Book Review: His Name is Jesus by Max Lucado

Recently I received a copy of the gift book “His Name is Jesus” by Max Lucado from www.BookSneeze.com. As a fan of Max Lucado’s writing, I was excited to read this compilation of excerpts about Jesus from his already existing books. Organized to tell the story of His life, it is broken down into five sections: His Birth, His Mission, His Death, His Resurrection, and His Legacy. These writings are then artfully displayed in a sturdy hardcover book that comes in a beautiful gift box on nearly 200 pages of landscape photos and softly aged looking pages that give the book a very warm and inviting feeling as you read.

But much more enjoyable than the design was the fact that this entire book was all about the beauty of Jesus, the “God-man” who is “at once, divine and human. Common and extraordinary.” Lucado takes you into all the Bible stories that we have become so familiar with and helps you to imagine what the characters were thinking and feeling as they discovered who Jesus really was. I found myself becoming more in awe of Jesus’ choice to embrace the lowliness of humanity and all the pain of life on this earth, for the sake of love – for me! I fell more in love with Him for the way He was not afraid to touch the untouchables and that He’s not intimidated by my mess, but gladly comes right into it to extend His mercy and power on my behalf. Yet, at the same time, Lucado in no way neglects to reveal the majesty and divinity of Jesus, who while human, was also fully God.

If you want a beautiful book for your coffee table that has substance or want a book that will creatively introduce the unbeliever or new believer to Jesus, or if you want to just be reminded of the beauty of Jesus for yourself and fall a little more in love with Him, then I would totally recommend this book!

Justice – 13 months; Baby #2 – 12 weeks

Well, baby #1 (Justice – not really a baby anymore) is now 13 months old (outside of the womb) and if you figured it out by the blog title, we’re pregnant with baby #2 who is now 12 weeks old (inside the womb)!!!  Yay!!!  We are very excited for this new addition to our family and wanted to give you all our wonderful news!  Again, for my RSS readers, there are several videos in this post, so you’ll have to come visit the site to view them (sorry!).

As for Justice, this last month has been one of growing in leaps and bounds, it seems!  He’s starting to stand on his own, but mostly by accident – lol.  He’ll get distracted for a moment and let go of whatever he’s holding onto and he’s quite good at balancing for a while, until he all of a sudden realizes what he’s doing & then he quickly goes to grab something again or sit down. He’s also getting very ambitious with climbing and just yesterday, he managed to climb up onto our loveseat in the office, which is a little lower than our living room couches, all by himself!  Oh, dear!  He’s also become a lot more energetic and rambunctious in his playing, loving to flail his body around and falling on purpose, etc.  This has led me to discover little scratches and bruises on him when I’m changing him, but apparently he’s pretty tough.    He gets into quite goofy moods sometimes and is starting to really get a silly side to him & he’s often making me laugh with his antics.  He loves it if we throw/drop him on our couches, but this has its disadvantages, because he has no concept of the danger of falling off of things & would willingly dive off of couches, beds, etc. with no regard for his well-being!  He loves to throw things, will sometimes even “play fetch”, and will chase us and let us chase him.  In fact, he LOVES it when we chase him & “catch” him and tickle him like crazy – he will stop “running” away if he thinks we’re not catching up quickly enough.    Here are a couple videos of him playing…

Another major step he’s taken is learning to mimic us.  The first thing he learned was to clap his hands whenever we said, “Good job!”, which I mentioned in my last post, but now we’re also teaching him to lift his hands above his head when we say, “Praise the Lord!”   He also tries to mimic how we use the phone and lately he’s actually started to mimic the sounds and words we say!  It’s quite fun getting him to do things – lol.  I’d say his first official word was “What?” which was followed by his second word, “Good!” and recently “Hi”.  At least, those are the words we can actually understand.    He may have many more that we just can’t interpret yet.  I’m also trying to teach him to say “milk”, and he really tries hard, but mostly just says, “ma!”  Here’s a bunch of videos to demonstrate…

Lately, Justice has also developed a very strong attachment to his daddy.  Me and him get along really well & have lots of fun together during the day, but as soon as daddy comes home, it’s like mommy no longer exists!  lol.  Every morning when Joe leaves for work, we have to try to distract him, otherwise he breaks down in tears.  This also happens if Joe goes to the bathroom and closes the door (not always a give-in at our house) and Justice will paw at the door like a puppy and cry for Joe to come out – lol.  He follows Joe wherever he goes and just simply adores his daddy – it’s quite cute.

As for Baby #2, we had a lot of fun telling our friends and family, using Justice’s birthday as a coverup for our plan.  We gave Justice a birthday present at his parties with the positive pregnancy test inside and here’s a video of how it turned out when my family came over to celebrate.  My favorite quotes from the night…

“You Peed on that!”
“I thought it was a thermometer!”
“I was completely clueless!”
“Is that a little toothbrush?”

So, Baby #2 is due around October 19th, which will make Justice and his sibling roughly 19 1/2 months apart in age!  It should be interesting!  So far, the pregnancy has been really good, although I was experiencing a lot more nausea this time around then I had with Justice.  As usual, I’ve also been SUPER tired, but it appears that as I’m finishing up this first trimester that the nausea has almost gone away and that I’m getting a little bit more energy – yay!  At 12 weeks, I’ve got a definite baby bump showing and since there was some confusion about my due date, I got to go for an early ultrasound and see the baby, which was super cool!  I love the fact that you can actually see their little heart beating inside their chest and seeing their arms and legs flailing around.  I also got to see the baby’s “yolk”, which if you didn’t know, is kinda like an egg yolk that is in the uterus to feed the baby until the placenta is formed – I just think it’s so amazing how God takes care of all those little details!  Anyways, to wrap up, here’s a picture, just for fun, comparing my baby bump with my last pregnancy (the left is now, the right was then).