it came in the mail almost 2 months ago.  my very own “advance reader’s copy” of mad church disease.  it was so cool… it had no page numbers.  the table of contents just had “000″ written next to each chapter where the page number would be and contained a disclaimer to the effect that this isn’t the final final which made me feel like i was getting a top secret glimpse.  when i got it and thumbed through it i was so proud of anne jackson.  for a little over a year, her bloggees have been privy to the signing of the contract with zondervan, quizzes about our experiences and her word count mile stones.  now, receiving this pre-release copy of the practically finished work, i think i can appreciate, at least on some level, the accomplishment of – - writing a whole freakin’ book!!! wow, congratulations anne.  that must be some feeling.

anyway… where was i?  oh yes,  almost 2 months ago i got this book that i have been so excited to read.  so what took so long, you ask?  was it hard?  was it deep?  was it difficult to grasp?

no…. quite the contrary.  it was one of the simplest things i’ve ever read.

no, wait!  hang on  – -  this is a good review.  keep reading.

the best way i can describe this book is that it is like sitting down with a good friend who will plant themselves in front of you and begin relentlessly asking all the right questions until you start spilling the honest to goodness truth about yourself.  and, the best part?  it’s not a “how to” book.  i was so relieved when i at some point during the read i flipped over to the cover to confirm this little fact.  the book contains no perfect prayer and no secret combination of activities that will cure you once and for all.  no, this is a book that emphasizes identifying and owning responsibility for our actions and embracing the process of overcoming the messes that, on many levels, we create all by ourselves.  i love that.  i find books that try to spoon feed me all the answers, though probably inspired, are uninspiring.  i’m a bright girl, challenge me to find my own answers.  and, that’s what anne did.

so, the number one question people have asked me about the book… “can i borrow it when you’re done?”

sorry, no way, no how.  the pages are dripping with a steady drool of my own honesty.  the book didn’t take me so long because it was difficult to read…. it took that long to make myself write down the answers to all those questions.  this is truly not a book you read.  if you just read it you are completely missing the point and wasting your time.  for people who have served in ministry for any length of time, there will be little to no new information in it.  but i almost guarantee most people have never taken the initiative to effectively act on the familiar truths written in it’s pages.  this book is tool you use to assess, and more importantly, identify what you need to do next to get healthy.  i mean it when i say… it is perfectly simple.  if she had made it difficult and deep it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.

i believe everyone who even entertains the idea of full time ministry should pick up this book before they start.  i would love to have had this book before i was in need of it… but perhaps i wouldn’t have taken it so seriously.

for those called to serve in ministry, we have a responsibility to be accountable for staying in the race.  we are not called for the period of time that it takes for us to self distruct.  our calling is for a lifetime.  to succeed in this will take a little bit of effort on our part and a lot of loving grace and strength from a loving god.

thank you, anne.

now, quit buggin’ me
and go buy your own book
here

completing this book could quite possibly be one of the single most challenging feats of my reading experience.  i bought it a year ago with about eight or so other books.  for whatever reason i saved this one for last.

i just finished reading the first 1.5 chapters for the 2nd time.

why?

because i couldn’t remember what they said… i was too busy thinking about all the stuff it was reminding me i had to do.

…and herein lies the root of my demise.

i need this book…. it’s great (at least the 1st 1.5 chapters are).  but how, oh how am i going to finish it???

i couldn’t concentrate on the book for thinking about wanting to blog.
now, i can’t concentrate on blogging for thinking about the book.

and so,  it sits… there on the couch.

taunting me – - laughing at me.

“You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy’s strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.

The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents – or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love – a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

i so love how mr. lewis has painted such a beautiful picture of true humility here, and more importantly how our enemy tries to distort it. i’m a little tired of being ashamed of myself for something that i did or i am that is good.

it’s all about the heart…. i’ll try to remember that.

“You are much more likely to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary then by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment among his friends when he is happy and expansive. Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. Although we have won many a soul through pleasure, all the same, it is His invention, not ours. The Enemy made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, in incorrect ways, or in an excessive obsessive way. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return – that is what really gladdens our Father’s heart.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

hmmmmm…. interesting. i’ve heard some that would disagree with mr. c.s. lewis on some points of this theory. what do you think?

“All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them. Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tends to develop inside itself a hothouse mutual admiration, and towards the outer world, a great deal of pride and hatred which is entertained without shame because the “Cause” is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal. Even when the little group exists originally for the Enemy’s own purposes, this remains true. We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-rightousness of a secret society or a clique. The Church herself is, of course, heavily defended and we have never yet quite succeeded in giving her all the characteristics of a faction; but subordinate factions within her have often produced admirable results, from the parties of Paul and of Apollos at Corinth down to the High and Low parties in the Church of England.

…Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE”

– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

(so you know what’s going on…)
writer= Screwtape (a demon)
to= Wormwood (his apprentice)
patient= a human
the enemy= God

“Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don’t, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father’s house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there.

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE”

– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our enemy’s [God's] will, looks around upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” - C.S. Lewis

Every Saturday my family and I go to the library downtown. I really look forward to this day. We always stay for at least an hour – sometimes more. We all love to read. And Cam likes to play the computer games. I usually peruse the stacks for something totally random to distract my busy brain. Today I walked by The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I love this book. I read it for the first time when I was about 15. C.S. Lewis is absolute genius…. he is hands down one of my very favorite authors. Anyway, I checked it out to read it again. I’ll probably drop a few more quotes from Uncle Screwtape from time to time. I suspect a lot of you have read it – it’s pretty popular. But if you never have – - i highly recommend. The premise: it’s a collection of letters (obviously, fictional) from a demon character named Screwtape to his demon understudy Wormwood. He is basically mentoring him on how to screw with human minds in order to keep them from falling into the enemy’s (God’s) hands. Outstanding.

Great stocking stuffer, too!

This book just moved to the top of my “want to read” list and thus makes my Christmas list. This book has kept popping up on my radar… but I never read what it was about until this morning. Here is an exerpt from deadlyviper.org (which is a fabulously awesome site to look at, by the way).

“Deadly Viper is an initiative dedicated to beginning a strategic conversation on the issues of radical integrity and grace. Our focus is to develop leaders who are having intentional, transparent, and honest conversations about key character issues.

Deadly Viper is no-holds barred. It’s for the radical, risk taking, gutsy leaders who are kicking butt and taking names. Even if you’re in the middle of your finest hour, basking in a pool of success, there might be some personal integrity stuff you need to think about. It’s very possible your character weapons have dulled and your integrity muscles have become flabby and soft. And you haven’t even noticed.”

Sounds like it could hurt a little. Now I just gotta finish reading this big stack of wonderful books I bought with my birthday money this summer so I can make room for more! I’m about halfway there!