Consuming Worship

Book Review: My Beautiful Idol

A few weeks ago I was notified that I was one of 50 bloggers selected to partner with The Ooze to be an “Ooze Select Blogger.” I feel privileged to have been picked, and I hope I can do this whole book review thing justice. I’ve never, ever done a serious review before, so I would appreciate lots of feedback on how I can improve these in the future. Once I get in the groove, you can probably expect a book review every 7 to 10 days.

First up is the confessional memoir of Pete Gall entitled “My Beautiful Idol.” I had never read a memoir of any kind before, so I really didn’t know what to expect. All I can say is, you know you’re in for a ride when the author quotes his wife in the preface as saying, “You know, you were kind of a butt.”

This is really the story of a young man who is a Christ-follower, and has been willing to let us in to see his innermost thoughts and feelings about striving to live the life. There are a lot of painful and embarrassing moments to be found, and in reality most of us could probably relate—we just don’t want to admit it. Let’s face it, the lives of most Christ-followers are much more internally messy than we ever let on—even to the point where we lie to ourselves and convince ourselves we’ve got it all figured out, but we probably couldn’t be further from the truth.

Gall’s journey is rife with pain and lies. Pain from the very stuff of life and how it all fits together, or rather doesn’t fit together, and lies that he told himself and others and lies he believed to be truths. There is great philosophical insight to be found when viewing the idols so many of us place before our relationship with God. We’re not talking about your typical OT type of idols, nor the idols so many of us think about in modern culture (stars and the like), but rather the idols we make for ourselves to stroke our own ego. Other idols are to be found within the walls of our Christian sub-culture as well. Do we worship the REAL Jesus, or a pale reflection of Him that we have conceived on our own and made into our idol?

There’s this crab metaphor running through the entire memoir. Without giving away the whole thing, essentially we are the crabs, and we spend our entire lives running around to find the best way to camouflage ourselves from those things in life that are out to hurt us. In a conversation with a cab driver, Gall says, “I want him to argue against me, to try to see me, to let me know if my camouflage is really working. Or better yet, I want him to show me a way to live that doesn’t require the camouflage. The truth is that I’m so desperate to be myself—but still adequate and loved—that I’m willing to look for clues anywhere.”

The entire book is a story of deconstruction-reconstruction-deconstruction. A life lived where, every time he feels he has arrived at a plateau of holiness, he finds that he has yet again been entirely off track and that the Jesus he thought he was following was yet another self-conceived idol. I found that we’re all something like this on the inside, but we’re just too slickly holy to admit it to ourselves.

An early thought in the book is one that seems to be the theme of Gall’s walk with God over the course of many years, a pattern that ruthlessly repeated itself over and over. He says, “I know, deep down, that the truth of my success is that God let me walk with my idol until I could see it well enough to put it down and head in the other direction.“ In the end, Gall learns that having an idol is really all about self. You can manipulate an idol to feed your ego, but no so God.

What you will not find by the end of the read is a man who tries to sell you a bill of goods that he’s figured this whole “Christian life” thing out. After the final words, you get a sense of having peeked into the life of a man who recognizes clearly what has gone on before, and will strive to live the future life out in the light of revealed truth. But, that each day will be filled with the same challenges as every day before.

I was highly encouraged by a story of true brokenness and true redemption. Here is a life of a man who became increasingly aware of his own standing before God. It is a humbling thing to learn you are not as holy as you thought you were, try to work it all out on your own, and then find that you can’t do it on your own. it is just as humbling to look upon a life that has had so many similar thoughts and feelings, if not events, and see the love that God has in abundance, no matter how off track the life has gotten.

There’s a great line of thought that comes from a conversation with a friend where he is told, “You will do works because you are a follower of Jesus, but as soon as you turn it around and start looking to do things to define your Christianity, to impress God or to enjoy the control, you stop following Jesus and instead head out after marching orders of your own invention. Jesus said that the yoke he would give us was easy and the burden light. He pulls the weight beside you, carrying what you cannot. He protects you. You do not have to fear the attacks that may come, because he will be there. The foolishness of the Gospel is the foolishness of being naked in a world that believes it can protect itself if it covers itself.”

In the end, this is a life that is left in tatters, in need of salvage. This is exactly where God wants him to be.

Stylistically, I’ve never read anything like this before. It’s written in a first-person, there-in-the-moment style rather than as a recollection. I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of this book, even the embarrassingly painful parts. What I found most painful was not Gall’s pain, but my own in recollecting the times in my life where I made (and still make) the exact same mistakes. This book will challenge you be broken and to tear down the idols in your own life that you’ve erected for your own self-worth and ego building.

I highly recommend this book to every sincere follower of Christ.

Next review on deck: We the Purple by Marcia Ford.

Technorati Tags: Authenticity, book review, my beautiful idol, ooze select blogger, pete gall, the ooze

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