The Book: Shepherding a Child’s Heart, by Tedd Tripp

The Story: This really is just another parenting book. The “twist” on this one, I guess, is that Tedd Tripp claims that his method of parenting is firmly based in the Bible and is the technique that will guide your kid down the “straight and narrow” from the time s/he is very young.

What I Thought: Parenting is weird because you’ll read half a dozen books on parenting techniques/ideas in a true pursuit of “figuring it out” and then really just feel out what works best for you and go with that. I have taken a lot of tips and pointers from parenting books, but I have always had this idea that it was a kind of “take what you want and leave the rest” proposition.

Guys, there was nothing here for me to take.

I think I picked up this book because I liked the title and the blurb on the back. The idea is that we can never “fix” our kids without knowing their heart issues. We should be able to kind of get to the heart of their issues and work from there instead of just disciplining behavior or talking to them about their actions. This seems true and right to me, and not just for kids. When I take time to see my husband’s heart on a matter instead of just getting mad at what he’s doing, things seem to go more smoothly too. I guess I thought that this book would talk a lot about how to get to those heart issues and helping the kid work through them. I was pretty wrong.

Tedd Tripp’s (what is with the extra D anyway?) idea is that at the heart of every misbehavior is sin. Dirty, evil, rotten sin. Tripp’s “biblical plan of child rearing” is to first communicate why what the kid did is sinful and wrong and then get rid of the sin. And apparently the Bible says that the ONLY way to get rid of that is by spanking. Like… he started spanking his kids when they were around 8 months old. EIGHT MONTHS. I’m not a doctor or anything, but I’m pretty sure that the “cause and effect” area of a child’s brain isn’t fully formed at 8 months…. right? He says that if you fail to spank you are saying you don’t love your kids enough to raise them the way that God said… or something. What?

There is just so much wrong with this that I am not going to even go through it point by point. I think that the constant spanking was my huge turn off (he spanked his kids from the time they were infants until they were 12-13….. every.single.time they disobeyed their parents), but it was more than that. I just felt like Tedd Tripp really thinks that talking to kids about what they do wrong and then spanking them is it, is the whole goal of parenting. To teach our kids that all this stuff that they do is wrong and that they need to first honor their parents and, in that, honor God. This just feels… wrong… to me. Really, really wrong. He kind of sets up this relationship early on that, “I’m your parent, therefore your adversary,” and I will take the opposite approach with my kids. “We are family, we are in this together. I am your parent, so I will teach you things, but you’re my kid, so you’ll teach me things too.”

I guess that was the whole problem… Tedd Tripp’s method may work for some people. Whatever. I’m too soft/too much of a hippy for that.

The other thing is that when he wrote this Tedd Tripp’s kids were all grown and out of the house. Maybe he forgot that parenting- being in the thick of it- is much different than looking back later. He just kept saying he did the communicate/spank for every time his kids disobeyed or acted out. What about little stuff? What about just normal KID stuff? I think that there is a possibility that he was just too far separated to remember what parenting little kids is really like….

Anyway, I could go on and on, but I’ll leave it at this: this book set wrong with me like very few books have. While I was comfortable with the blurb on the back, that was about it for me. The rest of it felt very harsh and wrong. Yuck.

Conclusion: I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. Ever.

The Book: The Shack, by William P. Young

The Story: Mac’s daughter is kidnapped on his watch. He is watching the kids play while they are camping, there is an accident and his youngest daughter goes missing. By the time she is found in a small shack in the woods, she is dead and her murderer has fled.

Mac and his family deal with the kidnapping and death in very different ways.

One day, Mac receives a note in his mailbox telling him to come to the shack where his daughter was found. Thinking it may be her killer, he packs up for a final showdown. What he finds at the shack is quite different. Quite different indeed.

What I Thought: I know that this is another craze I was totally late for. When this first came out it was one of those really talked about books. I’ve had a few rough run ins with popular Christian fiction, and so I always just kind of rolled my eyes at this one. Earlier this year, not one but two of my very trusted friends recommended this book to me. One friend even bought it for me. He said that I would love it and went on and on.

Honestly, I feel like I may have read a different book.

This was the cheesiest thing I have ever, ever read. It is a Lifetime movie waiting to happen. For a vast majority of the book I could even picture the white haze around the outside of the frame, like one of those strange “inspirational” pictures of an angel sitting by your bed or something. It was just one cliche after another after another. I almost felt embarrassed to be reading it.

