Your Photo on God's Fridge Door - Jackson Gordon S.

Your Photo on God's Fridge Door is a compilation of 101 original and thought-provoking analogies and parables that serve as devotionals or illustrations for the more mature Christian. Each entry's originality provides the reader with fresh insights into his or her faith.

The entries, drawn from topics like sports, politics, science and nature, provide the same kind of applicability to daily life that characterized Jesus' parables. It was part of the genius of Jesus' teaching that he spoke of things that were common aspects of his hearers' everyday life, such as agricultural images like sowing seed, or domestic ones like a lost coin or old and new wineskins. Your Photo on God's Fridge Door provides the 21^st century reader with images to which he or she can more immediately relate.

The book's introduction outlines the nature of figurative speech, which includes analogies, described by one writer as "one of the most dependable devices for making difficult, unfamiliar, or technical material interesting and easy to understand. Analogies relate the unfamiliar to the familiar." This was a common teaching strategy that Jesus used, as we see in the division of analogies into two other types of figurative speech: metaphors and similes. A metaphor is a comparison that is not to be taken literally. So when Jesus says, "I am the bread of life," nobody understands that to mean that he is in fact a loaf of bread. A simile entails making a direct comparison between two concepts, such as Robert Burns' famous statement that his "love is like a red, red rose." Think for example of Jesus frequently saying, "The kingdom of heaven is like..."

Jesus' initial hearers were smart enough to know the difference between figurative and literal speech, and so are the readers of Your Photo on God's Fridge Door. We would not take literally the psalmist's assertion that "The Lord is my rock, my fortress." (Psalm 18:2) God is certainly like a rock and like a fortress, common themes in the psalms. Yet no sensible Christian for a moment believes God is actually a rock or a fortress.

Most of the 101 entries rely on contemporary metaphors and similes, using concepts unavailable in Jesus' time. A few entries, though, are parables with a modern-day lesson, such as the one about the man with the laptop that he couldn't connect to his home network. Or the lesson to be drawn from an ailing centipede, who had gout in each of his hundred legs.

The entries are suitable for personal devotional reading, as well as a resource for those in ministry seeking original illustrations for sermons, homilies or newsletters. This diverse content, presented in an easy-going journalistic style, will attract and retain reader interest, with faith-related lessons drawn from individuals as diverse as Olympic long jumper Bob Beamon and US Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and topics such as flying fish, hardware stores, and entropy. And God's fridge door, of course.