God’s Love Letters to you—Crabb

God’s Love Letters to You: A 40-day Devotional Experience
By Larry Crabb
(Thomas Nelson, 2010, 121pp)


God’s Love Letters to You is a condensed sampling of the finest of Larry Crabb’s thinking and writing on the loving purposes of God for the believer as revealed through the whole record of Scriptures. Each two-page devotional captures the theme of one particular Old or New Testament book working forward from Genesis to Revelation. Forty readings capture the essence of the larger edition, 66 Love Letters, in bite-size devotional pieces with penetrating questions for reflection, and a closing prayer of application.
Each devotional is written as if it were God’s own words to the believer. For example, from the Matthew reading:


“He [My Son] never intended to keep you visibly good and pleasantly happy until heaven. He came to reveal My nature for your sake and to change your nature to Mine.”(62)

These are not emotional, feel-good letters but bracing truths that cut through the blind spots and sloppy theology of a hedonistic culture. They reflect the idea that God is more concerned with our holiness than our immediate happiness.

I have long appreciated Crabb’s writing and very much enjoyed this latest devotional, marking lines to re-read on most pages. (I will conclude with a sampling of quotes!) There is much food for thought here. One potentially disconcerting factor is the way words that are not directly traceable to Scripture are put in God’s mouth. Scripture has been filtered through Crabb’s own spiritual walk and life experience as a counselor giving it a distinctive ‘Crabb’ flavor. While I happen to believe his emphasis is a timely corrective for a Christian culture addicted to self-fulfillment, still it would be good if the devotionals were more directly referenced to the Word. I would still highly recommend this book. Even if you don’t agree with every word Crabb speaks for God you will be challenged to face potential blindspots and misconceptions about what the Christian life is really all about.

This slim, concise (144pp) devotional book will whet your appetite for the original more fully expressed version: 66 Love Letters: A Conversation with God That Invites You into His Story (432pp).

--LS

P.S. [I received a complimentary copy of this book to review from Thomas Nelson Publishers through the BookSneeze.com bloggers book review program.]


And now for the meaty morsels:
“Spiritual leaders who teach that I am here to solve your problems and make your lives comfortable and prosperous underestimate the energy of unholiness in the human heart that I must severely deal with to get you to My party.” (11)

“Your love becomes trust only when you choose to believe that I brought you out of something bad to bring you into something good before you experience that something good. Then your love is sustained by confidence in My character, not by enjoyment of current blessings.” (14)

“You and everyone else are inclined to depend on Me for the good life of blessings and to mistake that dependence for love.”(20)

“Know this: holiness and only holiness brings joy.” (23)

“You must trust that I permit terrible things, natural evil that grieves My heart far more than yours, as part of the process of destroying the moral evil that offends My heart.”(29)

“Do not live with the priority of making your life in this world as good as you can make it.” (29)

“But desire with hope is sweet. It is the abundant life…for now. I want you to nibble on the appetizers now. But to do so requires wisdom.”(41)

“I make no promise to protect you from suffering in this world. I do promise the power to believe in My goodness when bad things happen, the power to hope with confidence that a good plan is unfolding when nothing visible supports that hope, and the power to reveal the goodness of My love no matter how distraught or empty you feel.”(44)

“Without an ongoing consciousness of sin, any sense of nearness to me is counterfeit.”(44)
“The greatest danger My people face today is prosperity, blessings that reinforce the false hope that nothing serious will ever go wrong in their lives if they just keep believing, expecting, trusting, and smiling…”(47)
“When your life hits a bump that I could smooth but don’t, will you continue to think I should surrender My wisdom to yours and do what you think best?”(50)

“Know this: those who live by faith will struggle in ways that those who live to make their lives work will never know.”(53)

“Happiness depends on present blessing, which I do not guarantee. Joy depends on future hope, which I do guarantee.”(56)

“In your heart, you rarely find a desire stronger than your wish to be satisfied with life’s blessings, to feel both confident in My goodness that they’ll continue and excited about life’s opportunities. Your desire for spiritual formation lies on top of those self-focused desires like and attractive veneer. It needs to lie beneath them, as the controlling foundation of your life.”(68)

“You are not alive in this world in order to experience Me or to enjoy the blessings of a comfortable life. If that were My purpose, I’d have brought you into My Presence in heaven the moment you were forgiven and adopted into My family.”(74)

