Other things I’m reading

“Crazy Love” by Francis Chan.  Quite frankly, this book just didn’t do a whole lot for me.  Chan whipsawed between “you’re all miserable failures in Jesus’s eyes” and “Jesus loves you”.  The end effect is a mixed message of “Jesus will never leave or forsake one of His…BUT…how do you KNOW that you’re one of His?”  I have decades of memories of Southern Baptist revivals to do that for me.

At the other end of the spectrum is pastor Matthew Woodley’s “Holy Fools” (thanks for the correction, Hugh Hollowell!), or “Don’t Judge All The Desert Fathers By One Loony Flagpole-Sitter”.  While Chan thinks we need to suck it up and be more hardcore in our holiness; Woodley finds in the Desert Fathers of the early church another antidote based in loving God and loving each other likewise.  “Holy Fools” is one I’m going to have to read a couple more times until it sinks in.

The final book for this group is “Six Prayers God Always Answers” by Mark Herringshaw and Jennifer Schuchmann.  Prayer is something I struggle with on a regular basis.  I don’t know why; it may just be an innate cynicism borne of seeing too much of the dark side of institutionalized churchianity, but it takes a LOT to get me to even offer up a short prayer.

Probably the only exception to this rule is when things just reach a point where I blow up; then I drop back and find myself praying what a friend of mine, Jeremy Dale, calls “the real sinner’s prayer”, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

At any rate, the authors break the situations that lead us to prayer into six categories:

1. Bargaining prayer “God if you get me out of THIS one, I’ll…”

2. Questioning prayer “God are you there?”

3. Prayers for justice “God, it’s so unfair!”

4. Desperate prayers “God, please don’t let her die!”

5. Audaciously selfish prayers “God please let me win the lottery…”

6. Prayers of beauty or thankfulness “Oh God, this is great!  Thank you!”

The book makes a great primer for those trying to get a handle on praying.