What Are You Reading?

What are you reading?

I know what you are reading right now! I mean, what are you currently reading in that space you reserve for yourself in your busy life? This question is one I often ask missionaries when I am visiting. I believe a person's "reading diet" provides a window into their soul and well-being.

If nothing else, it makes interesting table conversation.

I am an inveterate reader. I read almost everything - books, newspapers, magazines and catalogs in the pouch in front of me on planes and almost anything else that has print on it. Just this morning my obsessive-compulsive disorder took over and I re-read the label on the shampoo I am currently using. "A shampoo guaranteed to luxuriously volumize your hair."

First, I doubt that "volumize" is a real word. I bet it wouldn't work in Scrabble. Second, if you have seen a photo of me recently, you can understand why I may doubt the claims this product makes for itself.

Apparently there are limits to modern science.

Over breakfast Susan and I enjoy sharing what we have been reading. It is one of the only meals that we regularly get to eat alone. It has become an encouraging time of fellowship for both of us.

This morning I had several of my books at the table in order to share some quotes from my current reading. Susan came armed with a few of her own.

I have been reading Bonhoeffer Speaks Today by Mark Devine. It is hard to beat quotes like, "When God calls a man, he bids him come and die." It is hard to deny the stark reality of that statement when you realize Bonhoeffer died eight years after writing those words in Flossenburg... hung by Hitler in a kind of final purge of his enemies.

Henri Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Son is on my bedside table. Nouwen has been a strange source of quotes for Evangelicals for years. He wrote, "One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God's forgiveness... Receiving forgiveness requires a total willingness to let God be God and do all the healing, restoring and renewing. As long as I want to do even part of that myself, I end up with partial solutions, such as becoming a hired servant."

Please, Lord, keep me from being a hired servant. Let me be your son.

One of my co-workers, Mark Edwards, is reading with me the book Living the Life God Has Planned by Bill Thrasher. I like Thrasher. He is practical, deeply biblical and not too popular. For some reason it always bothers me if the book I am currently reading is too popular. I find it disappointing that I might be normal.

Thrasher quotes Tozer when he writes, "What comes to our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." If we took that statement as true it might change a great deal of our priorities in study and life.

Susan has been re-reading (once again!) Rose From Brier by Amy Carmichael. There are a few great lines in there about books. "I suppose we all have our own familiar book-friends, books that we could not do without. Among mine I name very gratefully The Pilgrim's Progress. I do not think that we find the gathered wealth of truth and power and beauty in that book till we read it after life has had time to explain it."

My guess is that we do not understand the power in many books until the truth they contain interacts with our daily lives.

I re-read these thoughts and realize they have gone on far too long for those of you more accustomed to reading email than books. So, let me close with a quote from Brother Lawrence who wrote, "I will pray for you; do pray continually for me, who am, in our Lord, yours..."