Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Book Recommendation: THE POWER OF BROKENNESS by Jim McCreagh

I just finished this book this evening, and really enjoyed it!  Anyone who has struggled with the pitfalls of this world - depression, codependency, addiction, grief, anger, family problems, divorce, abuse - can benefit from this work.  Here is what I wrote in my Amazon review:

We live in a broken world, and all of us are broken in some way.  We may be broken by grief, anger, lust, depression, addiction in any of its many forms, or by frustration with our careers, our families, or our own shortcomings.  In the end, the thing that has broken us is the same thing that broke the world in the beginning: sin.
    The modern world often seeks to deal with brokenness by denying it - by encouraging everyone to be "comfortable in their own skin," to embrace their faults as part of who they are and deny that there is anything fundamentally wrong with our nature.  In other cases, modern therapists try to treat the symptom while failing to recognize the underlying disease.  We try to deal with addiction through self-help rather than God's help.
  What Jim McCraigh shows us in his book, THE POWER OF BROKENNESS: THE LANGUAGE OF HEALING, is that God can fix what is broken within us, as long as we acknowledge that we are broken and entrust our repair and restoration to Him.  McCraigh focuses on twelve words, exploring the popular understanding and spiritual meaning of each.  He devotes a chapter to each of them: Life, Seek, Trust, Fearless, Forgiven, Transform, Miracle, Relationship, Community, Vigilance,  Power, and Share. In each chapter he used this term to guide the reader into a better, closer relationship with God, which will in turn make the person who follows this path a better, stronger Christian.
   I thoroughly enjoyed this book; it is not a quick read - each chapter requires some time for reflection.  But I highly recommend it either for individuals seeking recovery and restoration, or for group studies, especially in Christ-centered recovery programs.  Excellent overall - my only (small) criticism is McCraigh's insistence on not capitalizing the name of Satan when he refers to the Father of Lies.  While I understand and even appreciate the reasoning behind it, as a grammarian I found it a trifle annoying. But that's really the only thing I did not like about this book. 

No comments:

Post a Comment