Primal

A while back I signed up to be a part of a blog tour for Mark Batterson's new book, Primal.  I'm not far into the book and I can already see things I've heard our own senior pastor, Mike Glenn, say but with a fresh spin on it.  This is a good thing to me because A) I like Mike and his style of teaching, B) These fresh spins are obviously good things, reiterating truths I need to sink deeper and C) Two teachers, one in Tennessee and one in Washington, D.C., teaching the same thing serve as confirmation for each other.

Some of the common teachings I am hearing in Mark's book are:

• we have forgotten how inconvenient it is to follow in the footsteps of Christ
  
• we are the ones who complicate Christianity
• Christians are more known for what we're against than what we're for
• most of us know what we believe but not why we  believe it
  
• people don't wanna hear what you have to say until you meet their needs first (compassion before truth)
• what comes out when you get squeezed? (reactions reveal what's in your heart) toothpaste comes out of a tube of toothpaste, does Jesus come out of you?

I enjoyed reading the short history of the beginnings of World Vision, a cause near and dear to my heart.  Mark poses the question to us: "What will kill you if you don't do it?"  He dares us to consider what our true passion, or compassion as he says, is.   He dares us to search this out, because once you know, "You can't not do something about it."

I flipped towards the end of the book to read a bit there (quite Mike-like for those of you who know him) and read a section entitled "Beyond Reasonableness."  Quite appropriate for me, for those of you who know me.  I'm usually a logic girl.  I like things to make sense.  However, I am finding lately that it is when things make the least human sense that they make the most God-sense, if you will.  In this section of Primal, Mark quotes Yann Martel saying, "I was sick to death of reasonableness."  Feels quite freeing to agree with that statement.  Mark goes on to pose that so many of us limit God to our senses and our logic, naturalism and rationalism.  He says, "As a result, our soul shrinks to the size of our senses, our mind shrinks to the size of our logic."  Then, he poses a question to ponder, "Do you have any God ideas that are being held ransom to reasonableness?"

Sick to death of reasonableness, indeed.  I definitely look forward to reading the rest of this book.  I am challenged to have fresh faith unhindered by the constrictions of logic, sense, and other things that may have been built on top but are unnecessary (see ch. 1 for that reference!), things that are hiding the true, primal nature of my faith that yearns to shine through.