Trade Paperback
128 pages
May 2004
Zondervan

Review  |   Author Bio  |  Read an Excerpt

Review:

What is faith? How does faith affect life? Is there any connection at all? In a delicate fade Ben Devries offers an intensely personal look at the struggle to go beyond simply existing.

In expression that is intensely questioning and lyrical, musician and songwriter Devries explores the questions of sorrow, faith, possibility, and hope. He shares his ponderings, ponderings to which many twenty-somethings can deeply relate. He intertwines his own experiences with quotes, poems, and passages from songs, combining them all into a cohesive whole which may challenge, move, inspire, or depress, but will not leave the reader unaffected.

This book is for people looking to understand the heads and hearts of a postmodern generation. It is for people who want to think and ponder the reality of religious experience, instead of the stained-glass version offered by many. I enjoyed the book. I don’t agree with him in every point, but he has given me much to ponder. I would recommend it to anyone open to new perspectives. -- Stephanie Clemons, Christian Book Previews.com

Book Jacket:

the only sense I ever made out of life was when a man told me the kingdom of God is placed between this world and the one to come. he said it hangs like a curtain between what I can see and feel (everything fragile and fading, like me) and everything whole. as weak as I am and as blind, it’s here waiting to show itself. . . .

—ben devries

what do you do when your experience of life doesn’t match up with what you thought it should be? a delicate fade offers an intense, stream-of-consciousness narrative as a twenty-something writer wrestles with this and other questions. including quotes, snippets of poems, and a detailed and sensory exploration of the world around him, ben devries chronicles his struggle to live between what is and what should be. an intensely personal journey of doubt, faith, and hope, a delicate fade is an honest chronicle of one person’s exploration of Christianity, postmodernism, and the meaning of life.

a lifetime and I saw you, I can see you change

I remember everything (except what I am now)

I remember how I spent all this time looking

a lifetime watching, but I lost myself somewhere

I found myself between what is and what was meant to be.