The last page was the best page…

I read The Shack by William P. Young a few weeks ago.  In a book that was at times particularly offensive (God is represented as a woman who resembles Aunt Jemima, all religions are just separate paths to God, etc.), I found an insightful poem on the last page:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries.

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If The Shack had centered on this theme and God’s self-revelation it could have been much more helpful to Christians and Christians-to-be.  I believe that this poem touches on the desires of many in our world today – meaning, beauty, and God behind it all.

Our problem is that we want to find bushes on our own, instead of relying on God through faith in Jesus.  The Shack relies on sentimentalism and speculation rather than the Bible to teach about God, and the two do not exactly mesh.  Please be careful!

A full review of the book (by Tim Challies) is here.

Thanks for reading!

Mickey

Do you own your Bible?

It’s taken a while for me to get this link up, but here is an interesting post on Challies.com from Mortimer Adler’s book How to Read a Book. I read this book last summer after hearing John Piper list it as one of the books that has had the greatest impact on his life, and I highly recommend it to the compulsive reader and the occasional skimmer alike!

Check out Tim’s post here: Beef and Beefsteaks

Do you own your Bible?