because that’s what life is like. Not that we’re trying to work out who, what, when and where, but what is real and what isn’t. Every attention-grabbing headline, every snappy tweet, every enticing piece of click bait - we have to decide how much is true, and what we are willing to trust. Maybe we’re in this over-anxious, social media saturated world, because we too, are too trusting.

No wonder we’re all tire
d. Sifting the plausible from the outrageous lie takes a fair bit of effort.

The truth I’m Holding onto

There’s so much news and information floating around out there that we can’t even begin to process it all. And for me this past year has been about processing stuff closer to home. I find it easy to fall into a thought pattern that tries to predict what is coming next and what I need to do to prepare for worst case scenario.

But I’ve been finding there’s quite a lot you just can’t predict, like finding a dead body in your library - how would the Bantry’s have conceived of a plan to work through that. And I was not expecting to nearly lose my mum on Christmas Eve the other year. There’s only so much you can reasonably expect to prepare for.

So in the spirit of giving up and letting the plot unravel, I’ve been working on not trying to be in absolute control of everything. It’s been tempting to put life on hold in case I have to drop everything and rush off to help my mum. The current strategy is to take these things to God in prayer. It doesn’t sound like much when it’s written like that but it is working. I’m also thankful that He doesn’t mind me sounding like a broken record, as I remind Him of all my fears, and make my suggestions of how He could make it better. But at the end of the day I’m getting better at relinquishing control to Him and trusting Him to provide what I need each day.

The Lancashire Library Challenge

I’ve been thinking about how I could make a challenge from this book. After much internal debate, I thought I would work with the idea that library was in the title. So my challenge for this year, and maybe a bit beyond, is to try and visit every library in Lancashire and borrow a book. I’m thinking only solid libraries, but I’ll award myself ten points for a mobile library visit. Not convinced I’ll find any of those though. Will keep you posted on my progress.