To sum up my book in one sentence, I guess it would be this:  God wants to show His glory through less than perfect people.  In this book, (which came to me while I was in the middle of writing my first book) I have tried to show that a person cannot find their true worth in any person.  If you look for value or worth or whatever you want to call it in any person or group of people your worth will change from person to person.  I’m saddened by the lack of self esteem that people have, Christians in particular… how people can think so little of themselves, people that Christ came to redeem and die for, escapes my understanding.  We have to look to the only One who’s views aren’t swayed by public opinion.
 When you look at the people of the Bible, I think we’ve done their stories an injustice.  We have taken the people that lived those stories and elevated them to sainthood status, yet they were people like you and me who were imperfect, sinful people who allowed themselves to be used by God.  Sometimes, a lot of time, we think “God doesn’t want to use us because we are not good enough”.  That is the complete opposite of what I read of in the Bible.  We cannot relate to many of the men and women in the Bible because we think they are some sort of ‘uber-Christian’. 
 In reality, it is because they were sinful, tainted creatures that God chose to use them.  God always chooses the weak, meek and humble over the able and prideful.  Just look at some of the people that he chose for great things.  God is jealous… in a good way.  If he used people that, by worldly eyes, seemed all together and perfect fits with all the right pedigrees and talents, then how would He get the glory when His will is accomplished?
 Secondly, our churches today have tried to set the bar at a level that no person could achieve.  We’ve become more concerned with adherence to rules over people’s hearts.  We’ve become like the Pharisees in Jesus day, more concerned with sacrifice over mercy.  We’re more concerned with the appearance of our church body than the spiritual growth of the heart.  The two are intertwined.  I think that if we get a grasp on the real people behind the stories found in the Scriptures, we may find that they really were just regular people.  We also might find ourselves mixed in there… between the halos and sainthoods. 
 Take for instance each of the different people that I’ve looked at in this book.  I’ve tried to tie all of the chapters together by the verse in Revelation 2:17.
“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.”
 Each person I’ve looked at in each chapter, I’ve tried to give a worldly name on a black stone.  When they meet Christ or learn the lesson that God wanted to teach them, they turn in that black stone to the alabaster one that only he or she knows the name.   Chapter one starts with the woman that they bring before Jesus who was caught in adultery.  Who knows what they story behind this woman being brought before Jesus was?   I compare this woman who was being judged by everyone else to modern day judgments we all hold on other people.  Who are we to judge?  One day it may be us on the receiving end of the stoning. 
 Chapter two looks at the insignificance we all feel.  I look at the boy in the Gospels who brought his bread and fish to Jesus and Jesus multiplied them.  We all feel like what we could possibly bring to God is insignificant.  But it is not what we bring but that we are available to be used… God will provide the miracles.
 Chapter three is my favorite.  It deals with the leper that Jesus healed.  Specifically the one that he reached out and touched to be healed.  I looked at what he must have gone through before being healed, what he lost to leprosy, and what he gained from reaching to Jesus.  We all feel like the leper sometimes.  People don’t even want to be near us, we lose our lives, lose our hope to go on.  Jesus was not afraid to reach out and touch this man and will do the same for us.
  Chapter six is about the original Jesus Freak.  John the Baptist may have been the greatest man to have lived in Jesus’ opinion, but he still had doubts.  “Heresy!” You say?  But John, at the end of his life, wanted to know that what he spent his life doing mattered.  Who hasn’t felt like that?
 Chapter seven looks at the thief crucified beside Jesus.  How did he get there?  What decisions did he make in his life that lead him to the cross?  His whole life had become a life to forget.  People would remember him as the thief.  All alone on a cross next to Jesus, he pleads for Jesus to remember him.  Jesus tells him that he will be with him in paradise.  What mercy.
 Chapters eight and nine is a two-parter.  It deals with religiosity.  The first half dealing with the man with the withered hand that Jesus dared to heal on the Sabbath.  The religious leaders were more concerned with adhering to the law and tradition that they neglected mercy.  Part two is about Paul having to answer to the Jewish Christians for bringing the Gospel to the Gentiles after receiving a vision from God to accept the Gentiles as ‘clean’.
 That's just a snippit of what's in my book.  The last chapter will be blank so you can write his own story in.  The last chapter is about Acts 3:1-10.  The man who was healed couldn’t walk from birth.  After he was healed he was praising God and the whole community saw and were in wonder and amazement at what was done.  Why doesn’t that describe the North American Church?  I think we’ve lost our identity at the expense of producing a polished, beautiful product for a consumer driven culture.  Religiosity. 
 If we want to get back the influence that the original church had, we need to get back to the idea that the church is not a gathering place for perfect people but rather a hospital for sinners.  A place where we don’t merely apply make up to the terminally ill, to give the impression of healthiness, but let the Holy Spirit operate on the person and make them whole from the inside out.  So that God gets the glory.