Wednesday, 16 July 2008

• Currently Reading Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality By Donald Miller see related

  Book Review: Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality by Donald Miller

  Official description:
  "I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. . . . I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened." In Donald Miller's early years, he was vaguely familiar with a distant God. But when he came to know Jesus Christ, he pursued the Christian life with great zeal. Within a few years he had a successful ministry that ultimately left him feeling empty, burned out, and, once again, far away from God. In this intimate, soul-searching account, Miller describes his remarkable journey back to a culturally relevant, infinitely loving God.

  How long it will take to read:
  A week at most maybe?  It's 240-or-so pages of storytelling with some funny (and real) characters.
  (But if you're like me, it'll take you a month b/c I have a short attention span for books.  Plus, I found a lot of his ideas challenging and I had to mull them over to myself.)

  My take:
  A lot of you have probably already read this book, but I'm quite behind when it comes to Christian literature.  Plus, I'm pretty skeptical about what's out there in terms of solid Christian writing and teaching.  But I must admit, this book took me by surprise.

  It reads like the author is just chatting to you about his experiences with Jesus and the church.  It's very casual - sometimes so much so that I felt like a teenager was writing it.  But once I got over that, I realized that the stuff he was talking about was really challenging me.  His Christian walk is not about rules, traditions, and order, but rather about truly loving people, honesty and vulnerability, and letting God transform him.  He doesn't reference the Bible directly and doesn't rebuke his readers - he just explains how his understanding of the Christian life has changed over the years.

  I had expected this book to be a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, but despite the lack of Bible references and "straight-forward" teaching, it's actually very sound.  The book is about personal experiences, yet I found nothing to be blasphemous or shady.  It is honest, refreshing, simple, and it completely rocked me (in a good way).

  Also, it further proved to me that Oregon is awesome and I shoud eventually move there.

  If you're a Christian:
  Absolutely read it.  Especially if you've been doing the church-thing for quite a while and feel yourself getting stuck in a rut.  His experience is evidence that a relationship with Jesus is not boring and traditional - it's alive and challenging and wonderful and unexpected.

  If you're not a Christian:
  I think this is a good account of the Jesus you might want to know.  Not the one that supposedly lives inside stuffy, judgemental churches (that one's not my favorite either).

   

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