I’ve been reading Philip Yancey’s “Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church.” MLK, Jr. made the list. So did Gandhi. But I’ve found G.K. Chesterton to be my favorite so far (Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy” is free as an ebook on iTunes, btw. Probably Kindle, too.).
I’ve wondered before if anyone else has ever felt the way I have about the church. That it seems odd to imagine a C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton doing what we Evangelicals tend to do week in and week out, with our hectic displays of church busy-ness and much-ness and all the work, work, work that it takes to worship God adequately in that one hour on Sunday morning… It’s easier for me to imagine Lewis or Chesterton in the Anglican or Catholic church 
It seems Yancey may have wondered similar things.
There is something absolutely life-giving about reading the authors in Yancey’s list (and they aren’t all liturgically-minded). I think it’s grace. There are other graceful authors, too, of course. I have a list of my own. But Yancey’s list is pretty good, too. Certainly a good primer in the language of grace.
I think grace draws people. Usually quietly, profoundly and through the dry desolation of corrupted earth that is so opposite of gracefulness. It is the “deep out there” that calls to our own “deep in here.” And I can’t live without it.
Father, give us our daily bread.
