Great Read

I just finished another semester of grad school and the last book we read in my class was one of my favorites. It's a really quick read, beautifully written, and extraordinary in its power to take a story that I've heard since I was a little girl and give me a new set of lenses to see it and hear it as if it were the very first time. It's called Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, written by Frederick Buechner.

The book is mainly written for an audience of those who are regularly communicating God's word as a profession, but I found it to be extremely applicable to many. Here's a really good summary in Buechner's own words of the premise of his book.

"The Gospel is bad news before it is good news. It is the news that man is a sinner, to use the old word, that he is evil in the imagination of his heart, that when he looks in the mirror all in a lather what he sees is at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob. That is the tragedy. But it is also the news that he is loved anyway, cherished, forgiven, bleeding to be sure, but also bled for. That is the comedy. And yet, so what? So what if even in his sin the slob is loved and forgiven when the very mark and substance of his sin and of his slobbery is that he keeps turning down the love and forgiveness because he either doesn't believe them or doesn't want them . . . In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen to him just as in fairy tales extraordinary things happen . . . It is impossible for anybody to leave behind the darkness of the world he carries on his back like a snail, but for God all things are possible. That is the fairy tale. All together they are the truth" (7-8).

The man uses words like an artist and brings back the run-on sentence. Yay, Frederick! :-)

I highly recommend it, especially in the midst of the Christmas season. Seeing His incredible gift with new eyes certainly does bring back a sense of wonder in the midst of familiarity.