Another day, another blog

This week marks the return of the auditor!! [insert creepy music here] Part of my responsibilities at the newspaper is being the point person for our annual circulation audit. This is my first time going through an audit in this position and seeing as I’ve only been in this position about 2 months, I’m a little nervous. But so far so good, which means the worst is yet to come. I’ll just be glad when it’s over.

Okay, book review time again. Late last year, I picked up Ted Dekker’s Black, book one of the Circle Trilogy. Suffice it to say that I was hooked and had completed Black in about a 48-hour time frame. I was given the other two, Red and White, for Christmas and made short work of them. I highly recommend these books to pretty much everyone.

So recently, I picked up another one of Dekker’s books called Showdown. [Warning!! Possible spoilers ahead, but I’ll try to keep them at a minimum.] It was a good read, albeit definitely not as good as the Circle Trilogy. Dekker has a pretty good grasp on the art of allegory, in my non-professional opinion. In Showdown, you have the classic struggle of good versus evil, but Dekker has a way of mixing it up a little bit. The story centers around two locations mysteriously interwoven– a town called Paradise (oddly enough) and a monastery in the mountains where a special project has been under way for the past 12 or so years. Half-way through the book, Dekker introduces a key element that anyone who has read the Circle Trilogy will recognize immediately. (As a side note, if you’ve not read the Circle Trilogy, read them before you read Showdown.) In the end, there is an allegorical element of redemption and a very stirring portrayal of just a tiny bit of the agony that must have ripped the heavens when God willingly sacrificed his Son, Jesus.

The other main take-away from this book that I had was the graphic depiction of the blackness of the sin nature. As the actions and thoughts of the townspeople rapidly degenerate, through the first half of the book it appears that they really have no control over what they do, but are seemingly under the power of a hallucinogen. However, it is later revealed that while there is some outside influence, all the choices made by the townspeople (even down to the seemingly untouchable minister!) are completely their own, and almost without exception everyone chooses the wrong, all the while thinking they have been “freed.” That’s a pretty good description of the sin nature, in my opinion.

Overall, it was a pretty good read.