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511. You’re Not Enough (and That’s Ok): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Nick Reader

Author:   Alice Beth Stuckey

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Christian, Self Improvement

228 pages, published August 11, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In You’re Not Enough, mother, Christian, and conservative thought leader Alice Beth Stuckey questions the narrative that to be happy, fulfilled and successful all you need to do is love yourself.  She believes that down this path of self love lies disappointment and disillusionment.  Instead, she advocates taking the focus off of yourself and putting it on others and Jesus Christ.

Quotes 

“If the self is the source of our depression or despair or insecurity or fear, it can’t also be the source of our ultimate fulfillment.”

 

 “This is an argument I made in a podcast episode titled “Three Myths Christian Women Believe”. The first myth was that you are enough. My counter was this: you’re not enough, you’ll never be enough, and that’s okay, because God is.”

 

“But if we were really enough as is, we wouldn’t have to try so hard to convince ourselves it’s true.”

 

 “When we follow Christ, we are never at risk of “losing ourselves,” because our identity is eternally found in him.”

 “The yoke of the god of self is difficult and its burden heavy, but God’s yoke is easy and his burden light. What a relief to know we don’t have to expend our precious energy serving ourselves. We make terrible, unworthy gods.”

 

“Without the Bible as our basis for justice, we get a system based on the only tool we have without a supreme moral Lawgiver: the self.”

 

“Because the self can’t be both the problem and the solution.”

 

“The self isn’t enough—period. The answer to the purposelessness and hollowness we feel is found not in us but outside of us. The solutions to our problems and pain aren’t found in self-love, but in God’s love.”

 

“While self-love depletes, God’s love for us doesn’t. He showed us His love by sending Jesus to die for our sins so that we could be forgiven and live forever with Him. Self-love is superficial and temporary. God’s love is profound and eternal.”

 

My Take

I was given You’re Not Enough by my son Nick as a birthday gift.  It was my first encounter with the conservative, Christian personality Alice Beth Stuckey.  I found her book to be a quick read with an important idea at its core.  It reconfirmed to me how foolish it is to base your self worth on how you look, what you weigh, how much you achieve, or any other temporal basis.  Worth a read.

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492. The Book of Longings

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Sue Monk Kidd

Genre:    Fiction, Historical Fiction, Theology, Christian

416 pages, published April 21, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The Book of Longings is a new take on the story of Jesus Christ.  It is told from the perspective of Ana who was raised in a wealthy family in Sepphoris with ties to the ruler of Galilee.  Ana longs to be a writer and rebels against the stifling expectations and oppression of her family and culture.  Author Sue Monk Kidd engages in poetic license and has Ana marrying Jesus and then making her home with his brothers, James and Simon, and their mother, Mary. Ana and Jesus are separated for several years and are reunited just before the crucifixion.  Ana then carries on, chronicling Jesus’ story and reaching her potential in a small artists’ colony.

Quotes 

“When I tell you all shall be well, I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.”

 

“Anger is effortless. Kindness is hard. Try to exert yourself.”

 

“Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.”

 

“Each of us must find a way to love the world. You have found yours.”

― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

 

“Why should we contain God any longer in our poor and narrow conceptions, which are so often no more than grandiose reflections of ourselves? Let us set him free.”

 

“Your moment will come because you’ll make it come.”

 

“It does the world no good to return evil for evil. I try now to return good to them instead.”

 

“Your moment will come, and when it does, you must seize it with all the bravery you can find.”

 

“Life will be life and death will be death.”

 

“Her mind was an immense feral country that spilled its borders.”

 

“Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it.”

 

“You think with your head. You know with your heart.”

 

“I went to stand beside him and looked in the same direction as he, and it seemed for an instant I saw the world as he did, orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right.”

 

“It’s always a marvel when one’s pain doesn’t settle into bitterness, but brings forth kindness instead.”

