Worth Your Time
Ever had a bunch of people recommend something to you?
That’s happened recently to me, I had quite a few folks tell me I should read a book. What’s crazy is they are not connected to each other, just friends who brought it up and recommended it. There was a pattern. And that was I should read this book.
So I did. It’s a bit different for me, I tend to read a lot of Christian Living books and a military thrillers. Yeah, I know, welcome to my brain.
After a bunch of recommendations I finally took the time to dig in. And I loved it. Great storytelling, characters and some really good principals on life and faith.
This is a fictional book about a character. It’s called “Theo of Golden” by Allen Levi. I actually saw him in concert forever ago, he’s a great singer/songwriter.
I won’t spoil the book, but I’ll just say it’s worth your time. It really draws you in and you want to know how the story unfolds.
The big picture: Theo is the name of the main character and Golden is the town. Theo is an older man who comes to town and starts buying paintings of locals from a coffee shop and starts giving them to the person painted. (That’s in the book description.)
What unfolds in the power of presence, listening, and character.
So many great things in this book.
Wanted to share some quotes from it, obviously these are not in context of the story, but I hope they stir you to think a bit, I know I found myself thinking a lot along the way:
“Thank you. I hope it’s true. There is no virtue in advertising one’s sadness. But there is no wisdom in denying it either. And there is the beautiful possibility that great love can grow out of sadness if it is well-tended. Sadness can make us bitter or wise. We get to choose.”
“God gave us faces so we can see each other better.”
“But even old men have young memories.”
“Unmet expectations have a clever way of showing up at every stage of life.”
“simply help people sit still long enough to see what is already there.”
“Ask an artist what it takes to make good art and you’re almost sure to get an autobiography in response.”
“You can bend a twig, but not a tree.”
“I wonder if, like newborn children, we go through our entire lives looking for a face, longing for a particular gaze that calms and fills us, that loves and welcomes us, that recognizes and runs to greet us. Is that perhaps what this day, Christmas, is all about? It is an imponderable thought that the Giver of Faces, the face of heaven itself, the face for which every heart yearns, became a wee babe, misty eyed and helpless, looking Himself for the tender face of His mother on the night of the angels.”
“…And remember, heaven can draw a straight line with a crooked stick.”
“He once wrote that the best portion of a good person’s life is ‘the little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.”
“But God, in His sublime goodness, has always sent others, mysterious others, to walk with us — prophets, preachers, friends, teachers, artists, storytellers, wives and husbands, children, songbirds and rivers, even hardship and loss — to help us see clearly. They are ones who make our hearts burn within us, who call us out of our indifference, our lethargy, our death and defeat. They call us to be fully alive, or at least more alive than we were before we met them.”