Some of the best writing, the writing that is most heartfelt and true, finds it source in life’s deepest valleys. This is exactly the case with Michael Kelley’s Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal.

Wednesdays were normal days for the Kelley family until they received the shocking news that their son Joshua, just two years old, had been diagnosed with leukemia. The normal life of this normal family was suddenly turned all around and upside down as their little boy battled for his life. The happy ending is that he won that battle and today is a healthy and growing boy. The journey, the subject of this book, is all the Wednesdays and other days between the diagnosis and the declaration that he is cancer-free at last. 

There are books that are good at asking questions and books that are good at answering them but not so many that bring strength to both questions and answers. The joy of Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal is that it does both well, rather a rare combination. While this book has several notable strengths, allow me to point to just a couple of them.

I guess I’ve made my love of baseball well-known around these parts. Just as a sampler, I’ve reviewed a biography of Albert Pujols, I’ve interviewed Ben Zobrist, and a long time ago, back when the site was in its infancy, I gave a short example of why I love the game. Baseball remains the best sport around and watching it is one of my favorite pasttimes. This weekend a reader of the site mentioned that R.A. Dickey, a ballplayer and Christian to boot, had released a memoir. I picked it up and read it over the weekend. I’m glad I did.

Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball is one of the most gut-honest sports memoirs I’ve read. Dickey’s life has been anything but easy, both on the field and off. Born into a turbulent home, he tumbled up more than he grew up, enduring divorce and excruciating sexual abuse. A high school friend shared the gospel with him and from a young age he professed faith in Jesus Christ. Here is how he describes this experience:

So on a fall Friday in an upstairs bedroom on Walnut Drive in Nashville, Tennessee, I get on my knees with Bo and his mom and ask Christ to come into my life. I tell Him that I believe He is the son of God, and I want to trust Him with my life. I secretly ask for forgiveness for what seems like a galaxy of sins and guilt and shame. When I am done speaking, the room is completely still. I feel relief. A lightness. It's not the sky opening up, or angels singing, or lightning bolts striking the big magnolia in the front yard. Nothing grand and God-like. It's much more subtle, like the best deep breath you could ever take.

Dickey began to show great promise in two areas—his proficiency with the English language and his athletic ability. These twin strengths took him to the University of Tennessee where he played baseball for the Volunteers and majored in English literature.

I had tried reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead at least three or four times, but without success, which is to say, without completing it. I would read twenty pages, or even eighty, and eventually put the book aside and forget to return to it. Gilead is wonderfully written, so it is not that I was trying to slog through dense or poorly-written text. Far from it! It is for good reason that this book received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. For some reason I just couldn’t get into it far enough to take it to completion.

A few months ago I came to the realization that some books are better heard than read. I don’t know why this came as a shock to me, but for some reason it did. Now that I have discovered the beauty of a well-read audio book, I wanted to revisit Gilead to see if I would enjoy listening to it. Earlier this week, before I set out on a nine-hour drive from Toronto to Louisville, I loaded up the book on my iPhone and listened to it all the way from the north to the south. It was sublime.

Gilead is a novel in the form of a long letter, a memoir of sorts, written by John Ames and addressed to his young son. Ames, a pastor in small-town Iowa, married late in life, was blessed with a son of his old age, and in his declining years shares his “begats.” He wants to give his son a record of his own life and a knowledge of family history. But as Ames writes this memoir, adding to it day-by-day, Jack Ames Boughton, a character from his past enters his life and he finds himself in a kind of spiritual crisis.

Let me borrow a paragraph from Wikipedia that aptly summarizes the heart of the book:

Although there is action in the story, its mainspring lies in Ames’ theological struggles on a whole series of fronts: with his grandfather’s engagement in the Civil War, with his own loneliness through much of his life, with his brother’s clear and his father’s apparent loss of belief, with his father’s desertion of the town, with the hardships of people’s lives, and above all with his feelings of hostility and jealousy towards young Boughton, whom he knows at some level he has to forgive. Ames’ struggles are illustrated by numerous quotations from the Bible, from theologians (especially Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion) and from philosophers, especially the atheist Feuerbach, whom Ames greatly respects.

