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On one relaxing afternoon last month, I was sitting, minding my own business, as it were, and enjoying a coffee by a river somewhere in northern Portugal, while I browsed the weekend newspaper. My eye caught something - the title of a book - that happened to be number three in the listing of bestseller books posted by the two big book companies in Portugal, FNAC, and Bertrands. “Jesus Está Contigo” , (or in English, “Jesus is with you”) by someone called Sarah Young.
I had to go and find out what this is about. It is truly astonishing that, in our secular, cynical age, when it seems that this country, at least, has moved far beyond faith and Christianity, a book of devotions based on a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ should hit the bestseller lists like this. Normally the religion and self-help categories in the local bookstores are filled with all sorts of exotic titles on zen and yoga and so on, with maybe one or two Bibles and a biography of Pope John Paul in the corner.
So I’ve discovered that Sarah Young is a Presbyterian missionary from America who has served with her husband in Japan and in Japanese communities in Australia. And also that the format of her book “Jesus Calling” is sort of based on an anonymous old devotional from the 1930‘s called “God Calling”, characterised by daily devotionals addressed from God to the reader in the first person singular. In fact, I remember that old devotional on my mother’s bedside table.
Now, whatever one thinks about the potential danger in presenting words and thoughts, as it were, spoken by Jesus, I cannot help but be amazed that, without any significant promotion (as far as I can see) on the part of churches or evangelicals here, this book is finding it’s way into the handbags and onto the bookshelves of thousands of Portuguese. May God use it to raise an awareness of how great, how amazing and how wonderful He really is - something that is so needed in our current spiritual climate here in Portugal.
There’s something very inspiring about standing on the very top of Portugal. Torre, in Serra da Estrela, is the highest point in the land, if you don’t count the volcanic Mount Pico which rises straight up out of the sea on the island of Pico in the Azores.
Portugal’s generally not known as a land of mountains, ice and snow, but up at 1,993m enough falls in the winter to warrant a couple of ski resorts, and in the height of the August summer, it’s still chilly enough with a fair wind blowing across a bare landscape of granite outcrops. I read somewhere that the reason it's called "Torre" (tower) is because King João in the early 19th Century had a tower built to bring it's height up to 2,000m. I'd need to verify that. Sounds a bit like "The Englishman who went up a hill but came down a mountain"!
Any sense of achievement we might have had in reaching Portugal’s highest point has to be offset against the realisation that we drove all the way up, rather than climbed, along with a hundred other visitors! Sorry, no walking boots this time!