“My Spirit is telling My story to your psychological culture, a culture that actually believes woundedness—how others treat you—is a more serious problem than selfishness—how you treat others.”(83)

“Your expectation of feeling everything you want to feel in this fallen world renders you vulnerable to false teachers who, in the name of My Son, offer you a strategy that promises to let you feel as complete now as you will feel forever in heaven.”(86)

“To be content does not mean to feel content but rather to know that in My Son you have everything you need to live in rhythm with My Spirit in any circumstance of life.”(92)

“You will be graced with the disaster your soul requires to find its way home.”—Tim Farrington in A Hell of Mercy (Crabb,98)

“With endurance, a joy will develop that frees you to appreciate the pleasures of life’s blessings without requiring from them a satisfaction they cannot provide.”(101)

“Don’t be surprised by your failure. Instead, be surprised, staggered by My response.”(116)

--excerpted from God’s Love Letters to You: A 40-day Devotional Experience by Dr. Larry Crabb (Thomas Nelson, 2010)

A Praying Life—Miller

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World
By: Paul E. Miller
NavPress:2009, 279pp
          [5 STARS!]

Here it is, a book for Christians “struggling with life, who pray badly yet long to connect with their heavenly Father.” I’ve collected lots of book on prayer over the course of my guilt-ridden life, driven to do something about my substandard ‘prayer life’. I’ve started in to read the classics by the ‘famous’ Christians who knew how to pray and could lay out the ‘doctrine’ of it thoroughly and without a loophole. And I’ve read some ‘loopier’ modern ones-- that imply that God is always talking to me and if I’ll just learn to tune in, I can ask anything I want and voila! I’ll have the answers I’m seeking.  It’s just that easy. But buying books on prayer is kinda like buying art books—it’s easier to spend the money collecting the books than the time learning to draw. Prayer comes down to that, spending time talking, and listening, and being conscious of God’s responses as they’re woven into my days.

What’s neat about this book is that it’s not only inviting to read because it’s built on the real life experience of the author (and his family), but it also makes you want to pray, to stop reading and start in, right now! Life-as-is becomes the starting point for coming like a dependent child to a Father who cares intimately about everything and desires to meet my needs. It’s not so much a matter of discipline once I recognize my utter need for God’s intervention in my days. Prayerlessness implies that I’m trusting in something else—my money, ability, spouse, fate?…to get me through without God. Anxiety is the tell-tale sign of my misplaced confidence. The circumstances of life are better seen as an invitation to talk to my Father about everything.

Paul Miller is not afraid to tackle the hard questions.
--What do we do with Jesus’ seemingly extravagant prayer promises?
--How do we avoid the extremes of not asking at all vs. asking selfishly?
--What are we to do with our own cynicism-- that dogged tendency to doubt God’s active goodness on our behalf in response to our prayers.
--And what about the messiness of ‘unanswered’ prayer or answers that seem to be the opposite of what we wanted?
He doesn’t offer pat answers. His hasn’t been a life of miraculous ease, all troubles removed in response to prayer. But his teaching gives witness to a God that delights in us and is weaving His story through our lives in response to our trust, as expressed in prayer. This can be hard work. It may mean laying down my will for God’s better will. “The praying life is inseparable from obeying, loving, waiting, and suffering.” (197)


When our hopes and our prayers do not change the reality we face then what? An excellent chapter is devoted to this topic. Our other options are denial (side-stepping suffering by insisting I’m well, for instance), determination (I will make this suffering go away--by prayer, by sheer will, by expending every means at my disposal), despair (the dead-end of determination gone awry; it avoids the pain of hoping in the face of failure), and one more. We can choose with Abraham to do our time in the desert, keeping one eye on reality but staking our lives on the sure hope to come? Miller wisely states that “God takes everyone he loves through a desert. It is his cure for our wandering hearts, restlessly searching for a new Eden.”(184) In the desert of deferred hope, he says, we give up fighting, let go of our idols, and come face to face with our helplessness, the crucial ingredient of a spirit of prayer. Here our priorities begin to change; praying continually becomes reality as we depend on God’s presence like never before. The desert is His gift in answer to our prayers. This is not the loaf of bread we asked for. Neither is it a stone. It is the bread of life by which we are transformed!

