I’m a tad over due in writing a review on this book. michael yaconelli’s messy spirituality: God’s Annoying Love for Imperfect People has been sitting on my table waiting for me to come back to it for a while now. Overall I enjoyed reading it.
It’s a nice, reassuring read for us messy people, imperfect people who don’t do very well at pretending otherwise. This is me, without question. I’m the girl in the church parking lot smoking a cigarette between Sunday School and Traditional Service.
This book nicely captures the freedom that comes from being openly messy and messed up and throwing yourself after God anyways.
He seamlessly pulls together many of the (in my opinion) best Gospel stories of Jesus’ life with the modern-day equivalents.
I’ve dog-eared this book marking good quotes and passages to come back to.
One of the many sections I enjoyed discusses faith and following Jesus as unbalanced. It’s comforting to know I am not alone in becoming more, rather than less, unbalanced in this journey. I’m a Libra, balance and equilibrium and all that. (Libra is quite literally Latin for balance.) But it’s true, reading poetry out loud to a crowd of strangers and staying up most of the night to write and hanging with a group of ex-cons, former junkies and burnt down pot-heads aren’t exactly “balanced” behaviors. Nonetheless this is where my running after God has taken me.
It’s an uncomfortably comforting book and well worth reading.
Apparently, a few minutes with Jesus teaches us more about God than a lifetime of studying about God.
It’s about the healing power of grace and love.