Breakfast Encouragement

Expect problems and eat them for breakfast.  Alfred A. Montapert

I had the delight to breakfast with Melanie this week.  Is there anything more satisfying than heart-to-hearts with your daughter? As the kids were chugging milk, Melanie and I enjoyed our orange scones and conversation. As we walked out the door, Melanie said, "That was so much fun swapping sheltering ideas." As the momma of four, she's busy with all that it takes to keep her household organized and running smoothly. Yet she takes God's commandment to "Stoop down and reach out to those who are oppressed. Share their burdens, and so complete Christ’s law."

Later in the day I picked up a book I've been eager to read, "Breakfast with Bonhoeffer" by Jon Walker. In the little bit I had time to read I had a REAL breakfast--steak and eggs with hashbrowns and 8-grain toast. God used Bonhoeffer in Walker's life to rescue him from a failing faith where God's plans seemed more evil than good." 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor and writer, and eventually, a spy during the time Adolf Hitler attempted to exterminate the Jews throughout Europe. What strikes me most in this book is the passion he had for truth. Not man's truth fed to him.  Not easy truth plucked from one or two books from the Bible.  But truth that  he found at the feet of Jesus. Truth lived out in his own life so effectively that his words ring clear today.  

Bonhoeffer believed we should walk the narrow way. "The danger as we follow Jesus into the Kingdom is that we can slip off the narrow path, on one side sliding into a ditch of burdensome religion--what we commonly call legalism--and on the other side sliding into a ditch where there is a presumptive regard for the bloody cost of God's grace," something Bonhoeffer refers to as cheap grace.

"Both these ditches carry us away from the intimate relationship God desires that we have with Jesus Christ...the first tries to separate grace from truth and the second tries to separate truth. As we follow Jesus down the narrow path, he will lovingly and ruthlessly place us on the anvil of his grace and then hammer us into the shape of Christ."

Jesus told us, Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life (Matthew 7:14). This book is stirring my heart, giving me a renewed desire to stay on the narrow path, not concerning myself with what is happening in the ditches beside me. I want to be hammered into the shape of Christ.

Have you ever found yourself in a narrow road ditch?

Have you read any of Bonhoeffer's books?  

Which one should I read next?

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