Discipled Through Books

John Denver says this in one of his songs:

   “I guess growing isn't hard to do

    Just stand against the wall

    Once I was just two feet high

    Today I'm six feet tall”

“Growing isn’t hard to do,” because physical growth just happens over time. We don’t have to think about it or do anything to bring it about. But spiritual growth is completely different and requires an intentional effort. I really struggled with this as a new Christian. I hadn’t grown up in the church, so the idea of spiritual growth was new to I me. And, to complicate things further, almost immediately after becoming a Christian I entered the US Navy.

Boot camp was a struggle for me as a new believer, because not only did I have no understanding of how to grow, I had no resources to make use of apart from the weekly worship services, which turned out to be very helpful (although the drill instructors reminded us as we left to attend church, “your soul may belong to Jesus, but don’t forget that your ass belongs to Uncle Sam”).

After boot camp I started damage control school at Treasure Island in San Francisco. Since I had become a Christian partly under the influence of the book Run, Baby, Run, by Nicky Cruz, I looked up the address of Teen Challenge in San Francisco and took a bus out there for a visit, arriving unannounced one evening.

I don’t know what I was hoping to find there. The people I met at Teen Challenge seemed to be generally discouraged themselves, and they certainly didn’t have much of anything to offer me, although one of the guys warmly reminded me that Jesus is our hope and that I needed to find strength in Him. The problem was that I didn’t know how to go about doing this.

After damage control school I was being sent to shipfitting school in San Diego, but during my time at Treasure Island I often traveled home to attend the Christian Life Center in Santa Rosa. One Sunday a guy named Frank Hernandez told me that he and his associates, a group called Agape Force, were also going to be in San Diego, so I went looking for him shortly after arriving there.

What I had been looking for, both from Teen Challenge and from Frank Hernandez (who I was never able to find) was fellowship with older, more mature believers. And what I ended up doing was finding this, for the most part, in reading Christian books. This has been the driving force behind my reading in all the years since that time. I recently read this quote from George Verwer (who has been a major influence in my life): “I came to Jesus because of a praying woman, a gospel of John, and Billy Graham. I was discipled largely through life-changing books.”

I did later encounter other believers — George Verwer, for example — who were a great encouragement and help to me, but Christian books became, and continue to be, a mainstay in my Christian growth.