Series
The Page that Changed My Life
Our Delightfully Strange World
It would be unfair to the work to describe my first encounter with Orthodoxy as a reading. That makes it sound so benign, so mild and harmless. The first time I picked up G. K. Chesterton’s most important book—-and maybe the most important book for the twenty-first century—-was a collision, a smashup that left my outlook on the world in pieces and me panting for breath. I was at the time tempted by the depressed cynicism from which many undergraduates at Christian colleges never quite recover. Having grown up in the church, chin-stroking deconstructive anti-institutionalism (combined with a strong sense of intellectual superiority) had an...
Which Generation Do You Live For?
Each summer, from roughly Memorial Day to Labor Day, blue-collar vacationers converge on Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and make it one of America’s largest summer tourism destinations, second only to Orlando. It’s a slice of NASCAR and rural Americana, served on the plate of Deep South beach town. For many, just the name of the city immediately conjures up the feel of sand and sunburn, and with it the scent of second-hand liquor, SPF-50, and Old Spice-masqued sweat. It’s a lovely place to have your life changed. In the midst such chaos, and that of other similarly gruff beach towns, Campus...
Reason to Believe
The Lord used one paragraph of text to convert me. He used a lot of other things, too—-my conversion was a long and messy process, and the Lord really put me through the wringer over a period of years. But it all hinged on a key moment when I read one paragraph that changed my life. I was a deist for most of my youth and early adulthood. I had fallen in love with philosophy at an early age; I was consumed by a burning desire to figure out what was true about the universe and build a life that...
Sometimes God Doesn’t Open Doors
A coffee press and a set of icing tips are examples of gifts that keep on giving. So is Milton Vincent’s 97-page book A Gospel Primer for Christians. It’s rare for me to remember how I happened to own any particular book. Books fly in and out of our house like the dusty Dubai air. This book is different. I remember standing in Kevin and Katie Cawley’s living room in Kansas City, and I noticed a thin, brown book on their coffee table. “A Gospel Primer for Christians. What’s this about?” I inquired. “It will change your life! Take it.”...
The Page that Changed My Life: Joe Carter
The lawsuits and insurance claims were getting expensive, so the trucking company realized it would be cheaper to appoint a 15-year-old boy to fix the problem. I was hired to sit in a lawn chair on the side of the dirt road leading out of the quarry and wait for the trucks. The drivers were often too overweight, too out-of-shape, or just too lazy to climb in the back and pull the tarp over their load of gravel themselves, so it became my job to do it for them. I’d pull the tarp on 30 trucks a day, less than...
The Page that Changed My Life: John Starke
After growing up in a couple squishy-evangelical churches, I headed to a conservative evangelical college, located South of the Mason-Dixon Line. And like many conservative Bible colleges in the South, this one had a pretty strict code concerning dress, alcohol, and movies. And like most strict Bible colleges, the campus burst with 18- to 21-year-olds full of angst and eager to put off the old garb of 20th-century fundamentalism and put on the new garb of freedom in Christ. But there was also more serious types who turned against conservative evangelicalism. These guys now write blogs with bios that begin,...
The Page That Changed My Life: Owen Strachan
It is not a commonplace that when a weary soul goes questing for life change, he turns to academic history. Not many people turn to academic history, period (and thus the source of so many of the world’s problems). Like an icy province off the coast of Newfoundland, academic history draws few tourists. It is the residency not of the intellectually faint-hearted but of hardy types, those who actually enjoy reading technical footnotes and who sigh pointedly when they see a critical monograph on 18th-century clothing patterns in the New Hebrides missing from the bibliography. It might seem odd, then,...
The Page That Changed My Life: Jared Wilson
C. S. Lewis wrote about how the writing of George MacDonald “baptized his imagination” for later receipt of the gospel of Jesus. The writing of Lewis himself did this for me. I consumed the Narnia stories in elementary school, the Space Trilogy in junior high, and most of Lewis’s non-fiction in high school. My experience is not rare, I know. For many Christians, the writing of C. S. Lewis serves as a gateway to both intellectual and imaginative Christianity. This is why he is the greatest Christian writer of the 20th century and one of the greatest of all time....
The Page that Changed My Life: Tony Reinke
While researching for my first book, I found this quote from a 1981 John Piper sermon on the benefits of reading: What I have learned from about 20 years of serious reading is this. It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99 percent of what I read, but if the 1 percent of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then...
