#15: Foreign Bodies

After 10 years of Forefront we’ve now done over 120 message series. Thought it might be fun and interesting to share with you my top twenty.

So one of my all-time favorite books is Foreign Bodies, by Hwe Hwe Tan. If you know me you probably think I love this book just because the author’s name is Hwe Hwe Tan, but that’s not why. It is an awesome book, and you absolutely need to read it. If there are any who only read Christian books, let me assure you that it is a Christian book, though not a typical Christian book.

Foreign Bodies is about three friends, all in their twenties. Two are from Singapore, a girl named Mei, and a guy named Eugene. The third is a guy from England named Andy. Each is a foreign body in the sense that they don’t always live in their native land. But that’s not the real idea of foreign bodies. In the book, Mei describes how her grandfather died because he had a foreign body, a fish bone, inside of him, though no one detected the fish bone. They only saw the external symptoms. Mei goes on to explain that the various problems she and her friends were experiencing in life were really just the external manifestations of foreign bodies inside of them.

In this series we talked about the foreign bodies inside of us. Not fish bones, but tales from our youth, tales of how we got our wounds. And we talked about the effects those foreign bodies have had on us. The external manifestations we can see, even if we’ve never quite figured out what caused them.

I wonder what foreign bodies are in you? What are they leading to?

I loved this series. Something that is probably only of interest to me is that the first message in this series later kinda-sorta became chapter five (“AKA”) in my book. (And, by the way, that chapter contains the line I might be most proud of coming up with: “”This test eliminated Mitch, Buck, and, of course, Fastard.”) (I still can’t believe my Christian book publisher let me keep that line in there!)

– featured on newchurches.com