Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me is a profound book.

The sign of a profound book is not that it makes you want to read more — a sign of a profound book is that it makes you want to write.

I was compelled to put down Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me countless times because I was inspired to try my fingers at what Ian Morgan Cron does so well. However, like trying to open for U2, just because I have a guitar doesn’t mean I should be on the same stage.

I was given Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me by the publisher to see if I’d be wiling to write a review and I’ve struggled for months to do so.

Not because I disliked this book.

But because I liked it too much.

Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me — a “memoir of sorts” – is a sincere and straight-forward story of what it means to grow up. A process that for many is less a familial masterpiece like the The Cosby Show or Full House, and more a resemblance of a Shakespeare tragedy mixed with Arrested Development.

Memories can be a tricky thing.

Childhood wasn’t all pin-the-tail on the donkey and eating smores. The Great Temptation can be to put kaleidoscope-colored glasses on all the “best years of your life” – forgetting about all the doubts, questions, fears and heartbreak that pushed us from Point A to B to 29 years old.

Or the temptation is to paint such a painful picture of your past that it becomes inescapable, a woe-is-me story without a chance for a happy ending.

Ian Morgan Cron, thankfully does neither.

Instead he sketches a story that is painful and hopeful, beautiful while ugly, redemptive while damning, all as he sorts through questions of family, identity, insecurities, faith, and purpose.

And even through the lens of his cold and distant relationship wit his father, Cron reveals that God can somehow prove faithful even if your earthly father is anything but.

I started crying during the last few pages of Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me. And I’m not sure exactly why.

If I had one guess? It’s probably because so much of our future, depends on how we deal with the past.

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