 

“When I was finally able to read the Scriptures for myself, I discovered (behold!) there were women.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings and enjoyed both books, so I was interested in her latest effort.  It’s a good book, not a great one.  Kidd offers a unique perspective on Christianity by imagining Jesus with a wife, but does seem to be accurate with a lot of the other historical details in her story.  Her main character Ana provides an compelling portal to view the life, death and resurrection Jesus.

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433. The Case for Easter: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Resurrection

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Karen Reader

Author:   Lee Strobel

Genre:   Non Fiction, Theology, Christian

90 pages, published March 26, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Case for Easter is a very short book that focuses on empirical arguments for the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Author Lee Strobel interviews experts from a number of disciplines to methodically make his case.  In journalistic fashion, he looks at the medical evidence of Christ’s death on the cross, the evidence of the missing body from the tomb and the evidence of Christ’s appearances after death.

Quotes 

 

My Take

While The Case for Easter is a quick read at just 90 pages, author Lee Strobel (who also wrote The Case for Christ), makes compelling and evidenced based arguments for the resurrection of Christ.  Highly recommended during the Easter season.

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415. Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   John Ortberg

Genre:   Nonfiction, Christian, Theology

208 pages, published April 22, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Soul Keeping is an in depth exploration of the state of your soul and has prescriptions for how to improve it.  By trying to buy your way to happiness and focus on the material concerns of the world, your soul will pay the price.  In this practical and spiritual book, author John Ortberg helps you to discover your soul, which is the most important connection to God.

Quotes 

“You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God.”

“Many Christians expend so much energy and worry trying not to sin. The goal is not to try to sin less.  In all your efforts to keep from sinning, what are you focusing on? Sin. God wants you to focus on him.  To be with him. “Abide in me.” Just relax and learn to enjoy his presence.  Every day is a collection of moments, 86,400 seconds in a day.  How many of them can you live with God? Start where you are and grow from there. God wants to be with you every moment.”

 

“Being right is actually a very hard burden to be able to carry gracefully and humbly. That’s why nobody likes to sit next to the kid in class who’s right all the time. One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.”

 

“If your soul is healthy, no external circumstance can destroy your life. If your soul is unhealthy, no external circumstance can redeem your life.”

 

“Your soul is what integrates your will (your intentions), your mind (your thoughts and feelings, your values and conscience), and your body (your face, body language, and actions) into a single life. A soul is healthy — well-ordered — when there is harmony between these three entities and God’s intent for all creation. When you are connected with God and other people in life, you have a healthy soul.”

 

“Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

 

“If you ask people who don’t believe in God why they don’t, the number one reason will be suffering. If you ask people who believe in God when they grew most spiritually, the number one answer will be suffering.”

 

“In the Bible, God never gives anyone an easy job. God never comes to Abraham, or Moses, or Esther and says, “I’d like you to do me a favor, but it really shouldn’t take much time. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.” God does not recruit like someone from the PTA. He is always intrusive, demanding, exhausting. He says we should expect that the world will be hard, and that our assignments will be hard.”

 

“The soul integrates the will and mind and body. Sin disintegrates them. In sin, my appetite for lust or anger or superiority dominates my will. My will, which was made to rule my body, becomes enslaved to what my body wants. When I flatter other people, I learn to use my mouth and my face to conceal my true thoughts and intentions. This always requires energy: I am disintegrating my body from my mind. I hate, but I can’t admit it even to myself, so I must distort my perception of reality to rationalize my hatred: I disintegrate my thoughts from the reality. Sin ultimately makes long-term gratitude or friendship or meaning impossible. Sin eventually destroys my capacity even for enjoyment, let alone meaning. It distorts my perceptions, alienates my relationships, inflames my desires, and enslaves my will. This is what it means to lose your soul.”

 

“For the soul to be well, it needs to be with God.”

