Thinking is the best way to travel...

"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think." James McCosh.

I have always been a reasonably quick reader. It's a habit born out of an impatient nature and a diet of fiction. The need to race for the end just to find out what happens. But reading a book slowly has its advantages. Not least it delays that slight feeling of bereavement one feels when finishing a really good book.

When I started Finding Sanctuary I read nearly half of it the space of a few short hours. The problem was, although I knew it was deep, I took almost none of it in. So I returned to the beginning and started again more slowly. Taking time to reflect on what I was reading.

Today I concluded the chapter on obedience. Here I find that Jamieson presents an answer to the conundrum I posed at the weekend. A resolution to the issue arising from the section on Thomas Merton. It is an answer not dissimilar to the one that I had independently arrived at.

Let's now look at the powerful question about who sets the agenda in your life. As you 'pray for your own discovery', the agenda of your life is set neither by other people nor by yourself; it is set by God. Life becomes the search for God's agenda in your life. When you find it, then you have found your true self. You have found the ultimate obedient freedom.

It's good to read Jamieson's take on the paradox - but I'm glad I took the time to wrestle with it. It's far easier to remember a lesson learned through struggle than one passed on as a complete package.

As an interesting aside, the McCosh quotation above was on the bag provided when I bought Out of Solitude. A quick Google brings up many references to it. Most of which omit (as did my bag) a second sentence from the quotation:

"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that."