LIESEL

Gender: Girl
Origin: Hebrew
Meaning: God is my oath

I just finished re-reading The Book Thief. As you'll know if you are my friend on GoodReads, while I am a big reader, I'm not a big re-reader. Liesel, the title character, is one reason I chose to read The Book Thief again a mere 7 months after finishing it the first time. She's a beautifully written character and we get to see her go from a scared little girl to a brave young woman over the course of the book.

Liesel becomes a book thief for the first time the day of her younger brother's funeral. He dies en route while her mother is taking them to an agency to be put under the care of foster parents. The fact that her mother gave Liesel up to a foster family should speak to the sadness that permeates this book. The Book Thief is not set during a pleasant time in our world's history: you know going in that a book set in Germany during World War II is going to be painful.

But I wonder whether Liesel, as Markus Zusak envisions her, could have existed during any other time. Certainly the reader sees her brokenness, her loyalty and her perseverance in stark contrast to the depravity surrounding her. Zusak knows Liesel well and doesn't write her in a false way. She doesn't change from damaged to whole in one fell swoop, never looking back to darker days. In fact, I'm not sure Liesel ever emerges whole from this experience.

I desperately hope that my daughters never experience any of the many traumas faced by this brave fictional girl. But I hope one day (when they are much, much older) that they will, read this book and, like Liesel, see the value of words and use them as a life preserver. Whether they are navigating the murky waters of adolescence, hiking the difficult terrain of a new college or just doing their best to get from one stage of life to another, I hope the written word will be there to buoy them. I hope they will see words as the gift they are and that this knowledge will guide them to use their own words very carefully.

I was thinking today about the Word becoming flesh and making his dwelling among us. My words clearly do not have the power of God's, but if my own words became flesh, would I want them to dwell among me? Am I carefully using the power of words that we have because we are made in God's image? Or am I squandering that gift on chit chat or, worse, crafting verbal weapons that soar through skin, bone and marrow to pierce the hearts of others? If there's anything I learned from The Book Thief, it's that words make the whole thing possible. Hitler could not have wooed a nation into insanity and hatred without words. That Liesel uses words to save herself is some solace.