Jesus – Safe, Tender, Extreme

Adrian Plass

What a great title!

As ever one reads Adrian Plass for sheer honesty. I love it when he talks about his moods, sulking, rage, fright, confusion, doubt because I know they all go on in my life too and because they occur for him within the context of his relationship with God and not externally to it. God seems to have so often worked through these times of vulnerability and failure. I loved the story of when he was in in London, supposedly on his way to a speaking engagement but actually hopelessly lost in an unfamiliar part of town. No-one he knew was in to answer the phone and time was running out. He sat down on a doorstep, the householder came out, recognised him and drove him to the venue!

His advice when doubt comes in is great – don't try to slug it out with doubt but treat it as an unwelcome guest: park him by the kitchen table and get on with your life but whatever you do, don't feed him! Sooner or later he'll get bored and go away.

I found his comments on healing ministry helpful and challenging when he asks us to face the truth that actually, not that many people get healed. He balances this with the story of someone he knows well who was truly and amazingly healed by the last person you might expect to do it! But he's quite savage on people who play upon the fear and sickness of others to create a hyped up, self-serving healing ministry and on those holistic healing ministries in which nobody actually gets better.

As ever the target is our unending ability to fool ourselves. Plass's greatest gift to us is to show us that we don't need to do this to have a relationship with God. It's not based on our wishful thinking but on His unstinting grace in spite of our folly. This is also close to the source of much of his humour. There we are constantly trying to convince God that He should love us, desperately trying every trick we can think of to make ourselves believe it, and there's God more constantly just longing for us to stop squirming and let His love in.

Plass's own insecurities are actually great teachers here – you've got to thank God for them. The great problem he and all of us have is that it is so hard for us to believe that we are loved and that God really cares about us.

This is a faulty book. Plass makes too much of his drive to write a thousand words a day, partly for therapeutic reasons. Although he is always good company sometimes you know he is just padding the book out for the sake of those thousand words – like the day when he went for a walk with his wife to a nice café (he writes so well you wish you knew where it was and could go there too), met a couple whom they almost made friends with but didn't, then stuck it in the book to make up the daily word count.

This book may lack some focus but it's full of lovely things!