Well Played, Paul

Anna and I just walked out of Book Man/Book Woman (a.k.a Nashville’s Greatest Used Book Store) with five pounds of books. Anna set the mood for the day by wearing her shirt that says ‘Calvinism: This Shirt Chose Me.’ Therefore, this was the attitude we had with buying books….they chose us.

If you want the truth, that’s how it goes with me normally. I’m a book wanter, not a book buyer. Normally I have a list of books that I want to add to my collection-most of them I haven’t read. All of the items on this list have answered one specific question in my mind: not only will they be special to me at this moment in my life, but they have the potential to grow on me and speak to me in different ways as time goes on. I don’t know why I pretentiously know that they will, but I can’t just look around a book store and pick something up that I’ve never heard of before—there has to be some background knowledge, and some reason why I’m reading it.

This list has been growing in my mind since my Freshman year at GC. I’ve had books on that list that I’ve wanted to read for two years. This is where the Calvinism part comes in: I always see specific books on the list at specific times and they always mean so much to me for that specific time period. And if they’re on the list, I know they’re ‘good enough’ to speak to me later. As we walked around the bookstore that made use of twenty wall alcoves besides shelves that seemed to go up forever, doubly stacked with books (books behind books, books on top of books), I perused the fiction section, the religion section, the mystery section…before settling back into the fiction section. And who do I see starting back at me right across from the beautifully bound Jane Austen books? Anne Lamott!
She chose me…and I’m excited to read Traveling Mercies and Further Thoughts on Faith.

Anna kept coming around the corners of the shelves with books containing Mark Twain and L. M. Montgomery. Perfect.

All of this made me think of scripture, and my slight obsession with Paul after taking Pauline Epistles in the spring. I’m currently reading Paul: A Novel….basically a strung together account of his life right before and then after his conversion and calling to the Gentiles. I really like this book because it encompasses the theology of Paul in areas such as the Torah, the status of people, Jews and Gentiles….even though the whereabouts of Paul are so heavily debated. Each chapter is written by a different person that was around him at a different part of his life: Luke, Titus, Prisca.

I thought of Paul because, after rereading Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, I started thinking about our repainting of the Christian faith. So much of Paul’s ministry was the ‘casting in a new light’ of parts of the Torah and repainting snippets of truth Paul found that was held by non-Jews: telling people that they knew of God because they saw what was outside them in creation. In Paul’s opinion, these people had experienced the God of Israel and they were completely non-Jewish (sacrificing to the god of the games and the god of this and that) just because they could see creation!

This repainting of the Christian faith includes reading books by Anne Lamott and what she thinks about grace, something I’ve asked God to help me wrap my mind around. Grace, for me, is God calling us out again, even though we screwed up the first time. Being called out to be pure, to live life abundantly, to choose God….every day