Jesus - Safe, Tender, Extreme - Softcover

Plass, Adrian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0310268990 ISBN 13: 9780310268994

Publisher: Zondervan, 2005

Synopsis

People long for reality in their walk with Christ. To attain that heartfelt need, Adrian Plass in his profound but endearing style engages with three deeply significant aspects of Jesus - how he is safe, tender and extreme. The safety we find in Jesus is only discovered at a price, which may be suffering or the witnessing of suffering. Jesus himself was able to battle through the agony of Gethsemane because at the deepest level he was safe in the love of his Father. And he also knew that obedience is the surest path to ultimate security. Are we able to embrace the safety of Jesus? The tenderness of Jesus can be one of the most life-sustaining things of creation. We can see it in the people around us and we can see it in the Bible, such as in accounts of Jesus himself, especially his dealings with the widow of Nain. Many people may find it difficult to receive the tenderness of God, but, like Peter confronted with his rooftop vision, we may be called to a new understanding and a fresh revelation. Do we experience the tenderness of Jesus? The extreme Jesus was actually, from a divine perspective, not extreme at all. After all, Jesus only ever did what he saw his Father doing. Some of his behaviour may seem trivial or mundane to us while other actions appear dramatic, such as clearing out the temple with a knotted rope, asserting that a dying girl was actually asleep and would soon be awake, or being extremely rude to important people. All of his actions reveal his total commitment to obedience. Whatever needed to be done would be done, regardless of how it would appear to human eyes. Is Jesus the solid ground on which our feet stand? With him at the centre of our lives are we willing and able to be extreme for God in the big and little and mild and dramatic and banal and bizarre acts of service that are required of us? Each of the three sections is accompanied by personal experiences of encountering Jesus, safe, tender and extreme, some of them very raw indeed, and the book ends with a selection of prayers for readers who would like to respond to the issues that have been covered.

About this title

About the Author:

Adrian Plass is one of today's most significant and successful Christian authors, and he has written over thirty books, including his latest, Looking Good Being Bad - the Subtle Art of Churchmanship. Known for his ability to evoke both tears and laughter for a purpose, Plass has been reaching the hearts of thousands for over fifteen years. He lives in Sussex, England with his wife, Bridget, and continues to be a cricket fanatic

