Letters & Dirt

As I read the final pages of Dug Down Deep, I concluded that the book I was just finishing was much like the letters my pen pals and I wrote to each other in years past.  Each chapter, like our letters, was a personal explanation—peppered with stories from our lives and references to our favorite authors—of why we believed what we believed and how we’d come to that point.  The only difference is that, unlike the rest of Josh’s books and my pen pal’s letters, Dug Down Deep has nothing to do with dating and courtship.  Or rather, it does, just not in the way you’d think.

Dug Down Deep shows why courtship and homeschooling are only the surface issues—they are the product of our theology, and not our theology itself.  Dug Down Deep encourages us to dig below the surface of appearances and words to explore what we really believe about God himself, and why that is what really matters.

Honestly, the first two chapters are my favorite: they are the personal testimony of Josh’s “rumspringa” and how he learned to “dig.”  Maybe I like those chapters so much because that’s where I’ve been and where I am.  I spent my teen years getting:

…faith so mixed up with family tradition that it’s hard to distinguish between a genuine knowledge of God and comfort in a familiar way of life. (Dug Down Deep, pg. 4)

Truth about God doesn’t define and shape us.  We have grown up in our own religious culture.  And often this culture, with its own rituals and music and moral values, comes to represent Christianity far more than specific beliefs about God do. (pg. 15)

But there came a day when my parents’ faith became my own.  And now, as a mom, I am praying for that day for my own daughters.  But it is humbling to realize how little I know and how much I need God’s help to point these little ones to Him.  In other words, I am learning that I have to dig.  I have to dig into the theology of what I believe in order to teach my girls that Christianity is more than just:

…a way of life or…cherished traditions.  Of course the Christian faith leads to living in specific ways.  And it does join us to a specific community.  And it does involve tradition.  All this is good.  It’s important.  But it has to be more than tradition.  It has to be about a person—the historical and living person of Jesus Christ. (pg. 15)

The rest of Dug Down Deep is a theology book in disguise.  In other words, it explains the truth about God in a way that reads more like a story and less like a text book.  I perused those chapters carefully, reading some paragraphs out loud to my husband, analyzing each chapter up close and as a whole.  Like the letters from my pen pals of days past, I probably couldn’t agree with every single line Josh wrote.  But instead of finding anything to pick apart and point to as near-heresy, I only encountered a perspective that inspired me to examine more closely what I believe.

Maybe he talks more about predestination than free will: but his focus on how much God has done and how none of it is about me was an incredible reminder that I never would have had the opportunity to choose to trust in Jesus Christ if it were not for His amazing grace.

If I love the Cross only for what it does for me, I will have reduced it to a monument to myself.  But the greatest glory of the Cross is what it tells me about God.  A God of justice and mercy.  A God who loved helpless sinners like me so much that he came to die so we could be free to know and worship him for eternity. (pg. 48)

Even though I was raised in a Conservative Baptist church, I couldn’t help but like this chapter on the Holy Spirit written by a Reformed Charismatic.  And “The Invisible Made Visible” chapter was such a beautiful and clear summary of the church that I forgot the author pastors a “mega church” in comparison to our little church family of fifty and my husband’s childhood experiences in home fellowships.

The most important truth I gained from the book was simply that I must know God and what I believe about Him in order to claim His name.  I must know the truth in order to live the truth.  But what brought it all into perspective (especially my analysis of the author’s doctrine) was the final chapter, “Humble Orthodoxy.”  Some days I cringe to remember all the dogmatic convictions I once held and wrote about.  I’m sure Josh sometimes wonders why he ever gave me permission to put all his old magazine articles on ylcf.org.  But I know it keeps me humble to remember how much I’ve changed and grown—and how much I still have to learn.  As for the future, I’ll be keeping this sagacious thought in mind:

We should strive to hold our beliefs with a charity and kindness that won’t embarrass us in heaven. (pg. 229)

P.S. Josh, if you ever make it up our way, you’ll have to stop by our little antique store.  We have the perfect thing to hang on your office wall: a shovel with a handle over ten feet long.  We were told it was used for digging power pole holes, and of course, they have to be “dug down deep.”

(Thanks to WaterBrook Multnomah for providing this book for review!)