 

“A very simple way to guard your soul is to ask yourself, “Will this situation block my soul’s connection to God?” As I begin living this question I find how little power the world has over my soul. What if I don’t get a promotion, or my boss doesn’t like me, or I have financial problems, or I have a bad hair day? Yes, these may cause disappointment, but do they have any power over my soul? Can they nudge my soul from its center, which is the very heart of God? When you think about it that way, you realize that external circumstances cannot keep you from being with God. If anything, they draw you closer to him.”

 

“A paradox of the soul is that it is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction. You were made for soul-satisfaction, but you will only ever find it in God. The soul craves to be secure. The soul craves to be loved. The soul craves to be significant, and we find these only in God in a form that can satisfy us. That’s why the psalmist says to God, “Because your love is better than life . . . my soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods.” Soul and appetite and satisfaction are dominant themes in the Bible — the soul craves because it is meant for God. “My soul, find rest in God.”

 

“I was operating on the unspoken assumption that my inner world would be filled with life, peace, and joy once my external world was perfect.”

 

“A soul without a center feels constantly vulnerable to people or circumstances.”

 

“The best place to start doing life with God is in small moments.”

 

“The soul seeks God with its whole being. Because it is desperate to be whole, the soul is God-smitten and God-crazy and God-obsessed. My mind may be obsessed with idols; my will may be enslaved to habits; my body may be consumed with appetites. But my soul will never find rest until it rests in God.”

 

“We will always take the most care of that which we value most deeply.”

 

“The soul was not made to run on empty. But the soul doesn’t come with a gauge. The indicators of soul-fatigue are more subtle: • Things seem to bother you more than they should. Your spouse’s gum-chewing suddenly reveals to you a massive character flaw. • It’s hard to make up your mind about even a simple decision. • Impulses to eat or drink or spend or crave are harder to resist than they otherwise would be. • You are more likely to favor short-term gains in ways that leave you with high long-term costs. Israel ended up worshiping a golden calf simply because they grew tired of having to wait on Moses and God. • Your judgment is suffering. • You have less courage. “Fatigue makes cowards of us all” is a quote so ubiquitious that it has been attributed to General Patton and Vince Lombardi and Shakespeare. The same disciples who fled in fear when Jesus was crucified eventually sacrificed their lives for him. What changed was not their bodies, but their souls.”

 

“Here’s the deal: The more you think you’re entitled to, the less you will be grateful for. The bigger the sense of entitlement, the smaller the sense of gratitude. We wonder why in our world we keep getting more and more and more and keep being less and less and less grateful.”

 

“The “with God” life is not a life of more religious activities or devotions or trying to be good. It is a life of inner peace and contentment for your soul with the maker and manager of the universe. The “without God” life is the opposite. It is death. It will kill your soul.”

 

“Our problem is that this world does not teach us to pay attention to what matters. We circulate résumés that chronicle what we have accomplished, not who we have become. The advertisements we watch, the conversations we hold, the criteria by which we are judged, and the entertainment we consume all inflame our desire to change our situation, while God waits to redeem our souls.”

 

“Despite the rise of the mental health profession, people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to depression. Why? Martin Seligman, a brilliant psychologist with no religious ax to grind, has a theory that it’s because we have replaced church, faith, and community with a tiny little unit that cannot bear the weight of meaning. That’s the self. We’re all about the self. We revolve our lives around ourselves.”

 

“We’re generally quite good at doing something, but we’re really bad at doing nothing.”

 

“Good habits are enormously freeing — we accomplish good things almost on autopilot. One study from Duke University found that more than 40 percent of the actions people take every day aren’t decisions, but habits. Good habits free us, but when sin becomes a habit, our souls lose their freedom.”