The final section of A Praying Life offers practical suggestions for developing prayer tools, specifically prayer cards and a prayer journal. While cautioning against a robotic use of systems, Miller holds that we will create systems to manage what is important to us. Our unbelief will be the biggest obstacle to creating a system of Word-based prayer requests for those we love. He shows how these work for him in just enough detail to make me want to get making my own! Do we really need to write things down? Consider it the next time you hear yourself saying: “I’ll keep you in my prayers”. Roughly translated perhaps what we mean is: ‘I have every intention of praying for you, but because I’ve not written it down, it is likely I will never pray for it. But I say it because at this moment I do care, and it feels awkward to say nothing.’ (Our 21st century version of ‘Be warmed and filled’—James 2:16) (229)

I can’t say enough good things about this refreshingly candid, practical, and inspiring book. It’s one that I will be adding to my collection of books on prayer, but with the difference that this one won’t make me cringe with inadequacy or guilt. Even a child can pray and it’s not too late to turn the details of today into an opportunity to pray. I'm ordering a copy today, and another to give away.  And say, I think I'll request that our local library purchase a copy too!

--LS


P.S. The disadvantage of a library copy is not getting to underline the best morsels. These are they:

“If you try to seize the day, the day will eventually break you. Seize the corner of his garment and don’t let go until he blesses you. He will reshape the day.” (233)

“Anxiety wants to be God but lacks God’s wisdom, power, or knowledge. A godlike stance without godlike character and ability is pure tension.” (70)

“Instead of hunting for the perfect spiritual state to lift you above the chaos, pray in the chaos. As your heart or your circumstances generate problems, keep generating prayer.” (72)


“When you stop trying to control your life and instead allow your anxieties and problems to bring you to God in prayer, you shift from worry to watching” (i.e. watching God weave His patterns in your lifestory, 73)

“Instead of being frozen by your self-preoccupation talk with God. If you don’t begin with where you are, then where you are will sneak in the back door. Your mind will wander to where you are weary.” (33)

Come as you are—“Private, personal prayer is one of the last great bastions of legalism.” (32)

“If we separate our mundane needs (doing) from God’s best gift, his loving presence (being), then we are overspiritualizing prayer.(122)

“Christians rush to ‘not my will, but yours be done’ without first expressing their hearts (Lk.22:42). They submit so quickly that they disappear. Overspiritualizing prayer suppresses our natural desire…. When we stop being ourselves with God, we are not longer in real conversation with God.” (122)

“Trying to dissect how prayer works is like using a magnifying glass to try to figure out why a woman is beautiful. If you turn God into an object, he has a way of disappearing….The only way to know how prayer works is to have complete knowledge and control of the past, present, and future. In other words, you can figure out how prayer works if you are God.” (128)

“Our dislike of asking is rooted in our desire for independence.” ‘The human ego assumes its self-sufficiency and self-mastery and imagines itself secure….It does not recognize the contingent and dependent character of its life and believes itself to be the author of its own existence.’Reinhold Niebuhr) (125)

“Frankly, God makes us nervous when he gets too close. We don’t want a physical dependence on him. It feels hokey, like we are controlling God. Deep down we just don’t like grace. We don’t want to risk our prayer not being answered. We prefer the safety of isolation to engaging the living God. To embrace the Father and thus prayer is to accept what one pastor called ‘the sting of particularity’(125)

“The most precious things in life can’t be proven or observed directly, but we know them as surely as we know that the sun and moon exist.” (127)

“Suffering is God’s gift to make us aware of our contingent existence. It creates an environment where we see the true nature or our existence—dependent on the living God.” (126)

“Asking in Jesus’ name isn’t another thing I have to get right so my prayers are perfect, it is one more gift of God because my prayers are so imperfect.” (135)

“At the center of self-will is me, carving a world in my image.
At the center of prayer is God, carving me in His Son’s image.” (156)


“The great struggle of my life is not trying to discern God’s will,
it is trying to discern and then disown my own.” (157)

“Until you are convinced that you can’t change your child’s heart, you will not take prayer seriously.” (167)

“I often find that when God doesn’t answer a prayer, he wants to expose something in me. Our prayers don’t exist in a world of their own. We are in dialogue with a personal, divine Spirit who wants to shape us as much as he wants to hear us. For God to act unthinkingly with our prayers would be paganism, which says the gods do our will in response to our prayers.” (168)

The Saving Life of Christ--Thomas

The Saving Life of Christ
by Ian Thomas
(Zondervan: 1961, 143pp)
4 stars—highly recommended!


