Reading at just the right moments...

This is my 1000th blog post, and it seems fitting to devote it to books that have changed my life or my way of thinking.

Have you ever read a book that came at just the right time in your journey - speaking into the places you are occupying in ways that astonish you with their piercing depths and insights?

It has happened to me a number of times over the years.

The moment I was searching desperately to understand if there really was a Holy Spirit, and what difference that made anyway, and my then pastor sent me to the bookstore on a mission to buy a book titled, "Surprised by the Power of the Holy Spirit". I devoured that book in three days, making notes in bold red pen in the margins. Talking back to the chapters in comments at the end. Underlining, circling, and looking up every scriptural reference that Jack Deere, the author made.

The moment when I opened the pages of Renee Altson's "Stumbling Towards Faith" and couldn't close it until I'd finished. When, in the midst of a severe depression, where I went to bed each night and prayed that the Lord would let me die in my sleep that night, I discovered that I was not in fact nearly as alone as I felt. I discovered that there were others out there who were asking the same deeply intense questions as I was.

It happened again while I was traveling at the beginning of this year.

Before I'd left, on the basis of a recommendation of a blog I read (ysmarko), I'd ordered a book online to take along on my trip.

"Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion" by Sara Miles rocked my world. It spoke to the deep themes I was thinking about and beginning to work through as I traveled. In that way that can only be ordained by God, in just the moment I would be working through a topic or idea, the next words that Miles wrote would speak directly to those thoughts.

I'm presently on my second trip through "Take This Bread" and I'm finding the same thing happening again. The Lord is using a book that few in the circles I grew up in would even consider reading. A book written by a radical left-wing lesbian journalist, who walked into a church one day, took communion, and met Jesus, and now spends her days feeding the poor through a food pantry around the altar of the church where she first took communion.

Tonight, I located online several articles by Miles, all of which are written in the strikingly poignant style of her book, and all of which are speaking to things I'm thinking about these days as well. I'll link to each article and tell you what part of my thoughts they're speaking to.

By Water and By Fire (thoughts on baptism)

Ashes and Dust (thoughts from Ash Wednesday 2007)

Like Lambs Among Wolves (thoughts on violence)

Anatomy of Reconciliation (thoughts on a broken world)

Miles' book begins with the following two paragraphs, and I can't recommend strongly enough that you pick up a copy and make your way through her thoughts on bread and food and war and prayer.

One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, at a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans - except that up until that moment I'd lead a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything.

Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I'd scorned and work I'd never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer at all but actual food - indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized that what I'd been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.

And so I did. I took communion, I passed the bread to others, and then I kept going, compelled to find new ways to share what I'd experienced.