 

“The alternative to soul-acceptance is soul-fatigue. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the body. When we stay up too late and rise too early; when we try to fuel ourselves for the day with coffee and a donut in the morning and Red Bull in the afternoon; when we refuse to take the time to exercise and we eat foods that clog our brains and arteries; when we constantly try to guess which line at the grocery store will move faster and which car in which lane at the stoplight will move faster and which parking space is closest to the mall, our bodies grow weary. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the mind. When we are bombarded by information all day at work . . . When multiple screens are always clamoring for our attention . . . When we carry around mental lists of errands not yet done and bills not yet paid and emails not yet replied to . . . When we try to push unpleasant emotions under the surface like holding beach balls under the water at a swimming pool . . . our minds grow weary. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the will. We have so many decisions to make. When we are trying to decide what clothes will create the best possible impression, which foods will bring us the most pleasure, which tasks at work will bring us the most success, which entertainment options will make us the most happy, which people we dare to disappoint, which events we must attend, even what vacation destination will be most enjoyable, the need to make decisions overwhelms us. The sheer length of the menu at Cheesecake Factory oppresses us. Sometimes college students choose double majors, not because they want to study two fields, but simply because they cannot make the decision to say “no” to either one. Our wills grow weary with so many choices.”

 

“I am so wrapped up in the hurt I have received that I do not notice the hurt I inflict.”

 

“When evangelist Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth, died in 2007, she chose to have engraved on her gravestone words that had nothing to do with her remarkable achievements. It had to do with the fact that as long as we are alive, God will be working on us, and then we will be free. She had been driving one day along a highway through a construction site, and there were miles of detours and cautionary signs and machinery and equipment. She finally came to the last one, and this final sign read, “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” That’s what is written over Ruth Graham’s grave: “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” Construction today. Freedom tomorrow.”

 

My Take

I read Soul Keeping as part of my women’s bible study and found it to be one of the best bible study books that I have read in the past 10 years.  Ortberg is a gifted writer and makes a lot of good, thought provoking points.  I also appreciated that he shared a number of personal details, vulnerably opening himself up to the reader.  I came away from reading this book with some valuable takeaways.

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336. On Calvary’s Hill: 40 Readings for the Easter Season

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Karen Reader

Author:   Max Lucado

Genre:  Non Fiction, Theology, Christian

144 pages, published October 24, 1999

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

On Calvary’s Hill is a 40 day Devotional leading up to Easter chronicling the passion of Christ and exploring his final days.

Quotes 

“Why is the cross the symbol of our faith? To find the answer, look no further than the cross itself. Its design couldn’t be simpler. One beam horizontal—the other vertical. One reaches out—like God’s love. The other reaches up—as does God’s holiness. One represents the width of his love; the other reflects the height of his holiness. The cross is the intersection. The cross is where God forgave his children without lowering his standards.”

 

“The next time you think that no one understands or cares, reread the fourteenth chapter of Mark and pay a visit to Gethsemane. And the next time you wonder if God really perceives the pain that prevails on this dusty planet, listen to him pleading among the twisted trees. The next time you are called to suffer, pay attention. It may be the closest you’ll ever get to God. Watch closely. It could very well be that the hand that extends itself to lead you out of the fog is a pierced one. No Wonder They Call Him the Savior.” 

My Take

I found On Calvary’s Hill to be an inspiring read, especially during the Easter season.  It really made me think about the sacrifice of Jesus and what that means to my life.

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323. Romans For You 8-16

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Timothy Keller

Genre:  Non Fiction, Christian, Theology

224 pages, published February 3, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Romans For You 8-16 is the second half of Romans study by noted theologian and Christian writer Timothy Keller.

Quotes 

“The same sun that melts wax hardens clay.” In other words, what makes a life “good” is not a particular set of circumstances, but how the heart interacts with them.”

 

“Sin can only grow in the soil of self-pity and a feeling of “owed-ness.” I’m not getting a fair shake! I’m not getting my needs met! I’ve had a hard life! God owes me; people owe me; I owe me! That’s the heart attitude of “owed-ness” or entitlement.”

