Monday, November 7, 2016

The Broken Way

The Broken Way *****
by Ann Voskamp

Ann writes about brokenness and weaves a parallel of her wheat fields beautifully through the whole book. She tells of her own brokenness and struggling with the pain and hardship of her life. She calls out to each of us to embrace our brokenness...to stop fleeing pain...to stop pretending we have it all together. God wants to set us free from sin, to use our brokenness to display his glory. He also wants us to stop shutting out the world's pain and be willing to reach out and engage in the lives of the hurting. Pain and suffering can lead us to community, and we were meant to share these burdens together. She calls us to give our lives for the service of others just like Jesus came to give His life for us.

She explores this brokenness of Christ that we celebrate during communion. He came to be broken so we could be forgiven. We now break the bread to remember His broken body. I love this quote from the book: "Standing there with the Farmer under the canopy of maples, I remembered Lewis's words echoing Christ: "I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down...Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked--the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours." It's like an echo of communion, of that intimate exchange of the givenness in my brokenness and the givenness of His acceptance."

Wow! Take a minute to think about that.

The insights in Ann's first book 1,000 Gifts were amazing; however, the strongly poetic style of the book made it hard to read at times. This book is so powerful and so well-written...very straight-forward but still with Ann's unique voice.

This book is a wealth of truth. I will probably re-read it every so often to remind myself of these truths and to ponder them. 

I would highly recommend this book for any one.


 

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