Patheos today features an interview on the recently-released book, UPENDED. As the interview explores, UPENDED explores how we can unite the sweeping truths of our faith with the small, daily choices that most shape our lives and impact. Catch an excerpt and link to the full article below:
Jedd Medefind (former White House official and now President of the Christian Alliance for Orphans) and Erik Lokkesmoe (principal of entertainment company Different Drummer in New York City) are close friends and fellow writers. The pair recently teamed up from opposite coasts to write UPENDED: How Following Jesus Remakes Your Words and World.
On one level, Upended is a practical examination of how we communicate and practice our faith richly in a media-saturated age. Its themes range from storytelling and attentiveness to the ways in which thoughtful communication makes abstract ideas present to the senses. Dig deeper, however, and Upended points to the choices we all can make that carry the potential to make our lives entirely different. Out of the accumulative effect of thousands of decisions and cultivated skills and techniques arises a character that reflects Jesus in ways that upend the assumptions of our culture and cut through its clutter…
You talk a lot about becoming an “apprentice” to Jesus. What do you mean by that?
Jedd: It’s like a cook getting to learn from Bobby Flay. Or a young painter in the workshop of Rembrandt. It’s watching and then reflecting the ways of the Master in everything: his instructions, his brushstrokes, the things he cares most about. Becoming a true disciple to Jesus—an apprentice—is about much more than a “ticket into heaven.” It is, as 1 John puts it, learning to “walk as Jesus did.” We know we’ll always do that in halting, imperfect ways. But we yearn to reflect the heart and ways of the Master more every day—not just in an abstract, philosophical sense, but in the small daily choices that really define who we’re becoming and the impact we’ll leave behind…
Read the full interview HERE…