Gilead

If you need a book right now, can I recommend Gilead? This is now my all time favorite. Personal choice, I know, but let me sell you a little. If you read this bit at all, then you must like a measure of what interests me.
Why do I search out the life of ministry- Christ's and otherwise? This novel says all I could explain about how the dedication to spiritual growth in one's self and other's is heroic and beautiful.
Here's an ordinary man in a unnoticable community making an epic love story by his honesty and grace. He's writing to his young son during the last months of his life, as last words become so compelling. His limits are what I fear in us and his generosity is what I believe about us. And of course there is the wisdom, speaking to someone like you and me-

"...I have thought about that very often-how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one gereration are irksome or meaningless in the next...young people from my own flock have come home witha copy of...L'Immoraliste, flummoxed by the possibility of unbelief, when I must have told them a thousand times that unbelief is possible...And they want me to defend religion, and they want me to give them "proofs." I just won't do it. It only confirms them in their skepticism. Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense."

There is no proof of God in this novel, but an acting out that is undeniable.