Outlive your Life by Max Lucado

The book, Outlive your Life, stresses the idea that each one of us can and should make a difference in living out one's pilgrimage. In fact, throughout the book the author, Max Lucado, shows us that we are given opportunities all along the way to make big differences. He says that we suffer from our sense or ordinariness and often don't grasp the significance of the opportunity. I like his statement: "God doesn't call the qualified. He qualifies the called." This was true when Christ called the apostles, simple fishermen mostly, and it is just as true today.

The author is a master at taking a simple statement and making the reader see it for something stabbingly personal. He is also a master at intertwining the gospel personages and passages with the people he has met personally along the road, both singing the same song. For instance, in his statement "he indwells the low-ceilinged world of the poor", he connects the apostles working among the poor with the admonition that God's children will be people of hospitality and ends it with the true statement that "Hospitality opens the door to uncommon community".

I loved the story of Stanley Shipp and the drifter. I also liked the way the author beat himself up on his own misguided response to this situation for compassion is a "movement from within--a kick in the gut". To me this chapter was the finest in the book. It kicked me in the gut...but not bad enough to hurt. It did sting, however.

So did the story of Father Damien on Molokai. This story caused pain as I struggled, in my own mind, to wonder how the Father recognized that this move to Molokai should be his own non-retreating mission of mercy. The book did not settle its focus on the great people who had responded to a spectacular need but, rather, it opened a door, a small ajar, so that each of us would, at least, consider opening the door a bit more in our own mission of mercy.