Skip to main content

My Review of "Good God, Lousy World and Me"



I have worked with troubled teens from broken homes, teens whose lives are themselves more broken than any thirteen year old girl should endure.  I have worked with adults in residential facilities, who developmental disabilities have broken my heart.  I now work with adults with autism.  My work has taught me to grieve at the world's brokenness.  These are jobs you shut off when you clock out.  That kind of brokenness sticks with you. 

So in reading Holly Burkhalter's Good God, Lousy World, and Me:  The Improbable Journey of a Human Rights Actuvist from Unbelief to Faith, I found a kindred spirit. 

I cried -- tears of joy.  But also tears of pain. 

This book is her honest journey from unfaith to faith.  And rather than glossing happy and pious, Burkhalter writes with all the honesty that is at the heart of following Jesus. 

There is darkness and evil in the world.  She's seen it.  And her accounting of all that pain gripped my soul.  There's so much of it in the world.  So, if God is so good, why is there all that suffering?

That's the question she seeks to answer in the book. 

This is, after all, the single biggest roadblock for so many people.  And Burkhalter talks about those times she couldn't get around it.  

Until, she met those who lived Jesus in the midst of all that brokenness.  People who taught her to pray and love, to hope and struggle, to believe and doubt. 

Compassion, empathy, kindness, prayer, love, and help.  In the middle of a "lousy world", that's what kept her going on this journey of faith. 

Reading this book helped to settle some of my own doubts.  But I'm still a companion on this way.  It's a true answer, though:  Love, love -- God's love in and through Jesus, in and through us. Love is why I believe. 

This book brought tears to my eyes.  Because it's a picture of our world.  It's a picture of me, of those I work with.  It's a picture of my husband's work in the church.  

And it's a book you deserve to read!

___________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookLook Bloggers <http://booklookbloggers.com> book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 <http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/16cfr255_03.html> : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Review of "The Prayer Wheel"

Patton Dodd, Jana Riess, and David van Biema's The Prayer Wheel:  A Daily Guide to Renewing Your Faith a Rediscovered Spiritual Practice brings a long-lost diagram that can be used to structure a 28-day discipline of prayer back into the practice of modern Christian spirituality.  The diagram was found in a 12th-century German book of gospels that emerged at a rare book dealer in Manhattan in 2015.  They begin with a cursory explanation of the wheel's origins but are primarily interested in reviving the use of the wheel to guide and enrich prayer by tying each day to a different thematic element of scripture. In concentric rings representing sections of the Bible and through seven "contemplative paths toward God" arranged like spokes through the rings he wheel uses Christianity's "big ideas" about the Lord's Prayer, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, events in the life of Christ, and the beatitudes to form a progression of prayer. The Praye
Post a Comment
Read more

My Review of "The Tea Planter's Wife"

Dinah Jefferies' The Tea Planter's Wife is a fun novel that vividly depicts the 1920s.  Gwendolyn Hooper, her 19-year-old heroine, speaks for an empire-branded breed of gutsy young British women who left the security of England to embark on extraordinary adventures abroad.  Not the back-packing, "lonely planet" travels of today, gap-year kids constantly connected with the folks back home via internet and smartphones, and usually safely and predictably back home for good inside a year.  Girls like Gwen married men who made their living and fortunes out in the colonies -- or what until very recently had been colonies -- and went out to join them, standing shoulder-to shoulder with their husbands to face down hardship, danger, disease, monsoon, drought, and not least the simmering and sometimes murderous resentment of locals. That makes The Tea Planter's Wife so much more than a love story -- it's a recognition that girls like Gwen had guts, and c
1 comment
Read more

My Review of "The Air I Breathe"

Louie Giglio's The Air I Breathe:  Worship as a Way of Life is a deceptively small book packed with insights.  Perhaps his most important, though, will also seem his simplest:  Everyone worships something or someone, because God has designed us all with the drive to worship.  We only have to study how we spend our time, energy, affection and money to discover the current object of our worship.  Thinking about worship in light of the book's simplest definition -- "our response to what we value most" -- is both eye-opening and thought-provoking. The Air I Breathe then proceeds to urge readers to devote their worship to God (the only One who's worthy of it) and to make worship a way of life rather than just something they do in church.  Giglio's beautiful writing -- which is full of simple, yet profound statements and fresh energy -- successfully motivates readers to ponder his points.  But as persuasive as his narrative is, it lacks sufficient
Post a Comment
Read more