I happened upon this unassuming looking little book recently, yellowed with age but packed with timeless spiritual wisdom for any generation—at least as pertinent now as when it was written.
Mr. Thomas is passionate that Christians discover the empowerment for life and ministry that God intended in sending Jesus not only to die for them but to live in them.  He is concerned with evangelistic efforts that produce converts oblivious to the source of their new life.  His words are challenging:

“Ignoring what they say, and what they sing, and what they pray, countless Christians live as though God were dead—and the Church of Jesus Christ needs above everything else to re-discover the fact God is alive, and to act as though He were! 
“Suppose that God were to die tonight!  Would it really make any difference to the way you live your Christian life tomorrow?  For all you really count upon Him as you go about your daily business…”(124)

The author’s own experience as a young believer was one of fiery zeal to do things for God but lacking in any real ‘fruit’.  Only when he had burned out did he come to understand that  Christ intends to live His life through the believer in a very literal sense—“Christ [who is] your life…”(Col.3:4).  His ministry was transformed.  Jesus Himself said, “Without me you can do nothing.” (Jn.15:5) and with his wry sense of humor Thomas amplifies: “How much can you do without Him?  Nothing!  So what is everything you do without Him? Nothing!  It is amazing how busy you can be doing nothing!” (142)

What I found most fascinating about this book is Thomas’ ability to illustrate New Testament truths with Old Testament types and stories.  For instance, using the Bible as its own commentary he traces the use of salt to heal a barren land (a type of the carnal Christian) (II Kings 2), to make meat offerings acceptable to God (Ezek.43:24), to be provided without limit for the service of the temple (Ezra 7) and to represent the believer’s impact on the world as he is filled with the true Salt— “the resurrection life of the Lord Jesus imparted to the true believer by the presence of the Holy Spirit.”(29)

The stories of the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings and conquests in Canaan are replete with lessons for the believer.  Thomas sees the ‘carnal Christian’ as one who has been saved from ‘Egypt’ but has failed to be filled with the Holy Spirit and enjoy the fruits of life in Canaan.  He suggests that the MANNA  represents the work of the Holy Spirit.  It has the ‘taste of fresh oil’ (Num.11:8) typifying the Spirit’s witness to the believer that he is God’s child, and the taste of honey (Ex.16:31), a picture of the Spirit whetting the believer’s appetite for what’s to come— ‘the land flowing with milk and honey’, as typifying the fullness of the Spirit every believer is called to enjoy.

Three excellent chapters discuss the enemy nation, Amalek, as a type of the sin nature in the believer and why it’s important to “Remember Amalek”.  A practical discussion is included of what it means to “walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh” (Gal.5:16) It is NOT a matter of trying not to ‘fulfill the lusts of the flesh’ so that I am rewarded by a walk in the Spirit.  For this will keep me quite preoccupied with myself instead of with Christ.  “There is nothing quite so nauseating or pathetic as the flesh trying to be holy!”  This is self-righteousness and full of self-praise or self-pity, but either way preoccupied with the energy of the flesh, not the Spirit.  Thomas suggests instead that to ‘walk in the Spirit’ is to maintain ‘an attitude of total dependence on God, exposing everything to Him’, and that as a consequence you will not fulfill the ‘lusts of the flesh—for you will be enjoying through Him the victory that Christ has already won.’  To walk in the Spirit is the means to enjoy the Saving Life of Christ! (82)

This is not a long or difficult book to read but it is a book that you will want to read in increments (with a pencil in hand if you’re like me!) to fully appreciate and apply what is taught about the saving life of Christ.  “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.” –(Romans 5:10)

[I’m happy to see it’s been reprinted with a more eye-catching cover and  is available from Amazon.com where you will also find some inspiring testimonies of those who have read it.]


