A work of grace and beauty

Leighton Ford’s The Attentive Life is a work of grace and beauty, well worth multiple slow and attentive readings.

Coming from the mind and heart of a very wise man, this slender volume is redolent with truth and love. It’s the kind of book that probably could only have been written by an older person, but that deserves careful consideration by people of all ages, especially young men!

Seventy-six-year-old Ford, a former world-trotting evangelist, recently a trainer and mentor of younger leaders, has stepped into the role of “artist of the soul and a friend on the journey.” As an artist with words, he surely succeeds, with elegant, even poetic prose laced with pithy nuggets of his own and apt quotations from a wide array of skilled authors. Rarely has a Christian leader with such a well-earned reputation for character and spirituality revealed so much of his own weakness and shortcomings. One thinks of St. Augustine’s Confessions.

As the back cover says, “Distractions and fear and busyness were keeping Leighton Ford from seeing God’s work in an around him. So he began a journey of longing and looking for God. And it started with paying attention.”

Under the rubric of “attention,” Ford includes concepts like listening, alertness, and the contemplative life. Chapter One, “Paying Attention,” would have been, as the saying goes, worth the price of the whole book, for it highlights how critical is attentiveness for finding “the way to clarity of heart,” which is “the path to seeing God.”

The author wants to help us be “clear at the center” (his preferred rendering of “pure in heart”) “and so with true attentiveness ‘to see God in all things, and all things in God.’” Such a quality mirrors the nature of God himself, who is a “Father who watches with careful attention.” After all, God is love, and “love is focused attention.”

By contrast, we learn how deadly distraction and inattention can be, not only in our relations with those around us, but in knowing either ourselves or God. “Perhaps inattentiveness is our greatest sin – not only against [God] but against ourselves.”

How, then, do we overcome inattention? Ford follows the “hours” of the monastic rule to paint a portrait of a life which stops, looks, and listens seven times a day. Each of these “hours” is related to a time of day, a state of mind, and a phase in our journey through life, until death itself approaches.

I am hard pressed to describe either the loveliness of this book or the depth and relevance of its central message as the theme unfolds and develops with a remarkably organic flow. A banquet of gourmet delights, pleasing to the palate, delightful to the eyes, and nourishing to the soul. A diamond with dozens of facets, each reflecting and refracting light in dazzling variety. A tapestry of rich colors of every hue, complex but coherent. A bouquet of flowers. A symphony of ideas and images, with theme and variation, ending in a quiet but deeply moving climax.

But I cannot do justice to the variegated richness of Leighton Ford’s style or the content of this highly-autobiographical guide to the attentive – and finally contented – life. You must read it for yourself. Soon. Repeatedly. Attentively.

Total Health?

How To Resolve 7 Deadly Stresses: A Health Manual for All Nations. Oak Brook, Illinois: Institute in Basic Life Principles, 2008.

Carefully reading and then applying the principles in this book would prevent a great deal of disease and even bring healing to those already afflicted with major illnesses.

The inside title page adds, and Discover Five Causes off all Diseases, which might seem to be an arrogant claim, but is supported by a great deal of evidence, both from science and from the Bible. Though the author is not named, Bill Gothard’s fingerprints appear on almost every page.

The book begins with a definition of “total health”” not perfect health, but “the ability to fulfill the purposes for which God created you.” We are told that “total health involves a restored relationship with God and the accompanying signs of joy, freedom, and inward peace.”

Next comes a series of chapters on the five factors that determine health, which are: what we think; what we say; what we do; what we eat; what we inherit. Each of these then receives detailed treatment, with a description of how they affect our physical health and how they can be adjusted to foster physical and mental well-being.

“The disease crisis of modern medicine” is that we rely too much on drugs, all of which have toxic side effects. Covering symptoms with unnecessary pharmaceutical intake, we set ourselves up on a “course of increasing drugs and diseases.”

After an explanation of the harmful effects of stress on the body, we read in the body of the work how to “resolve” the seven major stressors in life: anger, guilt, sexual lust, bitterness, greed, fear, and envy.

More specifically, the writers claim that anger affects the cardiovascular system; guilt affects the nervous system; lust affects the endocrine system; bitterness the digestive system, greed the immune system, fear the respiratory system, and envy the musculoskeletal system.

Extensive references to medical literature back these diagnoses, which were apparently contributed by C. Stephen Paine Jr., M.D., who is thanked for his extensive role in the production of book.

Fundamentally, however, the starting point for each analysis is the Bible, which turns out to contain far more specific references to the relationship of mind and body than most of us would think.

