Ally's #18 A Holy Ambition by John Piper

"There are only three kinds of Christians when it comes to world missions: zealous goers, zealous senders, and disobedient."

I think I've found the perfect Piper combination. A lot of his books go way over my head and are challenging to digest. I dig his sermons, but his voice is so distracting that I can't concentrate on what I'm hearing. A Holy Ambition hits the mark, as it's a collection of Piper's sermons on the topic of frontier missions--preaching Christ to unreached people groups worldwide as modeled by the Apostle Paul. I am only about half way through his book, Let The Nations Be Glad, on the supremacy of Christ in missions, so I won't try to compare them here.

The book is divided into three topical sections (see below) and is bookended by two intro sermons, one concluding sermon, and two very helpful sermons in the appendix. I highlighted a great deal in the final sermon in the appendix on the "Driving Convictions Behind Cross-Cultural Missions"...my guess is Piper knew it needed to be included, but didn't have a good place to fit it. While reading, I found some overlap here and there, but it's to be expected in sermons that span from a few months before I was born (June 1983) all the way to 2008. Each chapter was roughly 10-15 pages long, so it's a great book to read if you can only do so intermittently.

-A Biblical Theology of Gospel-Centered Missions

"...if we want our heart for the nations to rest upon God's heart for the nations, it should rest upon the basis of God's heart for the nations, namely, God's heart for his own glory."

-The Mandate of World Missions

"God is not done with the work of missions. He said go make disciples of all nations. And then he said, 'I will be with you to the end of the age.' The promise is good till Jesus comes, because the commission is binding till Jesus comes. Therefore, you and I face the question individually what our role is in obeying the great commission to reach all the unreached peoples of the world with the gospel of the riches of Christ."

-The Costs and Blessings of Mission

"I get very tired of people coming to look at staff positions in my church, which is in downtown Minneapolis. We all live in the inner city, and one of the first questions they ask is, 'Will my children be safe?' And I want to say, 'Would you please ask that question tenth and not first?' I'm just tired of hearing that. I'm tired of American priorities. Whoever said that your children will be safe in the call of God?"

As Jim and I consider our future, quite possibly in world missions, I dogeared two different sections that I think will help us on our journey. The first is a list of questions at the end of Chapter 8 "The Aroma of Christ Among the Nations." The questions are derived from 2 Corinthians 2:17 and include five tests from the Apostle Paul as to whether or not someone is fit to be a missionary. I appreciate that Piper follows it up by saying that there are no perfect missionaries, and we will all miss the mark in some way or another, but our desire should be a resounding "Yes!" in response to all of the questions posed.

The second section that would be an especially helpful resource for anyone considering world missions or in the midst of it is found in Chapter 10 "I Am Sending You Out As Sheep In The Midst of Wolves." Here, Piper does an excellent job of succinctly describing the six costs and ten blessings of frontier missions. I think the ten blessings would be an awesome thing to commit to memory or to have readily accessible in times of discouragement.

All in all, this was a great book and an easy read. I highly recommend it!

Ally's #17 The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

This work of historical fiction landed a spot on Oprah's book club list several years ago. I picked it up cheap at a used bookstore when I was in college. I wasn't Christian at the time, and I distinctly remember putting the book down and thinking "If that's what mission work and loving Jesus is all about, then I don't want any of it."  I also recall crushing the dreams of a classmate who had shared with me that her lifelong passion was to be a missionary to Africa. I told her missions were a sham and that she should read this book. My, oh my, how things have changed since then.

The book hasn't changed, but I have--dramatically--and any good change in me I attribute solely to Christ. Now it's my dream to be a missionary in a distant land. I love reading missionary biographies and encourage friends to read them as well. I decided to pick this book up again and to read it with new eyes, a new mind, and a new heart. I learned a great deal more the second time around.

If I had to briefly sum up this book, I'd call it the "How NOT to do Missions Handbook." It follows the journey of the Price family, a Southern bunch that venture to the Congo in response to the Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20). The book is told from the point of view of Orleanna Price and her four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May.

At the head of the family is Nathan Price, a zealous, strong-willed, ill-tempered man who is dead set on baptizing each and every person he meets in the Congo...never mind the crocodiles lying in wait in the river that would snatch up children in an instant. Nathan is resistant to anything that exists outside of his tunnel vision and takes criticism as an affront to his goals. Despite being rejected by the Baptist Missions Society to go to the Congo, he starts raising funds anyway.

The Price's receive no pre-field training in language or culture, and it shows the day they arrive in Kilanga. Within hours of their arrival, they manage to insult the entire village, who just sacrificed an exorbitant amount of food to celebrate and welcome the Price family. Nathan loves to preach about the preciousness of Jesus, but his mispronunciation of the tonal Kikongo language means that he often speaks of Jesus and the Bible as "poisonous." "Come to Jesus, everyone! He wants to give you pussy boils and pain! My, he is a good Jesus! He wants you to feed your children to the crocodiles!" No wonder no one trusted this Jesus.

