Saturday, September 29, 2012

The Promise of Israel by Daniel Gordis

It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!

You never know when I might play a wild card on you!



Today's Wild Card author is:


and the book:

Wiley; 1 edition (August 28, 2012)

***Special thanks to Rick Roberson for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Widely cited on matters pertaining to Israel, Dr. Daniel Gordis has been called "one of Israel's most thoughtful observers." It is a task he does not take lightly. Throughout his career, Dr. Gordis has tirelessly observed, written and lectured on Israeli society and the challenges the Jewish state faces. His writing has appeared in magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, Moment, Tikkun, Azure, Commentary Magazine, Foreign Affairs and Conservative Judaism.

Today, Dr. Gordis is senior vice president and Koret Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. A prolific writer, The Promise of Israel is his ninth book. In 2009, his book Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End received the National Jewish Book Award. His biography on former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin is scheduled for release in 2014. Gordis continues to be a much sought after speaker, traveling around the world to speak on the Jewish state and the challenges to Israeli society. In addition, he regularly blogs Dispatches from an Anxious State. He and his wife, Elisheva, make their home in Jerusalem. They are the parents of a married daughter and two grown sons now serving in the Israel Defense Forces.

Visit the author's website.

SHORT BOOK DESCRIPTION:


What Israel's critics in the West really object to about the Jewish State, Daniel Gordis asserts, is the fact that Israel is a country consciously devoted to the future of the Jewish people.  In a world where differences between cultures, religions and national traditions are either denied or papered over, Israel's critics insist that no country devoted to a single religion or culture can stay democratic and prosperous. They're wrong.  Rather than relentlessly assailing Israel, Gordis argues, the international community should see Israel's model as key to the future of culture and freedom.  Israel provides its citizens with infinitely greater liberty and prosperity than anyone expected, faring better than any other young nation. Given Israel's success, it would make sense for many other countries, from Rwanda to Afghanistan and even Iran, to look at how they've done it. Most importantly, perhaps, rather than seeking to destroy Israel.

The Promise of Israel turns the most compelling arguments against Israel on their heads, undoing liberals with a more liberal argument and the religious with a more devout one. The Promise of Israel puts forth an idea that is as convincing as it is shocking-that Iran's clerics and the Taliban could achieve what they want for their people by being more like Israel.



Product Details:
List Price: $25.95
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (August 28, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1118003756
ISBN-13: 978-1118003756
Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3


AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:


Introduction


ASLEEP UNDER FIRE


For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be;
Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer and the battle flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.


                                                                         —Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” 18371

What struck me most about California when I started to visit it was its newness. Nothing seemed old. The cars all appeared new; the people dressed young and acted younger. To a young East Coast kid just starting a career, California seemed all about the future, almost devoid of a past.

But all of us have pasts. All of us come from someplace, and even in the shiny new West, it often takes very little for people to start talking about their lives, their deepest regrets, and their senses of how they have, or have not, honored the legacies from which they were born. It’s amazing, actually, what people tell a clergyperson, no matter how young he or she may be. When I first headed out to Los Angeles after finishing rabbinical school, I had no real conception of what awaited me. Some of what I hazily imagined actually came to be. Much did not. But one of the things that I remember most clearly is the stories that people, especially elderly people, told me, even though they barely knew me.

There was one story that I heard several times, in one form or another, always from people around the age of my grandparents. These people told me how their siblings who had arrived in America before them would meet them at the New York harbor. The new arrivals came off the boat with almost nothing to their names, but they had, in addition to their meager belongings, Jewish objects like candlesticks for the Sabbath or tefillin that they had transported with great care. The sibling (usually a brother) who had arrived in the United States a few years earlier would take the bundle with these Jewish religious objects, nonchalantly drop it into the water lapping at the edge of the pier, and say, “You’re in America now. Those were for the old country.” The men and women who told me these stories were much, much older than I was, and the events they were describing had unfolded more than half a century earlier. When I was younger and first heard them, what horrified me was the mere notion of throwing those ritual objects into the ocean as if they were yesterday’s garbage. As I grew older, I was struck by the fact that these elderly people still remembered that moment and that it troubled them enough for them to recount the story to a young person like me, so many years later.



Later still, I began to understand the deep pain and mourning implicit in those stories. There was a sense of having betrayed the world from which they had come. There was a sense of the cruelty of their brothers’ cavalier discarding of the bundles; it might have been well intentioned, but it was callous and mean, and half a century later, it still evoked such pain that they sought to talk about it.

Before we judge these siblings at the pier, we should acknowledge that both sides were right. Both the elderly Jews who told me their stories and the brothers who had tossed their possessions into the oily, filthy water reflected a profound truth. The brothers were right that there is a price of entry to the United States and that it is a steep one. In large measure, many immigrants have done as well as they have in the United States precisely because they were willing to drop bundles of memory, ethnicity, and religious observance into the harbor. And the people who told me these stories were right that the pain and the anger that they felt about that price were real, abiding, and deeply scarring. They had given up something of themselves when they came to the United States, and the scars never fully healed. Being forced to pretend that they had paid no price at all only made matters worse.

Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hutu, Pashtun, or Christian—it makes no difference. All of us can imagine and even feel the visceral horror of being told to take our past and figuratively toss it into the harbor. Those immigrants were told that they were welcome, as long as they dispensed with the heritage with which they had come to their new “home.” But the story of demanding such sacrifice for acceptance is hardly over. It continues for some immigrants to the United States today, and it occurs in the international arena as well.

Sad to say, it is that same attitude that the United States (like much of the West) now exhibits toward Israel. You are welcome to join us, the West essentially says, as long as you drop your ethnic heritage in the ocean forever. We welcome you to the family of nations, but with a price: we want you to be precisely like us. Be different, and our patience will soon run out.

Later portions of this book will explain why preserving ethnic heritage is such an important human endeavor. For now, though, we ought to acknowledge how troubled we should be by saying to anyone—anywhere and at any time—that he or she must abandon a precious heritage and not transmit it. Those elderly immigrants who told me their stories had no choice when they arrived at the shores of New York. Often penniless and usually frightened, they had nowhere else to go. When their siblings took the parcels and dropped them in the water, there was little the new immigrants could do but stifle their cries and hold back their tears.

Israel, however, is not in that position. Israelis are independent, and the Jewish state rightly resists the demand that it become just like all those other states that are not based on a particular ethnic identity. Even though we rarely think of matters in these terms, the sad fact is that it is Israel’s very unwillingness to be a state like all other states in this regard, its resistance to erasing its uniqueness, that now has Israel locked in conflict with much of the West.







This book makes an audacious and seemingly odd claim. It suggests that what now divides Israel and the international community is an idea: the ethnic nation-state—a country created around a shared cultural heritage. This is what has the West so put out with Israel. Israel has lost its once-charmed status in the international arena, I argue, because of a conflict over this very idea. It is true that the Israelis and the Palestinians are still tragically locked in an intractable and painful conflict; the issues of borders, refugees, and Palestinian statehood still await resolution. But those matters, as urgent as they are, are not the primary reason for Israel’s unprecedented fall from international grace.

Israel is marginalized and reviled because of a battle over the idea of the nation-state. (The dictionary defines nation-state as “a form of political organization under which a relatively homogeneous people inhabits a sovereign state . . . a state containing one as opposed to several nationalities,” so I use nation-state and ethnic nation-state inter- changeably in this book.) Israel, the quintessential modern example of the ethnic nation-state, came on the scene just as most of the Western world had decided that it was time to be rid of the nation-state. Today, Europe’s elites wish to move in one direction, whereas Israel suggests that humanity should be doing precisely the opposite. The now young countries that emerged from what was once the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia are mostly nation-states; their creation—and the demise of the larger conglomerates that once included them—attests to the widespread and deep-seated human desire to live in a manner that cultivates the cultures that we have inherited from our ancestors. But many of Europe’s intellectual elites prefer to pretend that we have no lessons to learn about human difference and cultural heterogeneity from the demise of the USSR and Yugoslavia.

Israel suggests that they are wrong. The conflict in the Middle East is about borders and statehood, but the conflict about the Middle East is over universalism versus particularism, over competing conceptions of how human beings ought to organize themselves.

The purpose of this book is to explain the ancient origins of this conflict, how this tug-of-war about an idea has developed, how Israel got caught in it, and, most important, how a world bereft of the idea that Israel represents would be an impoverished world. Instead of being so commonly maligned, Israel ought to be seen as a beacon among nations, a remarkably successful nation that has persevered despite wars fought on its borders and that has brought prosperity to its people despite a shared history of misfortune. Israel has secured significant rights for all of its citizens, including even those who reject the very idea of Israel’s existence. All of this has been accomplished because of Israel’s commitment to the future success of the Jewish people, not in spite of it.

What is at stake in the current battle over Israel’s legitimacy is not merely the idea on which Israel is based, but, quite possibly, human freedom as we know it. The idea that human freedom might be at risk in today’s battles over Israel might seem far-fetched or hyperbolic. This book will argue that it is not, and that human beings everywhere thus have a great stake in what the world ultimately does with the Jewish state.

Imagine a world in which instead of maligning Israel, the international community encouraged emerging ethnic nations to emulate Israel. Egyptians, for example, may have demonstrated for regime change and for democracy, but they did not gather to demonstrate against Islam or their Arab identity. They have no plans to become the “America” of Africa, secular and heterogeneous. They wish (or so the most Western of them claim) both to celebrate their Muslim heritage and thousands of years of Egyptian history and to join the family of modern democratic nations. As they do so, to whom can they look for a model of a stable, prosperous, and open state based on a shared religion and heritage? There is no denying that Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, and many other Muslim countries would benefit from being more like Israel instead of hoping for its destruction.

