2007: My Year as a Reader

Well, Christmas week has been a sweet gift, with my boy Nate back with us for a little while, playing his mandolin and debuting his new songs for us. A sweet gift indeed. We have a fairly new family tradition around here of reading or performing for one another at Christmas. Me, I read the chapter from Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows called The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which is something I truly love, but the blue ribbon went to son Tim's ribald short story involving each member of our family (and a few others) in a wild careening sleighride of an adventure. We laughed almost to bursting!

But when not having great fun I've been reading, of course (it's what I do). I wanted to learn more about "union with Christ," so I chose to read an old book by Lewis B. Smedes called All Things Made New. I've got to say this was a wonderful find. I've not had a book stimulate and inspire like this one in a long time. It is a theological study of the life of a disciple that seeks to answer these questions:

How can a person who lived nearly two thousand years ago radically change a human life here and now? How can Jesus of Nazareth radically affect us, as persons, to the depths of our being? How can He reach out over the great span of time that divides us from Him and change us so profoundly that we become "now creatures" in Him?

I have no hesitation in saying that along with Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship this book has helped a good deal in adjusting my perspective and re-orienting my understanding.

In fact, it's been a pretty good reading year for me. I've reconnected with storytelling this year, reading more novels than has been typical in the past. I've read a couple of biographies (one of Tolkien, one of Lewis, both excellent), and a little natural history as well. In fact, I've completed a total of 38 books this year, which makes me, according to the NEA a frequent but not avid reader. Ah, well, avidity is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.

At any rate, and for the sake of nothing at all, here's the complete list of the "spiritual/devotional/theological titles" I've read in the past year:

1. Knowing God, by J. I. Packer
   
2. Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures, by Martyn Lloyd Jones
   
3. Living the Resurrection, by Eugene Peterson
   
4. Leap Over a Wall, by Eugene Peterson
   
5. Holiness by Grace, by Bryan Chappell
   
6. A Scandalous Freedom, by Steve Brown
   
7. The Discipline of Grace, by Jerry Bridges
   
8. Kingdom Triangle, by J. P. Moreland
   
9. Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God, by Marva Dawn
   
10. Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of God and the Praying Imagination, by Eugene Peterson
    
11. The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, by Walter Marshall
    
12. The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey
    
13. The Jesus Way, by Eugene Peterson
    
14. Choose the Life, Bill Hull
    
15. Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die, by John Piper
    
16. Humility, by Andrew Murray
    
17. Christ's Call to Discipleship, by J. M. Boice
    
18. All Things Made New, by Lewis B. Smedes
    
19. (in progress) The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    

You'll note the repeated presence of Eugene Peterson there. I consider him a wise man and a Christian with a deep understanding. I would read anything he writes and expect always to be moved and convicted.