Reflection

This trimester, I have read a total of 3 books. Even though I didn’t reach my goal that I set at the beginning of the trimester on Goodreads, I hope to continue reading more in my free time throughout the next trimester. I used Goodreads to gain suggestions for reading new books, and to see what types of books I might like from a certain genre. I also talked to family and friends who helped give me suggestions for reading new books that I might like. Reading other people’s blog posts also gave me information and summaries of books to see what I might want to read in the future. One thing I struggled with through this experience would be finding time to read from my books. I was very busy this trimester, and it was hard to set aside time just to read. I worked through this struggle by reading in my free time, and I hope to continue reading more throughout the next trimester. One strength I had with blogging would be to pull all my thoughts together into one blog post. This helped me to see more clearly the plot and story of each book. Also, it helped to see where there might be foreshadowing and connections throughout each book.

                   During this trimester, I have grown a lot as a reader and a writer by posting each week. An example of this would be from the beginning of the trimester where I wrote a blog post titled “Peace Child” (see post attached). In this post, I don’t go very in-depth in my explanation of the book Peace Child. I did talk about why I started reading the book though, because the missionary/author of the book visited my church a few years ago. In the post I said, “I chose to read this book because the author and missionary (Don Richardson) is friends with some people from my church.” Even though in this post I get the point across clearly, I could have tried to go more in-depth in my post. In this post I also said, “It takes place in Irian Jaya Indonesia (formerly called Netherlands New Guinea), which is just north of Australia.” To make this post more visual and detailed, I could have added a picture of a map to show where this place is located instead of just describing it.

                  A post that I made toward the end of this trimester would be one that I titled “Connections” (see post attached). This post is also written about the book Peace Child by Don Richardson. In this blog post, I made a connection from the book to myself. I wrote, “A connection that I can make from Peace Child to myself would be that I am going on a missions trip to the Dominican Republic in a few months.” Later on in the post I go on to explain that even though it’s not the exact same as moving to a foreign country with your family, our group will still need to have the same mindset as the missionaries who moved to this faraway country. Through this post and others, I made the book and blog more personal to myself, and improved my writing style throughout the blog posts. My reading also improved, by understanding more detailed and in-depth parts of the books I read. A quote from the book is, “’Lord God, have I been a fool? These men have never even learned to respect a policeman, let alone honor You-and here we are: man, wife and child, sixty-five river-miles from the nearest government post-defenseless except for Your Spirit surrounding us.’” This quote shows that the missionaries had to trust God that they would be okay when going out to the villages. They weren’t sure what they would do if the people there turned on them, or how to protect themselves. However, they trusted God, and were able to be safe. Even though the missions trip I will be going on isn’t as dangerous as this, we still need to trust God to keep us safe and to pray for the people we will be helping there. Overall, my writing and reading/analyzing strengths have grown throughout this trimester through my blog posts.