Major Ian Thomas is the founder of Capernwray Missionary Fellowship of Torchbearers (CMFT), more recently known as Torchbearers International, an evangelical Christian educational organization with Bible schools throughout the world.
-----------------------------

Quotes not to be missed:

“Relate everything, moment by moment as it arises, to the adequacy of what He is in you, and assume that His adequacy will be operative.” (16)

“Pray without ceasing”(I Thess. 5:17)… here the word to pray does not mean to beg or to plead as if God were unwilling to give—but simply to expose by faith every situation as it arises, to the all-sufficiency of the One who indwells you by His life.” (16)

“…if you do not walk in the power of God the Holy Spirit, if your life is not abandoned to the indwelling sovereignty of Jesus Christ, then all the promises of victory in the Bible, all the promises of power by the Holy Spirit and of divine vocation will simply be texts, printed on so much paper, impersonal and irrelevant! Your mind will be filled only with memories of that which has been true to your experience in the bitterness of defeat.” (51)

“The challenge we hear so often today in the name of consecration is ‘Do more!  Give more! Be more! Go! Go! Go!’ But God says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God’!  In other words, quit the panic! Just let God be God!”(59)

“It is comparatively easy to be sorry for what you have done and to recognize the sinfulness of sins committed, but we are by nature loathe to concede the natural depravity of what we are and the total spiritual bankruptcy of man without God.  We fall again and again into the error of estimating ourselves without due regard to the ultimate origin of righteousness and the ultimate origin of sinfulness.” (99)

“…we have become accustomed to the elaborate machinery of the church, as an organizational enterprise in which carnal activity on the part of Christians is not only tolerated, but solicited—often in sublime sincerity…”(101)

“When you come to know Jesus Christ in the power of His resurrection, you receive absolutely nothing new from God; you simply discover and begin to enjoy experientially what you received from God the day that you were redeemed; the tragedy is that you can live for ten, twenty, or fifty years or more, having all that God can give you in Jesus Christ, and yet living in self-imposed poverty…”(116)

“…every spiritual awakening and every mighty movement of God has been the consequence of a return to the basic teachings of the Bible, and inevitably, in reverse, such a genuine spiritual awakening has always produced Bible-believing Christians.” (120)

“Spirituality in man is his availability to God for his divine action, and the form of this activity is irrelevant.  if it pleases you, always and only, to do what pleases God—you can do as you please!” (134)

“That is the why and the how of all spiritual activity, and this is all you need to know.
Why?  God told me to.
How?  The God who told me to is with me.” (120)

The Second Coming—Percy

The Second Coming
by Walker Percy
(Farrar,Straus,Giroux: 1980), 360pp.

So, I’ve read my first Walker Percy novel! Here’s an author who takes his background as a devout Catholic and southerner, trained as a medical doctor, and combines it with his life experience of having lost both grandfather, father and mother to suicide, and weaves a story in quest of making sense of the nonsense of living in a crazy world.

Meet the two main characters: Will, a well-respected, well-to-do widower who finds himself depressed and increasingly suspect of the farcical nature of life as he sees it. The answer? Not suicide necessarily, for then one never finds the answers…and so he concocts a seemingly insane experiment to prove for himself once and for all whether God exists. The outcome surprises both Will and the reader.

In the process of pursuing his experiment, he meets Allison, a recent escapee from a mental institution, who has undergone too many shock treatments to remember much about how life works. She’s adept at reading facial expressions and stating the obvious but clueless when it comes to appropriate protocol in reacting to strangers. For instance, what is this expression: “Have a nice day.” Such a nice thing to say, so why is it said in such a perfunctory way like ‘goodbye’ ? Good question; she has many of these. She puzzles too over the meaning of “love”, having no better notion of it than that it ‘sounds like something dark and furry which makes a lowing sound.” (40)

This duo of characters give the author an unusual perspective from which to evaluate the meaning of life, language and relationships. With the perceptive diagnostic skill of a doctor and his own hard-earned life experience Percy Walker blazes a bizarre and sometimes humorous trail toward the best answers to life’s hardest questions. His is not a story of complex or gripping plot. It is even unbelievable in spots, but this is forgiveable in exchange for his expert handling of thought and conversation which so clearly mirror the reality of the human condition.

In fact within the story’s first handful of pages the reader is faced with the possibility that something might be wrong with life, not only with that of the depressed epileptic main character, but also with life as he knows it. Is it possible for a majority of people “to deceive themselves into believing that things are going well when in fact they are not, when things are in fact farcical. Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears.”(4)


This is not just another mindless novel to pass the time of day, though it is very readable. There is much food for thought in its pages on such diverse themes as belief vs. unbelief, real love vs. ‘doing it’, evidences for the existence (or not) of God, sanity vs. insanity, and the quandary of needing relationship when people are so tough to get along with! And yes, there’s reference to the Second Coming of Christ, but this is only a fragment of the meaning in the book’s title. The title’s full significance is in fact more food for thought!
--LS
______________________

A review would be incomplete without a sampling of quotes from THE SECOND COMING that give a taste of Walker Percy.