Yet it is not only Middle Eastern and Muslim nations that should be looking harder at the Israeli experiment. The whole world would benefit from thinking in terms of the questions Israel raises. The United States, Sweden, Brazil—it makes no difference. All citizens of every nation would benefit from asking themselves, explicitly, what values they hope their nation will inculcate in its citizens, what culture they are committed to preserving and nourishing. Such conversations would change the way Israel is seen in the world, but they would also change how everyone else sees his or her own country—and how people come to think about the reasons that countries actually exist.

The idea of a state for a particular ethnicity strikes many people as problematic, immoral, and contrary to the progress that humanity has made in recent decades. The idea of a state meant to promote the flourishing of one particular people, with one particular religion at its core—a state created with the specific goal of Jewish revival and flourishing—strikes many people as worse than an antiquated idea. It sounds racist, bigoted, or oppressive of minorities.

When the United Nations voted to create a Jewish state in 1947, the fires of the Second World War had barely been extinguished. Dispossessed Jews were still wandering across Europe by the thousands. The enormity of the genocidal horror that the world had allowed the Nazis to perpetrate was still sinking in. One of the many effects of that horrific period of history was that despite opposition from many quarters, creating a state for the Jews seemed like the right and expedient thing to do.

But times have changed. Memories of the Shoah are fading.* Jews are no longer dispossessed refugees; in most of the world, they are settled and prospering, and today it is the Palestinians who are stateless. Postwar Europe has decided that it was unfettered nationalism that led to the horrors of the two world wars; therefore, much of Europe’s intellectual elite now believes that the nation-state is a nineteenth- century paradigm that should be relegated to the dust heap of history,*Holocaust means “burnt offering” or “sacrifice to God.” I thus avoid it when discussing the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Europe’s Jews were not sacrificed; they were tortured, murdered, and annihilated. There is a profound difference. This book uses the word Shoah, which means “utter destruction” (see Zephaniah 1:15 and Proverbs 3:25), to honor that distinction just like those bundles that were dropped into the harbor to sink out of sight.



In several important respects, Jews drew the opposite conclusion from the horrific century they had just endured and barely survived. Battered by Europe and by history, the Jews emerged from the Shoah with a sense that more than anything, they needed a state of their own. Just as some of the world thought that it might move beyond nations, the Jews (who had dreamed of a restored Zion for two millennia) now intuited that nothing could be more urgent than finally re-creating their state. Zionism and postwar Europe were thus destined for conflict.

Zionism was not a matter of mere refuge; it was a matter of breathing new life into the Jewish people (the subject of my book Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End), of reimagining Judaism for a world after destruction, and, ironically, of insisting on the importance of the very difference that the Nazis had focused on as they perpetrated the horrors of the Shoah. What was at stake was much more than differing views about the nation- state; it was a battle over fundamental worldviews. For it was not only the nation-state on which Europe and postwar Jews differed. At issue was also the whole question of human differentness. To much of the world, the racially motivated genocide of twentieth-century Europe suggested that human difference ought to be transcended.

At our core, it therefore became popular to assert, human beings are largely the same. Our faces may have different shapes and our skin colors may differ, but those are simply superficial variations. We may speak different languages, but our aspirations are very similar. We may cherish different memories, but the future we create can be a shared one. Because human beings are essentially similar, this argument goes, the countries that separate peoples and cast a spotlight on their differences should now be dissolved, too. John Lennon put this idea to music in his song “Imagine”: “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion too.”

We might well have expected the Jews to embrace this vision. After all, since it was their difference that had condemned them to the horrific fate of the Shoah, we might have thought that the Jews would enthusiastically join the quest for a world without difference. In a world without difference, the Jews might finally be safe. But here too the Jews disagreed.

The Jews disagreed because whether or not they could articulate it, they intuited that they and their tradition have been focused on differentness from the very outset. The image of Abraham as the world’s first monotheist says it all: Jews have long been countercultural. And they have celebrated difference in many ways. The Talmud itself notes that it is differentness that is the very essence of humanity: “If a man strikes many coins from one mold, they all resemble each other,” it asserts. “But the Supreme King of Kings . . . created every man in the stamp of the first, and yet not one of them resembles his fellow.”

Difference matters, Judaism has long said, not just for individuals, but for peoples, too. Later in this book, we will see how this commitment to differentness became so central to Jewish life and thought. But this commitment to difference, to celebrating the uniqueness of the Jewish people, was never meant to foster rejection of those who are not Jewish. Indeed, at its best, Jewish celebration of difference is also about the celebration of the other. The horrific excesses of human his- tory have certainly led many to see in difference a frightening and terrible idea; too often the distinction between “us and them” was drawn to make it seem okay for “us” to kill “them” and for “them” to kill “us.” Israel, however, with all of its imperfections, has for decades been drawing lines and then reaching across them. Israelis do not pretend that being a global citizen is either sufficient or terribly meaningful, yet they willingly send medical teams to Japan or Haiti in a crisis. The Jewish state is a country that could very soon be annihilated without a moment’s notice by Islamic extremists in Iran and that has been at war with Arab countries since even before its independence, but its national government has more democratically elected Muslim officials than all the other non-Muslim states combined—more,  even, than the United States.

The Jewish tradition is replete with references to the differences between the Jews and other nations. From the very outset, Jews saw part of their purpose as being different, as having something to say that the rest of the world ought to hear. In a world without difference, the very point of Jewishness would be lost. Whether or not they could articulate it, Jews understood that being just like everyone else, even if that might somehow make them physically safer, was not at all what thousands of years of Jewish tradition and survival had been about.

Even after the horrors of what they had just experienced because of their difference, most Jews emerged from the Shoah determined to preserve their collective inheritance. Some enthusiastically embraced international movements like socialism or communism. But many more sought to celebrate their difference, to breathe new life into the unique way of living that had been theirs for thousands of years, to gather up the fragments of their texts from a century in which both their books and their bodies had been burned indiscriminately, and to fashion anew their libraries, memories, holidays, and long-dormant language. To do that, they realized, they would need a state. They had prayed for one for two thousand years, but now, after the Shoah, that age-old prayer took on newfound urgency.

Increasingly, however, the rest of the world has decided that it does not agree. The United Nations and much of the international com- munity are notoriously complicit in the push to rob Israel of its status as standard-bearer for the nation-state idea. As long as a country that is openly rooted in a religious or cultural tradition prospers, as long as its democracy serves its citizens well, as long as it defies the predictions of secular scholars and pundits who believe that religion and ethnicity are the handmaidens of imperialism and fascism, it must be reviled.

Otherwise, it could prove the intellectual elites of western Europe and North America, who believe that an experiment like Israel can- not work, wrong. What was once a well-meaning, liberal academic orientation to religion, ethnicity, and statehood has morphed into an international diplomatic witch hunt that smacks once again of intolerance for the Jew and the Jewish state, that is filled with the sense that in any conflict in which Israel finds itself, the Jewish state must be wrong. Sides are being chosen daily, and Israel’s fate is being decided, often by people who do not realize what is really being disputed. My simplest goal in writing this book, beyond advocating one side or the other, is just to make clear to people what the two sides are and what is really at stake in this battle of ideas.





Israel’s real problem, this book demonstrates, is that the state of Israel was founded to move the Jews to precisely the condition that the rest of the Western world was trying to avoid. For that reason, too, the Jewish state was almost bound to be in conflict with the West. That is why many in the ostensibly forward-thinking international community have now decided, consciously or not, that it is time to bring the Jewish state to an end. They propose to do so without armies and without violence. They will bring Israel to its knees with words, with philosophical and principled arguments, and with appeals to the loftiest moral standards. After all, they note, both apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union were felled in large measure by a widely shared international view that they were illegitimate, founded on ideas that were simply indefensible.

Given this new tactic, those who believe in the ongoing importance of a Jewish state need to ask themselves the right questions and provide principled answers. Can an argument really be made for a state that seems so out of sync with the direction of modern progress? In the twenty-first century, is there really a place for a country that defines itself as Jewish (or committed to any other ethnicity, for that matter); that does not see all its citizens as equally central to its mission; and that unabashedly declares that one religion, one people, one ethnicity, and one heritage will be more essential to its national life than any others? How could Israel’s supporters possibly defend such a country?

Such a state seems anathema to everything that many of us have been taught to believe.

Many of Israel’s supporters have no idea what to say in response to such attacks on Zionism and its legitimacy, and Israel has paid a terrible price for the silence of today’s Zionists on these issues. Its international status has plummeted with scarcely a countervailing word being said about why the Jewish state matters. The campaign to defend Israel has been sporadic, reactive, defensive, almost entirely devoid of theoretical argument, and focused almost exclusively on the conflict with the Palestinians. Zionists’ failure to make a case for their particular sort of state creates the impression that they know they cannot really justify Israel’s existence; it feeds a suspicion that they have decided that it would be best to stay under the radar, because when push comes to shove, what Israel is cannot be thoughtfully defended.

