Books For The Journey

I'm reading two powerful books right now. The first is called, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus, by Brennan Manning. These pages are full of deeply cutting words, ideas that slice to the marrow of our desperate need for Jesus. It offers powerful glimpses of His remarkable love for us, His children, and what we are meant to become when His love has been given sovereignty in our lives.

I confess, I can only handle a page or two at a time. I have to digest, apply and reapply these concepts. In the forward, Larry Crabb says he read the book in two hours. I simply can't imagine how. That's like being proud of eating a seven course meal in eight or ten minutes. (NOTE: I'm not picking on Larry. His name on the front is what led me to buy the book in the first place.)

The second book I'm reading is The Irresistible Revolution : Living as an Ordinary Radical, by Shane Claiborne. You can read a sample here (PDF). Lovin' it. Shane's a...well, an individual. He spent time in Calcutta working in Mother Teresa's ministry (or Momma T, as he calls her), he's interned at Willow Creek, visited Iraq (during the bombings), and founded a social action Christian community in the dark heart of Philadelphia. In short, the guy's been there and done that. In what is my favorite quote of the book so far, Shane's recalls a statement Rich Mullins made in a Chapel address at Wheaton College:

"You guys are all into that born-again thing, and that’s awesome; we’ve got to be born again. You know Jesus said that to Nicodemus. But if you tell me that I got to be born again, I can tell you that you’ve got to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy, too. But I guess that’s why God invented highlighters, so we can we highlight the verses that we like and ignore the other ones."

Zing!