This morning I read an essay by Elizabeth Berg in which she shares her resolution for 2008: to read more. It’s a really great essay, and I commend it to you.

Interestingly, though, my resolution is to read less. Sort of.

If I can still do math, which is not to be taken for granted, over the past four years (2004-2007) I have read, on average, 61.25 books per year. That is 245 books over the course of 1461 days (’04 was a leap year), or one book every 5.9632653 days.

After consecutive 50-book years in ‘04 and ‘05, I decided that in ‘06 I would cut back and read 40. Instead I read 70. So take my new resolution with a grain of salt. But here is my plan.

A couple of days before the new year I composed on a yellow legal pad what I titled “Daunting Books for 2008.” On the list are about fifteen scary books that had sat on my shelf for years in some cases, daring me into reading them - books with lots of pages and really small print. Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky (704 pages), Paradise Lost by Milton (512), and Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin (528), for starters. Or, for example, the book I am currently plodding through: The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman (672).

C.S. Lewis once advised readers that for every contemporary book we read, we’d do well to also read a book by a dead guy, as a way of exposing our own blind spots. I think I could do a better job at that than I do. But I also wonder if Lewis, were he alive today in our increasingly globalized world, might expand that advice. Recognizing that as a Protestant white North American male I read a lot of books by Protestant white North American males, I’m also trying to be more intentional about reading books from people who might see things from a different vantage point, including an assassinated archbishop from El Salvador and an evangelist from Sri Lanka and others as I come across them.

Finally, I’ve decided to follow the Book of Common Prayer lectionary for my daily Bible readings, complimented by readings in the African Bible Commentary, featuring the insights of 70 African pastors and theologians.

I hope you’ll find a rich and rewarding literary journey of your own this year, and I hope we can learn from each other. It’ll be exciting to see the previously uncharted territory into which this year’s readings will lead.

I’m heading up a book discussion blog kind of thing called Inside Out People in conjunction with Student Ministries at Calvary Church. Believing that we are changed on the inside and that this ought to show on the outside, we are seeking to reach outside the walls of the church building and into our community in practical ways. I invite you to join us for our first book discussion as we read Good News and Good Works by Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action. It is our hope that beyond reading and discussing we will begin living inside out lives for the glory of God and the good of others.

A couple of years ago I remember hearing about some guys who made the trek from South Africa to Egypt by motorcycle and had completed their journey through that rather tumultuous continent when a suicide bomber blew himself up in Cairo, thereby killing, among others, one of the four guys who made the journey. Read about the attack here.

While perusing books at Barnes and Noble earlier this week I came across one that, as it happens, was written by Erik Mirandette, the brother of the rider killed, who was also seriously injured in the attack. The book is titled The Only Road North: 9000 Miles of Dirt and Dreams. In further evidence that Google is taking over the world, GoogleBooks has a scan of the complete book here.

The thing that most stood out to me was actually at the very end, where Mirandette says that had he known beforehand how all of this would have turned out, he never would have done any of it: “I would have without a second thought or hesitation thrown my destiny right out the window and preserved the comfortable life that I was so lucky to have. But I wasn’t given that choice. My choice was to either follow and believe, or not. I understood the risk; there were never any guarantees” (p. 296).

This brings to mind something my favorite writer Frederick Buechner once said: “It is one of life’s greatest mercies that it is not given to us to know the might-have-been of things.”

Because let’s be honest: we all want the easy road. If we are told that making a certain decision will result in a significant amount of suffering - emotional, spiritual, physical, whatever - we will make some other decision. We will, as Mirandette says, minimize the risks and throw away whatever it is that is to be gained by walking the difficult path laid out for us. And that is the real tragedy.

Losing your life isn’t the worst tragedy, after all. Wasting it is.

I recently read a book on hip-hop culture called Where You’re At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-hop Planet. Patrick Neate’s belief is that hip-hop, like almost nothing else, has the potential to affect real social change:

“There is… one thing I know with absolute certainty, both because I have experienced it and because all the statistics say so. Worldwide - and these days you have to talk worldwide - the gap between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, mainstream and excluded is widening by the day and hip-hop is one of the few cultural forms that successfully bridges that gap on a global stage. Hip-hop has long talked about the possibilities for, depending on who you listen to, change, revolution or real social justice. Where once you might have been able to dismiss this as polemic, it now smells like prophecy. The time is now” (p. 265).

I found these words of particular interest, because the author and I both agree that bridging the gaps in this world is something we ought to be working for, and while Neate and I part ways when it comes to what (or Who) it is that has the potential to bridge these gaps, I really appreciated his mantra: “Act locally; connect globally; think glocally.”

Glocalization is a bit of a buzzword these days among trendy cultural critics, and it surfaces time and again in this book. As Peate leads us on this global exploration of hip-hop culture in some of the world’s great cities (NYC, Tokyo, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Rio), I was seeing a parallel.

The writer laments the fact that so often hip-hop heads don’t live up to their potential, which explains why hip-hop hasn’t changed the world for the better like it is capable of doing. And the whole time I am wondering what it would look like if the Church, this global community of Christ-followers, God’s instrument of transformation in this broken world, were to take this hip-hop writer’s mantra to heart, to “act locally, connect globally, and think glocally.”

Missional theology says that wherever we are, we are on mission with God, joining him in what he is already doing. What he is doing here is really important. It’s huge. It is something to get excited about, to commit yourself to being a part of. But here is not the only place he is at work. He is also there, and there, and there. And because his mission here is not really separate from his mission there, because it is all part of the redemptive story he is telling through his people, it only makes sense to connect. We connect with those down the street, we connect with those on the other side of the world, and we connect with anyone in between who is taking seriously Jesus’ teaching to make disciples, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to love those who do evil to us.

