​“Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.”
To me, it is so much harder to practice this belief than state it.  I have wondered often how people have the courage to do such hard things.  Even through all Corrie’s story she shows this is a fundamental belief that she holds. 
Near the end of the book, Corrie shares a story of how a story in which ad bandage from a gangrenous foot was put on her face: “I ran sobbing down the corridor and washed and washed beneath the wall spigot in the latrine.  I would never step into that aisle again!  What did I care about the wretched bedpans!  I couldn’t bear…But of course I did go back.  I had learned much in the pat year, about what I could and count bear.”
What an amazing story of courage and trust in God.  This is a book that I just keep rereading.  There is so much wholeness of soul and healing of souls within a very broken world.  It does my heart good every time I reread this classic.

​I found this book a very helpful and challenging read.   I started this on Audible but there were so many things that I wanted to go back and re-listen to that I bought the book.  The format of the book made it very challenging to keep ideas straight.  It was challenging to keep the ideas straight in my head as the author moved back and forth between the two major visions he addressed.  So many ideas. I needed to summarize the main points at the end of each chapter.  Then I could reflect on those ideas and see where I personally fell.    Unfortunately, I don’t think that we can categorize the political struggles into just two categories.  We are too complex.  Experience and education change our thinking and beliefs.  It also changes how we view the world.  I think I can straddle both lines (the constrained and the unconstrained) in some situations, especially in areas where I don’t have a deep understanding of the factors and influences involved.   For the constrained vision the big idea is that human beings are flawed.  So, to best help society we need to understand the fundamental laws of nature, government, and economy and then constrain man in order to maintain a healthy society.   This is very different from the unconstrained vision that believes that we can perfect society if we have the right conditions.   I guess we all want to live in a utopia.  However, by definition utopia is an “imagined place of state were everything is perfect” (Oxford Languages).   
So, what if you believe that man is flawed but is perfectible through Christ?   It makes it hard to completely land in one group or another.  The book does not address this idea.  The focus is how man believes that he can perfect society if the conditions and teaching are right.  For me that is a flawed belief since I believe that man in his current condition is not omniscient enough to make decisions that will lead to a perfect society.  We just don’t understand ourselves, our world, or others well enough to begin to believe that we have the right to determine how everyone should live.  

Interesting that I have two books on my self where the main character is a pig.  Charlotte's Web and Animal Farm.  They have very opposite ideas and purposes.   Charlotte's Web has a very heartwarming and optimistic feel.  There is friendship and descriptions about how beautiful life is.  The farm is painted as an ideal place to learn and grow.  In Animal Farm the setting is about human oppression and then animal oppression.  The farm is a place for the fittest and smartest to rule the weaker.  

I wonder what E.B. White wanted us to learn from this book? 

I read from one posting how this story can be used to talk about the carbon footprint of raising a pig or that pigs should not die to satisfy a human's appetite.  I guess when I visit my memories of this story and re-read the story, I don't see that message.   I think I prefer to see the power of friendship and mentoring in this story.  Charlotte mentors Wilbur.  Charlotte offers to Wilbur friendship and through that friendship Wilbur grows and becomes a "better pig".  By better I mean he begins to think and act differently.  He then learns to be a friend and mentor to others (Charlotte's children).  Its a small little farm utopia.  

This is a book that I have read with my children several times before.  Reading this book while looking for the principles listed in Oliver DeMille's book "We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident" adds more power to the story in my opinion.   In this speculative fiction story is a post WWIII story where a leader finds a way to eliminate all crime through a behavior modification system implanted in a people.  However there is a problem in that the community is struggling so they capture others to bring them into their system, implant them, and then let them know they are not part of a organization where they will be given the gift of better education, health, food, clothing, and technology.   The other groups that have been captured should be eager to join this more advanced society.  But are they?  

Some of the questions I think the book asks are:
1.  if you remove the ability to choose wrong from a people will they automatically always choose the good and right? Will they be happy?
2.  Can you train people to always be good? Should you?  Why/why not?
3.  How much are we willing to give up for security?
4.  How much are we willing to give up for freedom?
5.  What are some of the freedom's we have lost that should have fought for?  Why didn't we?
6.  If a person is raised without agency, once it is granted to them what will they do?  
7.  What happens do a generation if they have not developed their own moral character but have been forced to "be good"?
8.  What do we do know to promote freedom?