There is a shelf in our living room where I have placed the books that had the most influence on my spiritual growth. I call them my “Punctuation Marks” because in a metaphoric way some books were a comma, some an exclamation point, and some a period or full stop.
The beauty of having them all in one place is the visual reminder of those moments when God reached out through the pages of creative people who listened to the call to write and thereby touched me. It is a large part of why I have been involved in the book business for more than forty years.
Here are the books in no particular order:
Knowing God – J.I. Packer
Celebration of Discipline – Richard Foster
Green Letters – Miles Stanford
Lectures to My Students – Charles Spurgeon
Knowledge of the Holy – A. W. Tozer
Foundations for Reconstruction – Elton Trueblood
Much More – Jack R. Taylor
Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
Taste of New Wine – Keith Miller
Barabbas: A Novel – Pär Lagerkvist (Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1951)
No Longer Strangers – Bruce Larson
How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong? – Lewis Smedes
Life Together – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I and Thou – Martin Buber
The Timeless Moment: Creativity and the Christian Faith – D. Bruce Lockerbie
Loving God – Charles Colson
The Denial of Death – Ernest Becker
Making All Things New – Henri Nouwen
Waiting on God – Andrew Murray
The Struggle of Prayer – Donald Bloesch
Making Sense of Suffering – Peter Kreeft
I hope you scour the list and find a title or two unfamiliar or currently unread. That is why I like to read similar lists: to peer into the mind of a fellow traveler and learn something new.
Your Turn
What books are on your “Punctuation Marks” shelf?
