For the lion's share of my life I have been a reader. It is a pastime that if I allowed it to could wholly take over. So I have made rules that I have been pretty much faithful to follow. I try to be to be selective about when I read and what I read, sensitive as I read. I even have aspirations to being a mediocre judge of good as opposed to bad literature.
But several months ago I joined a writer's group where along with learning some practical techniques about writing, I began to experience the mixed blessing of educated reading. I say mixed because it is not always pleasurable reading when I find myself dissecting paragraphs and sentences, or half-consciously nosing about for a whiff of editorial error. Nothing can blur plot focus more effectively for me than to detect some gross faux pas in writing etiquette.
Yet somehow with my most recent reading project, Living Beyond the Limits, by Franklin Graham, that literary prosecutor in my head shrank and trailed off into nothingness. And the defense didn't even have to say a word. The level gaze of the accused was its own best plea. Now I do not mean to say that the book is devoid of good writing process. If it were I couln't have spent five minutes in its presence. In truth this work by Franklin Graham possesses the most important ingredient of great story-telling: desire in the protagonist. Desire is the everpresent, powerful undercurrent sweeping downriver the lesser debris of small imperfections in writing; here it rushes through every line. This book is the real deal.
I guess all this is to say that what makes Living Beyond the Limits a book I would want to comment on and recommend to others is not the writing itself, but what it is about. And what it is about is a few folk who have over time crossed the author's path, and God, and their adventures together, including Franklin himself. My copy has 215 pages making up seventeen chapters; most are self-contained though some bleed over into the next. You will always want to go to the next and you will not want the book to end.
In acknowledgments Franklin Graham opens with the statement, "God sends many people along life's pathway to help and encourage us." I have to confess that while God does sometimes send people my way He more often sends books. If you're at home reading books, you're not out circulating. But the thing is, many of these books have had a common denominator I can identify as telling a story of ordinary people who have allowed God to use them beyond the limits of the ordinary. So - if I may be so bold as to place myself in such illustrious company(Franklin Graham would probably laugh at that) - essentially we two are articulating the same thing : "God sends people to help and encourage us."
As the men and women portrayed in the book stretch their boundaries, live their lives as if faith truly were the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, God is both faithful and creative in His role as leader. There is no boredom here in the Christian experience, no dull vision of the goody-two-shoes missionary marm. We as readers are running, jumping, crouching, dodging bullets, feeling heart-thuds along with the person we are reading about - and akin to them asking God, "What in the world are you doing?" .
There is action, drama, even horror as you see, for example, through Franklin's eyes what life is like in Calcutta, India, or inside some of our planet's worst slaughter zones, or what it is to look at an array of torn bodies knowing only too well the limitations of available human resources. The book will reveal how God can use places, places of bone-crushing pain and human spirit deformity, as staging grounds to demonstrate His mercy, salvation, and grace, and as scenes of music and celebrating. There is life or death venture here into the unknown with only God's invisible (yet firm) grip to escort the daring, as well as the dubious, follower.
There are also those who are helped, those who are healed, those who are changed - those who learn to smile again. As Franklin so often reminds the reader, "We can't help all, but we can help some!" And in the helping of those some, when we walk in sync with God, He lights a candle - and light has a tendency to spread. Wherever we are to the best of our ability with God's help, we can brighten our corner, give a hint of a world that is yet to come.
I hope you will read Living Beyond the Limits. Is the book the for all time great American novel? I don't apologize when I say, "No!" Is it a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of many? Definitely not! Is it even prose with a twist of lilt? M-m-m-m - I don't think so! But it is real, authentic, palpable. It has substance. Yes, it is real and it has substance, substance so meaty that it can change a life or redirect a life that has yielded to a tempororary cul-de-sac. It can make a person kneel as I did to a powerful God of extraordinary patience toward ordinary whiners like me. And it is free if you write to Samaritan's Purse, PO Box 3000, Boone NC 28607.
If after reading the book, you have a tendency to think all this intrepid stuff for God is only for those with a special calling, I have only two words to say to you . . . Mama Gump.
