If you don't know who he is, let me explain it as simply as I can: My Christmas and Easter are explicably inexplicable because of Max Lucado. When I was just rounding the corner of a personal faith in Jesus as a teenager, someone loaned me his book God Came Near without realizing it would mark me with a perspective I’m still trying to catch up to. Lucado’s hypothetical interview with Jesus’ mother in a chapter entitled “25 Questions For Mary” brought life to the plastic baby Jesus under my Christmas tree. Six pages later I was spying on a pensive Jesus in the carpentry shop as he rolled a raw nail between His fingers, contemplating how His skin would be pierced with its spikes just like it three years later. By the time I arrived to the final chapters of the cross, I was panting for the Resurrection of Christ in my own life.
At the time I interviewed him, Lucado’s new book God's Story, Your Story: When His Becomes Yours came out to take people on a similar journey of rediscovering the Gospels and the meta-narrative of what God is doing on earth. Max colorfully lets the life of the Bible out through personal anecdotes, character analysis and an occasional word study that never comes across as dry curriculum. We’re not simply told to get involved, but inspired to through a fly-on-the-wall perspective of real people in the Bible and the real problems they experienced while following Jesus.
So this interview for me was like a basketball player who was inspired to play in the first place by a NBA star, and then he (for reasons unknown) gets the chance to scrimmage with that "mentor from afar." I hope you glean something valuable out of what was a great conversation.