Orleanna carries the burden of feeding their large family three meals a day with a garden that won't produce anything, a husband who doesn't know (and isn't interested in learning) how to hunt for meat, and a small stipend from the mission society that basically says, "We didn't want you here in the first place, but we don't want you to die of starvation." Orleanna loses her precious house helper and cook extraordinaire, Mama Tataba, to Nathan's relentless push to get children into the crocodile infested river for baptisms. Mama Tataba gives him a piece of her mind and then leaves--her compassion is all dried up for this stubborn man who doesn't want to hear what anyone has to say or learn anything from anybody.

In reading the daughters' accounts, as well as those of Orleanna, I realized that none of them truly had a firm grip on the Gospel: that we are justified and saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in the work of Jesus Christ. Orleanna went to a tent revival when she was a teen because it was the "cool" thing to do, and you'd be more attractive to handsome Christian men if you looked like you really meant it when they did an altar call. Nathan Price believed with all his might that he earned God's favor. Going to the Congo was a good thing, so God had to bless it and take care of them and give them oodles of converts. God just had to. Even when political upheaval forces the missions society to evacuate all its members, Nathan Price refuses to leave or send his family home. No Price would leave the Congo until his work was done, regardless of the dangers it posed to have zero means of support. Even his wife falling into a severe depression and one of his daughters dying didn't make him budge on his convictions. Eventually, enough was enough for Orleanna and the surviving girls, and they left without so much as a goodbye.

The latter 1/3 of the story is about their departure and the way each woman carried that year-long experience in Kilanga into their future. One daughter found love, while the eldest found found a string of husbands/lovers. Another daughter found a voice and a passion for medicine and contributed greatly to work in infectious diseases. Pretty ironic considering her father is a total misogynist:

'Sending a girl to college is like pouring water into your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.'

Orleanna lived on in Georgia, never remarrying because one husband was about enough to kill her, and beating herself up over the loss of one of her girls. I was surprised that the book continued on as it did giving glimpses here and their of how the girls lives had morphed over about 30 years. It could have easily ended with their escape from Kilanga, but it was interesting to see how their lives were forever impacted by Africa and what they experienced there.

Ally's #16: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson

It's hard to keep momentum going for three books straight, and this was unfortunately my least favorite of the Larsson trilogy. If I had to point to one thing to blame, it would be the focus on unearthing the extremely secret conspiracy going on behind the scenes in the Swedish equivalent of the CIA. It grew tiresome watching secret service agents, the journalists at Millenium, and the police talk themselves in circles speculating on the group behind the Zalachenko cover up. It may be interesting to watch on the big screen, but reading it is slow going for 500+ pages.

The final book in Larsson's trilogy opens with Lisbeth Salander receiving medical care for the life-threatening wounds she received at the end of book two. Amazingly, her brilliant mind is unaffected by the bullet and bone fragments that burrowed into her brain. Her father, the infamous Zalachenko manages to survive an axe to the face and is recovering in the hospital room two doors from the daughter he tried to murder. An overzealous prosecutor is determined to burn Salander for aggravated assault and attempted murder and she is confined to prison after several weeks of recovery in the hospital. For a person who is banned from receiving visitors and has no contact with the outside world, Salander is able to accomplish a great deal. Not only does she compile a cut-and-dry autobiography that sinks the prosecution's case, but she also pin points a source of harassment at one of the largest newspapers in Sweden, thus saving the reputation and career of the former head of Millenium  magazine, Erika Berger.

I was disappointed that the majority of the story revolved around Mikael Blomkvist, the man who sleeps with pretty much every woman he meets. I much prefer following Salander's character, who is as cunning as her old man, but with a better moral compass. But Blomkvist is dogged and successful in his mission to exonerate Salander from all the evil that has been said of her and to expose the real criminals within the government--for that, I have to tip my hat to him.

To say much more might ruin it, so I'll close by once again offering up a strong recommendation for this trilogy.

Ally's #15: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Oh man, I'm hooked. My dream came true in the second book of this series--the secrets of Lisbeth Salander's past have unfolded. I don't want to give too much a way for those who haven't read it yet, so I'll stick to generalizations and thematic observances in this review.

If your a fan of "Law & Order SVU," you'd love this book, but let me warn you that it's significantly more graphic in terms of (homo)sexual encounters, vulgar language, and the like. Sometimes I have to turn that show off because the subject matter kills a little bit of my soul, yet, I also want to cheer at the end when all the searching is done and the bad guy is caught. That's what I love about Larsson's series. He's written up the strangest heroin I've ever heard of, and yet I find myself cheering for this 90 pound wildcat every step of the way. This is perhaps the most succinct and accurate description of Lisbeth Salander:

Salandar was the woman who hated men who hate women.

