No Compromise

I'd been wanting this book for a long time.

Visiting friends about 5 years ago, I found it on their bookshelf. Immediately I picked it up with great interest.  When I was a little girl I can remember looking at my parent's record (yes, record) cover of Keith Green's worship album, Songs For The Shepherd. There was Keith Green on the front, larger than life with a thick mop of curly dark hair, the most serene and almost loving look in his clear blue eyes as he gazed out at me from the cover, and a lamb draped around his shoulders. (Totally '80's. :) If I remember right, due to the lamb and Keith's thick beard I vaguely wondered if that was Jesus; so the picture fascinated me. My parents had been deeply influenced by Keith's music during the early years of their Christian life. In fact they still talk about the time Keith came to our town to do a concert at the invite of their pastor, and parked his camper on some friend's property. They got to meet him! I've pumped them for info on what he was like but they said it was only a brief meeting for them and they don't remember it that well. (Still, no fair, right?)

At any rate, after a brief perusal of the book years ago, it jumped on my "to buy" list, and not too long thereafter I bought an album of songs from one of his concerts off of iTunes. I listen to it all the time. Truth be told, it's not his voice that I like so much as the passion with which he sings and the intense lyrics of his songs. It's powerful stuff.

I never did buy the book, but finally my mom got it for me last Christmas. I was pretty thrilled. I've  kept it in my locker at work to read on my lunch breaks, so it's taken a while for me to get through it. Yesterday at work I got to the part of the book where Keith was killed with his two young children in a plane crash. He was 28 years old—one year older than me. As I sat in the sun at the picnic table behind the nursing home and read that chapter, tears streamed down my cheeks. I couldn't see the pages because my eyes were swimming. I wanted to bury my face in my hands and just sob. It felt like I was grieving the fresh loss of a friend. My lunch break finished and I clocked back in, frantically trying to wipe the smudged mascara from my eyes and pull myself together (because a weeping nurse aid walking the halls doesn't really give our nursing home the cheery persona it's going for...plus what do I tell my co-workers when they ask what's wrong, "Oh I'm morning the loss of a man who died three years before I was born"?)

This morning I finished the rest of the chapter and was surprised that the tears came out in full force again. I can remember only two other times when a book made me weep like that. The first was Brutchko by Bruce Olson and the second was Safely Home by Randy Alcorn.  Both times I just buried by head in a pillow and sobbed my eyes out!

Okay this post is not about my weeping tendencies. To be honest I don't even know how to articulate what I feel burdened to say. This book has started a lot of thoughts whirring in my head and I want to take the time to process them. Mostly I just want to totally recommend this book to anybody who might read this post. I am planning on giving this and Shadow Of The Almighty to any guys I know graduating from High School because Jim Elliot and Keith Green are definitely two men to pattern one's life after. They lived short lives and they made them COUNT. They lived with passion. They lived imperfectly. But they lived with the deepest desire of their hearts to know God.

Keith struggled with a lot of the things that I struggle with. He couldn't quite grasp the grace of God until the final year or two of his life. He had a hard time with his personality which was so black-and-white, and sometimes it caused him to react harshly to other Christians who he felt were compromising. Sometimes he felt like he didn't know how to just rest and let God LOVE him. The last year of his life, it's like God started purging that stuff from him and he was brought to such a place of maturity, peace, love and joy in God. I know God will bring me there too. Maybe that's why I feel like I lost a friend when I came to the end of this book. Thank you, God, for my brother's life and testimony.

I feel a little jealous of Keith too. Do you ever just wish that God would take you home so the barriers in your relationship with Him would be gone and you could just bask in His presence and really KNOW Him apart from all the junk that being tied to a body entails? Keith got to leave an awesome, lasting legacy behind on earth and yet be with the Savior he wanted to be with so badly.
I do envy that...I really do. I love the joys of earth but I increasingly long for heaven so much. I want to KNOW GOD. To see Him. To touch Him, even. To understand Him and I think most of all, to finally be able to hear Him perfectly.

Look how I ramble when my heart is full. It's funny, really. There's too much going on inside of me to say so I just bounce from one thing to another.

Long story short, you really oughtta' read this book.