Reading Time: 4 minutes

Week four of 2011 had me reading a book that I’d never heard of until the week before. I was hanging with some guys down at a local coffee shop, and my good friend and running partner (partner always sounds so contractual to me) mentioned it and said it was pretty good.

Now, my running partner has a lot of stuff I don’t. A faster 5k time, 8k time, Half Marathon time and Marathon time. He also has better hair, but I don’t hold that against him nearly as much as I do the faster race times. He has a real name, too, but I won’t use it because I don’t want to cross some kind of internet privacy line, and also because I’d rather just call him Jerk, mainly because of all the stuff I mentioned earlier. Well, except the hair.

So, there was no way in double hockey stick land that he was also going to have book knowledge that I didn’t have, too, so as soon as I got home, I fired up the Kindle app on my iMac (which can be downloaded free at the new app store over at Apple’s website) and bought it. Faster than I can run a quarter-mile interval, it was downloaded and I was immediately hooked by a story about ultra runners, the evils of Nike shoes and some people I’d never heard of called the Tarahumara Indians.

Basically, the author hurts his foot, and in his quest to figure out why, he encounters Indians who run hundreds of miles at a time and never get hurt. His quest for answers takes him on a journey that ends with a 50 mile race deep in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. The runners in the race are a pretty amazing mix of people, but the main ones are Scott Jurek, possibly the best ultra runner ever, and some of the fastest Tarahumara Indians in the canyon. The author also runs in the race, but does a good job keeping his race details out of the spotlight, because the race that matters is whether or not Jurek can beat the newly-found Indians (which I will not be revealing in this post).

There is a lot in the book I could have done without, and if you pick it up to read, you might as well know up front that there’s some choice language in it, and some points where it feels like it gets very technical about science, the foot, and whether or not we’ve evolved to be runners. McDougall certainly has a different worldview than I do, and I found myself a number of times answering questions he posed with what seems an obvious answer to me. One section that dealt with our ability to process thought shows what I’m talking about:

Okay, so primitive man upgraded his hardware with a bigger brain—but where did he get the software? Growing a bigger brain is an organic process, but being able to use that brain to project into the future and mentally connect, say, a kite, a key, and a lightning bolt and come up with electrical transference was like a touch of magic. So where did that spark of inspiration come from?

Good question. Simple answer: God.

Of course, that’s not the point of the book, but I did find a clash of worldviews here at times. I also found that the meat of this book was worth spitting some of the bones out. Just know that you may be spitting quite a bit.

Now, here’s some of the meat I found in this great read:

ONE: The hero of the book, for me, was Scott Jurek. He appeared to be the kind of gifted athlete we’d all want to know: gracious, humble, a “man like us.” The author tells of how Jurek would win ultra races and then hop in a sleeping bag at the finish line so that he could congratulate other runners as they came across the line. He’d wait as long as it took in order to see even the last finishers. In a world full of prima-donna athletes (i.e., all the New York Jets), it was really refreshing to find myself pulling for a guy like Jurek to win.

TWO: I was inspired by the community that the runners found. Different people from different cultures and countries came together and learned to appreciate one another. Running was the glue. McDougall wrote about a speech given the night before the race by the American-turned-canyon-dweller that was particularly poignant:

As the American and Tarahumara runners squeezed around the two long tables in Tita’s back garden, Caballo banged on a beer bottle and stood up. I thought he was going to deliver our final race instructions, but he had something else on his mind.

“There’s something wrong with you people,” he began. “Rarámuri don’t like Mexicans. Mexicans don’t like Americans. Americans don’t like anybody. But you’re all here. And you keep doing things you’re not supposed to. I’ve seen Rarámuri helping chabochis cross the river. I’ve watched Mexicans treat Rarámuri like great champions. Look at these gringos, treating people with respect. Normal Mexicans and Americans and Rarámuri don’t act this way.”

As I read that, I couldn’t help but think of the words of Christ as He told His disciples that the unity they shared would be the proof to others of how real their faith was. Reading that speech made me desire a bond like that even more in the community of faith I find myself a part of, and while I know that running might hold our differences at bay for the length of a race, the transforming love and grace of Christ can unify different people forever.

I have no doubt that I was Born to Run after a world like that.

Reading Time: 4 minutesMost of my life is lived with a sinking realization that the Christianity of America is vastly different from the Christianity of the early church. I find myself unable to pinpoint what it is, or could be, that we’re missing, but when I read the Bible I can’t help but examine my own life and feel that I come up short in comparison. Their faith seems so much stronger than mine and purer than mine. In short, they impacted their culture while much of today’s American church isn’t even intersecting culture, or interested in trying.

So when a friend recommended David Platt’s book, Radical, my wife (my Better 99%) picked it up in a bookstore and brought it home. She read it a couple weeks ago, and since she practically read me half the book in snippets here and there (“Honey, can I read you this?” and “Oh! You have GOT to hear this!”), I decided that it would be Book #3 in my quest to read a book a week in 2011.