At the beginning of each chapter on the various stressors, we learn how we try to hide or deny their presence in our lives. “I am not bitter… I am just deeply hurt.” On the other side of the page are ways in which we reveal express what would otherwise remain hidden. Bitterness, for example, may come out as “harsh, vitriolic speech, being very easily offended, being extremely judgmental, hard facial features,” and other manifestations of a festering wound.

After diagnosis comes a prescription for healing, based on the Bible and illustrated by vignettes of people who have found freedom by carrying out biblical instructions.

I was amazed at just how intensely practical information was packed into this slender volume, and how much wisdom is contained in a very brief compass. The reader will find step-by-step guidelines on how to “have a courageous conversation” and “how to transform lust into the dynamic of genuine love,” for example.

Some of the aphorisms bear careful pondering:

“To love someone is to understand him.” “One of the greatest gifts we can give a neighbor is a listening heart.” “It is not wrong to desire greatness. It is wrong to strive for it in our own way.” “The truest test of being a servant is how we respond when we are treated like one!” “Love is not an emotion but a choice we make based on God’s will. “Love can always wait to give. However, lust can never wait to get.”

Because of my profound admiration for the value of this beautifully-produced, lavishly-illustrated guidebook to health, I hesitate to make any criticisms. No human production is perfect, however, and How to Resolve 7 Deadly Stresses has a few that should be mentioned.

Though in general I found the interpretation of the Bible adequate, a few sections seemed to stretch the original intent of the biblical passage quoted. “Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48) probably means that we are to evince kindness to all sorts of people, even those who are unlovely. Instead, it is somehow made to support the otherwise helpful concept that we should be sincere and enthusiastic in the way we greet people!

Indeed, one of the main criticisms leveled against Gothard over the past several decades has been his propensity for forced interpretations of the Bible. Perhaps he would benefit from more input from biblical scholars.

Some will be turned off by another of Gothard’s trademarks: A “simple recipe” approach to resolving complex and sometimes chronic problems. One could get the impression that it’s just a matter of going through a checklist of recommended activities, and everything will be fine. For some reason, this doesn’t bother me, perhaps because I think there is the principles are so true, and most of the application of them so helpful, that a great deal of benefit really would come from following the author’s advice.

More difficult for me to understand were the ways in which a biblical principle is linked with a “resulting quality.” “Go the Second Mile” will produce deference; “Observe Communion” (the Lord’s Supper) will result in thoroughness. And so forth. I found this to be the only really jarring feature of an what is basically an extremely helpful treatise on total health.

Overall, however, I would strongly recommend How to Resolve 7 Deadly Stresses. It deserves repeated and thoughtful reading, and forms a good complement to my The Lord’s Healing Words, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and AuthorHouse.

You may obtain this book from the Institute of Basic Life Principles http://store.iblp.org/products/rsds/.

G. Wright Doyle

EXPELLED: Evolutionary Ignorance

EXPELLED: Evolutionary Ignorance

The other night I saw “EXPELLED,” a documentary by Ben Stein that exposes a serious crisis in American society: The denial of freedom of speech to those who question evolutionism.

“EXPELLED” features interviews with university professors and others who have lost their jobs because they dared to suggest that perhaps Darwinian evolutionary theory does not adequately explain the origin and complexities of life on this planet. Even worse, some of them mentioned the forbidden term “intelligent design” in articles or lectures, thus signing their own career death warrant.

Not one of these people espoused creationism; none of them even suggested that evolutionary theory not be taught in public schools. They only wanted freedom to discuss different points of view.

That, they discovered, will not be allowed by Big Science.

Himself a Jew, Stein was led to consider some curious and rather scary links between belief in Darwinism and the eugenics movement, which led directly to the Holocaust. Though he makes it very clear that holding to Darwinian evolutionism does not automatically lead to killing off undesirables, Stein’s interviews demonstrated the well-known fact that Hitler was a fanatical follower of Darwin, and used Darwinian theory to justify eliminating the insane, deformed, and otherwise “unworthy” people from society. The same was true of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong, by the way.

Stein also interviewed eminent Darwinists at length. Allowing them to speak for themselves in answer to his questions, he let them show how irrational is their resistance to dialogue and how inaccurate are their characterizations of those who believe in intelligent design.

One common statement is that no reputable scientist could ever question the “fact” of evolution of all life from the simple to complex by random, impersonal processes.

But Stein found a number of people with one or more doctorates in science and/or mathematics who had serious doubts about the scientific basis for evolutionary theory. It seems that real evidence is lacking for the belief (and it is a belief) that all life comes from some original “simple” cell that somehow mutated into the plants and animals populating the globe today.

When pressed really hard, one evolutionist posited the possibility (he had no proof) that it all started with something piggy-backing on crystals. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said – sit down and try to be calm –that perhaps life on earth came from a superior race on another planet who had evolved to a higher intelligence and then had “seeded” the Earth with the original life forms. This is science?