“If one person is depressed for every ninety-nine who are not or who say they are not, who is to say that the depressed person is right and the ninety-nine wrong, that they are deceiving themselves? Even if this were true, what good would it do to undeceive the ninety-nine who have diverted themselves with a busy round of work and play and so imagine themselves happy?” (5)

“Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.” (21)

Lewis [a golfing friend], to Will : “The trouble is you and I share something that sets us apart.”
--“What’s that?”
“We’re the once-born in a world of the twice-born. We have to make our way without Amazing Grace. It’s a lonely road but there are some advantages along the way. The company, when you find it, is better. And the view, though bleak, is bracing. You see things the way they are. In fact, don’t you feel sometimes like the one-eyed in the land of the blind?”
He frowned. Why was Lewis’s unbelief so unpleasant? It was no better than the Baptist’s belief.
If belief is shitty and unbelief is shitty, what does that leave?
No, Lewis was even more demented than the believers. Unbelieving Lewis read Dante for the structure. At least, believers were consistent. They might think Dante is a restaurant in Asheville but they don’t read Marx for structure.” (151)

“Two more problems:
One: How to live. How do you live? My life expectancy is approximately another fifty or sixty years. What to do?”
Two: Memory. It’s coming back…Speak memory. Why? Only because I have to know enough of where I’ve been to know which way I’m going.” (93)

“Is there another way? People either believe everything or they believe nothing. People like the Christians or Californians believe anything, everything. People like you and Lewis Peckham and the professors and scientists believe nothing. Is there another way?” (132)
“Is it possible for people to miss their lives in the same way one misses a plane? And how is it that death, the nearness of death, can restore a missed life?....Why is it that without death one misses his life?” (124)

“…people notice very little indeed, ghost-ridden as they are by themselves.”(174)

“A mystery: If the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it? And if the good news is true, why are its public proclaimers such ### and the proclamation itself such a weary used-up thing?”(189)

“As unacceptable as believers are, unbelievers are even worse, not because of the unacceptability of unbelief but because of the nature of the unbelievers themselves who in the profession and practice of their unbelief are even greater ### than the Christians.

“The present-day unbeliever is a greater ### than the present-day Christian because of the fatuity, blandness, incoherence, fakery, and fatheadedness of his unbelief. He is in fact an insane person. If God does in fact exist, the present-day unbeliever will no doubt be forgiven because of his manifest madness.” (189)

“Are people necessary? Without people there are no tunneling looks. Brooks don’t look and dogs look away. But late afternoon needs another person.
“What do I do if people are the problem? Can I live happily in a world without people? What if four o’clock comes and I need a person? What do you do if you can’t stand people yet need a person?” (239)

“Must one have a plan for the pursuit of happiness? If so, is there a place where one looks up what one is supposed to do or is there perhaps an agency which one consults?
Who says?
Who is doing the supposing?
Why not live alone if it is people who bother me? Why not live in a world of books and brooks but no looks?” (241)

“Death in the guise of belief is not going to prevail over me, for believers now believe anything and everything and do not love the truth, are in fact in despair of the truth, and that is death.

“Death in the guise of unbelief is not going to prevail over me, for unbelievers believe nothing, not because truth does not exist but because they have already chosen not to believe, and would not believe, cannot believe, even if the living truth stood before them, and that is death.” (273)

“Is she a gift and therefore a sign of a giver? Could it be that the Lord is here, masquerading behind this simple silly holy face?” (360)

__________________________________

And lastly, Walker Percy’s writing is perhaps best understood with reference to his own sense of calling as an author. Here are his own words:

“To the degree that a society has been overtaken by a sense of malaise rather than exuberance, by fragmentation rather than wholeness, the vocation of the artist, whether novelist, poet, playwright, filmmaker, can perhaps be said to come that much closer to that of the diagnostician rather than the artist's celebration of life in a triumphant age.

