Book
Summary
Book:
Happy About My Christian Faith: 10 Stories that will Touch Your Soul
We discover life as much with our hearts as we learn
about it with our heads. As a result, we find that personal experiences, relationships,
and stories provide more effective media for investigating spiritual realities
than any essay or scholarly treatise. That is precisely the gift that the ten
contributors in this book are giving to us. Five of these contributors discuss
how they have used faith to help others while five discuss how they have used
faith to help themselves.
Faith based upon real-world
experiences serves to elevate belief above the quarrelsome and impassioned arguments
that too often mark our discussions about mere religion. A gift we can give to
each other is to provide frank descriptions of our own personal convictions and
how we came to believe what we hold to be true. Our 10 contributors give us this
window to view how they were lead to help others and help themselves.
HELPING
OTHERS:
Many of us wish that we could lead lives of service, and would
prefer one day to leave the world a better place because we were in it. We may
find no prescription in the journeys of these five individuals for how we can
actually serve fellow human beings, but we will at least be encouraged by their
clear and ringing testimonies that life at such a level is not only possible,
but, when we are under the right influences, such a life of service becomes irresistible.
Perhaps
reading the accounts of these people's faith will, itself, open a place and provide
in our own hearts room for some of that compelling urge to service that has become
so strong in theirs.
HELPING THEMSELVES:
Many
of us are on a quest for personal redemption of one kind or another. Abuse, compulsive
behaviors, trauma, bad parenting, peer pressure, fear of death and a thousand
other social pressures serve as albatrosses around our necks trying to drag us
down to chaos and destruction.
The concluding chapters
provide opportunity for five contributors to describe how they discovered upward
pathways towards the light through dark forces and circumstances in their lives.
"This book is worth a read. It will make
you laugh, it will make your cry, it will give you inspiration..."
