Ok, I have to admit that I’m only reading this book because I have to. I’m part of a peer mentoring community that meets in a retreat setting for five days annually. Each year we read a book together on the spiritual life, and our reading reflections become an important part of our time together.
Leighton Ford is Billy Graham’s brother-in-law, and at the time of my writing both men are advanced in years, but still alive and relatively well. Leighton was part of the Billy Graham evangelistic team that proclaimed the Gospel to literally millions of people across the globe over the latter half of the last century.
As an evangelist, Leighton’s life has been about being busy “making friends for God”, as he puts it. It was, by any account, a hectic frantic frenetic existence flying from city to city to preach, teach and speak as an itinerant evangelist. In the latter part of his life, the commitment to evangelism remains, but he also wants to attend to his own heart and to deepen his own friendship with God; he uses the language of paying attention to God’s presence in all things. This is the prime concern of this book.
It’s not the usual kind of book that I read, or that the people in my mentoring group might read either. But it so happens that Leighton Ford is effectively the grandfather of our group, which has been ‘grandfathered’ out of an original mentoring group assembled by him some decades ago. So I guess we owe it to him!
The chapters are structured around prayers of the hours, or the Divine Hours, a cycle of eight prayer times through the day (and night!) in the Rule of St. Benedict. This medieval monastic order or rule of life, has experienced something of a postmodern renaissance as Christians seek release and a sense of order within the chaotic activity of the pressure and stress-packed technological world.
In each chapter Ford offers his reflection on the particular prayer in the cycle, provides an exemplar of ‘one who paid attention’ to God, and notes a helpful practice or two for paying attention ourselves. It is written in an easy first-person narrative style. Sort of like a fire-side chat with your favourite grandfather, only it is mainly a monologue, and there are bits where you have to work hard to stop, reflect, pay attention to what is really being said... pay attention to what God might be saying.
I don’t think there can really ever be any replacement to reflecting on the Bible and what God is saying and teaching us through the Scriptures, but I’ve really valued how this book and these kinds of books force me to think and experience things outside the square of my default spirituality. Like great poetry, of which Leighton is fond, moments in this book catch you unawares, and you are better for it.
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