Something is indeed wrong, and one of the tasks of the serious novelist is, if not to isolate the bacullus under the microscope, at least to give the sickness a name, to render the unspeakable speakable. Not to overwork the comparison, the artist's work in such times is assuredly not that of the pathologist whose subject matter is a corpse and whose question is not "What is wrong?" but "What did the patient die of?" For I take it as going without saying that the entire enterprise of literature is like that of a physician undertaken in hope. Otherwise, why would be here? Why bother to read, write, teach, study, if the patient is already dead?––for, in this case, the patient is the culture itself.

[I]t is the primary business of literature an art . . . [to be] a kind of finding out and knowing and telling, both in good times and bad, a celebration of the way things are when they are right and a diagnostic enterprise when they are wrong. The pleasures of literature, the emotional gratifiction of reader and writer, follow upon and are secondary to the knowing.”

["Diagnosing the Modern Malaise," in Walker Percy, Sign-Posts in a Strange Land 204-221, at 206,207 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1991)]

I hope you will dip in and try Walker Percy!  Incidentally, the main character of The Second Coming(1980) is first featured in Percy’s book: The Last Gentleman(1966), which I have yet to read!

--LS

A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany
by: John Irving(William Morrow and Co: 1989, 543pp.)

***4 stars***



“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” (13)


So begins the first-person account of a friendship between two 11-yr. old boys coming of age in a small New Hampshire town in the Vietnam War era.

Owen Meany, the hero of the narrative is very small for his age and bears the stigma of a freakish voice that never changes. But he possesses a strong belief in destiny. For him there are no accidents. Everything serves a purpose, including his tiny stature and his voice. When the mother of his best friend (John, the narrator of the story) is ‘accidentally’ killed by a baseball he hits, Owen is all the more committed to the idea that his hands are God’s hands to do with as He pleases. His belief is corroborated by key visions and dreams of what he will accomplish in his life. He lives to fulfill this destiny, which the reader doesn’t picture in its entirety until the final pages of this 543 page book, where Owen’s stature and voice play a key role in the heroic saving of others’ lives.

Along the way Owen’s faith mystifies and challenges all he meets. His unconventional re-enactment of the Christ child in a nativity play confirm the reader’s suspicion that this character is a type of Christ—coming into the world to sacrifice himself for others. His wordless but authoritative role as ‘the ghost-of-Christmas-yet-to-come’ in Dicken’s “Christmas Carol” play establish him as something of a prophet in his own community. He becomes known as ‘The Voice’ as he takes on an editorial column in the local school paper, intent on exposing injustices, challenging the status-quo and fomenting change. Through this character John Irving exemplifies the stubborn vision and courage that typify a person of strong faith.

His best friend, John, is by contrast skeptical. His view is captured in this quote: “You’re always telling me I don’t have any faith,” I wrote to Owen. “Well—don’t you see?...that’s a part of what makes me so indecisive. I wait to see what will happen next…because I don’t believe that anything I might decide to do would matter.”(446 ) As narrator, John is artfully portrayed in both the present action of the story and in his future life as an English teacher in Toronto, Canada where he ends up after ingenuously avoiding the draft, thanks to Owen’s courage and foresight. As an adult, he is critical of American politics, opposed to the War, and cautiously committed to belief in God as he reminisces about Owen’s miraculous life. This retrospective point of view enables the author to interject statistics and describe political tensions of the times surrounding the Vietnam War and the Iran-Contra affair of which the young friends would not have been fully aware, making the book a not-too-subtle platform for his rants on these and other issues, including TV!

The strength of A Prayer for Owen Meany is in its well-formed characters and dialogue. Irving’s attention to life-like details in presenting his characters and his method of moving the story-line along by interjecting realistic conversations between them, make the less believable and bizarre events of the story more credible. The story-line is unfortunately plagued with content of a sexual nature, which arguably is a real-life factor in a teenager’s life but is excessive in this reviewer’s opinion and may be offensive to some readers.

John Irving’s story is clearly based on first-hand research and life experience, allowing us to see inside the varied occupations of quarry workers, English professors, and even Army body escorts while drawing from his own childhood in New Hampshire and teaching career.  He keeps his readers well-tantalized with unanswered questions that make the lengthy 543 pages slip by. His reflections on faith as inspired by Owen’s life and death make this a story you won’t soon forget.