But in today’s world, Zionists can no longer afford the luxury of staying below the radar. The questions are too powerful, the focus on Israel too intense. No longer can the case for Israel be made simply by hoping that no one raises the question of whether the idea of a Jewish state is defensible. Those who believe in the importance and the legitimacy of the state of Israel need to be able to explain why a country founded for a particular people, ethnicity, tradition, and religion has a place—indeed, a noble one—in the twenty-first century.

Therefore, Israel’s response to these challenges has to be equally thoughtful and no less compelling. Israel’s defense must also be based on moral claims. In a nutshell, what needs to be said is this: What is at issue between Israel and the international community is whether ethnic and national diversity ought to be encouraged and promoted. Israel has something to say about the importance of human difference that is at odds with the prevailing attitudes in the world today. It is a country that insists that people thrive and flourish most when they live in societies in which their language, their culture, their history, and their sense of purpose are situated at the very center of public life.

Let’s address one common objection right at the outset. Contrary to what many naysayers will claim, a country does not have to be entirely homogeneous to accomplish this. As even PBS (which is often very critical of Israel) once noted, “As a Jewish state, [Israel] is both homogenous and multiethnic.”3 As strange as it may sound, countries can have a predominant ethnic character and be deeply tolerant of minorities at the same time. Every nation-state has minorities, and part of the challenge to the majority is not only to accommodate the minority but also, even more, to help those citizens flourish.

Indeed, flourishing is the key issue. Israel is a country based on a belief that human beings live richer and more meaningful lives when those lives are deeply rooted in a culture that they have inherited and that they can bequeath. Human life flourishes most when a society’s public square is committed to conversations rooted in that people’s literature, language, history, narrative, and even religion. There is the possibility of a more fully integrated life in the nation-state in which all these spheres of human life overlap to much greater extents than other countries make possible. Ultimately, human diversity will be protected most by an amalgam of countries, each of which exists for the flourishing of a particular people, culture, way of life, and history and, at the same time, engages in an open and ongoing dialogue with other cultures and civilizations.

The world celebrated the Arab Spring in 2011, but that story is not yet fully written. Will it bring democracy? Rights for women? Tolerance for gays and lesbians? It would be foolish and naive to expect that we’ll see any such progress soon. Still, there’s no reason that Egypt couldn’t develop an engagement with modernity while staying committed to the dignity of its past. There’s no reason that Libya, finally freed of Muammar Gaddafi, couldn’t in theory develop both intellectual openness and a freedom of the press, since both could actually strengthen the nation’s understanding of Islam. Syrians too could someday live richer and more meaningful lives if those lives were deeply rooted in a unique Syrian culture coupled with freedom of choice at the voting booth. Even Iran could discover that Iranians flourish most when the public square is committed to open conversations rooted in Persian literature, language, history, and narratives, in constant and vigorous dialogue with the West and other civilizations that have very different takes on core human values.

But does the West really want to see those countries develop in that way? If Egypt remained deeply and profoundly Egyptian, and Iranian culture and history defined the Iranian public square, would the West approve, or would the West say that as long as those countries insist on maintaining those ancient attachments, they are not fully liberated? Would the West not still tell them they are doing it wrong? Perhaps. But the West would be wrong; difference and uniqueness do not mire people in the past but rather give them guidance and meaning as they build a better future.

This is now the challenge for Zionists. Precisely because Israel stands for a conviction not held by most of the enlightened world today, the time has come to defend Israel by boldly addressing the conversation that is at the heart of this book. It is time for Zionists not only to discuss borders, settlements, security, and Palestinian state- hood but also to proclaim that what is at stake is not just the Jewish state, not just the future of the Jews, but a profound vision for how humanity can most compellingly chart its future. No other country in the developed world calls into question today’s assumption that eradicating differentness is the best path toward human flourishing. That is precisely what makes Israel so countercultural, so divisive, and often so maligned. And that is what makes Israel so vitally important.

Today’s infatuation with the notion that human difference ought to be papered over is not the first time that the world has embraced a dangerous and dead-end philosophical fad. In the past century alone, humanity has lived through infatuations with unfettered social- ism, then with communism, and even with the belief in the nobility of imperialism. But Israel is a reminder to the world that there are moments when someone—be it a prophet in biblical times or a nation-state in today’s international community—has to speak truth to power and insist on what is right and true, regardless of how unpopular the idea is. Israel represents the argument that the nation- state is not a fad, but rather an ancient and still compelling vision for humanity.

Like the ancient Hebrew prophets Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea, who were highly unpopular in their own time but whose visions for humanity are still cited thousands of years later, the state of Israel is meant to be a clarion call to all of humanity. If Israel can survive (and that is by no means certain), history may one day come to thank the Jewish state for its role in reminding humanity what it stood to lose when it began to pretend that our differences were unimportant.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Letting Go of Super Mom by Daisy Sutherland

It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!

You never know when I might play a wild card on you!



Today's Wild Card author is:


and the book:

Publisher: Siloam (August 7, 2012)

***Special thanks to Althea Thompson for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Dr. Daisy Sutherland is the founder and CEO of Dr. Mommy, LLC. She is a doctor of chiropractic by profession, wife, and mom to five children, whom she has homeschooled for the past twelve years. She hosts a weekly Blog Talk Radio show called Family Talk and is the featured parenting expert on Mom Talk Radio, a nationally syndicated radio show that airs on more than fifty stations, reaches 50,000 moms, and has been recognized in The Oprah Magazine, Women’s Day, USA Today, and Parenting. Women all over the country have benefitted from “Dr. Mommy’s” health, parenting, and career management tips and godly advice. She is the voice and advocate for every mom and says she is blessed to be able to help so many.


Visit the author's website.

SHORT BOOK DESCRIPTION:

This guide will include time-management and organization tips, how-tos for handling stress, nutrition and general wellness advice, parenting and relationship tools, and ways to stay spiritually refreshed and highly productive without losing it! Dr. Mommy will also share her best tips and tricks from her personal experience of being a homeschooling, CEO mom.



Product Details:
List Price: $15.99
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Siloam (August 7, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1616384638
ISBN-13: 978-1616384630



AND NOW...A SAMPLE (Click on pages to see them better):


Monday, September 24, 2012

The Lego Principle by Joey Bonifcio

The Lego Principle not only shares the importance of building disciples but also teaches us how.  Joey Bonifcio gives us keys to reach out to the world one relationship at a time.  I see a sad phenomenon in our churches today in which Christians have forgotten our purpose here.  Not to warm the pews on Sunday morning but to share the Word, teach new Christians to develop a relationship with Christ and train disciples to go out and do the same.  Read the book and catch a fire to get busy for the Lord!

It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!

You never know when I might play a wild card on you!



Today's Wild Card author is:


and the book:

Charisma House (September 4, 2012)
***Special thanks to Althea Thompson for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joey Bonifacio is the senior pastor of Victory Fort. Bonifacio, a Christ-centered, Bible-based, Spirit-filled, disciple-making, mission-driven church that meets in Bonifacio Global City in Greater Metro Manila. Joey serves on the board of directors of Every Nation Ministries in the Philippines and is one of the key proponents of the Ephesians 4:12 Strategy for Church Growth. He is also the founder of VictoryBiz, a ministry to the business community. He is the author of The Promise No One Wants and The Mystery of the Empty Stomach. Joey and his wife, Marie, have three sons–Joseph, David, and Joshua.


Visit the author's website.

SHORT BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Christ’s instructions to His disciples were very clear: “Go and make disciples of all nations.” Yet, when asked for a one-word response to the question: “What is the business that the church represents,” few people can respond. Unlike Starbucks and coffee, Toyota and cars, or Rolex and watches, the church is having a hard time figuring out what its “one word” is. This book will direct people back to the mandate of Christ for His church—discipleship.


Product Details:
List Price: $14.99
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Charisma House (September 4, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1616386770
ISBN-13: 978-1616386771



AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:


Just like  lego


The story of LEGO cannot be told without the account of its amazing founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter who lived in the town of Billund in Denmark. He started his trade by making
household products from wood. In 1924  when his two sons, Godtfred and Karl, tried to light their oven at home, they ended up burning down the family home and the whole business with it. Flammable wood inven- tories and playful children don’t mix very well. Thankfully the children were saved, but Ole Kirk’s commercial future looked bleak.1
In less than a decade twin tragedies would pay the carpenter another visit. In 1932, as the Great Depression worsened in the United States, not even far-flung Billund and Ole Kirk’s business would be spared by the crisis. Christian Humberg wrote in his book 50 Years of the LEGO Brick that Ole Kirk “had to let his last employees go. His wife died soon after- ward, the carpenter was left on his own, with four sons and not nearly enough orders.”2
Jonathan Bender, author of LEGO: A Love Story, writes of the same adversities the carpenter encountered:

At forty-one years of age, he was a widower living in the largest house in Billund, Denmark—a house that he soon might not be able to afford. The Great Depression meant that demand had dried up for stools, Christmas tree bases, and ironing boards that were the trademarks of his carpentry and joinery shop.3

But like many success stories these challenges would prove to be serendipitous. It was also in 1932  when Ole Kirk made the decision to




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The  lego Principle


manufacture wooden toys. Daniel Lipkowitz, author of The LEGO Book: The Amazing LEGO Story, writes:

In  1932,  with  the  worldwide  Great  Depression  threatening  to close his carpentry shop for good, Ole Kirk turned his skills to creating a range of toys for children. These beautifully made playthings included yo-yos, wooden blocks, pull-along animals, and vehicles of all kinds.4

His best seller was a pull-along wooden duck. “Ole Kirk guessed that even in times of financial strife, people would still be willing to buy wooden toys for their children.”5 In a matter of a few years business was good again, and Ole was able to build a new factory. More significantly this initial foray into toy manufacturing would become his family’s core business more than fifty years later.
Yet in 1942  misfortune struck again. Another fire burned down the new factory, and “all the production patterns were lost.”6  At the same time Europe was facing an escalating world war. Both home products and toys were not in demand, and Ole Kirk’s business wearily trudged through those years.
However, five years later serendipity would once again bring about a historical discovery. Humberg writes, “After the Second World War, high quality wood was in short supply, and plastic gradually began to domi- nate the world market.”7  With very little money he “finally took action; in 1947, Ole Kirk was the first Danish toy manufacturer to buy a plastic injection moulding machine—with borrowed money.”8 With Ole Kirk’s newly acquired experience with plastics, the toy company soon would design, manufacture, and perfect the LEGO brick.

