under the feet of jesus

i am very thankful to be a part of a small group of lads who get together weekly. it is a sub-set of our wider community but in many ways our smaller gatherings are the heartbeat. i'm very thankful that we discuss and read a wide variety of topics and books. in the last few years we have read some shakespeare, watched movies, just chatted, read dense theology and equally dense fiction. at times we have drifted too deep into arguing over propositional statements and theoretical frameworks. as a way to keep us balanced we agreed some time back to alternate our reading materials between fiction and non-fiction. brad has been a great help in our understanding the power of fiction and his recent suggestion for reading is a stunning little book called under the feet of jesus. it is doing for me what hearing the prophets might have done to audiences back in the days of yore. i (arrogantly) thought i understood some things about the harsh lives of migrant workers in the USA. after all, i lived with an illegal immigrant for a while and daily meet homeless friends downtown. i've even been honored with the chance to help refugees settle here and heard countless (miraculous) survival stories. but there is something remarkable about this book in particular and fiction in general that can take me to new places. i would be more likely to pick up a sociology text about economic refugees and labor laws to find out about migrant families in california. so, if you are like me and too readily head for the non-fiction section of the bookstore, get 'under the feet of jesus' and get your heart ripped out by a nine year-old called Star.