Book Reviews
Book Review: In the Shadow of the Prophet
God Will Make A Way
I recently finished reading God Will Make A Way by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend. Like many other Christian books on the market today it is part psychology and part spirituality. The value of a book like this is that they occasionally describe situations you are experiencing and they have some helpful advice. When I read a Christian book like this I tend to fold the corner of the pages I want to return to. Still I am amazed at how much I had already forgotten and how hard it is for me to transfer what I have read into actions.
8th grade boys retreat/my son has a girlfriend
A few weeks ago some friends of mine at our church found out that I lived on a farm and asked if they could bring out some 8th grade boys for a retreat. I said yes though I knew nothing. Eventually I found out that between a little tackle football, capture the flag, and archery they were planning on talking to the guys about:
- Honor
- Purity and how to talk to women
- How on being a warrior
- Courage
In hindsight this retreat was about a man’s heart and his relationship to sex. These boys are going into high school. In this sex saturated society they were going to be severely challenged if they wanted to avoid the pitfall of meaningless sex. Meaningless sex may seem exciting and forbidden for high school students but it wounds the heart in a way that it is difficult to repair. Instead of building and supporting the intimacy that is essential for a good marriage, they develop a fake intimacy. They rely on movies and television to provide them with the role model of their attempts at intimacy. Like the movie characters they remember, they try to play the part. Unlike the movies they do not have a script for their movie. Ultimately a sense of failure and fraud sets in. They do not feel like the man they envisioned when they embarked on this journey. This fake intimacy colors all future relationships with women. It is repairable but it takes time.
I mention this because something amazing happened at the retreat. The boys had just finished a rousing game of tackle football in the arena. Demonstrating great common sense I avoided participating in tackle football. Sorry! Been there! Done that! The results are always bad for a man my age. While they were playing I lit the bonfire and moved some logs around the fire to sit on. We were probably thirty minutes into the talk about purity and how to talk to a woman when it started to rain. Everyone went inside except my son. So I sat down next to him. He told me he had a girlfriend. I was shocked! Like many boys his age he seems entirely preoccupied with video games and sports. When he is around girls his age he seems wonderfully clumsy. I thought he had a great chance about being labeled a jerk for the next five years. Boy, was I wrong! He told me that there was a girl at school he liked and she liked him. He said they were very comfortable being around each other and talking about things. So we sat in the rain and he went on to explain what he liked about her. I sat and listened. When he finished we got up and joined the group inside. This was quite an amazing experience for a father. My son was invited to participate in the retreat because he lives here. He is just a 7th grader. It is possible that he will make the same mistake as others before him and succumb to the pitfall of meaningless sex. Then again maybe God has armed him with the armor to protect his heart and the desire to seek out a deeper relationship with God and women.
It feels somewhat strange that God has used me to help my son start the journey in search of his heart. Like many parents I am pretty comfortable with God using the retreat leaders in this manner but I forgot that my participation is not only necessary but required. I should know better. I just finished reading John Eldredge’s great book, Wild at Heart, just before the retreat. There is a lot of wisdom about God and the masculine heart in that book. I find myself going back to reread sections several times as I continue to try and understand my heart and others I care about. I thought I had a lot of time before I needed to apply what I had learned on my son. Boy, was I wrong! The path to understanding your heart and your son’s heart is out there. The difficulty lies in the fact that God’s plan is not the same as your plan.
The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
The book is well written and probably very effective on many people who are “plan your work, work your plan” people. Don't get me wrong I like the book and the importance he put on the five purposes of life:
- Worship – you were planned for God's pleasure.
- Fellowship – you were formed to be part of God's family.
- Discipleship – you were created to become like Christ.
- Ministry – you were shaped for God's service.
- Mission – you were made to tell other's about Christ.
What I do know about myself is that I feel I have been most successful as an oblique learner. At an early age I realized that I frequently cannot get to my more difficult goals from the most direct route. When I got stuck with a difficult problem in school, I realized a successful strategy for me was to back off. I would work on something else or work in a different direction realizing that in the end I would have to work even harder to make up for lost time. I remember in college I was working on a programming problem for several hours and seemed to be getting no where. So I called it a night and headed back to the dorm. As I crossed the drill field I started to reschedule my next day's activities to allow time to work on this problem again when I realized the solution to my problem. Naturally I turned around and went back to finish the problem. My gut tells me that the growth in my faith has occured primarily in activities I did not consider as on my direct route to Christ. God's plan has frequently not been my plan. It sure helps to be flexible if you are not perfect.
What I'm reading!
It seems kind of funny how my reading preferences have changed over the last couple of years. For many years I was a prolific reader of the Wall Street Journal, technical magazines, and the internet. In the last couple of years I have become an avid book reader. I read several popular titles each year but many of the books are about Christianity. My style of reading has changed, too. I used to try and finish reading a book before starting with another. Of the five books I am reading right now, my favorites are: The Message by Eugene Peterson and The Journey of Desire by John Eldredge. The The Message tells the stories in the Bible in contemporary language. It makes the Bible more entertaining and sometimes we can glean more relevance from this interpretation that we might have overlooked in one of the standard versions. The Journey of Desire is an almost hypnotic voyage to core of our beliefs about who we are and what are our hopes. He quotes C. S. Lewis who summed it up: “We can only hope for what we desire”. The closer we get to understanding our desires, the closer we are to understanding ourselves and our actions.
" We Were Soldiers Once…And Young"
Bertrand Russell. “Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.” [Quotes of the Day]
Carl von Clausewitz. “No one starts a war–or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so–without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”
I just finished reading the book, “We Soldiers Once… And Young” and recently read the book, “Black Hawk Down”.Both of these books are great “war” stories. Despite almost thirty years that separate the events, both stories are very similar. They are action packed with lots of blood and gore sandwiched between individual acts of heroism. The movie “Black Hawk Down” with its great cinematography and sound is in my opinion better than the book. However I found these great “war” books difficult to read in this environment of a pending war with Iraq. The tactical advantage of the United States in Viet Nam and Somalia was their technological superiority. The weakness of the United States remains its unwillingness to sustain casualties to achieve a military objective. All of this sounds too much like the current situation with Iraq. I doubt the current administration has the political stomach to fight an urban war like as they did in Black Hawk Down. They definitely do not want to repeat the political and military mistakes from Viet Nam in Iraq. If for no other reason than the current situation in Iraq, these are important books for you to read.