Leap Over a Wall: Earthy Spirituality for Everyday Christians

Toward the end of this book, Peterson, author of the immensely popular translation of the New Testament, The Message, observes that ""the Christian life isn't a romantic idyll."" Rather, he says, the Christian life is fraught with pain, spattered with grief and paradox and, in the end, lit by hope. Out of a deep awareness of these truths, Peterson engages in an examination of the life of David to illuminate the ways in which the divine is often hidden in the ordinary. Exploring a number of scriptural passages about the life of David, Peterson shows the ways in which David's life, though fraught with struggles and shortcomings, was one filled with exuberance and animated by God's deliberate power. The author brings the Old Testament world revealingly close to our own century, and he makes vivid the notion that God's purposes are worked out in the ordinariness of specific human lives. (Feb.)