A Christian Heritage

For years Ole Kirk experienced financial as well as other difficulties before his real breakthrough came. Only one thing would keep him going—his faith. Unknown to many, Ole Kirk Christiansen, the founder of LEGO, was a follower of Christ.
In their book The Ultimate LEGO Book authors David Pickering, Nick
Turpin, and Caryn Jenner wrote that Ole Kirk’s faith helped him through



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Just Like LEGO



personal crises, including the death of his wife in 1932,  which left him with four young sons to look after.9 He and his family were members of a Danish Christian movement called Indre Mission, and even into the 1950s, when the LEGO company was still a small business, almost everyone would meet together for a short prayer before work.10,11
Jonathan Bender, alluding to the years in 1932 when Ole Kirk’s prob- lems were at their worst, writes of how he responded to those challenges as a Christian:

That year,  Ole  Kirk ’s  life  was  at  a  crossroads.  His  first  wife, Kirstine,  had  died giving birth  to  their  fourth  son,  Gerhardt. “Life is a gift, but also a challenge,” Ole Kirk, a devout Christian, is said to have remarked around that time.12

The fact that Ole Kirk Christiansen was a Christian is incidental to why this book is titled The LEGO Principle. It is, however, a good story to know. This book is titled as such because it is all about connecting— connecting to God and connecting to others. It is what Jesus and the Bible often describe as becoming a disciple or a follower of Christ.
Open any LEGO box, and you’ll find a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes. There are red, blue, green, brown, yellow, orange, white, black, gray, and  other color pieces. There are fat, flat, rectangular, round,  square, thick, thin, long, and short pieces.
Though there  is  a  wide  assortment  of  LEGO  pieces,  they  are  all designed to do one thing: connect. To connect means to attach, to asso- ciate, and to bond. LEGO bricks and pieces are designed with studs on top that interlock with the bottom of each piece. While LEGO bricks are so varied, they all have one purpose: to connect at the top and at the bottom.
Just like LEGO pieces that connect at the top and at the bottom, dis- cipleship is about connecting to God and with one another. This is the LEGO Principle: Connect first to God and then to one another.
It does not matter what one’s skin color, social background, age, or denomination is—God designed us all to connect to Him and then to one another. Jesus said the foremost commandment is about connecting with God: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all




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The  lego Principle


your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest com- mandment.”13  Then He said, “The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”14
These two commandments combine to become the LEGO Principle: Connect to God. Connect to one another. This to Jesus was what it meant to be His disciple.

A “Follower”

Mathetes is the Bible’s Greek word for disciple. It primarily meant to be a pupil or a student. But unlike our present-day meaning of the words pupil and student, which we tend to think of as one who goes to school to learn a subject such as algebra or biology, the word disciple had a much deeper meaning in Jesus’s day. It meant to be a follower of someone’s teaching.
Thus the word disciple meant someone who closely followed a teacher and had a relationship with that person. It literally meant the sharing of life lessons that were fully intended to be lived out in day-to-day life. More than just learning in a class, to be a disciple meant to have a rela- tionship with the teacher. Jesus took this popular cultural practice of His time and used it as the basis to connect us to God and to one another.
Similarly the word follower today means something completely dif- ferent than it did back then. Depending on what part of the world you come from, a follower can mean anything and everything from a blind adherent to a groupie or someone who lives on other people’s tweets.

Like  a Journey

Discipleship pundit Bill Hull writes, “Ship added to the end of disciple means ‘the state of ’ or ‘contained in.’ So discipleship means the state of being a disciple. In fact, the term discipleship has a nice ongoing feel—a sense of journey, the idea of becoming a disciple rather than having been made a disciple.”15
Thus the word discipleship meant to follow God while being contained in a lifelong journey of faith with Jesus and His other followers—to con- nect to God and to one another. In Matthew Jesus explains the essence of this journey.



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Just Like LEGO



Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.16

According to Jesus, making disciples or discipleship involves two things:

•   Baptizing people in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit

•   Teaching them to obey everything He commanded

First, let’s take a closer look at what it means to baptize people in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Part of the problem in defining baptism is that, depending on one’s Christian background and denomi- nation, it can take on a variety of meanings. To avoid going into a long dissertation on what the sacrament of baptism is, allow me to go straight to the heart and spirit of the practice. The best way to do that is to see what baptism meant to Jesus.

Immersed into a divine relationship
In Matthew 3:15 we see how Jesus went out of His way to be baptized by His cousin John. His reason: “It is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” When He was baptized He was immersed, submerged, and soaked. Every part of Him was dedicated and consecrated as He pub- licly identified Himself with God.
What was more significant was not the actual ritual but the result of
Jesus’s baptism. The following passage tells us what happened:

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”17







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The  lego Principle


Here we find a picture of what baptism is to Jesus: to be immersed into the fellowship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Author Rick Warren explains this relationship in his book The Purpose Driven Life:

[God’s] very nature is relational, and he identifies himself in family terms: Father, Son, and Spirit. The Trinity is God’s rela- tionship to himself.18

In Jesus’s baptism we see that being a disciple is all about immersing oneself into a divine relationship. To us it is an open invitation to become
a part of this relationship, eternity’s very first “small group”—a relation- ship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. At the end of the day disciple- ship is a journey into a relationship with God and His people.

Immersed into the family of God
Jesus further said that we were to be baptized or immersed into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In biblical times a person’s name described his identity and character, and still today it denotes one’s heritage and ancestry—his family. Thus to be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to be immersed into the identity, character, and family of God.
Although I don’t believe it is necessary for one to be baptized in the ocean, it paints a good picture of baptism. It brings to light the reality of how infinitely big God is and how small we are, that we are unable to contain God and instead every part of us is to be immersed, soaked, and saturated by Him.
To be Jesus’s disciple is to be immersed in a relationship with the Trinity. It came at the cost of one of its members giving His life so we could become a part of the family. Discipleship is relationship. David Platt emphasizes the same thought in his book Radical:

Disciple making is not about a program or an event but about a relationship. As we share the gospel, we impart life, and this is the essence of making disciples. Sharing the life of Christ. This is why making disciples is not just about going, but it also includes baptizing.19





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Just Like LEGO


The  Second Half of the Definition

According to Jesus, the second half of discipleship is “teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded.”20 Undoubtedly, teaching is a vital component of discipleship. However, more than just teaching, Jesus’s real emphasis is obedience. He said, “Teaching them to obey everything I have commanded.” And what did Jesus mean by obeying His command? He said, “If you love me, you will obey what I command.”21
Isn’t  it  amazing  how  we  see  obedience  to  God’s  commands  as  fol- lowing rules while Jesus sees them from the standpoint of a relationship? And what was one of Jesus’s foremost commands? “This is my command: Love each other.”22
To Jesus, obeying His commands meant loving one another. Discipleship is relationship. He also said, “You are my friends if you do what I command.”23 To Jesus, obeying His commands was all about rela- tionship. And how will the world know that we are Jesus’s disciples? “All men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”24
The world will know that we are His disciples by the quality of our relationship with Him and with one another.

Not Enough to Just Know

What makes Christianity unique among all other religions is it teaches people how to grow in their relationship with God and with others. The goal of teaching is not merely to increase our knowledge of divine prin- ciples, rules, laws, and things to do but to grow in our relationship with God and one another.
If discipleship is just learning more without deepening our relation- ship with God and one another, then we run the risk of being rebuked by Jesus, just as He did the religious people of His day when He said:

You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that tes- tify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.25

In today’s language it might have sounded like this, “You keep going to your Bible studies and meetings, thinking that by doing so you’re getting



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closer to Me. Yet you resist living a life in relationship with Me.” The idea behind all the teaching and learning is that the deepening of our understanding of God will result in a stronger and deeper relationship with Him. John Wesley warned about learning and not growing in rela- tionship: “Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.”26
Peter was one of Jesus’s closest disciples. He was also one of the first of His disciples to publicly deny his relationship with Jesus. What did Jesus ask Peter after he denied Him? “Do you love me?”27
Jesus did not ask him if he had been coming to church or how many Bible studies he had missed. He did not even confront him and say, “Why did you deny Me?” The question He asked Peter was simply, “Do you still love me?” Jesus knew love was more powerful than just being held accountable.
Clearly to Jesus discipleship is all about relationship. To Him the very foundation and basis of ministry to people is our relationship with Him. Notice what He told Peter after He asked him, “Do you love me?” He told him, “Feed my sheep.”28
Our ability to love others and give of ourselves to people comes only as a fruit of our understanding and appreciation of our relationship with God. John tells us that: “We love because he first loved us.”29
To Jesus, teaching was just the vehicle to help people learn how to love God and others. Relationship was the end goal, not teaching. Discipleship is relationship!

