What We Talk About When We Talk About God

Recently went to hear Rob Bell speak while he was in town, at Vanderbilt.
For me he is fun guy to be a fan of... simply because he is one of the only people that I really respect that is so controversial. Half the Christians you mention his name around make this facial grimace and the other half have a little spark in their eye.
In any case, he is one of the only speakers I know who could hold a crowd for hours at a time and still at the end you've got to tell everybody "it's over go home." And he's up there talking about... God.
Yet at the same time he's talking about everything else.
That's actually sort of what his new book is about: (from what i've gathered, haven't yet read it) "What we talk about when we talk about God." He's good at taking the stuff of life and pulling back the curtain to see the God behind it all... "the God who is with us, for us, and ahead of us."
Henry Nouwen once wrote, "The Christian leader, minister or priest, is not one who reveals God to his people - who gives something he has to those who have nothing - but one who helps those who are searching to discover reality as the source of their existence." 
This is what Rob does and is what, as Nouwen states, the Christian leader is called to do...

"Then Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that you are extremely religious in every respect. For as I was passing through and observing the objects of your worship, I even found an altar on which was inscribed:

TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.

Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you."

Acts 17:22-23 (HCSB)

More thoughts and updates on this book will follow.