This is my second Mark Buchanan book and I like it just as much as the first one (Your God is Too Safe). This one is about heaven, sort of. He says it is about "our longing for heaven, our instinct for it...It is about our yearning for things unseen. It is about you and me longing for heaven...and about living here on earth now in light of that longing."The book is divided into four parts - Heaven-Haunted: Missing Things Unseen; Heaven-Struck: Seeing Things Unseen; Heaven-Sent: Being of Earthly Good; and Heaven-Bent: Living in Light of Forever.
A few of the things that struck me:
"The world, beautiful as it is, is not enough. The beauty itself doesn't satisfy. It promises satisfaction that, mirage-like, it can't provide. Yet the beauty is a mimetic clue, both echo and foretaste, of Things Unseen, an inigmatic hint of Elsewhere which we puzzle over but rarely decipher. He has set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done. He is everywhere baiting us, prodding, luring us. He is playing hide-and-seek with heaven and earth, strewing clues all around, brushing the commonplace with the scent of Things Unseen. Making us always wish for more, and always coming up short."
"Faith is not sticky sentiment or dry academics. It's not an emergency provision for the times we're unable to compile enough hard, cold facts or weave a tight enough web of logic to explain things. It's not the last-ditch stand beyond biology, physics, psychology. It's not something we muster...only for the hard times and the dark times. It is more than flutter in the belly or a warm glow in the heart, more than nodding approval to a set of doctrinal statements. Faith is sinewy and feisty and vigorous, a living hope and a deep certainty that sparks life into all we are and all we do."
One of my favorite chapters has to do with John's question "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?" John is sitting in prison and he begins to doubt what he has believed about Jesus. So Jesus gives an answer to John's disciples to take back to him in prison and at the end of his message are the words, "Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me." Buchanan says "Blessed is the man who doesn't fall away on account of the One who does [miracles] for others, but who sometimes leaves you in your prison, with death just outside the door." Later in the same chapter he says, "Blessed are those who don't need the sign, the shadow. Blessed are those who, bereft of the miraculous cure or rescue or windfall or breakthrough, believe anyhow, turn and embrace the Reality anyhow. They have not fallen away on account of Jesus. They have grasped that a relationship with Jesus is different from a bargain or a contract with Him..They have understood that a miracle is as much a veil as a shrine, that it conceals God as much as it discloses Him, that it can become not the "sign" that points to God, but the diversion that keeps us from Him."
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