I did enjoy the first part, when it was kind of this mystery. I thought that the guy’s life was interesting and I think that I would have liked the book better if it had just been about how he, as a Christian, dealt with the loss of his daughter and then forgiving her killer. I just feel like William Young could have conveyed his message just as well without diving off the cheesiness cliff. (Yum! Cheesiness cliff?! I love it!)

The one part of Mac’s vision that I really enjoyed was the idea of God as a big black lady. Again, I think that there is a lot of stereotyping going on here, but that’s just a cozy picture and I liked it. I also thought that he thought of a clever way to explain the Trinity, but I think that the cherry pie analogy we were taught in Sunday school was just as good.

I get the idea. I commend it even. It is hard to explain the triune God, and when you can kind of wrap your head around it, it is pretty amazing, and I think that this idea is what motivated William Young. I think that his intentions were good, but is just came off really strange for me. I know that a lot of people talk about this book changing their lives. More power to them, I’m glad that they found something that they really connected with. For me? Not so much.

Conclusion:If you are kind of searching or wondering what the Christian idea of God is, check this out. If you’ve been around Christianity enough to be annoyed by the cheesiness of it all sometimes, skip this. Please.

The Book: Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream, by David Platt

The Story: The subtitle kind of says it all.  This book is all about this goal that we have as Americans: to be successful, comfortable, busy and look great while we’re doing it.  David Platt starts this book by questioning how our faith, as Christians, stacks up against this American Ideal and what we can do to exist here and live a radically devoted lifestyle.

What I Thought: I read this book awhile back, kind of in a rush.  Shaun and I have a small group that meets in our house once a week and we wanted to do a study on a book over the summer.  The idea of reading this one was thrown out there, so I read it to make sure that it was right for our group.  Now we are going through it as a group- discussing one chapter per week.  We have two weeks left.  I say this just to let you know that I kind of have conflicting ideas about this book, based on when I read it alone vs. now discussing it in depth with a number of other people.

The thing is this: David Platt is not the first one to suggest that maybe living in mansions and kicking our ten percent to the church is not enough.  That has kind of been something Christians have struggled with all the way back… we’re talking since day one.  Jesus told a guy to sell his stuff and come and follow him…. and the guy turned away, sad.  Know what I mean?  This is kind of an ancient, ever-present issue.  Even David Platt’s idea isn’t a new one: give your time, energy, money and prayers to people other than yourself.  Live in a way that Christ commands- sacrificially and in a way that tells people “I love Christ therefore I love You” without being annoying.  None of this is new.

The thing that David Platt brings to the table is that he is smack in the middle of it.  He is the head pastor of a mega-church (read: mega-rich-church) in Alabama and one day he kind of realized that while his church may be in love with God, they didn’t live any differently than the rest of the world.  With that thought in his mind, he started writing this book. What he is proposing is great and I walked away feeling challenged.

I have really enjoyed reading this as a group because there are a lot of ideas here that need to be fleshed out together- these ideas about overseas missions, serving at home, giving money, tribal religion, prayer and the Bible.  When I read through it initially, there were several parts that just kind of sat wrong with me.  As we discussed it as a group, I got a better idea of where David was maybe coming from.

There is a lot of meaty stuff here.  For an established Christian who is looking for something “more,” I would recommend this for sure.  For a new or wavering believer, I really just think that there is maybe just to many “iffy” subjects here.  I think that the challenges that David puts forth really do need to be read with real discernment and a background in the Bible.

Conclusion: A great read if you are looking to go deeper in Christianity.  Especially a great read for a small group.

The Book: To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father, by Donald Miller

The Story: When Donald Miller was pretty young, his Dad just walked out on his family.  He was raised mainly by his mom, but had several male influences (including neighbors and his youth pastor) come in and out of his life.  As he grew up and became a Christian, he started thinking about how growing up fatherless has effected his life- specifically his perspective on God.  This book is kind of his reflections on that.

What I Thought: The other day we were at Chic-fl-a (which is my absolute favorite, by the way!) and we heard a man talking to a table full of people and he said something to the effect of, “So if my son misbehaves and I spank him and he continues to do the same thing over and over, do I continue to extend grace over and over? No.  And God is our father and at some point he stops extending grace if we continue to mess up.”  I kind of wanted to go over to him and tell him that no matter how his father failed him and no matter how thin his patience is worn with his son, God is not an earthly father and his grace really does go on and on and on and on.  The God-as-a-father analogy is a tricky one because we all have this notion of what a father is and how that plays out. This book is just the exploration of that very idea.