The  Teachings of Paul

Next to Jesus the second most important teacher in the New Testament was the apostle Paul. Acts 18:11  tells us, “Paul stayed for a year and a half, teaching them the word of God.” That time of teaching was spent in Corinth. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we find that his teaching was no different from Jesus’s. He warns us, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”30
This profound seven-word admonition is another way of saying that knowledge by itself will make you arrogant and proud. The second half of the statement tells us what is better than just learning new things—love. Love and relationships are what builds up.


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Just Like LEGO



There is no doubt that Paul’s foundational teaching in Corinth is about Christ and His cross. A central component of this focused on love and relationships. He taught that while you can learn to have the wisdom and the power of the Spirit, the real key is love. He writes, “And now I will show you the most excellent way.”31
What to Paul was the most excellent way? Love. In the succeeding chapter he explains what love is. He exhorts the Corinthian church that love is preeminent over spiritual gifts and acts of service. Let me para- phrase Paul’s words this way: “Great that you speak in tongues. Awesome when you can prophesy. Amazing that you are a deep thinker and can fathom the mysteries of life. Fantastic that you have faith that can move mountains. Wonderful that you take care of the poor. But if you don’t have love, you really don’t have anything.”
He caps it by saying: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”32 In his book The Making of a Christian Leader, the late Ted Engstrom can only agree with Paul’s teaching:

The Bible considers our relationship more important than our accomplishment. God will get His work done! He does not demand that we accomplish great things; He demands that we strive for excellence in our relationships.33

As a new Christian reading this in 1987, these three sentences trans- formed the way I read the Bible and how I lived out my faith in God. Discipleship is not a program. It is all about relationships, first with God
then with others.
Paul, like Jesus, also taught the Corinthians that ministry is rooted in relationships.

All  this  is  from  God,  who  reconciled  us  to  himself  through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.34

In this passage Paul explains that ministry is all about reconciling people to God. Reconciliation is a theological term that primarily deals



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The  lego Principle


with relationships. Like Jesus, Paul taught that ministry is about restoring people into a relationship with God. As they grow in that relationship, they too will be reconciled to others.
Paul not only taught that his way of making disciples is rooted in rela- tionships, he also demonstrated it. He told the Corinthians, “I am not writing this to shame you, but to warn you, as my dear children.”35
In this verse we see how Paul admonished, adjusted, and held disciples accountable. He did it in the context of relationship as one does his own children. Paul’s brand of teaching was not in set classes but in relation- ships. Later in the same letter Paul wrote, “Therefore I urge you to imi- tate me.”36
More than just teaching them, he said, “Imitate me.” To imitate someone means you have to be close to him. It is in up-close relationships that one can best be made into a disciple and make disciples. Francis Frangipane put it this way: “While the doctrines of Christianity can be taught, Christlikeness can only be inspired.”37

An Unforgettable Reminder

In his letter to the Corinthians Paul dealt with the sacrament of Communion. When he taught on the topic, Paul merely passed on what Jesus had instructed:

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remem- brance of me.”38

What was the instruction that Jesus and Paul left to the disciples? “Remember me.” To remember means to not forget. Jesus was saying, “Don’t forget what I did for you. It is the ultimate expression of My love for you.”
In teaching the sacrament of Communion, Jesus and Paul instituted the simplest and most memorable of mnemonic devices—the bread and



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the cup. Both are common things that we encounter daily when we eat. The devices were brilliant, timeless, and hard to forget.
The genius of it all is that people don’t often forget to eat; they usually do so multiple times a day. Jesus knew that even when we forget Him, we would not forget to eat. This way every time we eat we can take a moment to be reminded of our relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Every meal becomes an opportunity to partake of His grace and com- mune with Him, a reminder that we are sinners saved by grace. As such we have the divine privilege of having a relationship with Him.
A few years ago I was asked to teach church leaders in China about discipleship. Risking their lives to hear fresh insights on discipleship, people from all over the nation came. It was inspiring to see these pre- cious saints so hungry to learn.
After three days of equipping leaders, the feedback was very positive. On the third day I realized it wasn’t just a lesson to them. As the meeting drew to a close, the leaders administered Communion to the more than
a hundred people who were there. Communion was not the typical cer- emony of passing around itty-bitty elements, singing, and praying—all in about ten to fifteen minutes.
It was an extended thirty to forty minutes of sharing fist-sized pieces of bread and big Styrofoam cups filled with red juice. For a good ten min- utes each person silently sat and recalled the love of Christ as He bore our sins in His broken body and spilled His blood to wash us clean. Many of them wept.
After this time of reflection, the people quietly walked to the other tables offering to pray. The prayer concerns ranged from persecution from family, friends, and the government to the more serious threat of being pregnant with a second child, as the one-child policy is still enforced in parts of China to this day.
After prayers and a time of encouragement, the people moved to another table and began to pray again. Some laughed, some wept, and some just talked and prayed. That day it became clear why they have received the message of “discipleship is relationship” so well. They live it.
It’s no wonder the church in China continues to grow at breakneck speed. As the London Times reports: “Christianity in China is booming. With  100   million  believers,  far  more  than  the  74  million-member



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communist party, Jesus is a force to be reckoned with in the People’s
Republic.”39
The Times’ estimate is not very far from that of other Christian orga- nizations such as the US Center for World Missions. This current growth trend shows that China will soon surpass the United States to become the nation with the largest concentration of Christians.
What used to be church growth among the peasantry in outlying rural areas has now spread into China’s cities. Hong Kong’s Sunday Morning Post reports of a church that meets in the very capital of China, Beijing.

Attended by a well-to-do and educated crowd—among them university lecturers, doctors, lawyers, NGO workers and even Communist Party members—Shouwang has come to symbolize
a new breed of young urban Christians who are no longer con- tented to practice their faith in secret.”40

This is the power of discipleship through relationships, and it works everywhere—in religious Manila, communist China, and metropolitan Manhattan.




























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Christians commonly say, “Christianity is not a religion, it is a relationship,” and yet all too often behave otherwise. Just like LEGO bricks, our life is about connecting to the top with God and connecting with others. Discipleship is not about being converted and converting others, nor is it about cramming our heads with information about the Bible. It is about rela- tionship, one that expresses itself in loving God and loving others. The primary reason we read the Bible is to know the God of the Bible.
Here’s how Andy Stanley and Bill Willits put it in their book
Creating Community:
“A  curriculum or a series of classes may be helpful, but they shouldn’t be considered the determinants for spiritual growth. They may help people become better informed about their faith, but they don’t automatically lead people to maturity. . . . At the risk of oversimplifying, it seems clear that Jesus is saying that loving God and loving your neighbor is what it all comes down to. . . . These two activities give evi- dence of a person’s spiritual growth and maturity.” 41

















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Bonlfaclo-LEGO PrinCiple 1ndd  14

Friday, September 21, 2012

Rock Solid Faith Study Bible for Teens from Zondervan

There are some great features to this new Bible edition being released for teens.

* I love the pop-out boxes which help draw out personal application and deeper consideration of key passages.

* Throughout there are boxes which point out important Bible principles for young adults, Rock Solid Truths, and attributes of God.

* Another neat feature are boxes labeled Unshaken People which bring to light good lessons for all of us.  Some characters highlighted include Caleb, Andrew and Eutychus... just to name a few.

* The concordance and various indexes are all helpful for someone who would like to dig in deeper to one topic or another.

* I find the heading within chapters helpful when searching for a particular passage.

*  I have horrible eyes and even with various glasses and contacts often find it difficult to read text in some Bibles.  This edition was easy on the eyes all around.

My one beef with this Bible is it is not available in King James Version, which always seems to be the case.  So to publishers reading this, would you consider doing a King James Version?  Otherwise, if you have an NIV reading teen this Bible would be a great gift!

Since this is geared to teenagers I asked my young ladies what they thought.
Likes:

Well laid out.
Love the way the notes (in boxes) are geared toward personal application with engaging questions
If this was KJV would make great gift
The font is easy reading and the typeset clear
The foot notes are helpful but not so large as to annoy those who don't like them.
The beginning of each of the books of Prophets tells where they fit in history
Love the author ☺
Has a great index especially what do I read today? section
Concordance seems thorough
Dislikes:
There is nothing discussing between the testaments
Not available in KJV

I have a friend who, together with her husband, is a youth leader in their very large church.  I asked her what she thought of this version.

Her thought was that she really liked the features but didn't feel that the Bible itself was put together in such a way to get the attention of today's very stimulated teens.  Gosia specifically noted that she did not feel the cover was trendy enough to grab the attention of the average teenager.

She further suggested the index should be located in the front of the Bible.  Her reasoning made a lot of sense.  Follow me along this trail.  Today's average teen is used to having everything fed to them.  So they pick up the Bible and open the cover and see Genesis.  Which they have already seen a thousand times before, if they have been in church for any time.  Alternatively, they are new to the Bible and after they get out of creation they are quickly overwhelmed.  Either way, they put the book down before they even see all the amazing features built into this version.  Features which were designed to help them get the most out of the book.  Gosia suggested if the index were in the front, the first thing they would see would be the neat features and they would dig in and check it out.

