Same Kind of Different As Me, by Ron Hall and Denver Moore

One of the best books I've read recently is a true story. Same Kind of Different As Me is an enthralling tale of two unlikely friends whose lives come together forever changing one another for the better.

The book was recommended to me a while back by my friend Vicki, who I think has read every book ever worth reading. And this being the second good book I've read after her suggestion, I'll be sure to read almost anything she puts in front of me.

Ron Hall is a wealthy and successful art Texas art dealer who lives the aristocratic life in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. After following his wife Debbie's lead they end up volunteering at and falling in love with a local homeless mission and soup kitchen in the "wrong" end of town. There, they meet Denver Moore, a career homeless man feared by the other street dwellers, who grew up picking cotton in the Louisiana sharecropper market and has never really owned anything in his life.

The book also has a third author, Lynn Vincent who, I believe, was brought on to aid in the actual writing process. If I am right then she did a good job, because the book reads very smoothly and has wonderful, detailed but not overly lengthy descriptive qualities which left me tense during suspense moments and sad during the heartbreaking scenes. The story was told from the two perspectives of Denver and Ron, alternating each chapter. In typical Dan Brown style, this method of storytelling kept the book in my hands.

I learned that only a few decades ago, Louisiana share croppers who were predominantly black, though legally free, were more like modern day slaves. Always in debt to the Man, these illiterate workers were neglected of education and thus other life options. The Man did all the book keeping so the workers never knew how in debt they were or weren't. For twenty something years of Denver's life he worked for the Man, earning no paycheck and stayed in a third-world quality shanty house with no running water, electricity or indoor plumbing. One day, Denver, fed up after losing another loved one, hopped a train and wound up in Dallas/Fort Worth.

Befriended by Ron and Debbie Hall, Denver gets his first look into the lives of rich people and with candid honesty points out some of the ludicousies of such life. The Halls also get a real life look into what a life of homelessness looks like and what it does to a man. Denver, though often offered to sleep in a nice house or hotel, feels safer sleeping outside and on the ground.

There's an eye-opening moment when Denver and Ron enter the lobby of a downtown hotel. Denver remarks saying he's never been in this hotel or any hotel lobby. Ron replies, "Did you never even walk in the lobby here? I think all hotel lobbies are open to the public." Looking Mr. Ron in the eye, Denver replied, "Homeless folks ain't no public."

The book is more than a simple compelling story about life, love, happiness and pain. It also causes the reader to reflect on many pertinent social topics such as homelessness, prejudice, sickness, suffering, forgiveness and faith. Around 235 pages, I read it in a week and am a better person for it.

Same Kind of Different As Me deserves the coveted "Nathan-Two-Thumbs-Up" and is a recommended read to every reader I know. It's a quick read that, when you finish it, will leave you laughing, crying and warm, ready to face one more difficult day of life.

Disclaimer: Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com http://BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/16cfr255_03.html> : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

The Jesus I Never New, by Philip Yancey

There is a genre of books out there among biblical scholars known as 'the quest for the historical Jesus.' For several decades now, authors have attempted to reconstruct the culture and mindset of the ancient near east and present it to readers in order to better understand what kind of person, culturally bound and all, that Jesus was. The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey is in that genre.

Yancey, primarily a journalist, writes smoothly and as if he's reporting on the observable historical and cultural contexts he has learned about from reading a deluge of books on first century Palestine. In seminary, they always told us that we can't view an authentic Jesus through our 21st century goggles. We can't interpret the Bible using post-enlightenment thinking. Yancey's book as another attempt to help us take off our modern day view points and presuppositions in order to understand the person of Jesus as one of his followers would have understood him.

The problem with doing this reminds me of an old joke: Two elderly fish are swimming along one morning talking about old times before oil tankers and deep sea divers. They swim past a young fish zipping by in the other direction. One of the elderly fishleman says to the young fish, "How's the water today?" The young fish swims past for a moment, then stops and says to himself, "What the hell is water?"

