Ordering Your Private World

I just picked up the updated version of the 1984 book, Ordering Your Private World. I’m used to reading endorsements like, “This book changed my life!” but this book really did. In re-reading this book (is it okay to call it a classic when it’s not yet twenty years old?) I’m rediscovering why it’s a book that still needs to be read. Two excerpts, with more to come:

We are all too tempted to buy gadgets (organizer programs for our computers, PalmPilots, cell phones, and BlackBerries, to name a few) with the hopes that they will bring tidiness of life. But it doesn’t work that way. Forget the gadgets and start with the interior, the private world. We are naively inclined to believe that the most publicly active person is the most privately spiritual. We assume that the larger the church, the greater its heavenly blessing. The more information about the Bible a person possesses, we think, the closer he or she must be to God. Because we tend to think like this, there is the temptation to give imbalanced attention to our public worlds at the expense of the private.