One other thing Gosia mentioned was also in regard to the index.  She noted on some pages key words were highlighted but in some of the other indexes all the print was the same.  Gosia said, once again, because teenagers are so used to stimulus and being able to easily get at what they want, there should be key words highlighted in all the various indexes throughout the Bible so as to keep them interested.  I will move on leaving you with her thought... what good is it to have so many great devotionals and applications throughout if the audience never gets around to reading it?

Since Gosia's youth group uses NIV, she agreed to take the Rock Solid Faith Study Bible to one of her students to see what they thought.  Thank you to Sadie Davis for taking time to check it out and do the following write up for Art's Chili Pepper.

Rock Solid Faith Study Bible is a rare phenomenon. Not only does it cater to teens, it caters to the teens of today. This bible specifically targets the teen population with its “Rock Solid” and “Unshaken” features that give helpful and insightful advice on common problems, gives tips on how to defend one’s faith, and encourages teens with scripture. With the help of Rock Solid Faith, teenagers will no longer complain that the bible is irrelevant or confusing. This study bible breaks down passages, puts each chapter into perspective with a book outline and summary, and has an easy to use index. The concordance in the back of the bible categorizes verses by key word, helping teens quickly find the exact thing they are looking for. In all reality, this bible won’t be getting dusty any time soon because teens will be challenged and captivated by the questions, thoughts, and real life examples presented in this study bible. However, teens may be pushed away by its textbook-like structure. Though it is cliché, a book is judged by its cover, and this hard and heavy binding makes this bible less appealing. This bible is thick, and can be intimidating. A leather-like cover can make it feel more as if it is a journal, somewhere teens can go to record notes and inspiration. The graphic however is appealing to both boys and girls and has a cool feel. Something else that would top it off is a built in book marker that would be helpful in keeping tab on the last stopping point. Overall, this bible can encourage the teenage generation with its friendly to use and supportive features. And personally, I cannot wait to buy it.  ~ By Sadie Davis


It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!

You never know when I might play a wild card on you!



Today's Wild Card is:

Zondervan; Special edition (August 21, 2012)

***Special thanks to Rick Roberson for sending me a review copy.***

SHORT BOOK DESCRIPTION:


This all-new, full-featured NIV Bible is great for teens looking to grow their faith, increase meaning in their lives, and find hope for their future. The Rock Solid Bible for Teens is a timely guide for teens grappling with big questions about the world, their future, and their faith.  Featuring the complete New International Version text, apologetics helps, hundreds of call-outs, and concrete promises for the future, the Rock Solid Bible provides firm traction for the development of beliefs and behavior rooted in the unchanging love, guidance, and promises of God.


Product Details:
List Price: $29.99

Reading level: Ages 13 and up
Hardcover: 1664 pages
Publisher: Zondervan; Special edition (August 21, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0310723302
ISBN-13: 978-0310723301



AND NOW...THE A SAMPLE (CLICK ON IMAGES TO SEE LARGER):






Chapter will be placed up here soon.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Midnight in Aisle 7 by Jay Lowder

This is a very easy and intriguing read.  Jay Lowder shares very honestly how his mistakes and experiences have taught him to love every sinner no matter what their sin.  He shows how we can reach a greater relationship with the Lord and man through forgiveness and understanding.  He has helped to reach people and build a ministry of changed lives through meeting people with the word of God right where they are.  You will be captivated with stories of the amazing ways God works throughout.  We see clearly through the testimonies shared that to have the most far reaching ministry possible we must step out of comfort zone and follow the leading of the Lord.

It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!

You never know when I might play a wild card on you!



Today's Wild Card author is:


and the book:

Passio (September 4, 2012)

***Special thanks to Althea Thompson of Charisma House for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jay Lowder is the founder and head of Jay Lowder Harvest Ministries based in Wichita Falls, Texas. His engaging and contemporary style gives him an ability to connect with adults and students alike. Jay has been featured on at least fifteen major networks, including The Discovery Channel, ABC, Fox, ABC Family, Daystar, and TBN. Jay and his wife, Melissa, have three children.

Visit the author's website.


SHORT BOOK DESCRIPTION:



True stories of random, unscripted encounters with God

Every day, God reveals Himself in unexpected ways in the lives of ordinary people. While religion has tried to confine Him to church buildings and cotton candy sermons, He continues to expose Himself in unlikely places to unlikely people.

This book describes these encounters using short compelling stories that show how common people from all walks of life have encountered this relationship that brings significance to life. Stories range from an uplifting insight prompted by a question from Jay's daughter, to stories of tragedy, forgiveness, and healing from lives of addiction, abuse, and prostitution.


Product Details:
List Price: $14.99

Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Passio (September 4, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1616386088
ISBN-13: 978-1616386085



AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:


Prison  Break




I Have never  been sentenced to prison or jail,  but I have been locked up  many  times. My cell  has  been lonely, dark, isolating, and  cold.  I have  met  a lot of prisoners
just  like  me.  It gives  me  some  comfort knowing I am not the  only  one.   It is  always easier to  justify  failure  when you  have  a companion.
Some  of my  former  cellmates could easily be  detected as  offenders,  but  many   others are  not  so  easy   to  iden- tify. Some  reveal their  chains through sarcastic and  bitter words; others do not have  to speak. The lines and  expres- sions  on their  faces tell  what  words dare  not say, their countenance revealing the  deepest and  most  private suffering.
People in  prison respond to  incarceration in  different ways.   Some   accept their   sentences,  while others spend every  waking moment trying to  find  a  way  of escape. I have   visited numerous  prisons  and   jails   where  I  have been amazed to meet  people who  say they  never want  to



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leave. Prison  has  become the  only  way  of life  they  know and  the  only  place they  have  respect and  friends.  They say  they  have  nothing on  the  outside to  go  back  to  and have  become comfortable locked up.
I guess if you  stay in any place long  enough, even  when it is the  wrong one,  it can  begin to feel  like  home. Maybe this  is why  the  number of people who  leave  prison only to return is sky high. Men have  tendencies: the  things we should not do come  naturally, while the things we should do  are  so  hard   to  get  done. Just  because you  take  the man  out  of the  big  house doesn’t mean you’ve taken the big  house out  of the  man.
On   the   other  hand,  the   prisoner  consumed  with escaping does  so because he is dying—not a literal death, but  the  death of  his  will  and  hope for  a  better life.  It is  the  death that  comes when your   heart gives  up  any chance for change or  to live  a life  of purpose. Everyone dies, but  only  a few  truly  live.  These  captives want  more than  the  air  they  breathe; they  want  a life  that  truly  has meaning.
There   are   many   types   of  prisons.  Some   have   literal bars  and  fences,  while others use  emotions, habits, and thoughts to hold  its captives. So which prison held me? It is the  prison of rejection. It can  be found in the  hearts of broken sons,  discarded wives, lost  teens, abused women, and  neglected children as  well   as  the  successful,  prom- inent,  educated,  and   religious.  People  find   themselves locked in the  prison of rejection because they  committed one  of two  crimes: either they  were unwilling to  accept others, or they  were not  accepted themselves. In my case
it was . . . wait,  let  me  first explain.





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t

I was  born  and  raised in north Texas  and  live  there now. Although there are  many  places in the  state  that  are  beau- tiful,  they  are not here in the far northern part  (no matter what  the  locals say). I have  spent the  lion’s share of my life  on  the  road. I have  visited every  state  in  the  United States except four,  and  I have  seen quite a bit of the  Lone Star  State. Yet I have  never witnessed as  many  unusual sights as I have  here.
One  particular sight   that  has  intrigued me  for  some time  is  a  tiny  jail  in  a  town  of  less  than  one  thousand people. It is  said  to  be  one  of  the  oldest jails  in  Texas and   is  located  on  the   highway between  Wichita   Falls and   Lubbock,  Texas.   If  you   have   ever   seen the  movie Lonesome Dove (considered a masterpiece here in Texas), then  you  can imagine this being the  jail  where Blue  Duck was  held before he  jumped out  the  second-story window to his  death. The  jail  is over  one  hundred years  old  and easily looks  twice  that.
Out  front  stands an  old  tree. After its  leaves fall,  the crusty, crooked branches resemble the  hands of an  evil witch   reaching  toward the  walls. The  jail  has  sleeping quarters that  will  house four  men  upstairs and  the  same number of women downstairs. It was  even  built  with  a trap  door  for “hanging” offenders. There  is a famous story of three inmates who  murdered the  on-duty sheriff  in an attempt to escape. The three were quickly reapprehended then  swiftly  tried and  convicted.
I passed by this  old  jail  every  few months in my travels, and  something about it always jerked at my curious mind. Although I felt a pull  to stop and  check it out,  I was always too  busy   to  break down and   do  so  until one   moonlit