There may have been a time when connecting like this was unheard of, and for some, due to all sorts of things, it may still be. Believers from a remote tribe in Kenya, for instance, may not be able to connect with other believers in Poland or Peru or Puerto Rico. But you and I in this age of technology and travel, in which a guy sitting in a hotel lobby in Phnom Penh, Cambodia at eight in the morning can be chatting with a bunch of friends in a church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania at eight the evening before (and for all of this to be happening via wireless internet in real time), we have no excuse not to get a lot more creative in connecting globally.

As we act locally - as we get on board with what God has us here to be and do - and as we connect with those who are also acting faithfully wherever they are, we truly start to think in a glocal way. We see that this world is interconnected, that the Church in Algeria and Afghanistan and America is one Church, and that when we do or do not do something, they feel it. We’re in this together. We see that the coffee we drink, before it was packaged and shipped north and sold to us by a corporation via a grocery store, was grown on a plantation in Guatemala by real people. We start to notice that the tags on all of our clothes seem to point to extremely poor parts of the world, and we wonder who made the shirt we wore to work today. We read a news story about a car bombing in the Middle East and where we once might have skipped ahead to read about Paris Hilton going to jail, we stop and consider what life must be like for all of those caught up in the conflict in Iraq, and particularly for our brothers and sisters in Christ who are not fighting but are being killed and having their lives torn apart nonetheless. We begin to realize these people have hopes and dreams, or at least they did at some point, and it hits us that people’s hopes and dreams matter. And then we consider the American Dream and whether the rest of the world can afford it, which is a kind of question that can get us into a lot of trouble.

All of this leads us to prayer.

We ask God to do something, anything, to mend this world, and to heal us. We ask him to strengthen his Church. We ask him to work miracles. We pray big prayers. We pray that he would bring peace to Iraq and that he would work in the hearts of leaders to stop the genocide in Sudan and we pray that he would work in the hearts of Christians everywhere, starting in my very own heart, to sanctify us, to set us apart, so that we can be of some use in this world. We’ve heard the stories from the frontlines and we have our own stories to tell. We know that the fields are ripe for harvest. So we ask God to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to heal the sick. We ask him to raise up the workers and to send them out.

And having cultivated a lifestyle of acting locally, connecting globally, and thinking glocally, many of us will find that God is leading us to go act locally somewhere else.

But where?

I think Frederick Buechner puts it best, so I’ll end with this: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

I have been asked to consider which of the books I read last year would be considered my favorites. While I enjoyed most of the books I read, I liked them all for varying reasons, so it is exceedingly difficult to pick favorites. Further, I am a firm believer in the fact that where you are in life has a lot to do with what books are beneficial and interesting for you, so you may very well pick up these books and find some of them lame. All the same, if you were to read ten books in 2007 from the pool of ones I read in ‘06, the following come with my highest recommendation (in no particular order):

Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell
I read this on the flight from Chicago to Tokyo and then reread it on the beach in Cambodia. Some great food for thought: is your theology a trampoline or a brick wall?

Free of Charge by Miroslav Volf
The subtitle provides a pretty good summary of what this important book is all about: “giving and forgiving in a culture stripped of grace.” If famous Anglicans carry any weight for you, the Archbishop of Canterbury named this the Lent Book of the Year.

Practitioners by Various Contributors
This is one of the more innovative books I have ever read. A lot of people out there talk about God and they talk about changing the world. These practitioners actually get their hands dirty in an effort to transform culture rather than just talking about it. I find that inspiring.

The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne
Shane is a dude who makes his own clothes and lives in the worst neighborhood in Philly. He gets arrested for sleeping outside with homeless people and does crazy things like spending three months with lepers in Calcutta. He calls himself an extremist for love. Don’t write him off as a saint, though. He’s just an ordinary radical.

Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider
Billions live in poverty and this is not because of a lack of resources. Without the guilt trip, Sider makes a passionate plea for us to take seriously Jesus’ teachings about money and the poor.

The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs
This world-renowned economist has committed the rest of his life to ending extreme poverty. He believes it can be done and he tells us how. Though I am one with absolutely no interest in economics, I tore through this 350-page book in only a couple of days. Your global poverty paradigm will take a beating, and you may just be left thinking, “Wow. Maybe it is possible after all.”

The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis
I’m kind of embarassed to only have one dead guy on my top ten list this year, but this book was fantastic. If loving God and loving others is what the Christian life is all about, and you want to be a better lover in the broad sense of the word, this book couldn’t be any more relevant.

The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard
400-page books with small print have a way of sitting on one’s shelf for a while, but when I finally picked it up this fall in Cambodia I was hooked. Willard integrates the concept of the Kingdom with personal spiritual formation in a way I’ve never encountered before.

Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven, But Nobody Wants To Die by David Crowder
The author’s band released an album taunting death and the devil and then everyone they knew started dying. This book weaves thoughts on death together with the history of bluegrass, in an amazingly powerful way you will have to read to believe.

The Challenge of Jesus by N.T. Wright
The first seven chapters were hard but rewarding work, but then chapters eight and nine were sheer adrenaline. I marked up those pages with reckless abandon and wanted to shout Yes! over and over. Read it.

brian mclaren has a new book out called the secret message of Jesus. i hate the title and i think i have probably vowed never to buy another book with a title like that again, because it seems to me like a gimmicky marketing tactic and i don’t want to succumb to marketing wizardry quite that easily. but, it is mclaren so i figured i would give it a shot.

i haven’t read the book yet, but judging by the subtitle (uncovering the truth that could change everything), and the current hype involving gnosticism and the da vinci code, i think i know what this secret is.

hint: it involves leonardo da vinci’s painting the last supper.