Yesterday I was attending one of my networking groups that focuses on public speaking.  No one signed up to give a speech that day, so I sent an email out to the group indicating that we were each going to do “Mini Speeches.” The assignment to the group was to bring in their favorite book and we would take 3-5 minutes to speak about why you liked it, what touched you, and maybe read a small excerpt out of the book. The point of the exercise would be preparing content and delivering the speech in a clear concise way.

When I started looking through my books, I knew right away what I wanted to talk on. Don Miller happens to be my favorite author and celebrity crush. I have all of his books and love his unorthodox version of pursuing Jesus with a tender and open mind.  One of my favorite of Don’s books is Searching For God Knows What.  One of my favorite chapters in this book is called “Children on Chernobyl.” This particular chapter was really impacting because it describes a picture Miller keeps on his desk of a small five year old boy whose body was grossly mutilated by the horrors of the nuclear leak in the Soviet Union in 1986.

Miller explains it may seem drastic to compare this boy’s pain to humanity’s pain, but there are parallels that are somewhat striking. This boy’s body was the result of a terrible tragedy. And yet, our soul are terribly disfigured by tragedy. That we are all distorted by the war between God and evil, and even though we appear to be fine on the outside, our souls have really become very damaged and pained.

As I was researching what to say in my mini-speech, it hit me how spiritual this book really was. I imagined myself standing in front of my club, telling them that their souls were damaged because of an unseen spiritual war. Which is just perfect because it happens to be the fastest and easiest way to be classified as the Crazy-Christian lady who you shouldn’t be friends with. Being confused, I did what I always do when I can’t decide something: I called my mom. I loved this book, but really didn’t want to preach or offend my friends that don’t believe in God…or Miller. My mom said a quick prayer, and I decided “what the heck – I’ll give it a try. I mean the worse thing that can happen is that they’ll all think I’m nuts..and I’m pretty good at convincing people of that on my own anyway.”

I did open the speech with a disclaimer that it was a Christian book, and if you happened to not be interested or disagreed, that was just fine. And then I went ahead and told the group about Miller’s brilliance. I finished. They clapped. I sat down.

Then something interesting happened. One by one, as people went to the front and spoke about books that changed their lives, I noticed that out of the 10 people in the room, 8 of them had brought books that specifically dealt with spiritual substance. I mean, not all of them were what you would call “Christian” books, but they were books like The Shack, The Alchemist and Angles and Demons. Regardless of the specific teachings within the books, it hit me: people crave spirituality.

I suppose it surprised me because most of my Christian life, I’ve felt like I’ve needed to apologize to people. To be sorry that Christians as a whole are broken people, that the church is obnoxious and annoying, that most Christians are people that I myself wouldn’t want to hang out with, that God had rules that they didn’t like, and that the rules offended people. In fact, I think I have gone almost to a hypersensitive place thinking that most people don’t want anything to do with God or spirituality.

I was more than surprised to notice that people may not love Evangelical Christianity as it plays out in our world, but that doesn’t change the fact that people are hungry. I suppose it also made me think that maybe humanity’s souls are still awake to the needs of spirituality, even if their tastes don’t include a modern church.

I’m not suggesting that we all run out and hit people over the head with our bibles and picket at street corners. I don’t think we need to give people any more reasons to not like Christians. I mean, I’m already standing in front of groups, and telling them that their souls are damaged, so I don’t think Christian PR needs any more help.  I suppose I just mention it to remind us that the world does crave spirituality and like  Miller says: The world wants something outside of itself  to give it a name, and tell it who it is.  Whether or not my networking group likes my friend Jesus or not I think it helps to know that we are all craving after the same thing.