Blue Like Jazz
Well, let me jump on the bandwagon.
Blue Like Jazz is a book everyone's been telling me to read, and frankly, I was a little reluctant. Why is hard to say, except that what I was hearing people say about Donald Miller's anecdotal odessey made it clear that it was going to impact me, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be really rocked at this particular moment. But finally, Thanksgiving morning, I picked it up and began to read.
Sure enough, it rocked me.
"Honesty" is a concept that keep cropping up in my work and in my thinking, and it comes, I think, from acknowleding somewhere inside that there is a deep disconnect between what Jesus had to say about life among the people in the Kingdom of the Heavens and the life of Christians that gets lived out here on the planet. Which is fancy way of saying hypocirisy is as rampant now as it was in Jesus' day, and I am infected with it. What's exciting about Miller's book is that it helps those who want to see that infection clearly do so.
For those of you unfamiliar with the book, Blue Like Jazz is Miller's perky tale of his own spiritual journey as a student at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, a place where Christianity is openly disdained and the intellectual life flourishes with great panache. Miller roams around in a frank search for a Jesus that is something other than what is now called "Christianity" and in one telling story, refuses to defend the whole notion of Christianity, seeking instead to talk about Jesus, which for him, is an entirely different subject.
Here is why it rocked me: his honesty is bracing, and a call to the rest of us who hem-haw around about what we can feel. If we've never told a single person about the way Jesus has impacted our lives, then chances are, he hasn't. There are many ways around that kind of thinking...as a practicing Christian, I am well skilled at it. Christian-this, Christian-that...it's all well and good, maybe, but a discussion of Jesus is indeed a different matter.
I told a friend of mine yesterday, I feel like I'm in the process of leaving the Old Country headed for the new, but there is a long dark journey to be made inbetween. I wonder how many people decide to stay on the shores of the Old Country even though they know there is no real life there anymore. They stand longingly at the banks of an ocean they have to cross. God is calling them to cross that ocean, even providing a boat that He says would rival the ark of Noah. Problem is, he's making no promises about the weather, or about just who will survive the journey.
But it's pretty sure the old you won't.
Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz is a message from a man at sea. But by God, he makes me think there's a New World out there after all.
Anybody wanna go?......
9:11:05 AM