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morning at  about twelve thirty. Two  friends  were riding with  me  on  our  way  back  home from  an  event  when we drove  past  the  jail.  We still  had  a couple hours more  to drive, but  when I looked out  the  window and  saw  the outline of the  jail,  I could not  resist.
I made an illegal U-turn,  parked out  front,  and  walked through a  door   that  was  faintly   ajar.   A slightly startled woman sitting at an  old  wooden desk  looked up  quickly and  asked if she  could help. I began to explain my  long- standing fascination with  the old jail.  I told  her my friends and  I were passing through, and  I could no  longer resist the urge to stop.  This jailer was a welcoming woman who surprised me  when she  recognized my name.
“I thought you  looked familiar.  I know   who  you  are. This weekend I heard a radio advertisement about the Outdoor Extravaganza you  were speaking at and  thought it would be  something my  youngest would enjoy doing. He  loves  hunting and  fishing, and  we  spent yesterday at your  event  in Lubbock.”
I thought it  was  highly unlikely that  this  was  a  coin- cidence, and  I felt  a chill  sprint up  my  spine. It seemed too  perfect  after  passing by  all  these times  that  I would just  happen to  stop  the  day  after  this  woman heard my name on  the  radio. She  cordially invited my  friends  and me  to glance around the  jail  as she  explained its history. Because there were no  women locked up,  she  let  us  see the  female quarters located on the  bottom floor.
After  about ten  minutes of small talk  and  gander we were about to leave. When  I asked how  many  men  were upstairs, a  strange  expression  washed  over   the   jailer’s face.  Then  she  asked, “Would  you  like  to go up and  speak to  the  inmates? They  have   very  few  visitors, and   even




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though it is late,  I think  they  would be glad  to see  a new face  and  hear  what  you  have  to say.”
I told  her  I would be glad  to talk  with  them  so long  as I did  not interrupt their  sleep. As soon  as I got the  words out  of my  mouth, she  grabbed her  antique-looking  keys and  motioned for all  three of us to follow  her.
Upon   climbing  the   old   staircase,  we   were  immedi- ately  met  by a curious group of four  wide-awake  men. I introduced myself  and  my  comrades, shook their  hands, and  began to  explain how  we  ended up  visiting the  jail. All four  of the  men  crowded near  the  bars  and  listened intently to every  word  I spoke.
First impressions last forever. Two of the men  stood  out to me  instantly. One  was  a gregarious Hispanic guy  with a  big  personality, and  the  other was  a young, quiet guy who  looked like  he  still  belonged in  high  school. I tried to offer  encouragement by telling them  we  all  make mis- takes  we  can  learn from.  I discussed how  the  crime that landed them  in  trouble could be  the  catalyst that  trans- forms  their  lives  for the  better if they  are  willing to own it and  learn from it. Reactions to events can sometimes be more  important than  actions in events.
I talked about letting go of the  past  because it can’t  be changed and  seizing whatever opportunities were before them. I did not offer some  hokey religious platitude about letting go  and  letting God.  I just  tried to be  transparent and  show  the  concern I genuinely felt.  I also  listened to them. If you  tune in  to  someone’s words for  very  long, those words will  reveal what  is  hidden in  that  person’s heart.
The  youngest inmate vented about how  he  was  twenty-one  and  in  two  days  was  being transferred  to  a  prison




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in Huntsville, Texas,  where he  would begin a twenty-five- year  sentence without the  possibility of parole. He  said his  father  would not  visit  him,  and  all  his  mother could do  was  cry  the  two  times  she  came  to  see  him.  I didn’t know  what  crime he  committed, but  my  heart went  out to him.  When  it was time  to go, I asked the men  if I could pray  for them. It was  the  best  thing  I had  to offer.  They were all  in  favor.  Nothing makes people  more   open to prayer than  getting in  a bind  they  cannot get  out  of on their  own.
Afterward  I  began  shaking  their   hands  through  the steel bars  and  wishing the  guys  my  best.  I also  offered my address in case  they  wanted to write. The  last  one  in line  was  the  young, baby-faced  guy  who  on  his  way  to the  pen. I obviously did  not  know  him,  but  I felt  a deep sense of compassion toward him.  The  whole time  I was with  the  inmates, I was  troubled that  someone so young was  losing so much of his life.
Before  I  left,  I  expressed  exactly what   I  felt  boiling inside me.  “Hey, man.  I do not know  what  you  have  done to get  twenty-five years, and  I do not  care. It is never too late  to  change and  to  start  anew. Your  life  is  not  over. Prison  can  be  a time  of getting your  education, working through  your   issues,  and   learning  how   you   can   help others. Do not give up,  bro.  I do not judge you,  but I love you  man.”  I meant ever y word . . . or so I thought.
Walking downstairs, I felt sickened to see  such  a young life  being crushed. My mind  kept  tripping over  what  this boy  could have  done wrong. After  explaining my  grati- tude to  the  jailer, I told  my  companions to  wait  for  me in the  car.  I then  broke a cardinal rule that  I established
when visiting correctional facilities. I never, ever  ask what




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crime someone has  committed because I do not  want  my opinion to be skewed by the revelation of someone’s past. But  with  this  guy  I just  could not  resist.
“Ma’am,   I  have   never  asked  this   question  about any inmate before,  but  I have  to  know, what  crime has  the boy  committed?” I explained that  I felt some  kind  of con- nection to him  and  wanted to help.
She  replied, “Are you  sure  you  want  to know?”
When  I said,  “Yes, I am  sure,”  I knew the  answer was destined to haunt me.  I had  no idea  how  much.

t

The jailer’s words left me  feeling nauseated. I acted like  I was unfazed, but I could feel my heart racing. After telling the jailer good-bye, I walked out  to my car,  wanting to hit something to  unleash the  anger I felt.  Drunk  with  fury, I turned into  a  Jekyll and  Hyde.   If you  have  ever  seen one  of those “when  animals go bad” videos, then  you  can imagine my  transformation.  For  the  next  two  hours of driving I tried to overcome the  rage  I felt.  I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t seem to shake it. After getting home, I lay  in bed  until 5:30 a.m.  completely unable to sleep.
Two  days  later  I was  not  only  struggling with  the  fact that  this  man  had  committed such  a  horrible crime but also  with  how  I could so easily turn  on  someone I genu- inely thought I cared for. As far as I knew, I did  not  hate anyone and  could not remember anyone in my past  I had not  forgiven  or  was  holding a grudge against. Why did  I feel  such  hatred toward this  man?
The  old  saying is  true: hating and  refusing  to  forgive someone is like  drinking poison and  expecting the  other person to  die.  I knew I had  to  do  something. I decided



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to  call  my  best  friend  for  advice on  how  to  shake the problem because nothing seemed to  help. In the  days  I spent wrestling with  my  anger toward the  man,  I began to  revisit   the  circumstances surrounding the  only  other person I could remember hating: my oldest sister.
My sister is quite beautiful and  intelligent. She was also quite rebellious and  stubborn in her  high  school days.  It was not uncommon for her  and  our  parents to be at odds. Sometimes the  conflict erupted in a volcano of anger and hurt  that  spewed everywhere. My sister and  I were fairly close  when we were young, but in time  the distance grew beyond measure. The  wall  between us  seemed to sprout up  suddenly, like  a new  building that  just  appears before you  even  knew it was  being built.
In  my  own  self-centered  world of girls, cars,  and  par- ties,  I was  oblivious to the  struggles she  was  facing. One weekend during my senior year  of high  school, her  friend called when our  parents were out  of  town   to  give  me some  unexpected news. “Jay,  I think  you  need to  know your  sister, Kay, is gay.”  I immediately jumped in  the  car and  drove  to  Kay’s  apartment to  confront  her.  I had  to make sure  it was  a lie.
When  no  one  came   to  the  door, I left  a  message on her  voice  mail  and  waited in  her  parking lot  until 3:00 a.m., but she  never came  home. The next  day  I continued my  stakeout and  knew something was  wrong when she kept  avoiding me.  Late one  afternoon I saw her  car on the road  and  raced up  beside her,  rolled down the  window, and  yelled, “Pull over; we’ve got  to talk.”
She  knew why  I was  chasing her,  because the  girl  who called me  also  phoned her  to give  her  fair  warning. Kay
yelled back  from her  car,  “We have  nothing to talk  about,”




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and  tried to  speed away. She  pulled over  only  when I threatened to run  her  off the  road.
I confronted  her  with  what  I had  been told,  and  she admitted that it all was true. I incorrectly reacted in anger and  disbelief,  unleashing on  her  every  disgusting ounce of my  judgment and  rejection. After many  jagged words were spoken, the  conversation ended with  her  telling me it  was  her  life  and  I should want  her  to  be  happy and me  responding, “I hate  you.”  I was  convinced I had  every right  to reject her.  That  misplaced confidence only  grew after  an  incident a few  months later  really sent  me  over the  edge.
It happened at  lunch late  in  my  senior year. Because my school was  close  to the  house, I often  drove  home for my thirty-minute lunch break just  to see  the family. At the time  everything was  going along great, and  my sister and I had  turned a new  corner. A few  weeks earlier, Kay had moved back  home and  told  my parents she  wanted out  of her  lifestyle.  We had  a tearful  reunion and  were putting the  pieces back  together.
But upon arriving home for lunch, I found my mom  and dad  sitting at the  kitchen table, and  Dad was  doing some- thing  I couldn’t remember seeing him  do before. Dad was crying. He  had  tears  running down his  face,  and  Mom’s eyes  were also  swollen, as if she had  been punched. As far as  I remembered, Dad  did  not  even  cry  when his  father died. Seeing him  upset was  a stab  in the  heart I could not take.
“What  is  going on?”  I  thundered. My  parents replied that  my  sister was  moving back  in  with  her  girlfriend.  I rushed into  my  sister’s room  and  started cursing, telling
her  that  she  was  tearing the  family  apart by leaving. Kay




