I had initially purchased this book in the summer of 2005
with the best of intentions for reading it. I had grown fond of Eugene Peterson
after one of my longtime friends and another mentor of sorts, Pavi Thomas had
recommended that I read the book UnderThe Unpredictable Plant. I was in Orlando, Florida helping to run a summer
long character based leadership program for college students and I found the
book for three dollars in a used book store.
Yet another close friend, Doug Scott, had told me about how
the book was shaping him as he read it during winter 2011. That, in turn, led
me to making this book among the first I read after getting married to my
wonderful wife Jamie. It isn’t a book about marriage but rather a book to
encourage finding God in the daily experience of life. Because of my respect
for both Doug and Pavi, and my growing enjoyment of Peterson’s writings, I
thought it might be a good way to enter into this new phase of my life.
The book is a series of reflections on the life of David
taken from 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, and 1 Kings as well as snippets of the book of
Psalms. It carries the subtitle of Earthly
Spirituality For Everyday Christians. I think that is a great outline of this book
as well as virtually any that Peterson writes. One of his great strengths as a
writer is that he insists that if anything, our approach to the biblical text
should be rooted in the world in which we live and not in some form of ethereal
other-worldliness. Leap Over A Wall,
is a series of reminders that our life in God should be rooted in the world in
which we live. It should be rooted in marriages, funerals, birthdays, as well
as our daily experience in the office, in traffic, and in encounters with
others on the journey of life.
Peterson, as much as he is a respected theologian, is also a
gifted story-teller. In my opinion, our contemporary world has lost a knack of
telling good stories. And Leap Over A
Wall serves as a tribute to the power of story. The stories of the life of
David are filled with earthly realities lived out in light of eternal truths.
God meets David in the wilderness, in giant-slaying, and even in David’s sin,
and God engages with David in each of these environments partially because David
stays rooted in the reality of the every day while at the same time seeing the
realities of God breaking through into these environments.
If you have never read a book by Eugene Peterson (or even if
you have read several), I highly recommend leap over a wall. The book takes the
spiritual and places is square in the middle of our human existence by looking
through the lens of David’s life. It is
not so much a book about David and God as it is a book about you and I and God.
It’s a book about how one person’s life has much to say about our own lives and
our own stories that are forming as we go through the daily exercise of our own
earthly spirituality rooted in loving God and others.
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