It is strange and unexpected—and delightful, of course—to find so much theological content in a novel that achieved such widespread acclaim and popularity. Ames does not wrestle with minor matters here. Rather, he wrestles with profound and important truths, looking to the great theologians of days past to reflect on the nature of forgiveness, the sin of envy, and so much more. This character of John Ames is wonderfully-crafted in all his confidences and questionings, all his strengths and weaknesses. So too is young Jack Boughton, who serves as something of a foil by forcing Ames to work out his theology in real life.

All of this comes from the pen of a skilled author, who is able to bring a liveliness to the text, who is able to use the English language as powerfully as any contemporary author I’ve read. Gilead really does exemplify writing at its best—an intriguing story, fascinating characters, the proclamation of truth, and beautiful writing. I just had to listen to it to fully appreciate it.

You can buy Gilead from Amazon in print or Kindle format or buy it at Audible in audio format.

You may have noticed that over the past few weeks I have been reviewing books that come from a little bit off the beaten path, so to speak. I have been reading, enjoying and reviewing books that have come our way from lesser-known Christian publishers. It turns out there are some fresh, excellent titles coming from some of these smaller publishers.

From Credo House Publishers and author Steve DeWitt comes Eyes Wide Open, a book about learning to enjoy God in everything. Let me say it from the outset: this is a really good book. I enjoyed it thoroughly and benefited in very specific ways from the time I spent reading it. Let me tell you about just one of the most important things I learned.

The place to begin when considering the topic is with a question like this one: Why do I enjoy _________ so much? You can fill in that blank with a kind of food or a form of art or even with a beautiful landscape. Why do you enjoy that thing so much? What draws you to it? What does it do in you and for you?

DeWitt wants to help you appreciate those things even more than you do now, and in order to do that, you need to understand beauty and joy and wonder from a biblical perspective. You need to know why God made this world as wondrously beautiful as he did. The author’s reflections on this topic, more than anything else in the book, have resounded in my mind and heart.

Beauty was created by God for a purpose: to give us the experience of wonder. And wonder, in turn, is intended to lead us to the ultimate human expression and privilege: worship. Beauty is both a gift and a map. It is a gift to be enjoyed and a map to be followed back to the source of the beauty with praise and thanksgiving.

This was tremendously helpful to me, this idea that beauty is meant to evoke wonder. Wonder, in turn, is meant to lead us to worship. The analogy of the map is helpful—beauty is meant to point us to the source of all beauty. It’s a simple progression: Beauty to wonder to worship.

If books dealing with death are to be a regular part of my reading diet, so too are books on missions. I don’t mean missional living or the mere theory of mission work, but books describing real work on the real mission field. In Reckless Abandon, David Sitton of To Every Tribe Ministries has given us a good one as he recounts a lifetime of experiences among the most difficult to reach peoples.

While Reckless Abandon is certainly not less than a book of stories from the field, it offers significantly more than that. As Sitton recounts his experiences in Papua New Guinea, he weaves into it his own philosophy of missions, one that calls for (you guessed it), reckless abandon. He defines the term like this: “To give oneself unrestrainedly to the cause of Jesus and the promotion of His kingdom without concern for danger and the consequences of that action.” His life models just that.

That kind of recklessness and abandon begins with an understanding of the beauty and power of the gospel. He says it well: “The gospel is so valuable that no risk is unreasonable. Life is gained by laying it down for the gospel. If I live, I win and get to keep on preaching Christ. If I die, I win bigger by going directly to be with Christ and I get to take a few tribes with me.”

His life story exemplifies that level of commitment. Converted as a young man, he very quickly determined that he was being called to foreign missions, and not only that, but was being called to go where no one had gone before. He wanted to be like Paul, not building on another man’s foundation but laying the foundation himself. He soon found himself in Papua New Guinea, trekking through the jungle, approaching tribes that had never even seen even a single caucasian man before. Wherever he went he proclaimed the gospel. Needless to say, his life has not been one of ease, but the Lord has used him powerfully to save the lost and to inspire others to follow in his footsteps.

When he was still just a young man, Jonathan Edwards wrote out a series of resolutions and among them he included these words: “Resolved, to think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death.” Edwards saw value in thinking about death, and not just death in the abstract, but his own death and the circumstances which might surround it. Martin Luther would have agreed that this was a good idea. He wrote, “We should familiarize ourselves with death during our lifetime, inviting death into our presence when it is still at a distance and on the move.”

