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Overview
The author of My Beautiful Idol is on a quest to be successful—in a lucrative job at an advertising agency, in ministry work, even in his relationships. And in a futile attempt to control the sources of love and security, he has turned these things into idols he can keep in his soul's back pocket. He pulls the idols out when he feels vulnerable and defenseless, and hides them again when things are going well. But the idols keep failing—even when he turns to his own Christian faith. In a creative narrative style rooted in raw honesty, My Beautiful Idol invites readers to identify with the young would-be Christian hero as he seeks God, and as he hides from God. Far from reducing complex matters to simplistic formulas, Pete Gall weaves together stories both sublime and wretched, ego-building and humbling, humorous and painful, and successfully celebrates the messiness of faith, the importance of validating truth, and the unscripted nature of experiencing a God who is intimately involved in all of life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780310540403 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zondervan |
| Publication date: | 05/26/2009 |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 489 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
My Beautiful Idol
By Peter D. Gall Zondervan
Copyright © 2008
Peter D. Gall
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-28310-2
Chapter One Lies for the Sake of Lies
I'm the fat blond guy on the corner in the African print shirt, squeezing himself into the yellow taxi.
"Burritoville on Addison near Wrigley," I direct.
It's 7:15, Wednesday night, August 3, 1994. I work late most nights because my ad agency buys cab rides and dinners for people who work past 7:00. Once a month my boss complains that as a man I'm taking politically incorrect advantage of a loophole in a politically correct policy intended to protect the safety of female employees. He says that I should be taking the bus and buying my own dinner. Maybe, but all I care about is that I get four giant chorizo burritos and four Mountain Dews a week for free, and I don't have to deal with the bus. And we both know that even my overtime, including dinners and cab rides, is cheaper than what any of the experienced employees would cost him.
"Long day at work?" the driver asks in a Russian accent.
"Yeah," I reply, sizing the man up. Lately I've been exploring the power and joy of lying to strangers. "I write for an advertising agency."
This part is true. The world's largest agency, in fact. And a fact of which I am quite proud. It wasn't easy getting into the industry, but somehow last year, with plenty of ego-stroking, I landed a great job with big-name clients.
"Anything I see?"
"Ever read your shampoo bottle?" I ask. "The directions on the back?"
"Yeah."
"I revolutionized the hair care industry with one word." This is the lie.
"How?"
"I added the word 'repeat' to the end of the directions. My client increased profits by 150 percent in a year." I make the number up at random.
"Interesting," he says, but he's clearly not all that impressed, and we return to silence as he weaves heart-stoppingly through traffic for a few blocks. Then he says, "Even if every person washed their hair twice, that would only be double. Why did profits go up even more?"
"Good insight," I say, practicing my client skill of congratulating people's intelligence when they show even the slightest mental effort. "At first our goal was just to increase sales - you know, get people to use more. And it worked. People quickly learned that they were supposed to shampoo twice. Then the shampoo makers realized that using twice as much shampoo was actually very hard on people's hair. So they diluted the stuff, which made it a lot less expensive to produce." I lean forward, locking his eyes in the rearview mirror to force him to listen, just to see how the trick will work. "And that's when things really took off. People who were only shampooing once needed conditioner because the shampoo wasn't working on its own, and people who were following the directions needed conditioner because the shampoo was frying their hair. All told, my client improved its profits by 150 percent, and the rest of the industry followed suit." I sit back in my seat. "Of course, that was just the first year - I've been working on other projects since then."
"This is what you do, write tricky words?"
"That's my job. We call it 'creating a need.' I write the songs that make the young girls sing. I write the songs of love and hair and shiny things," I sing. "I write the songs, I write the songs." It's Mr. Manilow to you. Most nights it takes a couple of hours and at least a couple of beers to slow the free association required to keep up the "talented young copywriter" role I play at work. And being so young, I feel like I have to be the one who makes the joke first, or who has the comeback ready, because the worst thing is to be seen as too young and too green - or gullible. It's exhausting to be driven by the sort of fear that tells me to "fake it 'til you make it"; but it was too hard to land this job to crash and burn now that I have it.
"What others?" he asks.
"You mean what other needs do I create?"
"Yeah."
"All of them, my friend," I say, practicing the trick of familiarity with a stranger to build power. "Needs are all made up, and there will always be new ones. Things you don't even know about today are things that I'll make sure you won't be able to live without tomorrow."
He scowls a little at the cliché and the dark truth behind it.
