My husband wrote a book…

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This is my husband.

Rod

Oh.  I know.

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I love him.

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Very much.

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He wrote a book.  Here are my thoughts.


When you hear the word “church”, what do you see?

Is it the building?

A steeple and stained glass. A yellowing hymnal. Colorful lights. A large, smooth room with acoustic panels and squishy seats.

Is it the service?

Hands raised in the air or a preacher standing near a pulpit. Communion bread with a cup nearby. A choir bursting with loud voices.

Is it Christ’s people?

Extending justice to the meek. Feeding hungry mouths or hurting hearts. Fostering love and grace and hope and growth.

Inevitably for most of you who have spent any amount of time connected to a Christian bunch, when you hear “church” you probably also see pain.

For many, “church” is a place to smile and be kind and pretend to have it together.  To others, “church” is a place to find judgement, condemnation, fear and rejection.  “Church” is a bunch of hypocrites, hanging out together.  “Church” is fake.  “Church” is not what it was made to be.

It was made to be a brotherhood.  A community, in the deepest, truest sense of the word.  A home.  A family.  A body.  For real.

It has been twisted in oh so many ways, and in Uncovered: The Truth About Honesty and Community, Rod seeks to call the Christian church of North America to get back to what it was meant to be.  To stop all the silliness.

How?  Through honest people, walking life together, consumed with grace and acceptance like few have ever seen.

Rod has a unique experience, growing up attending with his parents both church meetings and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.  In AA, he found grace, acceptance, joy, honesty, and real living relationships.  Jesus in the flesh.  In church, just the opposite.  Lots of faking.  Lots of judging.  Lots of hurting.  A far cry from the Servant Savior.

The difference?  Honesty.

In AA, everyone comes knowing everyone else is messed up.  The junk is laid out on the table, and people get to see that when they take the risk to let others inside their secrets to really see what’s going on in there, they can be accepted 100%, no questions asked.  But in church, we are saved.  We are bought with the blood’uh’GAWD, and we are filled with His spirit, so we better be looking clean and polished.  We talk about sin like it’s an old issue, and in doing so, we make others believe we have no sin, so they should have no sin.  Do you see the cycle?

Beginning with Adam and Eve, Rod unpacks for us the way sin binds us up into secrets.  Sin promotes dishonesty, convincing us to “sew fig leaves” to hide our embarrassing parts, then getting the focus turned away from ourselves by blaming whatever and whomever comes across our path, and finally being so ashamed of our very beings that we hide away from the world and from God Himself.

We like to stay hidden, and often we spend so much time and energy managing our hiding places and maintaining our demeanors that we forget to look up and out, to the broken world and to the people in it who need us more than we need to appear perfect.

But there is hope.

“If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship and the blood of Jesus will purify us from all sin.”  1 John 1:7

This little verse is the mantra of this little book.  Walk in the light.  Have fellowship.  Let Jesus purify you.

Through real-life stories, Scriptural exegesis, innovative musings, and creative works of fiction, Rod explains in Uncovered how exactly we can begin to carry out the message of 1 John.  How we can start, right this second, being people of honesty who accept each other with grace and who care more about bringing Jesus to the broken than fixing our own selves to the point of “perfection”.

If you are a Jesus person with a longing to see the church grow in new ways, to get us back to our roots, and to begin looking through windows instead of mirrors, you need to read this book.  {The chapters are short and pointed.  You will be hooked.  Grab a friend or two to join you, because every chapter ends with a couple of questions for reflection and discussion.}

As Rod says, “…honesty is not safe.  But it is good.  May we find it now.”

 

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