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just  continued packing, as if unfazed by how  much Mom and  Dad  were hurting. That  took  my  anger to  a boiling point. Kay yelled that  her  life  was  none of my  business and  I needed to  stay  out  of it.  I begged her  to  stay,  for Mom and  Dad’s  sake, but  she  said  nothing could stop  her from  leaving. That’s  when I exploded.
I’d   never  pushed  around  a  girl   before   and   haven’t since, but  that  day  I pinned my  sister against the  wall and  spewed my  venom. The  confrontation  ended with me  telling her  I never wanted to  see  her  again. I knew as I walked past  Mom and  Dad and  out  the  door  that  my actions had  hurt  them  as well, but I didn’t care. I thought I had  every  right  to shove  my  sister—out of my  way  and out  of my mind.
As  the   months rolled  by,  I  did   not   ask  my  parents about Kay and  tried to  ignore the  situation all  together. I believed the  ridiculous notion that  if  I avoided some- thing  long  enough, the  issue would either work  itself  out or  disappear. I was  still  too  young to  understand accep- tance, forgiveness,  and  love  are  not  meant to  be  earned but  to  be  given   freely.  I also  could not  wrap   my  mind around the  fact  that  forgiveness  is  denied to  those who are  unwilling to  dispense it.  Therefore  I just  moved on, or so I thought.
For the  next  three years  I viewed Kay as an  embarrass- ment  to our  family  and  me.  There  were times  when she would come   home for  a  few  weeks, which my  parents and  I always took  to  mean she  was  abandoning her  life- style. But then  she’d move  out  again, and  each  time  it felt like  she  was  turning her  back  on the family  all over  again. The  emotional roller coaster we  were all  on kept  the  ten-
sion  in the family  thick. Mom and  Dad became reluctantly




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accustomed to her chair  being empty at Thanksgiving and
Christmas, but  it was  fine  with  me.
When  Kay hurt  Mom  and  Dad,  I took  it as  a personal assault. No doubt many  of my own  actions had  hurt  them as  deeply as  my  sister’s, but  that  was  easy  for me  to  dis- miss.  Although my anger wasn’t justified, I thought it was. I  had   a  legalistic, self-righteous  view   that  I  learned in part  from some  of the  religious folks at church. Tragically, false  religion taught me  how  to  push away  people who were different rather than  to love  and  seek  to understand them.
My anger was  also  due  to pride. Rather  than  being con- cerned about my relationship with  Kay, I became focused on  what  my  narrow circle of friends  might think  of our family  and  me.  Their  opinions should never have  been my priority, but  I thought rejecting my sister would build walls protecting me  from  their   condemnation. In  actu- ality  I was  closing myself  off from one  of the  people who should have  meant the  most  to me,  and  I was  becoming hard, skeptical, and  angry. The  criticism and  isolation I was dishing out was doing nothing to alter  Kay, but it was definitely changing me.
I had  no  idea  at the  time  that  I was  bound in a prison of my own  making. I had  no idea  that  I was  not living  the fulfilling  life  I longed for because I refused  to deal  with the  anger and  unforgiveness that  was  destroying me.
When   I  hit   twenty-one,  I  experienced  a  watershed event  that  began to  change my  perspective. I began to see  how  far I was  from  becoming the  man  I’d  hoped to be.  It did  not  happen all  at  once, but  the  scales began to fall,  and  I found myself  wanting to repair the  dam  in
my  relationship with  Kay. So  I called her  in  Dallas  and




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asked if we  could meet. I knew she  was  a hundred and twenty miles away, but  I had  no  idea  how  far  that  two- hour  drive  would actually take  me.
Upon  arriving at Kay’s house, I admitted my faults  and asked for forgiveness.  I didn’t expect anything in  return. I was  just  worried that  she  would not  believe my  words because I  hadn’t  done  anything to  prove   my  sincerity. I  had   hurt   her   tremendously  both   in  word   and   deed, wrongly thinking I had  a  right  to  reject her  because of the  life she  was  living. It was  an amazing moment for me when, after  two  hours of talking about all  the  mistakes we  both  had  made, Kay and  I hugged. I told  her  I loved her  and  that  I was  glad  she  was  my sister. She  replied, “I love  you  too,  brother, and  I forgive  you.  I really do.”  The road  to a real  relationship was  not  completely paved that night, but  it was  under good  construction.
It has  been years  now,  and  I can  honestly say my sister and  I are  closer than  ever.  She  does  not  have  to do  any- thing  to earn  my love.  I drove  home from Dallas  realizing that  while I thought I was  letting her  out  of a cage, I was actually the  one  who  needed to be set  free.

t

That  night   at  the  old  jail  when I asked the  jailer what crime the  young man  had  committed, she  had  motioned for me  to sit in a chair  before she  answered.
“Jay, he is going to Huntsville because he raped two pre- teen  girls.”
I swallowed hard, partly because the  girls  he assaulted were the age  of my only  daughter. She offered a few more details before I walked out  the  door.
As I walked to  the  car,  I thought about a  male  nurse



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who  once  sat  next  to me  at an  event  where I was  sched- uled to  speak. He  asked if I had  heard the  news about the  two-year-old girl  who  was  expected to die  after  being raped by her  drug-crazed  stepdad. He was  the  nurse on duty  when she  was  brought in,  and  he  was  still  pretty shaken up.  I was  supposed to  be  talking to  a  crowd of church people in a matter of moments and  found myself silently calling the  offender  the  worst  names possible. I felt  like  such  a hypocrite, but  the  emotions were hard  to lasso.
I have  seen the  effects  of sexual abuse in my most  cov- eted  relationship, which is with  my wife.  A family  member sexually assaulted  her  for  years, and   it  wreaked havoc not  only  on  her  personally but  also  on  our  marriage. If there was  anything that  got  under my skin,  it was  sexual crimes. The  inmate had  struck a tender nerve. I believed he  had  not  only  tried to  crucify  and  steal  the  innocent girls’ present but  their  future as well. I was  livid,  because
I know  the  cuts  of sexual abuse are  the  hardest to  heal. The  scabs  keep tearing off, leaving victims  with  a sense of guilt and  unworthiness due  to something that  was  no fault  of their  own.
Three  sleepless nights after  leaving the  jail,  I got  a rev- elation about accepting others. I had  vengeful  thoughts about the  boy  I’d met.  I am  not  proud to own  them, but
I secretly hoped he  would burn  in  hell. I told  my  best friend  that  justice would seek  and  find  him  behind the walls of the  Huntsville prison. I concluded that  if anyone was  beyond forgiveness  and  restoration, he  was.   I sur- mised that  I might be  responsible to  forgive  and  accept
some   people but  not  everyone. I was  convinced I was





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midniGHt  in a isLe  se v en



judge and  jury  when it came  to who  deserved my pardon and  who  did  not.  I was  so wrong.
What about my own  guilt?  I have  never been unfaithful to my wife,  but I have  entertained lustful thoughts. I have not been involved in a murder, but what  about that hatred I have  harbored?  I have  not  been involved in  a same-sex relationship, but  what  about my promiscuity before I was
married? My failures are  no less  sinful  than  anyone else’s.
Judging others only produces self-judgment. I was taught early on to love the sinner and  hate  the sin,  but often  that is  just  religious jargon, a  masquerade to  hide   our  judg- mental attitudes. Who am I to despise anyone else’s faults when I should be busy  enough hating my own?  Instead of shifting blame away  from my own  shortcomings, I should be  reaching out  to those who  may  not  know  that  God is not  the  one  condemning them. Tragically, many  people are  isolating the  very  people who  need them  the  most.
Jesus   never  favored  the   religious;  His  darlings were always the  hurting and  the  sinful,  not  the  self-righteous. He  never tired of  showing His  love  for  renegades. It is ironic that we tend  to be drawn the least  to the people He was  drawn to  the  most.  Jesus  was  regularly seen eating and  spending time  with  outcasts and  those we  wickedly condemn. Unlike us  He had  an  uncanny ability to make the  losers of the  world feel  like  the  winners. He not  only made them  feel  like  somebody, but  He also  helped them to become somebody. We see  people for who  they  were and   are,   but  God  sees   people for  who   they   have   the potential to become.
Sadly, many  morally superior people fall  into  the  trap of  loving only  those who  think, dress, act,  and  believe as  they  do.  It is easy  to beat  your  chest  and  say  you  are




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Prison Break



standing for  truth  without considering whose truth  you are  standing for.  It’s  time  for us  to stop  hating and  start liberating. It’s  time  to bury  our  legalistic and  narcissistic actions. I do not claim  to know  everything about God, but I do  know  He  loves  and  unconditionally accepts anyone
who  is willing to turn  to Him.  This  includes thieves, rob- bers,   murderers,  drunks, adulterers,  Muslims, homosex- uals, gossipers, cheaters, fornicators, liars, hypocrites like me,  and  even  those whom I have  the  hardest time  loving: child  abusers.
I asked God why  He allowed me  to stop  at the  old  jail that  night. Many  people believe in coincidences, but  I do not.  I am  sure  every  step  I take  has  a purpose, a lesson, even  beneficial pain   if I am  willing to  embrace it.  As I prayed for understanding, a question popped in my mind. Does  God  love  the  rapist in  the  Huntsville prison, and could even  someone like  him  be forgiven?
As much as I wanted to deny  it, I knew there was  only one  answer: yes.  I believe God  allowed me  to meet  that man  so  I could understand that  He  does  not  see  others as  I  do.  My  love  has  boundaries, but  His  has  no  end. Although  God  does  not  accept all  the  things I do,  He  is willing to accept all  of me.  This  is the  love  I still  do  not completely understand. Yet it is exactly the  kind  of love  I want  to give.