"Don't think of it as a bad thing, or at least don't think of me as the bad guy. It's the nature of man. We're all after something to tell us about ourselves. We all want to be on the right teams. And we don't care much where the things that identify us - in the sense that they give us our identity - come from. In fact, the easier they come, the better. Take Coke versus Pepsi, for example. Do I see myself as more of a loyal traditionalist with family values? If so, I buy Coke to remind myself about it. Or do I see myself as more of a hip fun member of the next generation, in which case Pepsi is my drink of choice? Exactly the same thing with McDonald's and Burger King, Ford and Honda, IBM and Apple. We build a whole world around that sort of stuff. We measure who we are and tell other people who we are by labels we slap on our lives. It's not new, either - it's how we've picked our religions for generations."
"Hmm." He doesn't care, but I think it's fascinating. Plus, if I speak with enough confidence he'll let me feel like maybe I'm right.
I do think I'm right, though. I'm not happy about the truth, but at least there's an ego stroke in feeling like I'm one of the rare people who's willing to face it. Once I saw it, I started seeing it everywhere. For example, the other day I picked up a gem from a program about the collector crab. Of the genus schizophroida, which is Greek for bearer of split likeness. The collector crab, or decorator crab, as it's also called, attaches to his shell bits of what it finds on the sea floor. According to the narrator with the British accent, the idea is to protect itself by becoming invisible to its natural enemy, the squid. Makes sense, I thought. People do the same thing. And like the collector crab, which sometimes chooses camouflage that actually makes the crab easier to spot, we can't ever be all that sure about the stuff we pick up and attach to our shells; all we can do is grab what looks good to us. That's where I come in. My job in advertising is to sell people, all bearers of the likeness of God, baubles to attach to their personal shells. Labels we slap on our lives, like products, ser vices, impressions, approaches, tones, movements, whatever - anything that can help build a consumer's "personal brand." Our god is our personal brand, our existential self, our chosen reflection or explanation or defense or excuse to the world. It's how we hide from the "squids" in our lives, which show up in the form of evil or fear or shame or a host of other things we work furiously to avoid.
And the squids are everywhere, looking to devour us. We're desperate to do what we can to camouflage ourselves - from fig leaves to 401(k)s, we're all about covering our nakedness. We scurry along through the dark corners of our worlds looking for hiding places we can take with us. And so long as we remain uneaten, it feels like it's working.
My job is to help my clients sell camouflage to frightened crabs. What's tough is that I'm a crab too. It's why I bluster in front of strangers, or tell lies for the sake of telling lies and getting away with it. Still, something inside of me resents this taxi driver for letting me get away with my sinister bravado. I don't want to be right about the world. I want him to disprove my cynicism, not just endure me. I want him to argue against me, to try to see me, to let me know if my camouflage is really working. Or better yet, I want him to show me a way to live that doesn't require the camouflage. The truth is that I'm so desperate to be myself - but still adequate and loved - that I'm willing to look for clues anywhere. Even from cab drivers. But he doesn't care. He has his own hiding places to worry about - and there's no way he'll risk his security by admitting I'm messing with it. Admitting you're hiding is too much like admitting you're vulnerable, and, like most people, he chooses not to talk about such things.