I guess this may sound morbid to some and especially so in a culture in which we flee from death and live in denial of its power and inevitability, but I have to throw in my lot with those giants of the faith. I try to make books on death a regular part of my reading diet and find that they always challenge me.

Death is the subject of Mike Wittmer’s little gem of a book The Last Enemy. This is a realistic, powerful and hopeful book. He gets right to the point and begins like this:

You are going to die. Take a moment to let that sink in. You are going to die. One morning the sun will rise and you won’t see it. Birds will greet the dawn and you won’t hear them. Friends and family will gather to celebrate your life, and after you’re buried they’ll return to the church for ham and scalloped potatoes. Soon your job and favorite chair and spot on the team will be filled by someone else. The rest of the world may pause to remember—it will give you a moment of silence if you were rich or well known—but then it will carry on as it did before you arrived.

Death will, indeed, take us all. The world will move on and we will be gone. But, of course, death is not the end which means that each of us needs to be prepared to face it and to face what comes beyond its dark door. This is what Wittmer seeks to do in this book, to prepare us to face death with hope and strength and confidence.

I love writing book reviews and I love reading them. Since I cannot possibly read and review all of the interesting books out there, I've decided to put together some occasional round-ups of reviews written by other writers. Here are a few notable links I've collected over the past few weeks.

The World-Tilting Gospel by Dan Phillips - review by Douglas Wilson. “Phillips begins with the facts of creation and sin, moves on to God’s plan of redemption for us, discusses what justification and regeneration mean (and why they are important), and then concludes with a detailed and very helpful discussion of sanctification and Christian living. If there are any pastors who are looking for a good introductory book for new Christians and/or new members, this book ought to be on their short list. For any older Christians who are mentoring younger ones, this would also be a good book to read together.”

The Transforming Power of the Gospel by Jerry Bridges - review by David Steele. “Bridges continues his winning ways in his newest book, The Transforming Power of the Gospel. The foundation of his approach is the holiness of God. Building upon this sure foundation, Bridges carefully constructs a framework that accurately reflects the gospel - a gospel that truly transforms lives.”

Bloodlines by John Piper - review by Jeffrey Waddington. “This is a wide-ranging and searching volume that addresses a perennial problem. At the end of the day, the only satisfactory answer to racism is the reconciling blood of the Lord Jesus Christ and the integrating ministry of the Holy Spirit that glorifies God the Father. When we are reconciled to the Father by the Son through the Spirit, this spills over into reconciliation with our fellow human beings. Piper does not pretend to have offered the last word on this subject. But it is a powerful word.”

Journeys of Faith by Robert Plummer, et al. - review by Carl Trueman. “Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of this book is the passion with which the authors write. Those whose idea of theological conversation is simply to assert the relative nature of all truth, or at least all of your truth, will find themselves irritated on almost every page. The contributors to this book believe in truth and, refreshingly, believe it so strongly that they think they have each moved to positions that are better - more true - than those they once held.”

Loving the Way Jesus Loves by Phil Ryken - review by David Murray. “You will come away from his book softened, mellowed, calmed, entranced, even inspired, and all by an eloquently stunning exposition of love. As you read, you gently and enjoyably swing between praise: ‘Thank you, Jesus, for loving me like that!’ to prayer: ‘Help me, Jesus to love you; and to love like you.’ Or I could easily conceive of an unbeliever reading it and praying, ‘Lord Jesus, please love me like this.’”

Is it satire or is it parody? Whatever it is, Douglas Wilson's Evangellyfish must be unique in the Christian market. This is a book, a novel, first serialized online but now re-edited and formally published, that provides a scathing indictment of evangelicalism. It does it well.

Of course if you know evangelicalism you know that it isn't all that difficult to satirize. What you dream up as a hilarious punchline is the kind of thing you'll see next month on the shelves of the local Christian bookstore or in the advertisements for the nearby megachurch. It makes me wonder, why haven't more people written books like this?

Evangellyfish revolves around Chad Lester, a massively successful megachurch pastor who makes Bill Clinton look positively chaste. He is loved and adored by his legions of devoted fans and by the millions who read his hopelessly shallow books. He drives a flashy sports car and has a massive home and a girlfriends all across the city. He suddenly finds himself embroiled in a sex scandal which is shocking only because this time his accuser is a man.

