Books I've Recently Read

PATIENCE WITH GOD: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion {Or Atheism} (Frank Schaeffer). This title really appealed to me, even though I actually do like religion. It is just really hard to call yourself Christian when in the minds of a lot of people, that automatically associates you with the crazies who want to burn the Qu'ran. I've been lucky that the two friends I have who self-identify as atheists are pretty understanding and generous people who don't mock people of faith; and the friends I have who are super-evangelical are not super-crazy, even though some of them do believe that God placed dinosaur fossils in the earth just as they are today during his six 24-hour days of creation. I need to take notes as I read books--use post-its or something--so that I can comment more fully on them. For now, just reading this was a breath of fresh air (sorry for the cliché--they will happen) because it made me feel understood.

SOUL SURVIVOR: How my faith survived the Church (Philip Yancey). This book isn't what I expected. It doesn't really describe the church of the author's upbringing except in the vaguest of terms. I think he must go into more detail about that in some of his other books, which I haven't read. Each chapter of this book is a meditation on how a particular person, whether Yancey met the person for real or through the person's writings, affected his growth as a person of faith. It took me a few weeks to read through this, bit by bit, and it was strange how as I read each section, it shed light on different parts of my life. The morning after I finished the chapter on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, my dear friend sent me a Dostoevsky quote. I love those bits of life-sparkle. Sometimes I call them God-breezes.

In the last year I have had a lot of God-breezes. Maybe I'll do another post on those sometime.

I hate that this post has so little substance. I will do better with other books I've read.

In the meantime, it has been Luke 15:11-32 which has sustained me this week: the prodigal son.