It truly sums up her mission in life, which we learn is born out of a history of being a victim and observer of abuse against women. You have to get through about 80% of the second book before you get the full picture of "All the Evil" that occurred during the mysterious gap in Salander's early teen years that earned her a bed equipped with restraining belts in a padded room in a psychiatric ward for children.  Not only does Salander not want to share that part of her life with anyone, but the Swedish government also goes to great lengths to keep it hush hush. Anyone else smell a conspiracy?

While the first book was about Salander helping track down a murderer/rapist, the tables turn in this book and Salander is the one being hunted. She's wanted in connection to a triple homicide and manages to not only evade the multitudes who are searching for her, but to also be successful in her own man hunt for the person truly responsible. In the process of searching for Salander, the police and the press hang all of Salander's dirty laundry out there for the nation to see. They make sport her "mental incompetence," her bisexual relationships, and her violent streak. My big question for the next series in the book is how does Salander go on with life in a place where everyone now knows every secret she had been trying to bury deep.

Bring it, Larsson. I'm ready for book three.

Ally's #14: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The first 74 pages of this book were a bit ho-hum and I wasn't quite sure where it was headed. Then on page 75, the author serves up the most delicious looking carrot that keeps you chasing for answers right up until the end.

The three main characters are Mikael Blomkvist, Henrik Vanger, and Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist is an investigative reporter who suffers a major blow to his writing career and magazine company. Vanger is the elderly head of a centuries-old family corporation. Despite his age, he's still as sharp as a tack and is eager to have the biggest mystery of his life examined by the unemployed Blomkvist in hopes of securing some answers before he dies. Forty years prior, Vanger's niece, Harriet, vanished from the family estate without a trace, and Vanger suspected foul play within the family.

Salander's character deserves a paragraph all her own. She's a teeny, tiny, anorexic looking 25 year-old in the body of a 14 year-old boy. She also sports a punker look, with jet black hair, oodles of tattoos, and a fair number of piercings. You can tell right off the bat that she's a deeply scarred and extremely guarded individual. While we never get too much information about the experiences she went through as a child, we do learn that she has been declared mentally incompetent by the state, a verdict handed down not because of her lack of mental aptitude, but because she refused to cooperate with any psychiatric evaluations. In fact, she's the most gifted computer hacker in Sweden, has a photographic memory, and can process an insane amount of information in a very short amount of time in her job as a free-lance private investigator. As Blomkvist's investigation begins to intensify, he and Salander team up to nail both the Vanger family fiend and the business mogul who trashed Blomkvist's reputation. They are quite the dynamic duo.

At the beginning of each section, Larsson offers a statistic on sexual abuse against women in Sweden. It wasn't until I got 3/4 of the way through the book that I realized the significance of those statistics. Not only is Salander  attacked, but Blomkvist's investigation of the Vanger family leads to some seriously, seriously, disturbing secrets that have been perpetuated for 40+ years.

What threw me for a loop, though, was the double-message the author seemed to give. On one hand, he seemed to glorify--if not deify--sex and promiscuity among the characters in the story; yet, on the other hand, makes a huge statement about abuse against women. I challenging to explain why it bugged me, but it did.

Off to read the next book in the series...I'm hoping it'll shed some more light on Salander's past!

Ally's #13: Erasing Hell by Francis Chan & Preston Sprinkle

Ever since I read Heaven by Randy Alcorn, questions have been rolling around in my head about hell. After purchasing Erasing Hell, I discovered that is was written in response to Rob Bell's book, Love Wins. While I haven't read that book, I still found this one helpful and easy to follow, despite the frequent references to Bell's assertions.

The biggest question I've wrestled with is whether hell is a place of eternal punishment or if it's a place of annihilation. Either way you slice it, hell is hell, but in my heart, non-existance is a more palatable punishment than experiencing pain and suffering for all of eternity. While this book didn't answer my question, it did spend quality time on verses relating to this topic and reminded me that regardless of the outcome, I should be deeply concerned for the fate of others and, as a result, be moved to action.

I really liked the way Chan and Sprinkle (what a fun name!) structured the book. It made sense and flowed well. The first four chapters are spent examining the facts of Scripture and extra-Biblical evidence to show what 1st Century Jews believed about hell, what Jesus taught about it, and what Jesus' followers went on to teach about hell. The final three chapters of the book challenge the reader to look inward at what their own beliefs about hell, what those believes indicate what they believe about God, and how they relate to Him. These chapters also serve as a challenge to really feel the weight of the severity of hell, rather than living a life content in our own "fire insurance."

I don't think I could've handled a super heady book on hell. As I was reading, I didn't feel like anything was over my head, but I didn't sense that the authors watered it down either. Perhaps now I'll pick up Love Wins and see what the fuss was all about.