Il mio Idol bello da Pete Gall
Scritto da Michael Cline: 2 maggio 2008
Iil secolo san Augustine di quarto di f ha venuto a contatto di mai in su in un vicolo scuro con il ventunesimo autore Donald Mugnaio di secolo… ed allora invece di venire ai colpi, hanno saltato congiuntamente alla pubblicazione più vicina… ed allora è stato stabilito per sedersi giù sopra una pinta e ripartire le loro storia tra loro… ed allora auto-hanno pubblicato in qualche modo il loro viaggio di collaborazione per vedere soltanto che ha preso da Zondervan e la diffusione al risultato desideroso del bloggers-the sarebbe maldestramente simile alla memoria spiritosa della scorticatura del Pete
“di cui l'inabilità secondo-più grande è che abbastanza non osserva ha ritardato.„ Ma l'ultima cosa che desiderereste su questo giro è affinchè le serrature di sicurezza sia disinnestata perché in qualche luogo lungo il viaggio, la scorticatura ha cominciato a leggere la vostra posta. You see a glimmer of yourself in his tale of idolatry and being the “nice guy” for all the wrong reasons and you must read on to find some sense of hope for your own self constructed hiding place.
But back to original metaphor…
It’s Pete Gall’s absolute honesty that brings Augustine into the frame. At times he’s self-deprecating. Like Augustine’s Confessions, much of My Beautiful Idol is the journey of one man who desperately wants to be all God’s, but enjoys the few toes and fingers still reserved for the self. The symptoms are different, but the disease is the same. For Augustine, the pleasures of sex and lust were a little too fun to give up just yet. For Gall, it was faking the part of being the “tremendous man of God.” He’s that “nice guy” who manipulatively, yet secretly, wants everyone to notice how pleasant he really is. Both as a successful brand strategist and as an inauspicious non-profit engineer, Gall was merely looking to be defined by how much love he could suck from those around him. He was wading through life, attaching little trinkets to his shell like the collector crab (a metaphor that encompasses the entire book). God becomes our own personal brand that we slap on to hide from the “squids” in our lives. “And so long as we remain uneaten, it feels like it’s working.”(19) The problem with these hiding places is that “they’re more like prisons than protection.”(43)
In Donald Miller fashion, the offhand and imaginative writing style of My Beautiful Idol is sure to agitate its fair share. In the process of deconstructing a false sense of self before an all loving God, Pete Gall also deconstructs some camouflage that many Christians will cling to such as the local church—“I’d feel better about selling motherhood to a teenager than church to a person looking for God.”(33) and the suburbs— “Zionsville…is proof to me that there was a reason we were kicked out of the garden.”(53) Being currently enrolled at Bethel Seminary, the author’s critique of seminaries as places that are more likely to mold salespeople than witnesses was hard to read. And it will only be a matter of time before Christian watchdogs will be all over Gall for comparing a genuine experience of God with his early days of smoking pot. But the readers need to heed the end of the story before jumping to conclusions. Gall comes to embrace the church as the terribly flawed, but finest alternative God has at His disposal. He treks back to Zionsville to live with his suburban family who demonstrates the real meaning of love at the moment he needed it most. After roasting seminary, it is Gall who states that seminary professors are some of the most submitted people to God that he’s ever encountered. But many will find it just as easy to pick on the parts of Beautiful Idol that upset our worldviews while disregarding the counsel that we “don’t get to decide who Jesus is.” (120)
Pete Gall was seeking a faith… “the sort that can flex and grow and be beautiful without needing me to shine it up and pose it just so.” (11) It is the style of his writing, while leaving numerous questions unanswered, that best captures such a dynamic faith. This reviewer can only hope that he too comes to the place where “success in life is not measured by what we achieve, but by what we admit.” (267)
Michael Cline is a co-editor of the Jesus Manifesto. He considers himself a freelance pastor and and over-employed learner who currently attends Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. When not snuggling with his wife, he’s blogging at www.reclinerramblings.blogspot.com
for further reading . . .
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