A delayed flight, a bag of almonds, and The Cost of Discipleship. The book has been on my shelf for three years. It got read in two hours.
Bonhoeffer is an uncomfortable companion. He is, of course, writing under the shadow of a regime he will eventually be killed for resisting. He has earned the right to call cheap grace cheap. I have not. I read him with the embarrassed alertness of a man being addressed across a great moral distance.
Two lines stayed with me.
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace.
And later, more practically:
When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
I do not, in the airport sense, have anything to die for at the moment. The dying he means is not airport dying. But there is a small dying he means, too — to the version of yourself you would prefer to keep — and that is available at any gate.