A Mind Bending Book

7-30-08 Laguna Christian Retreat – Panama City, FL. I just completed reading a mind bending book. It was a slow and at times painfully laborious read. It took me right at a month to slowly wade through page after page of deep theological and philosophical truths. It was challenging, hard, but profoundly impacting.
I recently walked through a Christian bookstore. I stopped briefly at the best seller’s section and perused the titles there. I walked away unconvinced that most of any of the top twenty best selling books would still be in print after three decades much less than after three centuries like the book I just completed.
This has prompted two questions for me to ponder. First, why are we so prone to read the popular and the practical rather than working our way through the deep literary streams? What is it that tempts us to reach for the “easy read” if we even make the time to read at all as opposed to fingering a book of substance which might prove more difficult to understand?
As I am writing this seated in a lawn chair next to the pool, one of my college mates from Howard Payne University walked by and saw the book on the ground next to me where I placed it after finishing it only moments ago. He read the title out loud and asked me if it was good book. I commented that it was a mind bending book. He chuckled as he walked away replying that he did not have much mind to bend which I interpreted to mean that he would not be reading that book or any like it any time soon.
Why do we do that? Why do we go for the less mentally and spiritually challenging reads? This particular book set on my shelf for more than ten years before I summoned the courage to tackle it. I was intellectually intimidated to read it because I knew the author walked deep with God and swam in waters way over my head.
Now, though I missed a lot of truth in the book because I could not grasp it and because my mind often wanted to come up for air and check out of what I was reading, I caught enough of the truth of that book to cause great mental strain. I’m glad for the intellectual work out that mind bending books can give us. It is amazing to me that many people would not blink at the thought of going through the physical work out of running, biking, swimming, or pumping iron. Often we feel refreshed and more alert after a great work out. We schedule such works out, discipline ourselves to do it, and know the benefits outweigh the strain it causes. Earlier today I went for a little jog down the beach.
What if we took that same mentality into giving ourselves mental workouts by reading mind bending books that have stood the test of time? What benefit would it be to our souls if we were willing to wade through the deep streams of books that have challenged and inspired the saints for decades and centuries? I find myself spending less and less time drinking from the stagnant fountains of best selling books of this era and more and more time drinking from the fountains of books written long before I was born.
Centuries ago men could take one or two scriptures and expound them through the written word for hundreds of pages. Today we often take less than two hundred pages to try and unpack dozen of scriptures merely scratching the surface of most of them.
This impacts me on a different level because I am called not only to be a reader but to also be an author. For as long as I have been trying to write books, my prayer has been over and over again that god would enable to write books that would stand the test of time. I pray that regardless of what generation a person is from they would be able to take a book I have written and be challenged or encouraged because of the truth in those books proves to be timeless.
To write a mind bending book, I must first be willing to tackle mind bending truth and wrestle with it. I must be willing to ponder and reflect and own for myself great truths both in my mind and in my heart. I must be willing to painstakingly lasso those thoughts and corral them onto the printed page. I must not be motivated to write for success or monetary gain. Instead I must write because God has birthed a message in my heart and captivated my mind with transforming truth.
The late prophet A.W. Tozer once commented, “The only book that should ever be written is one that flows up from the heart, forced out by the inward pressure. The man who is thus charged with a message will not be turned back by any blasé consideration. His book will not be to him not only imperative it will be inevitable.”
I pray that I would not only write those kind of books but that I would be willing to read those kind of books as well. I hope we all will read those types of books. We only have time to read a certain number of books in our lifetimes. May we not shrink back from reading mind bending books.