I still can't get over how much I'm loving every word of Mike Yaconelli's "Messy Spirituality." But I think I've at least solved the mystery of why there's no way I can read this book in one sitting: I just want to hang onto every word, every sentence, every story, every chapter, and so on. It's truly that great of a book.

There's a chapter on "Living Our Ignorance" that initially got my attention due to a Brennan Manning reference. But later on, I realize why this book is so short. Yaconelli packs into one paragraph more heft than I can put into a year's worth of blogging (or a decade, even). The Manning reference retells a story of his about a new believer that meets someone who asks a few questions about Jesus Christ that the believer obviously knows nothing about, but concludes with something out of Marcos Witt's sermon from my "Your Story" posts (here and here), explaining his life before Christ and after Christ.

Yaconelli recaps the one page worth of Manning into one paragraph, putting it into the context of the blind man healed by Jesus:

The blind man knows very little about Jesus, but he is an expert in first-time seeing. He doesn't know where Jesus is, but he knows what Jesus did. He can't define a messiah, but he certainly can describe what it is like to see a flower for the first time. When confronted with questions about Jesus, the blind man is not afraid to say, "I don't know."

"I don't know" is often the only reply we can give to explain the mystery of Christ.

Obviously, there's loads more. So I'll add a few more over the weekend. Check back.