 

“Notice that in 16:25 Paul does not say “is able to save you”; rather, he says God is powerful to “establish” us through the gospel. This reminds us that the gospel is not only the entry point into the Christian life; it is also the way we continue in, grow in and enjoy life with Christ. Paul has shown in Romans how the gospel not only saves us (chapters 1 – 5), but also how it then changes us (chapters 6 – 8; 12 – 15). If we believe the gospel, God is working powerfully through it, in us. We need never move away from it.”

 

“Look what God’s done for me! Is this how I respond to him?”

 

“This shows us that “the good” God always is working for us is character change. He is making us as loving, noble, true, wise, strong, good, joyful and kind as Jesus is.”

 

“Christians who don’t understand “no condemnation” only obey out of fear and duty. That is not nearly as powerful a motivation as love and gratitude.”

 

“Paul is saying that sin can only be cut off at the root if we expose ourselves constantly to the unimaginable love of Christ for us. That exposure stimulates a wave of gratitude and a feeling of indebtedness.”

 

“children of God” only for those who have received Christ as Savior and Lord: “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children [tekna] of God” (John 1:12). Sonship is given to those who receive him. No one has it naturally except Jesus Christ.”

 

“The “Spirit of sonship” that Paul speaks of is, therefore, an ability that the Holy Spirit gives us to approach God as a Father instead of as a boss or slavemaster.”

 

“Not Christians. We don’t expect things in life to “work for good” of their own accord. When we find things working out beneficially for us, it is all of God, all of grace, all of him. When things work out, Christians never say: Of course—that’s as it should be! Rather, they praise God for it.”

 

“But second, this truth removes general fear and anxiety when life “goes wrong.” We know it hasn’t gone wrong at all! If God “works” in “all things,” it means his plan includes what we would call “little” or “senseless” things. Ultimately, there are no accidents.” 

My Take

After reading Galatians for You and especially The Reason for God, I am a fan of Timothy Keller.  A thoughtful and intelligent religious thinker and writer, Keller challenges his readers to dig deep and really think about what it means to be a Christian.  Romans for You 8-16 does this well and Keller has some interesting discussions of some challenging texts in the Bible.

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312. Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Lisa Stock

Author:   Nadia Bolz-Weber

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Theology, Christian

204 pages, published September 10, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint is a memoir by Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran Pastor who started the Church of All Sinners and Saints in Denver and who took a very unlikely path to the clergy.  Bolz-Weber is a former standup comic, a recovering alcoholic, is heavily tattooed and regularly uses foul language.  In this book, she shares her theological insights and a personal narrative of a flawed, beautiful, and unlikely life of faith.

Quotes 

“God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word … it’s that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn’t about God creating humans and flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace – like saying, “Oh, it’s OK, I’ll be the good guy and forgive you.” It’s God saying, “I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.”

 

“Matthew once said to me, after one of my more finely worded rants about stupid people who have the wrong opinions, “Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.” Damn.”

 

“The image of God I was raised with was this: God is an angry bastard with a killer surveillance system who had to send his little boy (and he only had one) to suffer and die because I was bad. But the good news was that if I believed this story and then tried really hard to be good, when I died I would go to heaven, where I would live in a golden gated community with God and all the other people who believed and did the same things as I did…..this type of thinking portrays God as just as mean and selfish as we are, which feels like it has a lot more to do with our own greed and spite than it has to do with God.”

 

“I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.”

 

“It would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected to that mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear, or resentment doesn’t free us at all. It just keeps us chained.”

 

“God was never about making me spiffy; God was about making me new.

New doesn’t always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve it. New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage to not mention when I’m right. New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn’t live without and then somehow living without it anyway. New is the thing we never saw coming- never even hoped for- but ends up being what we needed all along.”

 

“Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.”

 

“This is our God. Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps. A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross. Therefore what can I do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering. This is a God who bears suffering. I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering; God transforms it.”

 

“Every human community will disappoint us, regardless of how well-intentioned or inclusive.”

