Honest. Humble. Hilarious. Hopeful.
Raw. Revealing.
Insightful. Beautiful.
Nadia Bolz-Weber's book, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint, is all of those things.
The title comes from the insulting term sometimes used by critics to refer to female preachers and pastors. The book, from the very first word, is (in the publisher's words) a "messy, beautiful, prayer-and-profanity laden narrative about an unconventional life of faith."
Don't touch it if you're easily offended. Don't open it if you have trouble finding God in unexpected places. Don't read it if you are unwilling to be challenged, stretched, and blessed to hear God's Word and see him work in new ways, with head-tilting (and sometimes head-spinning) results.
On the other hand, those may be the very reasons you should read this book, maybe even devour it, as I did. You may experience in its pages, as I did, "the redeeming, destabilizing love of a surprising God." You may laugh, as I did, at the author's knack for honesty and clarity, shown in such statements as, "I'm a lousy Christian, and I hope that's good enough since our call to be compassionate has to include ourselves, too." And you may even cry, as I sometimes did, at the beauty and grace in her stories of House for All Sinners and Saints, the church she started in 2008.
It is a wonderful book that I was preparing to pass on to others from the moment I started reading it.
No comments:
Post a Comment