I call it an “exploration” because it is just that.  There’s nothing groundbreaking here and not even a real conclusion, but more so just a collection of thoughts and experiences that he has had throughout his life.  It is kind of this incomplete thing, and I think that that is why this is not one of Donald Miller’s more popular books, but for those of us who did grow up without a father, it is a pretty good read.

This was marketed more towards men, but as a woman I still got a lot out of it and I think that they have since re-titled and re-released the book for women & men.

Maybe some people that grew up without fathers sat around bemoaning their luck or whatever, but like Donald Miller, I just kind of took it all in stride.  It wasn’t until I got engaged… then married… then had a baby that I really started thinking about how much that had shaped me into the person I am.  When he got old enough to think it through, Donald Miller also realized that the person that he is has been really shaped by his father (or lack thereof).  It was just kind of good to know that someone else is in the same boat.

Conclusion: Not Donald Miller’s best and not life changing, but if you grew up without a dad, I’d say check this out.

The Book: The Oath, by Frank Peretti

The Story: A dude and his wife are out in the woods camping and taking pictures.  Dude gets straight up destroyed.  His wife runs.  She gets back to town and can’t really remember what happened so people head up to check out the situation.  Her husband has been chewed up from the waist up.  Everyone flips out and starts on a bear hunt.  Just so happens that Steve, the eaten-dude’s brother, is a biologist and an expert on bears.  He comes to town to help hunt the bear and eventually takes it down.  No human inside.  Something or someone else has to be responsible.

With the help of one of the city cops (who is a woman, so of course there’s a little bit of romance going on), Steve starts investigating the dark secret history of the town.  Their investigation takes them to the town “crazy”, the pastors, and Harold Bly- the man who owns the town.

What they find blows Steve’s mind entirely.  They end up on a trek through the mountains trying to find answers and save the whole town.

What I Thought: I’m going to spoil this for you because I wish that someone had spoiled it for me.  There is an actual frigging dragon in this book.  Like honest-t0-God fire breathing dragon.

Ugh.

I hate when the back of a book leads me so far astray.  I thought this was going to be a creepy murder mystery.  If there’s going to be sci-fi and dragons I really want to know first.  The first minute I realized that this was a real dragon, I was totally over it.  I made myself finish it, but I was ticked.

The thing is, I loved the first 200 pages or so.  The story was fast paced, I liked the characters and I was totally into it.  I knew that Frank Peretti is a Christian author and that the black marks on people’s hearts and this idea of secrets and so on were an allegory for people’s spiritual state.  It was this big parable.  I’m cool with that.  That didn’t bother me at all.  It’s kind of what I expected, and I was excited to see where he took it.

He threw all subtlety out the window.  The only way to “escape the dragon” was to literally confess your sins to Jesus.  The dragon was Satan and yadda yadda.

Barf.

Conclusion: Please skip this.  There is good Christian Fiction out there and this is not among it.

The Book: A Million MIles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life, by Donald Miller

The Story: Six or seven years ago, Donald Miller kind of rose to Christian stardom after his memoir Blue Like Jazz got super, super popular.  I guess a while later, some guys came to Donald and asked him if he wanted to make the memoir into a movie.  He jumped at the chance.

This book is kind of his journey through that.  Because they involved Donald Miller heavily in the process of writing the movie, he was partly responsible for “editing” his life.  He went to a seminar and did a lot of reading on the important parts of a story: the rising and falling action, the characters, and so on.  At some point, someone tells him that any story is, “A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.”

Donald starts applying these ideas and the principles of a “good story” to his life so that he’ll have something interesting to talk to God about when he gets there.

What I Thought: I jumped on the Donald Miller train way early with Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (which he changed up and later republished as Through Painted Deserts)  and I’ve been following him closely all along.

When I started this book, I felt a little disappointed because the first few chapters sort of re-tell a lot of his story that he told in Blue Like Jazz.  I thought maybe he just needed a few extra bucks and so he was just going to try to rerelease Blue Like Jazz without anyone noticing.  After a few chapters though, it becomes pretty obvious that this is a book unto itself.

The ideas that Donald Miller explores here are kind of convicting and pretty provocative.  He was thinking about what would make his “story” better- how his “character” could be better- and he starts taking the steps that it would take to make that happen.  He bikes across the country.  He hikes the Inca Trail.  He tries to find his estranged father.  He goes out on a limb with the girl he has a crush on. He quits watching so much TV and really starts to live.

