The autobiography of G. Stanley Jones is titled A Song of Ascent, and is considered to be one of the spiritual classics. Jones was a great man: a missionary to India, a friend to Gandhi, a tireless world traveler, and a great writer and speaker.

What's amazing is that this book was actually his third attempt at an autobiography. And he was 83 at the time. He had actually written two previous books but was unwilling to publish them. The first, he said, was too filled with the little events of his life, things he judged not worth telling. In the second attempt, he tried to take the events of his life and to use them to philosophize about life in general. But even this, he decided, was not the right focus. The third time, he determined, he was going to begin with Jesus, and that's what he did. You see, what he discovered after two bad attempts was that he had been working backwards; he had been working from events to the Christ Event. And now, in his third attempt, he found he had it wrong. As he would say in his introduction to that third book: "Christ has been, and is, to me the Event.

There is a story that Stanley tells about an African, who, after he was baptized, changed his name, calling himself 'After.' What he was saying was everything happened 'after' he met Christ. Stanley said that that was description of his own life. Everything that happened to me happened to me after I met Christ.

In his first two attempts, said Jones, he had been too events-centered and not enough Event-centered. In the third and successful book he concentrated on the Event and worked back to the events, understanding his own life in the light of Christ.