I have a good friend that I first met back in the early 80’s. Greg and I are both “retired,” in the sense of no longer drawing a salary from the nonprofits we served in ministry. But we both continue the callings that we have long sensed on our lives and are determined to maintain the friendship we have long enjoyed. We are geographically distant—the Grooms in CO and us in MN—but technology allows us regularly scheduled “face to face” conversations.
Our conversations range widely, with one important constant: What are you reading? Why?
Those two questions come up virtually every time we chat, and we take one another’s answers seriously. We trust each other to be followers of Jesus who strive to be discerning, wanting to creatively live in the reality of Christ’s Kingdom in our world of advanced modernity. And I, for one, know that I need to be constantly challenged to read well, rather than just skating through whatever I happen to enjoy. And that begins with the questions: What do I choose to read? Why?
It’s not that we only discuss heady books. Each year when the latest Jack Reacher novel appears from the pen of Lee Child—formulaic, unrealistic, violent—I eagerly read it. I think of it as a “palate refresher,” like a bite of a nice grapefruit sorbet between courses in a nice meal. Still, Greg and I are mainly interested in serious books, by religious or secular authors that help us better understand how to live faithfully in our broken world.
I remember when Greg’s and my spiritual mentor, Francis Schaeffer, issued a challenge to those who claimed to be Christians. We need to out-read and out-think our neighbors, he insisted. Our non-Christian neighbors need to read whatever they think significant; we need to read ALL that they think is significant AND whatever is significant in orthodox Christian thought. If we’re too busy to do that, he said, we are too busy to be faithful. The older I get, the more I agree with him.
Photo credit: Photo by Element5 Digital (https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-book-from-shelf-1370298/)
