What Good Is God? Book Review

I just finished Philip Yancey's new book What Good Is God?, if you like Yancey, then you will not be disappointed in this newest offering. He delivers a powerful journalistic account of how he has witnessed the presence of God in nearly every corner of the globe and in nearly every conceivable circumstance.

Yancey's comments to students and others at Virginia Tech after the campus massacre:
I ask you to honor the grief that you feel, a pain that results from your connection to those who died, your friends and classmates and professors. Grief proves love. The pain will dull over time, but will never fully disappear. 

Cling to the hope that nothing that happens, not even this terrible tragedy, is irredeemable. We serve a God who has vowed to make all things new. J.R.R. Tolkien once spoke of "Joy beyond the walls of the world more poignant than grief." You know well the poignancy of grief. As healing progresses, may you know too that joy, a foretaste of a world redeemed. 

Finally, do not attempt healing alone. Rely on the people in this room, the staff of this church, other members of Christ's body in your hometown. True healing, of deep connective tissue, takes place in community. Where is God when it hurts? Where God's people are. Where misery is, there is the Messiah, and now on earth the Messiah takes form in the shape of the church. That's what the body of Christ means (34-35).

Yancey addressing a conference based around ministering to women in prostitution:
Our desires, including sexual desires, are not wrong. They are rather, like the rungs of a ladder that lead us toward beauty, toward relationship and intimacy, and ultimately toward God who granted us these gifts. Remove the rungs from the ladder, though, and you are left with scattered sticks of wood leading nowhere. The path to health for those of you leaving the sex trade will mean neither quenching nor exploiting desire but rather restoring it to its proper place (82). 

My friend George once said to me, "I feel caught somewhere between 'Just as I am' and 'Just as I Should be'" In fact, we're all caught there. In my teenage and college years I branded the uptight, perfectionistic people in my church as hypocrites, and perhaps they were. Now I look on them with sympathy and self-recognition. If we compare who we are to who we claim to be, we are all hypocrites, and the church provides a place where we can openly confess our failures and receive the cleansing power of grace (84)