The premise of the book boiled down to 2 questions for Platt. The first was the easiest: was I going to believe Jesus? Sure, most of us do. But the second one was what he found to be the hardest: was I going to obey Jesus? Platt wondered if we could:

Take an honest look at the Jesus of the Bible and dare to ask what the consequences might be if we really believed him and really obeyed him.

I sense a growing level of discontent in the American church. It is not a growing number of complainers who rip the preacher apart at the Sunday buffet, or who are always up in arms about the song selection in the worship service. It is a discontent with the gap that many of us see growing between what we read in the Bible and what we see in our own lives. If Jesus called his first disciples to give up everything and follow him, then are we not called to do the same? “But we don’t want to believe it,” Platt writes. “We are afraid of what it might mean for our lives. So we rationalize these passages away.” He continues:

And this is where we need to pause. Because we are starting to redefine Christianity. We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with. A nice, middle-class, American Jesus…And the danger now is that when we gather in our church buildings to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead we may be worshiping ourselves.

Yeah, that’s on page 13. If you’re able to make it out of chapter one, you’ll find that it doesn’t get any easier. In response to our unwillingness to obey God, Platt writes this zinger:

We spurn our Creator’s authority over us. God beckons storm clouds, and they come. He tells the wind to blow and the rain to fall, and they obey immediately. He speaks to the mountains,”You go there,” and he says to the seas, “You stop here,” and they do it. Everything in all creation responds in obedience to the Creator…until we get to you and me. We have the audacity to look God in the face and say, “No.” (emphasis added)

This, then, seems to be the heart of where the American church has gone so wrong. We have made much of ourselves – our comforts, our dreams, our hopes – at the expense of the advancement of God’s glory in the most devastated areas of the world. It isn’t so much that any of us woke up one day and said, “Today I stop caring about others,” as much as it has been a slow, gradual turning away from the needy and toward ourselves. This self-centeredness is quite the opposite of the life our Savior led when He said that he’d come to serve, and not to be served.

As Platt says, “If there is no sign of caring for the poor in our lives, then there is reason to at least question whether Christ is in our hearts.” Ouch.

The obvious question is: So what do we do? I’ve attempted to answer that from our family’s perspective in this post, but the short answer in Radical is that we need to begin seeing the excess God has given us as a reason to give more instead of as an excuse to have more, and in order to make the shift in perspective, Platt offers the Radical Experiment. It is a one year commitment to do 5 things:

• pray for the entire world
• read through the entire Bible
• sacrifice your money for a specific purpose
• spend your time in another context
• commit your life to a multiplying community

I could give you the specifics about how to go about tackling those 5, but you’d be much better off getting the book and reading about it for yourself. Just do it with your eyes wide open, because you will be taking your life (as you now know it) into your own hands.

If, as Platt writes, “the goal of the American dream is to make much of us and the goal of the gospel is to make much of God,” then you may find yourself being one of God’s greatest spokespersons a year from now.

Buy this book, but don’t say you weren’t warned. Read Radical at your own peril.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Halfway through the second week of the year, I was pretty sure that my goal of reading one book a week during 2011 was toast. I had decided to read What Good is God? by Philip Yancey, and it looked that my downfall was going from a 56-page book in week 1 to a 287-page book in week 2. To my surprise, I finished it on Saturday evening to keep this goal alive for at least one more week. It helped that I was reading something by Yancey (who has been one of my favorite writers, and was also the speaker at my seminary graduation) and that it was compelling. The B99 had given this to me for Christmas and I found myself on more than once calling her in to hear portions of the book.

The format of the book follows Yancey’s travels to 10 areas in the world that were all experiencing some type of grief or suffering. He shares some of what he learned in each place and then includes the transcripts of speeches he delivered while there. The locales in the book range from the campus of Virginia Tech after the massacres to the underground church in China.

Some noteworthy excerpts from What Good is God?:

The Jews, schooled in Old Testament prophecies, had a saying, “Where Messiah is, there is no misery.” After Jesus you could change that saying to, “Where misery is, there is the Messiah.”

…pain redeemed impresses me more than pain removed.

David Aikman, former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine, estimates that up to three thousand Western Christians work in China as English teachers, many of them vocal about their faith…Almost every urban young Christian I met in China had come to the Christian faith through a foreign, English-speaking teacher.

In a speech to faith-based addiction help groups entitled “Why I Wish I was an Alcoholic,” Yancey expressed appreciation to recovering alcoholics for the truths they had learned and could teach others, especially Christians. His last point – that they have a lot that they could teach about what the church can and should be – was concluded with the following:

I yearn for a grace-abounding church that rewards rather than punishes honesty, and that, in Jesus’ words, exists for the sinners and not the righteous, the sick and not the healthy.

He concluded that speech with a story about his friend, George, who gad been attending A.A. for 20 years because they took him in at his worst and told him to “keep coming back.” Yancey writes:

George sometimes gets a different response from his church friends. “Aren’t you done with that issue (alcoholism) yet?” they ask. And this is what George says: “I realize for the rest of my life, I can go to A.A. meetings and nobody will ask me, “Aren’t you finished with all this talk about your alcoholism?” They will just say, “Keep coming back – glad you could make it.”

May the church learn.

Indeed, Mr. Yancey. Indeed.