Receiving the Word
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Category Archives: Books
Freedom of Simplicity
Review: The Cost of Discipleship
You can believe a man is committed to a cause when he is willing to lay down his life — literally, willing to die — for the cause’s sake. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian who was martyred during World War II in Germany for the sake of Christianity and the German people. His story is movingly told in the video Hanged on a Twisted Cross. (There is also a dramatized version, Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace, which I have not seen yet.)
Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis
Discipleship Journal named C. S. Lewis one of the most important Christian authors of the 1900s. Some credit him as being the single most popular Christian author of that century.
Getting Things Done
When I was about 10 years old my parents bought me a set of red metal shelves. I don’t remember if it was a gift I had requested, or if they just decided I needed a hint to clean my room. But that gift inspired a change. It is my earliest memory of a step forward in my lifelong struggle to keep my personal world, my little corner of the universe, my home, clean and in order.
From the day I lined up my toy cars on the second shelf — each one not only in line, but also in a specific parking spot that it held exclusively from then on — all the way through high school and college, I pursued orderliness with a zeal as strong as anyone I knew. One of my first rules was the mantra, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” Once I was happy with an arrangement, I seldom changed it. If you had snapped a photo of my dorm room on the first day of classes, and compared it with another taken on graduation weekend, you might not have noticed any difference. [Edit: I should be clear that orderliness does not require that arrangements be static; however, constant change does interfere with orderliness.]