An Embarrassing Call

Yesterday, I started the book Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World, written by Lipscomb professor Dr. Lee Camp.  I saw the book recommended by Mike Cope (I think it was there, though I can’t find  the post right now; Mike does have a “blurb” on the back cover, so I know he’ll vouch for the book), and put it at the top of my Amazon wish list.  When I learned that we had a visitor coming to Togo who could bring it, I got her address, had it shipped there, and it was delivered to me yesterday.

I first met Lee when he was a freshman at our mutual alma mater, Lipscomb University (or David Lipscomb College as it was known in those days).  In the halls of Sewell dormitory, Lee never impressed me as a scholar.   Wait a minute, that didn’t sound right.  I never thought of him as a scholar, just a really nice guy.  It was years later, when our paths crossed again at ACU, that I started to recognize that not only was this guy really nice, he was also really smart.

As I’ve only made it through the first chapter, I can’t really give you’re a review of the whole book, but I did find myself identifying with these words:

There is, I must confess, a deep part of me that is embarrassed to advocate a “radical Christianity.”  For I find, in these recent days of my pilgrimage, that the more I seek to surrender to Christ, the more I discover those idols to which my “old self,” as the apostle Paul calls it, has been desperately clinging.  It turns out, of course, that my sins are not all that interesting, but the same as the lot of all humankind:  pride, ambition, lust, greed, self-seeking.  The more I pursue the light of Christ, the more he illumines the diseases of my heart, the dysfunction of my soul.  I have long desired quick fixes for my thorns in the flesh, my defects, my failings—but Christ has granted me none.  But he does, as I walk behind him, alongside him, and alongside others on the Way, grant me daily bread, daily sustenance, his grace being always sufficient for the day. (p. 24)