My good friend Linda recently gave me a copy of Richard Paul Evans’ book Lost December, suggesting that I read it and pass it along to someone else when I was finished. It’s a compelling, simply told, modern-day presentation of the Prodigal Son story found in Luke 15. The main character is named Luke, and he warns readers in the Prologue that they won’t like him … but I did.

The only hard parts to read are the excruciating details of the young man’s financial demise at the hands of his “friends,” who lure him into distant countries where he (more they than he) wastes his trust-fund fortune in reckless and loose living, similar to the boy in the New Testament story. You know that he will not wake up from the nightmare until he is down to nothing, and in this case, he is left curled in a fetal position in a parking lot, bloody, all possessions gone except for the boxer shorts he happened to be wearing. All the friends are gone by this point too, as well as his father, whom he believes he has hurt and betrayed too severely for pardon.

Fortunately the book is divided almost exactly in half, with the first half recounting the dive to the bottom, and the second, the climb back to the top. Of course, the father is key to the story, and the costs to the father of his son’s decisions are more fully drawn than in the Bible story. A lot of elements are more fully drawn in Evans’ account, and that is the strength of this book, which shows how this ancient Biblical story could actually happen in modern-day settings with modern-day people. And the portrayal of kindness and aid from the man who saves Luke from probable death is so well drawn that it made me wonder why the Bible story had no such person but only a briefly mentioned hog farmer who allowed the boy to feed the swine.

The long-anticipated reunion with the father does, of course, occur, but I have to say that the sweet scent of hope that rises out of this book stems more from the attitudes and behaviors of Luke as he gets his feet back under him than from anything else. That sense of hopefulness alone makes this book worth reading.

Thank you, Linda.

Every so often a really practical, spiritual book comes along, and even though that sounds like a contradiction in terms (practical, spiritual), it’s impossible not to pick it up and see what can be learned.

One of those books is 40 Ways to Get Closer to God, by Jerry MacGregor with Keri Wyatt Kent, just out from Bethany House Publishers. I encourage you to get a copy and study it. The book is organized into 40 days, so rather than chapter headings, you find “Day Twenty-Eight,” for example, which happens to be about letting go of worry and instead choosing to trust: “Trust is not based on our circumstances, but rather on our decision to believe God is in control.” Each day’s chapter has a discussion of the spiritual discipline described along with a challenge of how to put that discipline into practice immediately.

In his blog, MacGregor writes: “if you read this book, you’re not going to glow in the dark. It’s not one of those, ‘I worked to be perfect … now YOU can be perfect like me’ type of books [but] if you and I sat down at Starbucks to talk about this topic, the things in the book are exactly what I’d say.”

Just imagine: 40 practical ways to get closer to God! Surely a few of them will fit exactly where you are today.