We drive the rest of the way to Burritoville in silence. I casually over-tip him, and ask for a receipt for my expense report.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from My Beautiful Idol by Peter D. Gall Copyright © 2008 by Peter D. Gall. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents Preface....................9Part I: The Wisdom of Cynics 1. Lies for the Sake of Lies....................15
2. Happy Birthday, Sweetheart....................21
3. Truth in Advertising....................27
4. Bravado Runs Away....................37
5. Confessions of a Nice Guy....................41
6. Leaving Mayberry....................49
7. For Those About to Rock....................57
Part II: The Lure of Heroes 8. The Deal About Scaffolds....................65
9. Sales people and Witnesses....................71
10. Rachel Likes Me....................77
11. Waiting for Air Force One....................81
12. A Load of Sunshine....................87
13. A Change of Scenery....................91
14. When Scaffolding Collapses....................97
15. Intercession....................103
16. Alone in the Desert....................111
17. Breaking Fellowship....................117
Part III: The Company of Philosophers 18. On Filling Canyons....................125
19. As Honest As the Moment Is....................131
20. A Collection of One....................139
21. Chocolate and Bible Study....................145
22. Don't Know What to Say About Poverty....................151
23. I'll Be Home for Christmas ... I Guess....................161
24. "I'd Like 'Things That Suck' for 500, Alex"....................165
Part IV: Life Among the Humans 25. Tuna Helper and Jesus....................171
26. Mugging the Tooth Fairy....................185
27. Faith Sails Unraveling....................195
28. Aidan....................205
29. Why God Made Moms....................211
30. Why GodInvented Dads....................217
Part V: With Power to Fix the World 31. The Cost of Ascending Ministry....................229
32. Benevolent White Moses....................233
33. Murmurs of Revolution....................239
34. Uh, About That Moses Thing ....................243
35. What Christians in the Mexican Mafia Already Know....................251
36. When Questions Outgrow Solutions....................255
Part VI: Admissions Unto Conversion 37. Death of the Hero....................263
38. Reality = Relationship....................269
39. Tearing....................279
40. Tatters....................283
41. Salvage....................287
42. Easter....................291
Acknowledgments....................295
What People are Saying About This
At age 23 Gall walked away from a lucrative advertising job, determined to uphold his ethical standards while revolutionizing the world and the church. Five years later, after dropping out of seminary and quitting jobs with a rehab program, a community center, a home for developmentally disabled men, Bud’s Warehouse and a plumbing distributor, he returned to his Midwestern family, musing, “What do you call someone who leaves the ordinary world on a hero’s journey, but fails?” Like Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis ) and Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz ), Gall is edgy the evangelical way: he keeps sex and swearing mostly offstage, but, like other good guys, drinks, doubts and unleashes scathing sarcasm at the conservative Christian subculture. Now in his mid-30s, Gall mocks his younger self throughout: a “fat blond guy” with “no car, no cash, no direction, no prospects, no discipline.” Relentlessly ironic, he may invite misunderstanding: do his harsh criticisms reflect his present view of evangelical reality, or are they meant to show his postadolescent pomposity? Nevertheless, his themes are clear: God doesn’t need an image consultant; it is better to be authentic than great; and to achieve authenticity we must forsake “our deepest sin and our love for our most beautiful idol: to be our own god.” (May) -- Publisher’s Weekly
“A truly humble account of a man’s journey through Christian America. Pete’s struggles and insight hit home with me as it did others I know who read this book.” -- John Dale
“Have you ever turned on lights in a basement only to see a flurry of critters running for cover? With a wry mix of insight and transparency, Pete Gall lights up a reader’s soul. Thank God for a book that becomes an honest friend! But Pete does more than expose our brokenness. He tugs us to join him in walking, stumbling, running---whatever our state and status---into the arms of a God who loves us. This book is for everyone, absolutely everyone, who knows what a prodigal is and needs!” -- R. N. Ron Frost
“I knew Pete could communicate---just not so honestly or about himself. I laughed, I cried, and all the while I am grateful for funny prophetic voices that challenge my own story and shine the light of God’s love right where the darkness is most dense---the human heart.” -- Bill Knott
“In this era of American idols, money branded “In God we trust,” altars colonized by the U.S. flag, and bombs baptized in patriotic prayers, this book is a delicate reminder to denounce all that dazzles that does not look like Jesus. It is an invitation to say no to all other lovers and counterfeit hopes, and to put our faith in the God that is blessing the most downtrodden people of this world, the God whose gospel is good news to the poor.
God---forgive us for thinking too highly of ourselves, and for thinking too lowly of ourselves, and for thinking of ourselves so much.” -- Shane Claiborne, Author
“Pete Gall runs a gauntlet of self-absorption, religious dysfunction, and disgust at the tawdry meanness of his own spiritual veneer---the archetypal path of contemporary evangelicalism. With humor and honesty as his only protections, he takes a beating (and the candid reader will too), but keeps his feet moving out of a genuine hunger for God.” -- Greg Paul, Author
This gem of a story held me from first page to last. Pete Gall can write! -- Nate Larkin, Author
“St. Augustine invented the confessional memoir. Modern examples are shorter and funnier (think Anne LaMott and Donald Miller). Now comes Pete Gall, who somehow gathers the messiness of his life into an enduring account, one both poignant and whimsical.” -- Philip Yancey, Author
“This is the candid autobiography of one young person’s search to find himself and the deeper meaning of his life. Amidst his search, he stumbles onto a stinging truth: his life plan is unreal, for he has made an idol of all the virtues and values his evangelical faith and suburban lifestyle tattooed on his soul. In the end he returns home to where his journey began, albeit with a scarred bravado and a faith barnacled but more transparent and believable.” -- Bill Enright, Director