Point being: the problem with totally getting out of our post-enlightenment thinking is, we're stuck in it like the young fish in the water and don't even know it. So, with that said, books like Yancey's and so many others is, while they may be shooting at a target they'll never hit, they are also very much needed to keep us from interpreting Jesus as if he was speaking in culture 2,000 years after his own.

Yancey is a good writer. This book includes lots of pertinent information for pastors and researchers. As well, he includes a slew of usable stories for application purposes.

The book is divided into three parts for the sake that the table of contents looks pretty: Who He was; Why He Came; What He Left Behind. However, in reading it, the book more or less begins with discussion on the birth of Jesus and chronicles pointed topics throughout his life concluding with the death and resurrection as told by the four Canonical Gospels.

Overall, I'm glad I read it and may read more by Philip Yancey in the future. I found myself underlining on more pages than not. My one hold up, and this is for me only, is that Yancey is writing from a very conservative theology. Again, this isn't a negative, it's simply a place at which I have a different preference. The result is, most of the time his theology doesn't affect what he's writing. Conservative or whatever, the facts, historical context and literary criticisms are the same. Where it does play a role is in his reflections and statements of truth that are actually based on belief. But again, this doesn't surface enough to make a huge difference.

I give the book a thumbs up. A definite worth-while-read for any pastors and teachers of the Bible. I do expect to refer back to this book in the future for it's plethora of useful information about Jesus' life and culture, just not for it's theology.

Licensed

Congratulations are in order.

Congratulations to Heather, my wife, for recently passing her licensure exams which permit her to practice pharmacy in the state of North Carolina. We formally celebrated this last weekend but were reminded again of the achievement when we checked our mail today and found the official documentation enclosed. To the right is a picture of her license. Not exactly what I thought it would look like, it resembles a diploma more than anything.

Of the four diplomas between her and I, we have only framed one. This is a costly endeavor, and this piece of paper makes one more to be framed.

On the same day we received a text message which said, "I passed!!! Can't believe it." This means congratulations are also in order to Anna, our friend, who today found out she passed the second and final pharmacy licensure exam. The second of these tests, known as the NAPLEX, costs over 500 big ones just to take, includes about 185 questions and lasts over 4 hours. Whew.

Anna, a worry wart, has been stressed for days about her test results, despite my sureties of her success. Here's a picture of her and her hubby, who, if he's smart, is taking her out tonight to celebrate. One year ago, she was donned with a white coat along with Heather and their fellow class mates, and 14 months later they're all licensed drug dealers.

Congrats Heather!
Congrats Anna!

Now, go out there and get some jobs to support your lazy husbands!

Employment

Some people I know cut down a tree recently. They sheared off all the limbs and cut the trunk into manageable pieces...and then they left it. After about a month of sitting, one of them asked me, "You interested in making a few bucks?" "Yes," was my response without even asking what the job was.

The job was to move the limbs, sticks, twigs and all brush from the back yard up a hill to the road to be picked up by the city. Then I was to stack the stump pieces in an orderly fashion. Having done this kind of work for two summers I responded, "No problem, I'll knock it out in a few hours."

A few hours turned into an entire day in the blazing sun picking up stick and huge limbs, loading them into a truck and then unloading them once more. Notice the size of the pile in relation to the truck. It's about the size of two pickup trucks!

Overall, though I sweat profusely, the job was somewhat enjoyable. I got a chance to be alone and work outside, which always makes me feel connected to the earth, to God and to most humans throughout history who worked manually. I'm reminded of Babara Brown Taylor's comments regarding manual labor as a spiritual practice when she wrote, "Digging down is as good a way to God as rising up, if only because you can feel it in your shoulders." Later in the same chapter she captures what I found to be true several hours into my day of labor, "Choose the work, and it becomes your spiritual practice."

