Summer Reading to Grow Your Life

I just planted our annual vegetable garden and am watching it grow. It's a pretty simple formula: Fertile seed plus soil nutrients plus sun and water equals a garden of delights. It never ceases to amaze me that a barren patch of dirt can be transformed into a lush paradise of diverse plants, abundant colors, and good tasting food in a matter of months.

The human mind is also like a garden. It can become barren in the "winters" of life where pressures and problems stop us from learning and growing our garden of thought, insight, and creativity.

One antidote is a good "summer of reading" that can bring everything back to life.

On our recent family vacation, I took along five good books that when combined with time, meditation, slowing down, and curiosity produced a harvest of insights and spiritual refreshment. I deliberately chose different books for variety--like planting five different vegetables for maximum taste and nourishment.

I love history because it's one of the greatest revealers of truth. This year I chose Bill Bennett's America - The Last Best Hope Volume Two. Bennett is one of the best thinker/historians of our time who first made his literary mark after serving in the Reagan White House. For many years we read his classic Book of Virtues to our children at bedtime. A few fascinating tidbits from America:

• One of the contributing factors to World War I was that most of the European monarchs were related to each other through marriage. Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm was the grandson of England's Queen Victoria and his cousin was Tsar Nicholas of Russia. Talk about in-law problems!
• Teddy Roosevelt named the president's home the "White House."
• World War I ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month--November 1918.
• The flu pandemic of 1918-19 killed over one hundred million people worldwide in a matter of months. It killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS killed in 24 years, and more people in a year than the Bubonic Plague of the Middle Ages killed in one hundred years
• Stupidest statement of the 20th century: "I have seen the future--and it works" uttered by muckraker Lincoln Steffens regarding the newly formed Soviet Union in 1919.
• FDR gave the first address ever broadcast on the "new invention" of television at the opening of the New York's World Fair on April 30, 1939.
• The code name of Hitler's private train was Amerika.
• The siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) lasted over nine hundred days. In the city alone, two million Russians died--exceeding the death toll of all US and British losses in WWII.
• The "day that will live in infamy" - December 7, 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and 2403 Americans died-- was the same day that Hitler began gassing the Jews in Poland. What a day of demonic carnage.
• During WWII, one in eleven Americans were serving in the armed forces. In 2007 that number was one in two hundred.
• The greatest voter turnout of a presidential election was in 1960 (Kennedy versus Nixon) when 64% of the population cast ballots.
• Neil Armstrong's historic steps on the moon on July 20, 1969 hits the news the same day as Ted Kennedy's tragic accident at Chappaquidick which took the life of Mary Jo Kopechne.
• "Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time." (E.B. White in the New Yorker.)
• Some two million German women--everyone from eight-year-old girls to eighty-year-old nuns were raped by the Russian army in their final assault on Germany in 1945. There were 130,000 rapes in Berlin alone of which 10,000 of these women committed suicide.
• It was Winston Churchill who coined the term "Iron Curtain" in a 1946 speech at Westminster College in Missouri--President Truman's home state.
• The United States was the first nation to recognize Israel as a sovereign nation in 1948--eleven minutes after they announced their independence.

I serve on a board with the Navigators' Alan Andrews who was the general editor of a great new book called The Kingdom Life which focuses on the spiritual formation of a believer. Some highlights:

• The Kingdom of God is the primary theme of the New Testament being mentioned over 150 times.
• Dallas Willard's famous quote on grace: "God is not opposed to effort--just earning our salvation."
• The basic idea behind all temptation: "God is depriving us of what is good or what we want so we think we must take matters into our own hands, pushing him from our thoughts and putting ourselves on the Throne of the universe."
• "People who are unable to trust will never experience love--not ever--because the degree to which we trust is the same degree to which we're able to receive love from others."
• Humility is trusting God and others with me. It is the most basic of spiritual disciplines. "I need others to get healthy. Without others I cannot get well. I cannot mature."
• "Grace is the face one wears when it meets imperfection."
• "We do not initiate some of the most life-changing experiences in our journey. They are unexpectedly thrust upon us  in the form of failure, loss, injury, illness, pain, exploitation, and unfilled desire." "In a fallen world, suffering is a key element to living life to the full."
• " A God unbounded by our rules of time has the ability to invest in every person on earth. God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us."
• The Trinity is itself a "sweet society of relationships." And the smallest things that scientists have discovered--quarks--exist only in relationship i.e. as three interacting pairs of two.
• "Authentic spirituality, then, is all about living the transforming life of the Triune God."
• Good definition of repentance: "Think about how you've been thinking, and change!"

Another gem was Darrow Miller's Life Work which is truly one of the best books ever written on the biblical worldview as it applies to our everyday life and vocations. Miller agrees with E. Stanley Jones that "the Church has lost the biblical vision of the kingdom of God." He helps us see all of our life and talents as devoted to the glory of God and making of culture. How about:

• "We live largely unexamined lives. We need to examine what we're doing and create a radical re-ordering of them."
• "There is an objective worldview, the worldview of the Bible. All other worldviews, to a greater or lesser extent, are a distortion of the reality that God has made."
• "Thirty-four percent of the contents of America's founding documents were direct quotations of the Bible (Lutz & Hyneman)...The Bible, perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our Founding document."
• We are called to live coram Deo: To live all of our life in the Presence of God, under the authority of God, and to the honor and glory of God.
• "If as Christians we do not increasing act consciously  on behalf of the kingdom of God, we will likely find ourselves contributing to the kingdom of darkness."
• "Our work is ultimately to create kingdom culture on earth."
• "Kingdom culture is bounded by truth (God's metaphysical and physical laws), justice or goodness (which reflects God's moral laws), and beauty (which reflects God's aesthetic laws).
• The future life we call Heaven will be a garden-city because it's described as a Paradise (Garden) and Polis (City)
• Our primary call is salvation. Our secondary call is our job or vocation "which comes from the Latin word vocatio meaning a calling, a summons, or an invitation as a "calling from God."
• "As we seek to respond to God's double call--to connect the whole of our lives and work to the kingdom of God--we stand firmly in reality."
• "The concept of retirement is foreign to biblical culture."
• "We have been made to make history. We have been made to fulfill a destiny in our time and our place that no one else has been made for."
• "Our sanctification does not depend as much upon us changing our activities as it does in doing them for God rather than ourselves" (Brother Lawrence).
• John Wesley - "Lose no time. If you understand yourself and your relationship to God and man, you know you have no time to spare. If you understand your particular calling as you ought, you will have no time that hangs upon your hands."
• Puritan motto: "A Christian can regard his shop as well as his chapel as holy ground."
• "The greatest single statement most people will ever make in their life for the cause of Christ--for good or bad--is how they do their work" (John Politan).
• "God has a big agenda--nothing less than reconciling all things to himself and seeing all nations transformed through discipleship."
• The Latin for educate is educare: "to draw, or lead out." This reminds us that educaion is primarily about drawing out the God-given potential found in each human being.
• "Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade--not outside it."

I also read Billy Graham's Living in God's Love - which is the messages of his last New York Crusade in 2005. It was absolutely refreshing in its simplicity and beauty. As I mentioned last week, I also enjoyed John Wooden's My Personal Best which is his personal autobiography and collection of life lessons from the America's greatest coach (Click here for our June 11 article on Coach Wooden). If you put one of his sayings on your bathroom mirror each week and and resolve to apply it with God's help, you'll live a fruitful life.

That's the blessing of reading--it creates of garden of growth and nourishment in the soul.

Now it's your turn.

Choose those books and have a great summer growing your life in God.