Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands

This book, one of many by Paul Tripp* written to help Christians be more Christ-like, is actually one of the most uplifting, challenging, encouraging, and practical books of this type that I can remember ever reading. (Don't worry, Tim Chester, if you're reading this, which is highly unlikely - you're still way up there.) My dad lent it to me months ago and I've been reading it very slowly but progressively** so as to carefully and meditatively digest its wise, helpful, gospel-centred insights.

   There is so much excellent stuff in here that I can't and won't discuss or overview it all; I simply exhort Christian readers to slowly and progressively digest this book. Tripp knows the nature of the human heart as well as he knows the glory of the gospel, and he is excellent at helping us focus on Jesus so we can navigate our own and others' brokenness so as to allow the Holy Spirit's work of sanctification to be seen and delighted in. This book is, technically, written as a guide for Christian leaders to help them model personal holiness and to counsel and disciple others in their communities, but as Tripp points out, all Christians are called to strive for holiness and to speak the gospel in encouragement and rebuke to one another to keep us all in the body of the church; so both elements of the practical advice given in the book should I think be applicable to any maturing Christian. Tripp writes clearly and powerfully, reminding us of our own need of God's work in us to make us holy, reminding us of the beautiful redemptive truth that we know in Christ, helping us diagnose blind spots in our attitude to personal sin, helping us develop meaningful relationships with other Christians so that we have a more-than-superficial understanding of their lives that enables us to see not just surface sin but the deeper struggles warring in their hearts, helping us develop effective conversational methods to work through our and others' understandings of these heart struggles and where we can turn the gospel light onto it to show them up as redundant and sinful, helping us establish personal and relational and church-community accountability for processes of change as we and others are reminded of our identity in Christ and soften our hearts to allow the Holy Spirit to work in us for Christlike change.****

   This is a book that I feel has substantively sharpened my attitude to my own sin and that of others around me, has substantively re-oriented my proper and clear thinking about my identity as a Christian and its implications, has substantively empowered me with a practical toolkit for loving and knowing and speaking truth to and seeing real heart change in other Christians (and likewise helped me in responding to all the same) as we, together, as a church, seek to put old ways behind us, seek Christlikeness; a collective process involving lots of broken pieces, but we are in the hands of a God who can - and does - do great things using weak unreliable sinners. Including fixing them, bit by bit.*****

* A lovely and godly man with, if I remember, a delightfully Ned Flanders-esque moustache - I met him when I was about 11, as he was in the UK visiting various churchfolk, including my dad.

** Like, seriously, reading half a chapter or a chapter and then having to sit and think and pray about it and then do something else so I don't let any of the wisdom leak out. This book has been with me to Manchester, London, Catalonia, Amsterdam, Derby; to a beach and a campsite and a countryside villa, to the houses of four different friends, to two pubs and three parks and six or seven cafés; finally finishing it this morning in Marmaduke's - one of my favourite little places in Sheffield - also incidentally the last place I met up with Rowan, who's probably up there with my dad and Tim Chester as men who have helped me mature as a Christian; it seems fitting that I finished this there as we used to talk a lot about what we were reading. Needless to say, the book, while it wasn't in mint condition when my dad lent it to me, is now fairly battered and stained. The worst damage was done on the ferry from Calais to Dover during my return from the Netherlands - the book was in my secondary rucksack with a bottle of water which leaked all over it, and while it dried out fine and none of the pages have run, the top third of the book's pages throughout are forever bent together in a rigid wavy deformity. There's also a considerable coffee ring on the front cover, from when I couldn't find a coaster for my bedside table and didn't realise how drippy the mug was. Blemishes like these add character though.***

*** Needless personal digressions like this are what make these posts sometimes go on for so long, and yet also what make them so easy/fun to write. Structured writing takes intensive thought. When the stakes are low enough to allow it, I much prefer aiming generally at a cluster of ideas and reflections and allowing my brain to burp out as much as it can be bothered - needless digressions and all.