I love Donald Miller’s style of writing.  It is conversational and flows beautifully.  He makes me feel “normal” because he struggles with a lot of the same things I do- ego, boredom, contentment.  I just found myself nodding a long so many times.  He hits the nail right on the head.  I hate to say something so cliche as, “this is a life changing book,” but it actually kind of is.  It just offers this new, fresh perspective and I know that I’ll find myself thinking about it for a long time.

Conclusion: I would read Blue Like Jazz before this one, but if you’ve already read that: read this now. We’re talking right now. Go get it. Good stuff.

The Book: Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, by Donald Miller

The Story: Donald Miller grew up in a vaguely Christian environment, going to church and hearing the stories but never quite wrapping his head around it.  This is the story of him fleshing it all out.

He kind of “comes to age” in Oregon and is just kind of this hippy guy and attends Reed college and has friends that he gives strange nicknames to.  He goes to a church that focuses strongly on community and ends up living in a house full of guys.

This book is just about that journey.  He doesn’t go into the deep or very controversial issues, but more so what the Bible says and what that would look like lived out.

What I Thought: Let me preface this by saying I read this book when it first came out and was just blown totally away.  This was when the “emerging church” was just emerging and I thought it was refreshing and amazing and great. By now, that movement has been taken to the extreme.  I think that they started off on the right path and just went too far. I think that this book was maybe the start of that.  I know at the time I was part of a huge Christian community and people were obsessed with it.

That being said, I love Donald Miller’s honesty.  It’s striking.  Most Christian books slap you around a little for not believing and tell you to get into the word and pray. Which is good advice, but it is nice to hear from someone that that’s ok to stumble and we’ve all been there.  He talks a lot about his insecurities, with women and writing and friendships and just life overall. Not only does this make him relatable, it touches a place inside that isn’t frequently touched.  Even with close friends I rarely hear this kind of honesty and it is just nice. That is the part of his character that I really love and admire.

I feel like this book is pretty much a bound blog.  It is just these little sections of rambling on about one topic or another.  The chapters aren’t really cohesive or chronological or anything, so sometimes it becomes a little hard to follow and keep track of what he’s even talking about.

The part that I loved the most the first time I read it and this time was the part where they set up a confession booth at Reed.  People laughed at them, but then when students went in, instead of having to confess their sins, Donald and his friends confessed that as Christians we’ve screwed up and confessed to different occasions and people were truly touched.  I like that story. I love that they were willing to do that and the reactions were priceless I thought.

Conclusion: An interesting take on Christianity, but I think it should be taken with a grain of salt.  Not much balance here…

The Book: Asylum, by Nan Corbitt Allen

The Story: Ian, a little 10 year old kid, is in his house when it catches on fire.  His parents both die in the fire, but he survives.  He moves away to live with his great-aunt Jo.  We kind of find out that his parents were wrecks anyway and just drank all day.  They didn’t have to work because of a car wreck that they had been in before Ian was born.

While he’s staying at Jo’s, a man comes and starts asking questions about the fire.  It freaks Ian out because he thinks that the man is implying that Ian started the fire.  He thinks he’s in big trouble, so he takes off.  He ends up in another state, and accidentally stumbles into this city church.  He eats communion crackers and lives in the room behind the organ.  From this vantage point, he kind of gets to “know” the pastor and the other people who go to the church.

Meanwhile, there is a massive search going on for Ian.  His aunt Jo is searching for him, but so is the man, Frank, who had come to the house asking questions.  It’s revealed that Frank doesn’t have the nicest of motives.  The tension in the book comes from this search: will Jo find him first or Frank?  Or will Ian just run again?

What I thought: I stole this book from my mom’s house during Thanksgiving.  I didn’t realize til I was about halfway through that it was published by Moody and written by someone who has won Dove Awards.  As a general rule, I avoid Christian Fiction- not because I don’t like the message, but because the writing is generally sub-par.  This book was no exception.

While I enjoyed the story, I felt like I would have enjoyed it just as much had I been 10 or 12 years old.  And this isn’t a YA book.  The writing was simple and the dialogue was completely unbelievable.  Even the guy who was supposed to be the really bad guy was fairly polite.

My other issue was how preachy it got at the end.  I am a Christian and I was annoyed at the full sermons that were included.  Ok, we get it.  He’s in a church.  He needs Jesus. Here are some Bible verses.  Ok.

But, like I said, it was a good, fast story.  And I guess that the end was inspiring, although it was 100% predictable. Eh.

Conclusion: Skip this one.