Great Books – Shattered Dreams: God’s Unexpected Path to Joy

Some really great thoughts in this book. I posted some of the ones I loved below. They are pulled from different chapters so I hope they don’t lose their context too much. Well worth the read for people who have gone through or are going through suffering in their lives.

In our Christian culture, we’ve weakened our understanding of personal sin by talking too soon and too much about our longings and our needs. We want to feel good about ourselves, we long for enjoyable relationships, we desire effective and recognized ministries. We become the point and see nothing really wrong with it

What needs breaking remains unbroken. We continue to think life should work well and we should feel good. The nature of our spiritual journey, we assume, is that God’s glory will be revealed in our prosperity, whether financial, relational, physical, or emotional. As long as we believe that, we walk in the flesh. It’s so natural to think the Presence of Jesus has no greater purpose than to improve the quality of our journey through life—with quality defined as a pleasurable, satisfying, self-affirming existence—a journey where certain things don’t go wrong or, if they do, they correct themselves. Marriages should work, biopsies should come back benign, ministry efforts should succeed, and we should feel pretty good about the way most things go.

As long as our purpose is to have a good time, to have soul-pleasure exceed soul-pain, God becomes merely a means to an end, an object to be used, never a subject rightfully demanding a response, never a lover to be enjoyed. Worship becomes utilitarian, part of a cunning strategy to get what we want rather than a passionate abandonment to someone more worthy than we

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