pat loughery

If you haven’t read Blue Like Jazz, put away your computer, rush down to a decent bookstore or at least go visit Bean Books and order it. Read it. Note, if you read it in bed with your spouse you will wake her or him up, laughing.

Searching for God Knows What is Don Miller’s second book, and it’s a doozy. I think it’s the best explanation of the Gospel in book form today, and that’s because Don focuses on explaining the gospel as relationship. This book isn’t as playful or silly as the first one, but it’s a lot more focused. Home run, Miller. While you’re at beanbooks, you might as well get this one too. You’ll want to read it next.

Here are a few quotes from Searching for God Knows What to whet your appetite.

“If you happened to be a person who thought they knew everything about God, Jesus would have been completely annoying.”
…
“In my opinion, there are two essential problems with believing God is somebody He isn’t. The first problem is that it wrecks your life, and the second is that it makes God look like an idiot”
…
“What if the economy we are really dealing with in life, what if the language we are really speaking in life, what if what we really want in life is relational?

Now this changes things quite a bit, because if the gospel of Jesus is just some formula I obey in order to get taken off the naughty list and put on the nice list, then it doesn’t meet the deep need of the human condition, it doesn’t interact with the great desire of my soul, and it has nothing to do with the hidden (or rather, obvious) language we are all speaking. But if it is more, if it is a story about humanity falling away from the community that named it, and an attempt to bring humanity back to that community, and if it is more than a series of ideas but rather speaks directly into this basic human need that we are feeling, then the Gospel of Jesus is the most relevant message in the history of mankind.”