Book Review, Tables in the Wilderness

I've read two books in 2015. (SiDE NOTe: I'm almost done a re-read of Walking on Water-- because it just needs to be read every.single.year. and am half way through this book, which the author calls a "commitment"... a rather apt description.)
The Bible Tells Me So, by Pete Enns. I thought about doing a book review for that one because I doubt I will read a better book all year. (Which kind of sucks because I read it completely on January 5th... which leaves me 360 days of knowing I already read the book to "beat" for 2015.) I chose not to because...well, just read it, okay? It will be a hard pill to swallow for many. I almost choked like every other page. But it is honest and difficult and challenging in the best ways. Peter Enns jumped to the top of my Theologians I'd Love to Have a Beer With list.
Oh...the questions I'd ask.
The second book I finished is Tables in the Wilderness by Preston Yancey. It is a memoir of a journey through "God Found, Lost, and Found Again," as the book jacket put it.
It is inviting and beautiful, through and through. He writes things like
God is unchanging, but we're standing on the image we see. One day we wake up and find that God has shifted the image. Everything looks different. The world looks different. The world seems new. The trick is learning how to recognize that all the old colors are still there. It's just the patterns that have changed.
Somewhere this past year I read the quote, "If your theology never changes, maybe there is something wrong with your theology." And it has stuck with me; daily creeping into those places that had become really.very.totally secure~ places that probably looked more like walls built by an indifferent acceptance of everything I'd been taught in my very-Christian life for years and years and years.
The point of the quote is NOT that God changes. But that I often have Him pegged. Understood. Figured out. Completely. How foolish I was to live like that for so long.
In the places of growth there is always some discomfort and pain~ and this is the part of the book that deeply resonated with my own experience. The silence of God. The long days of knowing God is there (intellectually) but not being able to know His presence or closeness.
Wilderness.
Yancey graciously guides readers to see through his own wilderness journey that there is a table there. A table spread for the wilderness wanderer. The silence is an opportunity to hear. And this place is inhabited by God.
I've already passed mine along to Phil. He pretty much knew he had to read it when I spent 23 of 24 hours one day on the couch telling everyone to "shhh." It's just a beautiful, encouraging reminder that the wilderness is a dwelling place~
A hearing place. And there are tables spread for us all.

Leave a comment with a book recommendation. One person will be gifted Yancey's book~ (I'll be sure to send a new copy and not my scribbled/underlined/ruined-margins one:)