The Christmas I was six, I woke up to find my stocking (one of my Dad’s old hiking socks – simpler times) full of sweeties and books. Venturing out onto the landing, I discovered that Father Christmas had left me a bulky parcel. Upon unwrapping it, I found he had given me a beautiful wooden Noah’s Ark, complete with gangplank to facilitate Mr and Mrs Noah’s entry and egress from their floating home. There were lots of animals too, all in pairs, all instantly recognisable even to a six-year-old from Essex. Lions, giraffes, turtles, elephants – the list went on and on. I spent most of that day walking them into the Ark, putting the roof on and taking them for a spin (did I mention the ark was on handy wooden rollers?) then affixing the gangplank and marching them all out again.
Today, nearly fifty years later, we’ve still got the ark. It lives in my parents’ sitting room and my children loved playing with it too. To be honest, although I’ve heard the story many times and even listened to talks at church diving a bit deeper into it, still it remains one of those narratives where I’ve got the main takeaways (Noah, Mrs Noah, their family, lots of animals, rain, Mount Ararat, a dove, a rainbow) but that’s kind of it. The book I have the privilege to be reviewing today takes the story of Noah and the Ark and completely transforms it, peopling that floating mobile home with real people and giving us context and background.
Jocelyn-Anne Harvey’s Not Knowing But Still Going
The author, Jocelyn-Anne Harvey (an Instant Apostle stablemate) first got an inkling that she might like to write about Noah and his family when a cargo ship capsized out to sea and more than 2,000 tons of wood were washed up on Worthing beach, near her home. I was captivated from the off when I read her description of the event.
“Overnight the stone-strewn shoreline turned into a forest. The scent of pine filled the air, not salt. It was an incredible sight, and what made it even more incredible was the night before, I had watched the movie Evan Almighty for the first time. As I stood on the promenade and looked at all the piles of timber, it literally brought to life the feeling of what it would be like if God told me to build an ark.”
That was back in January 2008. Since then, the author has been researching and developing the concept of how it would be for Mrs Noah (henceforth known as Emzara and her three daughters-in-law to leave the life they knew for a new one, floating around in an ark with their husbands and any number of animals.
The book cover shows the ark with a washing line on its deck, various garments gaily fluttering in the breeze. The fact that eight people’s clothes would have to be washed and dried on a regular basis had never occurred to me. Jocelyn also helpfully gives us a sense of the massive scale of the operation. I vaguely remember reading about cubits (an ancient measurement of length) in the Bible but had only the haziest grasp of how big one was. Pretty large, I would have thought, to accommodate all those animals, and food and a household of eight. Let’s find out how large from the expert.
“…. the length of the ark could be filled with one and a half football fields or three space shuttles could be laid out end to end, and the ark’s height was taller than a four-storey house.” I was fascinated by the stats that Jocelyn had found, including this one. “The ark had enough capacity to hold at least 120,000 sheep. I like sheep, but that’s a lot!”
There is so much information in this wonderful book that I could carry on for pages and pages. The author has ended each chapter with a prayer, some blank pages for readers to journal or make notes and some helpful contemplations. This structure makes the book ideal for small study groups, or as a resource, either online or face to face.
I love Jocelyn’s honesty. She has cleverly woven the story of the women on the ark in with her own struggles in life and the current situation in which we find ourselves. By telling the story of four women who find themselves in a new and often scary place, dealing with a completely unfamiliar way of life, isolated from others and having to look deep into themselves, she draws parallels with where we are, right now, in the midst of a pandemic. Listen to this, Emzara looking for reassurance having heard the news that her husband is constructing an ark.
“Everything she knew and had lived through gave her nothing concrete to centre her emotions on to. She couldn’t pick up her mobile phone and search for what an ark looked like. In a moment, her life switched from the regular routines of the ordinary into the sudden extraordinary, with Noah chopping down gopher-tree-filled forests to build an ark for a flood, which she had never experienced, let alone seen. Can you imagine the kind of questions Emzara must have had? If it was me, I would have asked Noah, ‘When exactly is the flood going to happen? Sorry, but did you say animals were going to live with us?’”
Yep. I would have been asking those questions too, plus quite a few more.
This book has been meticulously researched. There is something for everyone within its well-written pages. It’s the story of four women voyaging into the unknown, woven in with Jocelyn’s own journey of faith and experience.
Next time I’m at my parents’, I’ll think of Emzara and her three daughters-in-law, floating along in their vast abode in a completely different way. No longer just wooden figures endlessly walking up and down a gangplank, but real, living people with a story of their own.
You can buy, “Not Knowing but Still Going” from Waterstones, Aslan, Eden, the Book Depository and Amazon, as well as good bookshops. To find out more about Jocelyn-Anne Harvey, follow her on Instagram and on Facebook.
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This review is based on my own reading and enjoyment of the book.