 

“Forgiveness is a big deal to Jesus, and like that guy in high school with a garage band, he talks about it, like, all the time.”

 

“God’s grace is a gift that is freely given to us. We don’t earn a thing when it comes to God’s love, and we only try to live in response to the gift. No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don’t continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that’s different from spiritual self-improvement. We are simultaneously sinner and saint, 100 percent of both, all the time. The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority. The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can’t, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.”

 

“It happens to all of us,” I concluded that Easter Sunday morning. “God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.”

 

“We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.”

 

“Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples. Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new. On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid. To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold’s funeral, that death is not the final word. To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it. And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, we still make our song alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.”

 

“The life changing seems always bracketed by the mundane. The quotidian wrapped around the profound, like plain brown paper concealing the emotional version of an improvised explosive device. Then, in a single interminable moment, when we discover the bomb, absolutely everything changes. But when we recall it from our now forever-changed lives, when we start with the plain brown wrapping, it looks like every other package, every other morning, every other walk.”

 

“Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing and saying, ‘Screw you. I’ll take the destruction please.’ God looked at tiny, little red-faced me and said, ‘that’s adorable,’ and then plunked me down on an entirely different path.”

 

“God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word. My selfishness is not the end-all… instead, it’s that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn’t about God creating humans as flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace—like saying “Oh, it’s OK, I’ll be a good guy and forgive you.” It’s God saying, “I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.”

 

“This is exactly, when it comes down to it, why most people do not believe in grace. It is fucking offensive.”

 

“When these kinds of things happen in my life, things that are so clearly filled with more beauty or redemption or reconciliation than my cranky personality and stony heart could ever manufacture on their own, I just have no other explanation than this: God.”

 

“This desire to learn what the faith is from those who have lived it in the face of being told they are not welcome or worthy is far more than “inclusion.” Actually, inclusion isn’t the right word at all, because it sounds like in our niceness and virtue we are allowing “them” to join “us”—like we are judging another group of people to be worthy of inclusion in a tent that we don’t own.”

 

“Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are. And maybe, just moments after Jesus’ baptism, when the devil says to him, “If you are the Son of God…” he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God. So if God’s first move is to give us our identity, then the devil’s first move is to throw that identity into question.”

 

“When what seems to be depression or compulsive eating or narcissism or despair or discouragement or resentment or isolation takes over, try picturing it as a vulnerable and desperate force seeking to defy God’s grace and mercy in your life. And then tell it to piss off and say defiantly to it, “I am baptized” or “I am God’s,” because nothing else gets to tell you who you are.”

 

“It was in those first couple months that I fell in love with liturgy, the ancient pattern of worship shared mainly in the Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, and Episcopal churches. It felt like a gift that had been caretaken by generations of the faithful and handed to us to live out and caretake and hand off. Like a stream that has flowed long before us and will continue long after us. A stream that we get to swim in, so that we, like those who came before us, can be immersed in language of truth and promise and grace. Something about the liturgy was simultaneously destabilizing and centering; my individualism subverted by being joined to other people through God to find who I was. Somehow it happened through God. One specific, divine force.” 

My Take

Pastrix is a compelling, well written memoir.  Author Nadia Bolz-Weber is a strong writer has a lot of new and powerful things to say.  I also appreciated her explanations of how things work in a church.  For example, her explanation on the liturgy was very interesting and informative.  As a recovering alcoholic, heavily tattooed former standup comedian, she comes at religion for a different angle than books that I have previously read.  While I didn’t agree with everything she wrote, she certainly gave me a lot to think about and broadened my perspective on several theological issues.  Recommended.

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278. The Story of God, the Story of Us: Getting Lost and Found in the Bible

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Sean Gladding

Genre:  Non Fiction, Christian, Theology

237 pages, published August 27, 2010

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In The Story of God, the Story of Us, author Sean Gladding tells the story of the entire Bible.  Gladding’s convention is to follow the conversations of a group of people (sitting around a campfire in Babylon, reclining at table in Asia Minor, or huddled together by candlelight in Rome) wrestling with the Story of God for the first time.  While the book can be read alone, it is designed to be shared with a group.

