Recently i purchased Mark Scandrettes book Soul Graffiti, and surprisingly i ended up having to put it down after a couple of chapters. It’s not that i thought it was a bad book, or i disagreed with his points. Its just that i feel like i have “story fatigue” or something. I mean Mark’s life sounds awesome, and the things he is courageous enough to do, i envy. But his life is not my life and its not even a realistic ideal for my life — our situations, gifts, and areas of greatest faithfulness are just too different. And so reading it was just bringing me down.
At another time in my life, i’ll probably pick it back up and hopefully be able to get everything out of it that many of my friends have, but right now i can’t.
I post this not as a critique but because its making me begin to wonder about the limits of testimony, of “hearing each others stories” like we always talk about. I don’t know, maybe testimonies are a first step and the next steps are process and application? But whose responsibility is the processing and the applying? Is it all in the listener or does the teller have some responsibility to bridge that gap as well?
I’m just wondering to myself, that’s all.
For whatever reason, it took me almost a year to finish Mark’s book. I think it was some of the same thing you’re talking about: having trouble bridging the gap between who he is and who I am. I think I also had a little trouble with his writing style. It’s excellent – don’t get me wrong – but maybe it’s written more for the ear? For whatever reason, I’ve always much more enjoyed hearing Mark speak than reading his stuff, even if he was just reading his stuff.
I should say that by taking that long to read it, it turned out that there were some really helpful bits near the end that I got to right when I needed them. So it was all for good.