Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

Somebody put me on to this short book by a feminist lesbian university professor who was converted and became the homeschooling wife of a Reformed Presbyterian pastor. Quite. A. Story. To say that Rosaria Butterfield brings a fresh set of eyes and ideas to the life of a disciple is inadequate preparation for the lively, honest, and uncomfortable gift she offers by telling her story. She humanizes people whom those in the church typically only categorize. Her stuff is delightfully and painfully observant:

• gain is only sweet when you actually have something to lose 
• where everybody thinks the same, nobody thinks very much 
• The closest I ever got to Christians during these times were students who refused to read material in university classrooms on the grounds that “knowing Jesus” meant never needing to know anything else; 
• without the proper response to failure, we don’t grow, we only age. 
• what I saw in my study of the religious right (and what I still see): spiritual pride and club Christianity. 
• Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame. 
• the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin. 
• “Rosaria, if people in my church really believed that gay people could be transformed by Christ, they wouldn’t talk about us or pray about us in the hateful way that they do.” 
• This experience taught me a powerful lesson about evangelism: the integrity of our relationships matters more than the boldness of our words.

And on and on.  Well, I marked up this book real good.  I hope it marked me, too.