Book Review: The Visitation

The Visitation by Frank Peretti
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was great! Peretti spun this tale with his usual mystery, cunning, and suspense. It's not my favorite novel of his--that will forever belong to his book The Prophet--however, it was still an entertaining and powerful read.


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Fearfully & Wonderfully Made - 3

Dear Journal,

When I first read that “God opposes the proud” or that “pride comes before a fall,” I thought that this opposition must be painful indeed. I sought to avoid this secondary fall at all costs. However, this week I have come to realize that in the midst of my pride, the most gracious thing God could do is to oppose my self-centered plans. Fearfully and Wonderfully Made points to the muscular system to illustrate this point.

Dr. Brand once had a patient whose neck muscles twitched with such violence that “every few seconds his chin smashed into his right shoulder” (Brand  Yancey, p. 189). The man’s story was a sad one, but Dr. Brand’s key point focused more on the dysfunction of a muscle. You see, the muscle itself does not cause the impairment, but the nerves that cause it to act independently from the body. The parallel drawn between the autonomous actions of a muscle in a physical body and the self-serving actions of a member of Christ’s body, are certainly striking. Yancey and Brand skillfully paint this picture in the book:

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made - 2

Dear Journal,
Today was a difficult day; I was stressed about everything from my summer job to family strife. However, when I picked up Fearfully and Wonderfully Made God immediately reminded me of His peace that passes all understanding. As the book recounted Dr. Brand’s first secret encounter with the amoeba, I too could feel the chilly, sterile air of the laboratory scented faintly with formalin.

The lab is quiet as I take a seat and peer down my scope; it is just me and the organisms. No one yells or fights—there is no voice to hear but that of my own thoughts and of the Holy Spirit. It isn’t hard to imagine what these organisms look like: I saw them for myself last semester in Introduction to Biology (ironically, my sample was also taken from the campus lake). As I gaze at the wonderful, wiggling world through my microscope, I can hear the words of Jesus from John 4, “a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem”—indeed I worship Him in my imaginary lab.