Quotes 

“The ever present ache of exile rises above the comforting sounds of the river, as the image of the house of the LORD in ruins breaks the peace. . . . Despite the warmth of the fire, he feels a chill. He wraps his cloak around him and looks into the eager faces of his people, then closes his eyes. ‘Picture this scene . . .'”

 

“Did you hear it? Can you picture the symmetry? Our God is a God of hospitality, creating a place for a people, a place where all life can flourish. God provides for all creation, as our Story shows. Our God is a God of order; we can trust God to provide for us now as in the beginning. “I know that it may not seem that way today, for here we are, exiles in a foreign land. Life is hard. We know that. And that is why we must tell each other the Story, and keep telling it, to do exactly what God has continually told us to do: remember . . . remember . . . remember.”

 

“Sin is not just something I do. Sin is social; it always impacts the whole community.” 

My Take

I read The Story of God, the Story of Us in a small group from First Presbyterian Church in Boulder, of which I am a member.  This book is a fresh take on the Bible and provides a succinct and compelling overview.  I especially enjoyed the discussions of the book with my small group and recommend reading it in a group if you can.  There is a companion study guide which we found very useful.

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266. The Great Divorce

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   C.S. Lewis

Genre:  Fiction, Christian, Theology

146 pages, published 1945

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Great Divorce is C.S. Lewis’s vision of the Afterworld in which the narrator boards a bus on a rainy English afternoon and embarks on an incredible voyage through Heaven and Hell.  Along the way, he meets a variety of supernatural beings far removed from his expectations, and comes to some significant realizations about the nature of good and evil.

 

Quotes 

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”

 

“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”

 

“Milton was right,’ said my Teacher. ‘The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality.”

 

“You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.”

 

“The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.”

 

“Son,’ he said,’ ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why…the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”

 

“There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”

 

“Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness; but your darkness cannot now infect our light.”

 

“That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves part of eternal reality.”

 

“Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”

 

“I wish I had never been born,” she said. “What are we born for?” “For infinite happiness,” said the Spirit. “You can step out into it at any moment…”

 

“And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.”

 

My Take

I listened to The Great Divorce on the heels of The Screwtape Letters and there is a lot of similarity between the two books.  Both books are characterized by admonitions on how to live a holy life dedicated to God, and how we so often get that wrong (even though we may think we are getting it right).  Pride truly is the worst sin.  If you have an interest in Christian Apologetics, then both The Great Divorce and the The Screwtape Letters are essential reading.

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264. The Screwtape Letters

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  John Breen

Author:   C.S. Lewis

Genre:  Fiction, Theology, Christian, Fantasy

223 pages, published 1942

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

This classic satire by the acclaimed C.S. Lewis is a sardonic portrayal of human life by the demon Screwtape, a senior tempter in the service of “Our Father Below.” The device used by Lewis are letters from the experienced old devil Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man.

 

Quotes 

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. ”

 

“We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.”

 

“Humour is…the all-consoling and…the all-excusing, grace of life.”

 

“The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forewarmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.”

 

“Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.”

 

“[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist’s shop.”

 

“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

 

“She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.”

 

“One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food;

(2) He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.”

 

“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”

 

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

 

“You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to him employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which h allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.”

 

“The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents–or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.”

 

“When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.”

 

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

 

“Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.”

 

“A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others…thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.”

 

“A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.”

 

“By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the the impossible.”

 

My Take

Even though it has been almost 80 years since The Screwtape Letters was published, it still has a lot of relevance to modern day life and makes the expression “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” particularly apt.  C.S. Lewis’ clever device of a conversation between demons on how best to ensnare human beings made me really think about how I was living my own life and what God expects of me.  Lots of food for thought told in a very interesting fashion.

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