This is but one of several ways I've managed to find employment during my time of unemployment. Elsewhere, my wife and I have babysat kids for a church a few Sunday evenings, I was paid to take one more on-call at the hospital a few weeks back, and a friend may pay us to babysit her toddler later this month. We've also sold stuff preempting a yard sale to make a few bucks.

All in all, unemployment so far isn't that bad. We'll need to get work soon, and I have no doubt we'll find it. In the mean time (I may regret saying this), I look forward to more opportunities for some good manual labor, because as I sit here, my shoulders still aching, I am reminded of God.

Unemployment

This is the forth week since my residency ended, and I've got to say, unemployment can be stressful. After all, it's been a while since I've been without work.

One week after I turned 16 years old I went and got a job at the local grocery store near our house. I worked there until I went to college. During college I didn't work, except during the summers. Two summers I worked for a landscaping company and learned the benefits and pains of manual labor. However, I do look back at those summers as two of the most rewarding.

During grad school I held multiple jobs at various times. My first year I worked in a law school library and as the music minister at a small church. For three years I worked as a college pastor and a Harris Teeter cashier. During that time I was also a TA for the Hebrew professor.

My residency began directly after grad school so there was no break in work responsibilities, and my time as a hospital chaplain was more rigorous than when I held 3 jobs while in school full-time. At the hospital, I worked 60 hour weeks and had papers and committees to prepare for. What I'm trying to say is, I've stayed pretty busy for all of my adult life.

Being unemployed is a harsh change. The lack of responsibility is as stressful as multiple tasks on my plate and people counting on me to preform. Job hunting is what it is, and I've done a bit of that. It, however, takes time.

One of the things I have accomplished recently and perfected during this near month is something I always wanted to learn: how to solve a Rubik's cube. Below is a video of me solving a scrambled cube in less than 2.5 minutes!

If you have any suggestions on how to best handle in-between-jobs-time, please leave them in the comment section. Until then, I'll continue to try and decrease my Rubik's Cube time. Enjoy.

(I've discovered that Firefox is not compatible with the video format. If you can't can't view the video, try opening it in a different browser, such as Internet Explorer.)

Night, by Elie Wiesel

I breezed through this book in a matter of hours during my first couple of days of unemployment. Since high school I had known of this book not only as a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature but also as a striking account of the stark and harsh reality suffered by Jews in Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.

Elie Wiesel was only about 15 years old in 1944 when he and his family were shipped off in a suffocating train car along with the rest of the Jews in his town after having been forced to live in starving ghettos for weeks. Later in life, Wiesel became the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University and founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

With horrifying detail he recounts his own experience of his time spent in Auschwitz concentration camp, where his mother and sister were killed, and later at Buchenwald where his father died.

Night is a story of death. Though Wiesel survived, it seems a part of him died in his teen years. This book illustrates vividly the death of not only his family, but of his innocence and also the death of this once devout Jewish boy's faith.

Reading, my heart broke repeatedly. There's there part where he found himself angry at his father because his father let himself be beaten. There's the part where he admittedly loses all faith in God. There's the scene when a friend says, "I've got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He's the only one who's kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people." There's the part where during a running march from one camp to another he watches a friend wither and stop running only to be trampled to death under the feet of his Jewish brothers.

After the train ride to Buchenwald, which took near a week, he writes, ''The guards came to unload us. The dead were abandoned in the train...The last day had been the most murderous. A hundred of us had got into the wagon. A dozen of us got out." The scene when his father dies is perhaps the most wrenching, because Elie Wiesel was unable to cry, "It pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears."

This book is a must read, I believe, for anyone. A real eyewitness, a non-sugar coated account of the horror of the Holocaust. (And I can't believe there are still people in the world today who think the Holocaust was a hoax!) The mood and tone of the book are perhaps best captured in this segment which captures Wiesel's lament of his first night at Auschwitz:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

If you haven't yet read it, give Night the time of day. You will be changed and enriched to experience Wiesel's story. May we never forget this Night, and may we always strive to bring light to those experiencing their own dark night of the soul.