Evocative reflections on three facets in our relationship with Jesus. People long for reality in their walk with Christ. To know him better, we must understand the different sides of his complex nature. Popular British author Adrian Plass draws on biblical stories and personal experience---as well as his keen understanding of people's needs---as he explores the Safe Jesus, the Tender Jesus, and the Extreme Jesus. God has told us that he holds us in the palm of his hands, where no one and nothing can harm the most important part of us. But from biblical times to the present day, Christians encounter accidents and disasters. What does it really mean to experience the Safe Jesus? Jesus tells his disciples that they must love one another. Yet time and again we try to find achievement and success through our own efforts and individual gifts, only to end in failure. Instead, we need to know the Tender Jesus who becomes visible when we join with each other in the body of Christ. Jesus only did what he saw his father doing. Each of his actions and encounters were fueled, informed, and instructed by the dynamic, creative, unpredictable Spirit of God. Failing to be obedient in this way is what truly constitutes sin. When we are open to the genuine leading of the Spirit, we will experience the Extreme Jesus. In Jesus -- Safe, Tender, Extreme, Adrian Plass is 'simply a man with a broom, sweeping away the rubbish that prevents others from passing further in and further up, by talking about what Jesus does and doesn't do in my life.'
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About the Author
Adrian Plass is one of today's most significant and successful Christian authors, and he has written over thirty books, including his latest, Looking Good Being Bad - the Subtle Art of Churchmanship. Known for his ability to evoke both tears and laughter for a purpose, Plass has been reaching the hearts of thousands for over fifteen years. He lives in Sussex, England with his wife, Bridget, and continues to be a cricket fanatic
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Jesus -- Safe, Tender, Extreme Copyright 2006 by Adrian Plass Requests for information should be addressed to: Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plass, Adrian. Jesus -- safe, tender, extreme / Adrian Plass. p. cm. ISBN-10: 0-310-25784-0 ISBN-13: 978-0-310-25784-4 1. Jesus Christ -- Person and offices. 2. Spirituality -- Anecdotes. 3. Plass, Adrian. I. Title. BT203.P53 2006 232 --- dc22 2005016640 Adrian Plass asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means -- electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other -- except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. This edition printed on acid-free paper. Interior design by Beth Shagene Printed in the United States of America 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 * 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Safe in the Love of Jesus, Safe in the Body of Christ At this very moment, as I write, in the room at the end of the hall across from my study, someone is dying. Kathleen Rosa Ormerod is my wife's mother and my good friend. She is eighty-eight years old and has terminal cancer. Three weeks ago, one week before Christmas, we made the decision that Kathleen should leave the hospital and spend her remaining days, weeks, or months in our house. She is confi ned to bed, and what a bed it is, one of those special electric ones that you feel might even perform a backward somersault if you pressed its multitudinous buttons in the correct permutation. This superbed stands in the room that until now has functioned as our dining room. We want this to be a place for her to live in, not just the equivalent of a hospital ward. Fortunately, it is an ideal room for the purpose, bright, cosy, and enfolding, yet with a sense of being connected to the rest of the world. The windows and the glass doors are responsible for creating this effect. There are three windows, two large ones opening out towards the area at the front of the house, and another smaller one facing the backyard. In addition, there are two glass-panelled doors, the one directly in front of her giving a view of the hall and the stairs, and the other, diagonally to her right, looking through to the kitchen, which is where everything of any real importance has always happened in our home -- talking, eating, sitting around, all those crucial things. She is effectively right at the centre of our family activity. She can see people arriving and leaving and moving from room to room and working in the kitchen and passing up and down the stairs. Her room is ablaze with fl owers, sent and delivered to the house by friends and family who know how much Bridget's mum has always loved growing things. Stoic though she is, it is a matter of great sadness to Kathleen that it will not be possible for her to see the fl owers growing in the garden of her own house this springtime. It breaks my heart for her. How sad it must be to feel that you have probably seen your last springtime. However, if you have no choice but to die and you cannot leave your bed, this is not the worst corner of the world in which to fi nd yourself. That is Kathleen's continually expressed point of view, and I agree with her. She deserves this comfort and consideration. She is a toiler of the old school, a person who has given to others all through her life. A hardworking, consistently obedient servant of the Lord for more than eight decades, she has merited every good and helpful thing that can be made available to her. We all pay a price though. For Kathleen there is the frustration in this last phase of her life of constantly having to take from others. On the day when she fi rst arrived at our house after leaving the hospital, she said she wanted to ask me something. 'Adrian,' she said, 'I want you to be absolutely truthful with me. Is my being here going to disrupt your family celebrations or get in the way of your day-to-day living? Be honest with me.' 'Good gracious, no,' I replied. 'We always like to have someone sleeping in a hospital bed in our dining room over the Christmas period. We'd fi nd anything else very odd indeed.' Safe in the Love of Jesus, Safe in the Body of Christ 21 Kathleen laughed a great deal at this, but it was also a step on the road to acceptance of the fact that the independence she values so much is not possible now. It is not her way to take without giving in return. Now she has no choice. For my wife some things are painfully diffi cult to watch. Bridget sat beside her demented father as he died only months ago, and since then she has hardly had the time or space to grieve his passing. Kathleen was never a bulky person. Now she is very thin -- horribly, frighteningly thin. Both of us fi nd it very hard to look at her outstretched fl eshless arm, to see the way the skin goes sliding down that brittle stick of bone like silk gliding along a polished wooden curtain pole. It is the cancer that does it. It would make no difference how much she ate. Like some ravening fungoid monster, the hungry killer inside takes a huge part of all the goodness and nutrition that goes into her body, feeding itself and growing larger and more blindly, grossly dominant by the day. We fi nd it strange to look