The Inside Out

As if I wasn’t already excited enough about the final season of LOST starting this week, I just finished reading Chris Seay’s book, The Gospel According to LOST. I always saw some relationship between the story lines of the television show and faith, but this book made me think about them in so much more depth! Chris is an awesome story teller and weaves our favorite characters from the show into our beloved stories from the Bible and I love that. Our culture needs things like LOST to engage them. And when we apply them to the Gospel, it just encourages understanding of stories in the Bible. I think churches need to use pop-culture more and be more applicable to this world…and our culture is into things like tv, movies, and music. People can understand God more if we use things that they already understand and it ends in a win-win when church and culture collide! (see Pop Goes the Church by Tim Stevens) Thank goodness there are people like Chris Seay who aren’t afraid to use things like a seriously cool television show to get people into the Word of God. I think that’s awesome.

Quick PS: It only took me 3 days to read this book so if you get on it, you can finish it before the last season starts on Tuesday! GET ON IT!

 

 

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255

I am so damaged by the scene from Haiti. It’s almost like that island is too small for so much damage and loss of life. I hope I am not the only one who didn’t realize how really horrible it was in Haiti, even before the earthquake. It’s like my eyes have been opened to another place that I really didn’t “see” before. I hope I am not the only one changed by this event. And I hope the aftershock of this horrible tragedy is that the whole world gets a reality check. And I hope that when we look back on this awful event all we see is amazing human stories of how one side of an island could go from poverty and destruction, all the way to new life, extreme rejuvenation and return to be so much better than it was before. God really has put us here, in such a time as this, to change this world. And this is an opportunity to do that.

Pray for Haiti.

Give to Haiti.

And let the aftershocks of what happened there stay in your heart and change the way we see places that need our help.

Mark Batterson’s new book PRIMAL, is quite an inspiring read. This book has enough one liners to set Twitter on fire for the next year!  My favorite being:

We complicate Christianity.

I enjoyed his little touches of humor, and his clever stories were enough to keep me reading, but the real draw to this book for me were the simple examples and explanations of how we love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength. It’s the simplicity that Mark is teaching that helped me to understand things so much better, and made me feel so encouraged. We all have times when we feel like our walk is not really, well, cooking with gas, and this book came at just one of those times for me. It’s encouragement has meant the world to me. In the introduction Mark said,

And by the time you reach the last page, I hope you will have done more than rediscover Christianity in its most primal form. I hope you will have gone back to the primal faith you once had. Or more accurately, the primal faith that once had you.

And that is exactly what it has done!