Tag: Reflection

40 for 40 (2020 Books)

Yesterday I published my 2019 book list. Check it out.

Today, let’s talk about 2020. Happy New Year!

I turn 40 this year. This milestone is obviously a time to pause and reflect, and one thing I’ve decided to do is to set a very different reading goal for the coming year. (My other big goal is to try to run a marathon).

This goal comes from two places. First, our church community is thinking a lot about spiritual formation and disciplines this year. One of my personality traits is to constantly seek and acquire new information. This is not a bad thing. But sometimes I can get caught up in needing to always be reading the “new” thing.

So part of my goal this year is to cut down the flow of new information, go a bit slower, and revisit some of the things that have formed me over the years.

Which leads to part 2: I’ve read a lot of things and been deeply formed by a lot of what I have read. There are a number of books that have been extremely important at different moments, but many of them I haven’t revisited. Some of those moments are now many years old. I’m interested to see: were these books I loved about that moment in time, or was there something timeless about what I was encountering?

Either way, it will be an interesting means through which to reflect on my 40 years. My hope is to then post something here about each book, what the original moment was like, and what it was like to read that book again at this stage of life.

A few ground rules: I could only pick one book from an author, even if I REALLY like that author (I did make one exception to this rule, but rules are made to be broken). I also sometimes picked a book that was more representative of the author, and not actually the book I enjoyed the most (this will make sense later on when I do the reviews). I also picked 39 because I want to leave room to remember something or change the list if needed. Finally, I tried to pick books from many different eras of my life.

Here’s the list:

  1. The Holy Longing
  2. A Community Called Atonement
  3. Surprised By Hope
  4. An Unstoppable Force
  5. Reaching Out
  6. The Divine Conspiracy
  7. Jesus Wants to Save Christians
  8. With Justice For All
  9. The Gift of the Jews
  10. Persons in Relation
  11. The Drama of Doctrine
  12. Tattoos on the Heart
  13. Blue Like Jazz
  14. Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places
  15. Five Smooth Stones For Pastoral Work
  16. The Shaping of Things To Come
  17. Searching For Home
  18. To Change the World
  19. Church Next
  20. You Are What You Love
  21. Between Two Worlds
  22. A Band of Misfits
  23. What the Dog Saw
  24. Traveling Mercies
  25. For The Time Being
  26. Everything is Illuminated
  27. A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius
  28. And The Mountains Echoed
  29. Book of Lost Things
  30. High Fidelity
  31. The Fortress of Solitude
  32. My Name Is Asher Lev
  33. Franny and Zooey
  34. The Fault in our Stars
  35. Plainsong
  36. The Kid From Tomkinsville
  37. Angela’s Ashes
  38. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
  39. The Tender Bar
  40. The Hate U Give

 

3 Things I Learned From All Those Old Notes

The other day I posted this…

Purging/Downsizing in preparation for move to new apartment. One thing I’ve learned going through old boxes: In Pacific Christian Fellowship we wrote A LOT of notes!

…on Facebook.

There truly were a lot of notes. Boxes and files and folders full. Sheets of paper, post cards, picture albums, even a paper plate: all filled with words of affirmation. I guess this is how we communicated love  pre-facebook.

In all honesty, I threw much of it away. Some of the notes were redundant, some had lost context over the years, some were just inside jokes. But there were many, many gems, and I saved those.

In ministry there are all sorts of channels for feedback. Very few of those channels are helpful.

You open yourself up to a lot of cuts in this line of work. Sometimes there are really big things: a big rejection, someone you thought was on your side who bails, someone who takes an offhanded statement and uses it against you. Sometimes there are really small things: comments, distancing, the reality that you ask most of the questions.

That’s the hard stuff. But then there are the beautiful words that good people speak and write to you and those words are gold.

There were a number of themes that stood out to me as a I read through all of those notes:, but these were the Big 3:

  1. You are funny
  2. You ask really good questions
  3. You should be a pastor

Why is it so important to be reminded of these themes”

  1. From time to time I’ll hear the message, directly or indirectly, that I am not fun. Fun and funny are two different things, but it was so, so good to be reminded that at one point in my life I was fun(ny) (a ringleader of fun, no less). I believe that’s still in me.
  2. Several notes revealed that not only were my questions “good”, they could also be “intimidating.” My current students will have a good chuckle about that. Still true. Sometimes we need to be reminded about our true selves and other times we need to see that what we do and love has been there all along.
  3. Welp. I’ve been told I should pastor ever since college. Even though pastoring pushes me out of what is comfortable based on my personality and preferences, there’s been an internal and external push, an undeniable call, to help people on their journey back to God.

The moral of the story, dear readers, is hold on to these words of affirmation that people give you: they are gold, they are sustenance, they are life-giving.