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After the last book I felt I needed something a little more edifying – and fairly short to help with my reading target for the year… this had been packed for holiday with the other Adrian Plass book so it was still near the top of the pile, and seemed like a good choice!

Definitely more serious than his Sacred Diary, but still with a handful of entertaining anecdotes, this looks beyond the core reason many of us follow Jesus (His death and resurrection to save us from an eternity of separation from God), and at some of the other reasons he continues.

Each chapter title starts with “I follow Jesus because”, and continue with all sorts of things including, “He’s so good at Judo”, “He’s interested in the heart of worship rather than the form”, “He offers hope for the future” and “you’re allowed to even if you’re useless with practical problems, general technology and especially computers.” So you can tell it’s a bit of a mixture of the light and heavy – always light enough to read but heavy enough to make a point.

I will leave you with one of the lighter parts – the “Post Office Queue Game”:

“When the people in front of me in the queue moved forward a yard or so, I pretended not to notice because I was so absorbed by a notice on the wall. There was a lull in the dialogue behind me. I sensed the minor frustration of these two ladies as they willed me to move into the space that had been created, thus allowing them to move forward as well I waited until the queue in front of me had progressed yet another pace before appearing to notice for the first time that a gap had opened up. Then i moved on at last – but only about 12 inches. At this, billowing waves of annoyance began to wash over me from behind. Why hadn’t I moved right up behind the people in front of me, leaving room for the rest of the queue to do the same? I sense that a major component of this frustration was the awareness that no logical complaint was justified because we would all be serve at exactly the same time, regardless of gaps in the queue.”