As it happens, I ran into the problems with evolutionism a long time ago, so I asked a friend who worked at the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor laboratory. “Of course,” he replied, “all serious scientists know that evolutionary theory lacks sufficient evidence.”

“So,” I queried, “why don’t they tell us the truth?”

“Because the only alternative is creation, and we can’t believe that!”

My curiosity piqued by his admission of the lack of proof for macro-evolution, I have read a number of books and articles over the years. Thus, I was not surprised when I recognized a couple of the people whom Stein interviewed, including William Dembski, who has been called “the Isaac Newton of information science,” and who holds two doctoral degrees, and the eminent German-born Jewish mathematician, David Berlinski.

If you want to follow this up, I recommend the following volumes, written for non-scientists like myself:

Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, by Michael Denton, an evolutionist who is alarmed by recent findings that undercut evolutionary theory.

Darwin’s Black Box, by Michael Behe, who maintains that Darwin simply could not know how “irreducibly complex” even the simplest cell is, making natural selection over long periods of time virtually impossible.

Darwin on Trial, by Phillip Johnson, a professor of law at Berkeley, who used the normal rules of evidence to evaluate the claims of evolutionary theory and found them almost without basis.

Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? by Jonathan Wells (who also has two doctoral degrees), which examines the most commonly cited instances of development from one species to another and shows that they are all either fraudulent or lacking any foundation in fact.

I haven’t finished William Dembski’s Intelligent Design yet, but it looks pretty good.

Note: Not one of these people argues for young earth creationism.

But you might want to look at Faith, Form, and Time, by Harvard Ph.D. Kurt Patrick Wise. A student of one of the most eminent Darwinists of the 20^th century, Stephen Gould, Wise actually thinks that the Genesis account of a six-day creation makes better sense scientifically than does the evolutionary model.

One caveat about “EXPELLED”: Stein is pretty angry about the suppression of evidence and the silencing of people who dare to challenge the status quo, so this documentary, though very well done, comes across as pretty stark and black and white. But then that’s how the dogmatic evolutionists portray the conflict between evolutionism and intelligent design, so maybe Stein is simply telling it as it is.

Healing Words

    For several decades, I suffered from something like fibromyalgia. During that time, I read countless articles and many books about nutrition and health, but I found that the most helpful instruction came from the Bible.

Over a period of several years, I compiled a number of references to passages in the Bible that spoke about physical, mental, and spiritual health, and wrote short comments on them. You can find the results of this study in The Lord’s Healing Words, available from www.AuthorHouse.com.

The former dean of the medical school of the University of Virginia, Dr. Robert M. Carey,  wrote in his preface, “I commend this book most enthusiastically to you.”Dr. Francis MacNutt, author of Healing, The Power to Heal, and other widely-read books, said it was “Very well done.” Other readers have told me how much they have been helped by The Lord’s Healing Words, so I encourage you to find out for yourself.

The 200-page volume contains six months of daily readings from the Bible on physical, mental, and spiritual health, with brief commentary. The comments are meant to stimulate your own reflection, prayer, and action to produce substantial change in your health and overall happiness.

Without offering any guarantee of a pain-free existence, this book does uncover the wisdom of God’s Word for a healthy lifestyle. A special section on men’s health addresses common problems we men face and contains essential principles for along, effective, and joy-filled life.

TLHW is not a “page-turner”; nor is it meant to be. It works best for you to go slowly, one section at a time, thinking about what you have read and applying it to your own life.

Happy reading!

Wright

William Tyndale: A biography, by David Daniell

This marvelous book was given to me by dear friends a few years ago. It had been highly recommended to them as the biography to read for that year. I agree.

Daniell gives us a fine mix of historical background (“life and times…”), careful analysis of Tyndale’s fresh rendering of the Bible into the everyday English of the time, and judicious evaluations of Tyndale’s friends and enemies.

I came away with fresh admiration for the courage, dedication, and brilliance of this man. He labored long and hard, against immense odds and ferocious opposition, and at great danger to his own life. In the end, he was betrayed before he could finish his translation of the Old Testament, but not before he had laid a foundation that would become a magnificent edifice.

What surprised and disappointed me was the portrayal of Thomas More, who was so favorably presented in the movie, “A Man for All Seasons,” and who is considered by Roman Catholics to be a saint. What do we say about a man who did all he could to keep the people of Britain from reading the Bible in their own tongue, and who delighted in the torture of Protestants?

At any rate, Tyndale shines forth as the giant he was. We are all in his debt, and Daniell’s volume makes that abundantly clear in elegant and exacting scholarship.