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Jesus -- Safe, Tender, Extreme Copyright 2006 by Adrian Plass Requests for information should be addressed to: Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plass, Adrian. Jesus -- safe, tender, extreme / Adrian Plass. p. cm. ISBN-10: 0-310-25784-0 ISBN-13: 978-0-310-25784-4 1. Jesus Christ -- Person and offices. 2. Spirituality -- Anecdotes. 3. Plass, Adrian. I. Title. BT203.P53 2006 232 --- dc22 2005016640 Adrian Plass asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means -- electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other -- except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. This edition printed on acid-free paper. Interior design by Beth Shagene Printed in the United States of America 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 * 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Safe in the Love of Jesus, Safe in the Body of Christ At this very moment, as I write, in the room at the end of the hall across from my study, someone is dying. Kathleen Rosa Ormerod is my wife's mother and my good friend. She is eighty-eight years old and has terminal cancer. Three weeks ago, one week before Christmas, we made the decision that Kathleen should leave the hospital and spend her remaining days, weeks, or months in our house. She is confi ned to bed, and what a bed it is, one of those special electric ones that you feel might even perform a backward somersault if you pressed its multitudinous buttons in the correct permutation. This superbed stands in the room that until now has functioned as our dining room. We want this to be a place for her to live in, not just the equivalent of a hospital ward. Fortunately, it is an ideal room for the purpose, bright, cosy, and enfolding, yet with a sense of being connected to the rest of the world. The windows and the glass doors are responsible for creating this effect. There are three windows, two large ones opening out towards the area at the front of the house, and another smaller one facing the backyard. In addition, there are two glass-panelled doors, the one directly in front of her giving a view of the hall and the stairs, and the other, diagonally to her right, looking through to the kitchen, which is where everything of any real importance has always happened in our home -- talking, eating, sitting around, all those crucial things. She is effectively right at the centre of our family activity. She can see people arriving and leaving and moving from room to room and working in the kitchen and passing up and down the stairs. Her room is ablaze with fl owers, sent and delivered to the house by friends and family who know how much Bridget's mum has always loved growing things. Stoic though she is, it is a matter of great sadness to Kathleen that it will not be possible for her to see the fl owers growing in the garden of her own house this springtime. It breaks my heart for her. How sad it must be to feel that you have probably seen your last springtime. However, if you have no choice but to die and you cannot leave your bed, this is not the worst corner of the world in which to fi nd yourself. That is Kathleen's continually expressed point of view, and I agree with her. She deserves this comfort and consideration. She is a toiler of the old school, a person who has given to others all through her life. A hardworking, consistently obedient servant of the Lord for more than eight decades, she has merited every good and helpful thing that can be made available to her. We all pay a price though. For Kathleen there is the frustration in this last phase of her life of constantly having to take from others. On the day when she fi rst arrived at our house after leaving the hospital, she said she wanted to ask me something. 'Adrian,' she said, 'I want you to be absolutely truthful with me. Is my being here going to disrupt your family celebrations or get in the way of your day-to-day living? Be honest with me.' 'Good gracious, no,' I replied. 'We always like to have someone sleeping in a hospital bed in our dining room over the Christmas period. We'd fi nd anything else very odd indeed.' Safe in the Love of Jesus, Safe in the Body of Christ 21 Kathleen laughed a great deal at this, but it was also a step on the road to acceptance of the fact that the independence she values so much is not possible now. It is not her way to take without giving in return. Now she has no choice. For my wife some things are painfully diffi cult to watch. Bridget sat beside her demented father as he died only months ago, and since then she has hardly had the time or space to grieve his passing. Kathleen was never a bulky person. Now she is very thin -- horribly, frighteningly thin. Both of us fi nd it very hard to look at her outstretched fl eshless arm, to see the way the skin goes sliding down that brittle stick of bone like silk gliding along a polished wooden curtain pole. It is the cancer that does it. It would make no difference how much she ate. Like some ravening fungoid monster, the hungry killer inside takes a huge part of all the goodness and nutrition that goes into her body, feeding itself and growing larger and more blindly, grossly dominant by the day. We fi nd it strange to look at her, so slight, so fragile, and so inoffensive, and to know that this ugly thing is murdering her by inches. At the end of the day, assisted by medication, she sleeps like a dead person, skin china white, her mouth hanging open on her chest, her head tilted to one side. Recently, exchanging notes, my wife and I discovered that after she has settled for the night, we are both in the habit of peering fearfully in through the glass panels of the door that connects her room to the hall, studying her with round-eyed, fearful concentration, hoping to detect in the rise and fall of the emaciated chest beneath her nightdress that she is still with us. Hard though it is to admit, there are times, especially when she has had a depressingly diffi cult, uncomfortable day, when we half hope that her shallow breathing will stop. We wonder if God might allow her to slip quietly away to join her beloved George, in a place where, for him, there is no more panic-stricken confusion and, for her, no more commodes and catheters and bedsores and all the other varieties of personal humiliation that polite and private people so dislike. At night we take Kathleen's breathing to bed with us. Bridget has bought one of those baby monitors so that her mother can call her in the night if she needs help urgently. The transmitter is downstairs beside Kathleen, and the receiver is in our bedroom. I found this very strange at fi rst, and I shall never become accustomed to it. It is as though another person's soul is trapped in the little white plastic contraption with the glowing red light that stands on a shelf in the corner of our bedroom. Every night now, after I have switched off my bedside lamp, there are, unnervingly, two sets of human sounds in the blackness apart from my own, and the overlapping rhythms of two clocks ticking, one of them on our wall, and the other standing on the little table next to Kathleen as she sleeps. The ticking of her little square clock continues like the beating of a healthy heart, but there are moments when the sound of Kathleen's breathing seems to be arrested altogether. When this happens Bridget will sometimes sit bolt upright in bed, straining her ears to detect the slightest evidence of a breath being taken. More than once she has begged me to go downstairs and look through the glass door to check that her mother is still alive. Nights are far from easy at present.

About this edition

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0310268990
• ISBN 13: 9780310268994
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304