Book junkie

I did it again! Am I compulsive? Do I have an addiction? Is this pathway I am on taking me somewhere? I tried so hard not to but I just wasnt strong enough. I am sure that people will understand. This is what I was navigating with this morning after I ordered yet another book on Amazon. I am halfway through the two that arrived on Saturday and this book I have read a few times but gave my copy to a friend years ago and I never got it back. The book is called The General next to God, the story of William Booth and the Salvation Army. Ever since I made a decision for Christ this man has inspired me. His love for the lost and broken coupled with his vision for people that seemingly had it all together is still at work many years later.

Here is a little extract from the book:

The evangelist halted outside The Blind Beggar Tavern up the Mile End Road, East London. He was a tall figure in a frock coat and wide-brimmed hat and his piercing grey eyes looked out from a pale face. Drawing a book from beneath his arm, he gave out the verse of a hymn and faces pressed against the pub's glass windows. 'There is a heaven in East London for everyone,' he cried, 'for everyone who will stop and think and look to Christ as a personal Saviour.'
From the pub came a volley of jeers and oaths, followed by a rotten egg. The preacher paused, egg running down his cheek, prayed, and turned west towards Hammersmith and his lodgings. He made his way through savage fighting men, ragged match-sellers, orange-women, and Irish flower girls clad only in soiled petticoats with their bare feet covered in dirt; children with wolfish faces gobbling up decaying food left by the street market, or swaying blind drunk in tap-room doorways. He strode past crowded tenements and stinking alleys where life was a just a struggle; and the dark alleys near the docks where the sick and dying lay side by side on bare boards of fireless rooms under tattered scraps of blanket.
'A large muckheap what the rich grows their mushrooms on,' was how one pauper described East London. After thirteen years as a Methodist Circuit Minister, the preacher was no stranger to it. But as he walked home a conviction grew within him. Towards midnight when he arrived at his lodgings, he found his six children in bed. His wife, Catherine Booth, who worried over their precarious financial position, waited in the living room. Excitedly he burst out: 'Darling, I've found my destiny!' Convinced that the churches had failed the people, William Booth would set out to save the world. The year was 1865.