Rugged American individualism seems to oppose descriptions of the Christian understanding of God as being childlike and shrouded in mystery. Yet, throughout the first two books of the Chalmers Trilogy, the Asher and Sloane families struggled to understand the hardships they endured. The dilemmas they faced, however, are about to be upended unless or until they come to grips with ordinary, acceptable sins, those little sins. The Song of Solomon calls them “the little foxes” that destroy the vineyard of marriage and friendship by wearing down its victims.

 

With dilemmas and choices still tumbling in the wake of Choices & Secrets, Lydia’s Aunt Deborah offers the Asher women and their friends a challenge. In The Propitious Calumet, 

Lydia’s Aunt Deborah offers Lydia an explanation through a question. In 1880, two American historians faced off after one of them convinced Congress to appropriate millions of dollars to publish—sight unseen, in French, and in Paris—a seventeenth-century French travelogue describing North America. Deborah uses the epic contest between the two historians as a challenge: By what metric can one Christian judge another Christian’s spiritual walk? The metric sometimes attributed to Samuel Johnson applies. We judge by how someone treats another person who can do him or her absolutely no good. Thus, Cameron will need to learn, whether in joy or sorrow: I Corinthians 13:12-13. (ESV)—“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”