This book by Denver's most famous Lutheran pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, is a collection of autobiographical vignettes of the complexities and difficulties of the real rough Christian life as experienced through her pastoral career. People are broken and messy - they will disappoint you, confuse you, sin against you, requiring love and forgiveness in amounts that do not come naturally to humans outside the activity of the Holy Spirit. In this book Nadia skips through a series of problematic encounters that she's had, wrestling with God over how best to encourage or rebuke others as much as wrestling with God over how much we might need an encouragement or a rebuke that we're unwilling to currently hear. She writes with a down-to-earth lucidity that is extremely readable, and her way of discussing both practical and spiritual matters is so deft that one easily gets a sense of the shapes of situations discussed. It is a book that makes you deeply grateful for God's grace, as it reminds us just how much all of us need it. Reminding me somewhat of Dave Tomlinson's How to be a Bad Christian, though with more emphasis on pastoral care than on individual behaviours and attitudes. I'd recommend this a solid resource for any Christians feeling somewhat stultified in their faith and relationships, as it makes a powerful wake-up call to the boundary-pushing certainty-defying modus operandi of our God's grace.
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