This book has gripped me. It is like I have lived in this shelter, and this book has deconstructed the shelter. And now, ideas that were just small inlets of light into life are vivid realities, all around me. I’m gripped. It’s like I’ve realized all of these personal and corporate limitations on God, and now that I know that I’ve been suffocating myself, I need to shake it off. It’s a process that I need, and I can’t even explain it in a way that is going to make sense, but this book just makes sense.
Velvet Elvis made me think, “Where was all this info before, and why didn’t my sunday school teachers know this stuff?” Then Blue Like Jazz vocalized the things I felt inside in a way that led me to tears as I dealt with the words on the page breathing life into thoughts that had just been bouncing around inside my head, like Donald Miller was speaking for me. And this book just ripped the blinders off. It was like here are some ideas, these are how these ideas worked for me, and now, these ideas are real, and this is what it looks like to take Jesus at his word. I finished it this morning, and I brought it with me to Mugshots in case I needed to quote stuff from it, but I can’t think of just one thing. I guess the most real part to me, the part that sets the stage for everything else is in the beginning when he talks about how we hear over and over how people’s lives were going to crap, and then they met Jesus, and they just can’t thank him enough for pulling them out of that life. But when you grow up in the church, and you hear that story over and over, this new life doesn’t really feel so much like life. “If God was as boring as Sunday morning, I wasn’t sure I wanted to have anything to do with him.” He goes through what it was like to really follow Jesus, and as he is introing this idea, he says “…me, I had it together. I used to be cool. And then I met Jesus and he wrecked my life.”
As I process this stuff, it starts to freak me out, but I hope for fire. I hope that I live in this community, and the sparks catch kindling, and another world clashes with this one.
