my reading list for the spring and summer

Hello everybody! By the end of this weekend I will be shutting down my facebook again for an unspecified time (though I may pop back on here and there, if I need to do something). But before I go I thought I'd share with you my plans for the next season of life I'm in. In short, it's reading, reading a TON. I feel like I've been back-logged in books for the past year or so; there have been plenty I wanted to read, but when I picked them up to do so I could barely get through even a page. Somehow I knew I couldn't absorb the information, that it wasn't time yet and I needed to take care of other things both inside and out first.

Well, over the last month and a half or so I've sensed the winds of my life shifting, signs of the seasons changing, and of of the biggest evidences of this has been a growing "book-lust" (for lack of a better term). I'll go on Amazon to by a book for me or a friend and I'll just start wandering around, or I'll be in Half Price Bookstore looking through every book on the clearance rack. My "wishlist" at Amazon is about to burst from the weight of the 23 books it now contains unless I alleviate it soon. It's time to read some books over here, and I can't wait for the weather to warm up enough for me to set up a little place on the front porch to get to it!

To give you a feel for what I'm embarking on, I want to share with you the current list of books on my "to read" bookshelves. At the end I'll share what I plan and hope to gain from all this, but for now just know that it's my goal to read 30-40 of these (so not all of them) between now and Labor Day. I'd love your thoughts on any or the whole of these books, especially ones you have read yourself.

And now, in no particular order, the books on my "to read" list:

Whole Life Transformation: Becoming The Change Your Church Needs
Keith Meyer

Heaven's Calling: A Memoir of One Soul's Steep Ascent
Leanne Payne

The Complete Father Brown
G.K. Chesterton

Crazy Love
Francis Chan

New Light on the Difficult Words of Jesus: Insights from His Jewish Context
David Bivin

The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour vol. 3 and 5
Louis L'Amour

Love Wins:A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived
Rob Bell

God is the Gospel: Meditations on God's Love as the Gift of Himself
John Piper

Desiring God
John Piper

After Shock: Searching For Honest Faith When Your World is Shaken
Kent Annan

Jesus the Jewish Theologian
Brad Young

Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith
Marvin R. Wilson

Echoes of His Presence
Ray Vander Laan

God in Search of Man
Abraham Joshua Heschel

Herod King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans
Peter Richardson

The Politics of Jesus
John Howard Yoder

Apprenticeship With Jesus: Learning to Live Like the Master
Gary W. Moon

One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Ann Voskamp

After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters
N.T. Wright

The Kingdom Life: A Practical Theology of Discipleship and Spiritual Formation
Keith Meyer

Girl Meets God
Lauren Winner

The Broken Image
Leanne Payne

Setting Love In Order
Mario Bergner

The Jesus I Never Knew
Phillip Yancey

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
Lesslie Newbigin

The Message and the Kingdom
Richard Horsley &Neil Asher Silberman

A Rabbi Talks with Jesus
Jacob Neusner

Transformed Into Fire
Judy Hougen

A Long Obedience in the Same Direction
Eugene Peterson

A Layman Looks at the Lord's Prayer
Phillip Keller

The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person
E. Stanley Jones

The Rest of the Gospel: When the Partial Gospel has Worn You Out
Dan Stone & Greg Smith

Kingdom Come: How Jesus Wants to Change the World
Allen Mitsuo Wakabayashi

Life of the Beloved
Henri Nouwen

Streams of Living Water
Richard Foster

In Christ
A.J. Gordon

The Ragamuffin Gospel
Brennan Manning

Simply Christian
N.T. Wright

Rediscovering the Kingdom
Myles Munroe

Surprised by Hope
N.T. Wright

The Great Omission
Dallas Willard

What's So Amazing About Grace
Phillip Yancey

The Spirit of the Disciplines
Dallas Willard

Knowing Christ Today
Dallas Willard

Abba's Child
Brennan Manning

NOT the Way it's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga

Renovation of the Heart
Dallas Willard

The Challenge of Jesus
N.T. Wright

Hearing God
Dallas Willard

Listening Prayer
Leanne Payne

A Traveler Toward the Dawn: The Spiritual Journey of John Eagan
edited by William J. O'Malley

The Irresistable Revolution
Shane Claiborne

Wounds That Heal
Stephen Seamands

Experiencing Father's Embrace
Jack Frost

Wired For Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Mind
William M. Struthers

Present Perfect
Greg Boyd

The Sacred Romance
Brent Curtis & John Eldredge

Blue Like Jazz
Donald Miller

TrueFaced
Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol, & John Lynch

Becoming Human
Jean Vanier

The Divine Conspiracy
Dallas Willard


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And that's all for now! Plenty, I'm sure, though I don't doubt I'll add a few more to that list before this season ends, as well as take plenty off after reading them. Though I didn't list those books in any order other than how they're currently arranged on my bookshelf, if you know anything about them you may have seen a few themes emerge. For one, they're almost all books that will make a person think. A good percentage of them are thick, often difficult reads in which you need to follow the author's train of thought the whole way through in order to catch the full weight of his or her beliefs and convictions. That's certainly not going to make both reading and processing them an easy task, but one of the giftings God has given me is the ability to synthesize a lot of information, especially in areas I'm passionate about, and then to share it in a relevant and coherent manner. This will be the deepest testing of that gifting yet.

But to make a process like that worthwhile, you have to have a mission, a purpose, something to gain or achieve from all that work. This is where you may or may not have spotted some of the other patterns in all those books. With few exceptions, they are all intended to answer a few basic questions I've been asking at ever deepening levels over this past year and a half, questions that have been driving me deeper and deeper in a search for understanding what it is I'm here for and how my lifelong faith in Christianity intersects that.

I think, at the most basic level, all of the questions I've been asking have at their core this question: What is the good news of God, and how does it effect the live I live now, here on this earth? Within that question I've been all over the map, as my list of books evidences. I want to know how closely the gospels we preach here in America resemble the gospel that Jesus preached. I want to know what this "Kingdom of God" is that Jesus preached so often about. I want to know how internal transformation looks like, what I need to be transformed into, and how it happens. I want to learn how to live life in the Presence of God, in communion with Him, and to make His Presence my heart's home. I want to know what proper mission looks like, what role a person endowed with the very presence and message of God can have amidst those in this world who lack one or both. I want to know what it means to come to life in the life abundant that Jesus said He came to give. I want to know what a disciple is, what one looks and acts like, what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, and what it means to make disciples of all the earth. I want to know.......I want.......I...........

"And this is eternal life, that they know you the only True God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." (John 17:3)