Laboring near Lester is John Mitchell, also a pastor, but of a small, conservative church. He has no real following and drives an old, beat-up car that is shedding parts. Though he may be a little bit of a legalist at times, he is a genuine and caring pastor who toils in obscurity. He is representative of any number of really normal pastors. The lives of these two men, and so many others, are thrown together as the details of the scandal unfold and explode. As is the case with such scandals, the facts mean nothing when compared to the lurid details.

Allow me to make a few observations about the book.

First, I found that the book was more about "them" than "us." What I mean is that Wilson appears to be satirizing the run-of-the-mill, cliched, program-driven megachurch. At least that is how I read it. I enjoyed the story, but didn't feel like it really sucker-punched me the way I had expected it to. I wanted Wilson to aim at me as well because I'm pretty sure there is a lot of foolishness that I am blind to as well. There were a few of those digs, but not as many was I would have liked.

Right there are the top of the New York Times list of nonfiction bestsellers is The Vow by Kim and Krickitt Carpenter. This book was published by B&H Books (a Christian publisher) twelve years ago, so what is it doing at the top of this week’s list? Well, 4 years before that the authors signed a deal for the movie rights to this story and after all these years that movie has finally hit the big screen. A new edition of the book has been published to coincide with the film and it has raced right to the top of the list.

I have not seen the movie and neither do I intend to, so this is a review of only the book. From what I hear, the film is only very loosely based on the broad outline of the story; not only is it a poor movie according to the reviews, but it also ignores the Christian moorings that are so important to the real-life characters.

So what is The Vow all about? Kim and Krickitt Carpenter had been married for just 10 weeks when they were in a serious accident in which Krickitt suffered traumatic head injuries. When she woke from her coma she had no recollection of her husband and no recollection of ever having been married to him. Not only that, but her personality was very different; once a sweet and kind person, she was now often angry and frustrated and cruel. But in his marriage vows Kim had promised to remain with her, and that is exactly what he did, suffering deeply as he cared for the wife who no longer knew him and who no longer wanted him. The Vow tells their tale, from dating to marriage to the accident and back to dating as they try to fall in love a second time. It is a stirring story in many ways—an inspirational one that deserves to be told.

Central to The Vow is the Carpenter’s Christian faith. There is never any doubt that this is a distinctly Christian book, meant to make the reader understand that the vows that held this couple together were made before God and that even in the darkest days these two remained accountable to God. They give all credit and glory to God as the one who held them together despite their unique and trying circumstances.

Yet despite all of that, I found myself wishing that this book was just a little bit more. I wanted it to dive deeper into the realities of marriage, to do more to anchor the story in gospel truths—not just “Jesus” but “Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead,” not just marriage as an institution, but marriage as a display of the gospel. The broad outline of the story is so good, but the execution feels dry and inadequate. Marriage is certainly not less than “the vow,” but it is so much more!

Byron Yawn has the ignominious distinction of being the first person to ever invite me to be a keynote speaker at a conference. That was a long time ago, and it seems like an even longer time, but he and I have stayed in touch since then and I was excited to hear of his work on a book titled What Every Man Wishes His Father Had Told Him. I had anticipated that I would be reading a book on fatherhood, but was pleasantly surprised to learn that it is actually far more than that.

It seems notable that I am writing this review on the occasion of my son’s twelfth birthday. It is probable that he is already more than half way to striking out on his own, to marrying, to beginning a family. I've already used up half of my opportunities to teach him what a father ought to teach his son. This is the kind of thought that can very nearly move me to tears; rarely do I feel less up to the task and more dependent on grace than in fatherhood. In that regard this book was both a challenge and a comfort.

What Every Man Wishes His Father Had Told Him is a book of essays more than it is a book that flows easily and logically from the first chapter to the last; the topics are much like the lessons a father will teach his son in that they meander a little bit, wandering from being a son to being a father and a man and a husband. They extend from biblical manhood to sincerity to pornography to having “the talk” with your son, to integrity. Each one is punctuated by wisdom that is sometimes biblical and sometimes, well, just plain practical (At least to my recollection the Bible doesn't comment on why you don't want to cut into a steak to see if it's ready to eat). These are not lessons for me to teach my son; not first and foremost. These are first lessons I need to learn and apply to my own life. There is a proper order to these things.