**** There are also several quite extensive and really practically helpful appendices about 'data gathering' and 'homework' (basically strategies for working out and working through and working to change what's going on in sinful hearts).

***** Note: I'm on about progressive sanctification here, not salvation generally. #theology!

the Snowman

This book, a wordless (yes) children's Christmas classic from Raymond Briggs, is another that I feel a bit iffy about writing a blog post about, not because it's so short (I've read a few short things on here) but because it has literally no words in the actual content of the book. But alas, I find myself a month on from the last post on here, without having finished any more actual substantive books - this is largely because of the ongoing writing project I mentioned in my previous post, as well as having started back at uni (two jobs, a part-time postgraduate degree, several churchy or extracurricular or activism-ish endeavours, a social life, eating and sleeping and also enjoying TV - this combination does not allow a huge amount of time for recreational reading, sadly), and also because the one substantive book I was recently getting more of a groove into (Spinoza's Ethics, if you must know, which makes the following anecdotal excuse for postlessness quite roundly ironic) was in a bag of mine which was stolen by a drug dealer who crashed a party I was at in Manchester a couple of weeks ago.*

   So as an excuse for a post, and also because despite the immense cultural impact of this particular snowman I had somehow never seen or read it, I seized the opportunity (it's a birthday present for my sister, and being a book made of child-style cardboard, was able to be pre-read without a trace) - and you know what, it's pretty good. The whole story is told through the medium of pencil crayon drawings evocative of 1970s childhood nostalgia - all toast and wellies and fireplaces, when winters were genuinely snowy and snow was genuinely magical, when you had easy access to actual lumps of coal with which to demark facial features and buttons upon any snowmen built, when, let's face it, kids actually built snowmen.** Simpler times. The Good Old Days. Whatever.

   The actual story is as follows [SPOILERS]: boy builds snowman, boy goes to bed, boy wakes up in the night to see snowman moving about, boy invites magically-living snowman inside, shows it a variety of hot (oh no!) and cold (oh yes!) and funny (haha!) items therein, boy is then led outside by snowman - who seizes the boys hand and flies off dangerously into the night, in what can either be taken as a bizarre exploratory abduction or a glorious flight of youthful imagination (probably the latter), snowman returns boy home, boy goes back to bed, can't sleep due to excitement about the occurrence, goes outside at sunrise to discover a melted snowman.

   For what it is, a wordless book of pure nostalgic imagination, it is actually brilliant - its status as a classic should probably attest to that. There's a purity in its simplicity, it's the kind of story that a small child who can't quite confidently read yet could fully engage with and be absolutely spellbound by, and for that, big thumbs up. Despite how flippant and digressive this post has been (aren't they all though), don't think I don't know this book would be a perfect wintertime delight for kids - indeed, one to stoke and spark their love of both alternative methods of storytelling and old-school play, two of the finest imagination-pumps in existence.

On that note, if you're a six-year-old or younger reading this, go outside!***

* Upon realising this, I was annoyed about losing the book but also amused that such an item had been, if only as part of a bag-to-chuck-other-stolen-stuff-in type deal, stolen, and wondered if its new owner would get round to seeing what Baruch de Spinoza had to say about God and metaphysics and inner peace and whatnot. Whatever the case, it turned up stashed in a cupboard the day after, and is still in Manchester. The whole debacle has made me slightly wary of getting stuck into any other of the several interesting books I currently have on the go, lest they meet a similar fate. Key lessons here are probably not to leave your bag in the kitchen of a party where there are people you don't know, as some of them may turn out to be party-crashing super-shifty dealers (we weren't to know), but also probably don't take philosophy books to those kinds of parties. Even if it's only for reading on the lonely train ride home.

** I mean, they still do, but have you seen them? Calvin and Hobbes would despair. Kids these days get cold hands after constructing a cylindrical lump any taller than a foot or two, whinge out and finish quickly by sticking a carrot, a twig, two small stones and a flatcap on said lump, and whisk back inside to warm their fingers up on a games console. I blame global warming - there's just not enough snow to make it worthwhile anymore.

*** Or read a book!