--LS

How to Ruin Your Life by 40--Farrar

How to Ruin Your Life by 40
by: Steve Farrar
(Moody: 2006, 143pp)

Don’t mistake this for a trivial book based on its facetious title. Steve Farrar addresses the 20’ish crowd with refreshing candor and relevance based not only on his own life experience but on his extensive interactions with people who have struggled and/or derailed their lives by the age of forty. What are the common denominators? The groundwork for a successful life at age forty is laid in the decisions that are made in the twenties. Sobering counter-examples are woven through chapters dealing with finding life’s purpose and one’s unique calling, finding and being the right mate, pursuing God’s will and guarding the heart. A ‘blow out’ at age 40 comes about because of errors in judgment and poor choices before then.

A particularly effective chapter (9-‘Honest Struggles’) discusses the critical need to deal honestly with the struggles of life before they erupt into full-blown disaster. The heart cannot be merely ignored or hidden, it must be guarded. “It is the struggle to guard you heart that will determine what happens to you by the time you are forty.”(125)

Farrar concludes with a recommendation he calls one’s “minimum daily requirements”, suggesting that the reading of Scripture is to the health of the heart what adequate nutrition is to the body. “You can’t fight off temptation when you are malnourished.” (138) He suggests a chapter of Proverbs a day, read and put into practice, as a safeguard against ruining your life by forty.

I appreciate Farrar’s obvious passion and insight. His Bible-based counsel is both pointed and practical. This book will be a timely encouragement to young adults and even to those of us who are older, but still intent on living our lives to their fullest potential.

--LS


“The greatest difficulty in conversion is to win the heart to God, and after conversion to keep it with him.”—Charles Bridges

As Easy as Drinking Water--Javid

As Easy as Drinking Water: A Muslim Forgiven
by: Afshin Javid
WinePress Publ., 2010, [Beware this publisher. More info via 'google']144pp.


WARNING: Contents no longer endorsed by ghost writer as authentic! (Feb.2012)*

“As easy as drinking water” is the Persian expression Afshin Javid uses to summarize his own story of finding forgiveness in Jesus Christ.  His riveting and inspiring testimony  commences with a brief synopsis of his childhood in Iran.  He was a zealous and committed Muslim, the pride and joy of his grandfather who commissioned him to go to the West and make converts for Islam.  His illegal immigration attempts land him in a Malaysian prison where hope of ever being freed is slim.  Here he comes face to face with the reality of Jesus Christ and his life is forever changed.  

His conversion reads like a modern-day Isaiah 6 story of God’s revelation of His holiness, Javid’s sinfulness and His offer of cleansing, followed by His commissioning of Javid to tell the Good News of salvation.  The miraculous, though not sought, is woven through his testimony much like it was in the days of the New Testament church.  God’s incredible interventions in Javid’s life and subsequent ministry are an awe-inspiring reminder that God is alive and well in our day, and is still a wonder-working God.  Javid’s own passion coupled with his candid retelling give this story a refreshing and empowering vitality.  His example of simple trust and obedience are inspiring reminders of the life of discipleship every Christian is called to.

[Unfortunately Mr. Javid has not been candid or honest in the telling of his story.  It is very impressive, very inspiring but not altogether factual.  As of February,2012, the ghost writer, Dan Holmes, has rescinded his endorsement of this story as true and lays out some of his objections at his website: 2peter2.blogspot.com
Mr. Javid has been required to step down from his pastorate following multiple allegations of immoral behavior and cult-like leadership.]

As Easy as Drinking Water  will inspire fresh faith and worship of the God who is worthy of all we are and have.  I highly recommend it!

--LS   I have retained this book review as a sobering reminder to all of us to beware of false teachers and of the 'deceitfulness of sin' in the times in which we live.  I commend to you to read instead: 2 Peter 2, I Tim 6, II Tim.3,4.  The Word of God is forever to be trusted.


P.S. I had opportunity to hear Afshin Javid tell his own story at Missions Fest, Vancouver this year.  He is a dynamic speaker with a passion for the lost, be they Muslim or any other 'stripe', and a passion for believers to live the Word they claim to believe.  He reserved the writing of his own story for twenty years--so that his life would have opportunity to prove that this was no passing 'phase' but a lasting transformation!  He is currently a pastor in the Vancouver area. This was the 'alleged' reason for waiting to tell his story.  Sadly, he was already deeply involved in scandalous behavior when the book was published.  May God's goodness lead Mr. Javid to repentance. --LS


*For more information visit 2Peter2.blogspot.com