at her, so slight, so fragile, and so inoffensive, and to know that this ugly thing is murdering her by inches. At the end of the day, assisted by medication, she sleeps like a dead person, skin china white, her mouth hanging open on her chest, her head tilted to one side. Recently, exchanging notes, my wife and I discovered that after she has settled for the night, we are both in the habit of peering fearfully in through the glass panels of the door that connects her room to the hall, studying her with round-eyed, fearful concentration, hoping to detect in the rise and fall of the emaciated chest beneath her nightdress that she is still with us. Hard though it is to admit, there are times, especially when she has had a depressingly diffi cult, uncomfortable day, when we half hope that her shallow breathing will stop. We wonder if God might allow her to slip quietly away to join her beloved George, in a place where, for him, there is no more panic-stricken confusion and, for her, no more commodes and catheters and bedsores and all the other varieties of personal humiliation that polite and private people so dislike. At night we take Kathleen's breathing to bed with us. Bridget has bought one of those baby monitors so that her mother can call her in the night if she needs help urgently. The transmitter is downstairs beside Kathleen, and the receiver is in our bedroom. I found this very strange at fi rst, and I shall never become accustomed to it. It is as though another person's soul is trapped in the little white plastic contraption with the glowing red light that stands on a shelf in the corner of our bedroom. Every night now, after I have switched off my bedside lamp, there are, unnervingly, two sets of human sounds in the blackness apart from my own, and the overlapping rhythms of two clocks ticking, one of them on our wall, and the other standing on the little table next to Kathleen as she sleeps. The ticking of her little square clock continues like the beating of a healthy heart, but there are moments when the sound of Kathleen's breathing seems to be arrested altogether. When this happens Bridget will sometimes sit bolt upright in bed, straining her ears to detect the slightest evidence of a breath being taken. More than once she has begged me to go downstairs and look through the glass door to check that her mother is still alive. Nights are far from easy at present.
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More About the Author
Adrian Plass is one of today's most significant and successful Christian authors, and he has written over thirty books, including his latest, Looking Good Being Bad - the Subtle Art of Churchmanship. Known for his ability to evoke both tears and laughter for a purpose, Plass has been reaching the hearts of thousands for over fifteen years. He lives in Sussex, England with his wife, Bridget, and continues to be a cricket fanatic
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A honest and witty collection of essays on each of the three aspects of Jesus's nature,
By FaithfulReader.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Jesus - Safe, Tender, Extreme (Hardcover)
Ever since I reviewed Adrian Plass's novel, GHOSTS, for FaithfulReader.com, I've been hoping for an opportunity to review another of his books. That's because his is an honest, vulnerable, and witty voice that speaks to the heart of so many everyday matters that alternately delight us and plague us as followers of Christ.
Drawing from his experiences as a well-known author, television personality, and all-around bumbling human being who lives in the English countryside, Plass exposes his quirks and annoyances and temptations to the light of Christ's teachings, and finds himself consistently wanting. Which, for him, begs the question: how on earth can he be of any use whatsoever in the kingdom of God? God answers that question quite pointedly: "Okay, you go off into a little corner and tell yourself how rotten and useless you are...Despise yourself if you want. Beat yourself up to within an inch of your life. But don't you ever, ever dare to despise what I do through you, because that is completely different." Excellent advice for all the self-deprecating ones among us, I'd say. In the three major sections of the book, Plass offers a number of essays and reflections on each of the three aspects of Jesus's nature referred to in the title. He finds the safe Jesus, for instance, in the story of his dying mother-in-law, who lives out her last days in a hospital bed that occupies what used to be the Plasses' dining room. The tender Jesus is "The God Who Defaults to Compassion" in a priceless chapter dealing with social issues, dogmatism, and one "sulky prophet" named Jonah. The section on the extreme Jesus opens with a chapter describing Plass's shameful and extreme behavior in a frustrating, everyday situation that ended in a wee bit of jail time for the "vicar on the telly," as one bloke called him. The book ends with several dozen prayers relating to these three aspects of who Jesus is. But instead of being the kind of sanitized prayers you expect to find in the typical Christian book, these are the kind of prayers you expect to find a guy like Plass praying in his intimate moments with God. Though he is atypically generous in revealing his inner and often doubting thoughts about faith and the Christian life, I tend to think those thoughts are far more typical than the majority of Christians admit to. His thoughts on healing, for instance, in a chapter titled "Freedom, Safety, and the Value of Truth" most likely resonate with many of us, though we'd be hesitant to give voice to those thoughts in any respectable Christian setting. Plass has succeeded in his goal of not writing "one of those unremittingly positive treatises that fails to deal with life as it is actually lived. The result is perhaps less clearly defined than I had planned --- but hopefully much more authentic...I am not a theologian. I am not a preacher; I can't preach to save my life. I am simply a man with a broom, sweeping away the rubbish that prevents others from passing further in and further up, and I tend to do this by talking about what Jesus does and doesn't do in my life." In so doing, he helps clear away that which litters our own paths to an authentic life.
5.0 out of 5 stars
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This review is from: Jesus - Safe, Tender, Extreme (Hardcover)
Plass has a way with words. This book reads like a journal much of the time, with intimately personal spiritual insights. The transparency of Plass is one of the things that readers so appreciate about him. His doubts, questions, and epiphanies are very honest. He's not afraid to say (or write) the things that many Christians are thinking but are too proud to admit. The beautiful prose that is uniquely Plass is always poignant. This book is a treat for anyone wanting to cut through the facade of spirituality that pervades religion today.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Book!,
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This review is from: Jesus - Safe, Tender, Extreme (Hardcover)
I have totally enjoyed the book, and it came in great shape too! Thanks.
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