From errant golf shots and Friday night football, to witnessing in Starbucks and at the gym, Benton Hall’s memoir Tales from the Bike Path reassures the reader of God’s grace and love
in stories laced with wisdom and humor
DALLAS – April 19, 2016 – Looking for God? Perhaps Benton Hall can help.
For more than 40 years, Hall’s life and ministry have been a daily adventure of finding God at work in his life and the lives of people he encounters.
Hall serves with Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) and has ministered to teenagers pretty much all over the world, but mostly in Texas, where he serves as Dallas Missional Team Leader.
In his memoir released today, Tales from the Bike Path, he shares 70 stories from his own life and the lives of others, using each to highlight unique aspects of God’s heart and character.
Ranging from witnessing to Muslim teens and survivors of Hurricane Katrina, to touching tales of student athletes eager to accept Christ, Hall’s stories illustrate God’s desire for us to share His love with others. Hall finds lessons about God’s character everywhere in life. Some of the best lessons, he says, have come from realizing God’s hand in the details of his life, including lessons learned from good dogs and getting help for his golf game.
“Don’t be afraid to join the Lord in these adventures of faith. He is standing in the deep water, asking you to jump and trust that He will catch you,” Hall says.
He knows that God has sometimes surprising ways of using us to share his love in the world. Through his stories, Hall reminds us God loves us, walks with us and ahead of us, and empowers us all to do far more than we believe we can do.
“He is an awesome God who resides far beyond the circumstances of our lives and yet also somehow right in the middle of them at the same time, always wooing us to trust him and fall back onto his unconditional love,” he writes.
“As we grow in faith, the Spirit fees us up and unlocks our ancient longing to connect with our good Father,” Hall explains. “We are free to be ourselves, sharing his love without concern for the judgments of others. Whether in the cities on in the country, Christ is lifted up best by those who love and serve others without thought of reputation, considering the needs of others as more important than their own.”
With disarming humility, honesty and more than a little humor, Hall tells heartwarming stories of his own growth in faith, his challenges working with teens and in the community, as well as the joys of making friends from Korea, China, and the Middle East as he encounters them at the gym, Starbucks or on airplanes.
The lessons come from incidents big and small. A lifetime golfer, Hall shares a story about deciding to pray about his golf game, especially a painfully dramatic and humbling tendency to slice his shots. He decided to pray about it through one entire golf game, shot by shot, and the slice disappeared, never to return. The lesson was far more important than the tee shot.
“If God cares enough to work on my golf game, how much more does he care about the more important things in my life? And thus began the adventure of a constant journey from little to big,” he writes, “appreciating his attention to the little things of life while trying to trust him to accomplish the big.”
Tales from the Bike Path [ISBN 978-1-942557-20-3] just released from Clovercroft Publishing. It is available from Amazon and other online retailers, selected book stores, and from www.talesfromthebikepath.com.
For a review copy or to interview, contact Joni Sullivan Baker, Buoyancy PR, at 513/319-3231 or jbaker@buoyancypr.com.
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