The Inside Out

Mark Batterson’s new book PRIMAL, is quite an inspiring read. This book has enough one liners to set Twitter on fire for the next year!  My favorite being:

We complicate Christianity.

I enjoyed his little touches of humor, and his clever stories were enough to keep me reading, but the real draw to this book for me were the simple examples and explanations of how we love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength. It’s the simplicity that Mark is teaching that helped me to understand things so much better, and made me feel so encouraged. We all have times when we feel like our walk is not really, well, cooking with gas, and this book came at just one of those times for me. It’s encouragement has meant the world to me. In the introduction Mark said,

And by the time you reach the last page, I hope you will have done more than rediscover Christianity in its most primal form. I hope you will have gone back to the primal faith you once had. Or more accurately, the primal faith that once had you.

And that is exactly what it has done!

I just finished reading this enormously inspiring book that challenged me to really push further and “Do Something Bigger than Myself.” And it was written by a teenager. Not just any teenager, but one that is making a huge impact on the lives of AIDS orphans in Africa. This book showed me that anyone can make a difference, anyone. Austin knew he was teenager and had to find a new and unique way to get involved and did he ever. For more on his ministry go to hoopsofhope.org. I loved the stories he told of the children and how they effected him, here at home and also when he  went there to meet them. Each of these children stop being a number and become so real when you see them through Austin’s eyes. My particular favorite was when he described how the kids in Africa always wanted to see themselves on the digital camera after they took a picture. I never realized that they had never seen themselves before! Austin says,

 ”Can you imagine that? Not even knowing what you look like? It seems almost impossible but it’s true…That’s funny isn’t it? Because here in America we have the exact opposite problem. We are so used to seeing who we are on the outside that we never find out who we are on the inside.”

Lots of pieces of our lives come to life through Austin’s eyes.

This is an awesome read for adults and teens alike because it challenges us to never give up and helps us realize that God is in the business of making the impossible not just possible but phenomenal. Thanks for the inspiration Austin!

This review was posted for Thomas Nelson’s Book Review Blogger program http://brb.thomasnelson.com/.

It’s kind of like that extra homework you have to catch up on when you miss several days of school…with 2 exceptions: 1. I love to read now and 2. This book is amazing!

Donald Miller has written a book that is so thought-provoking and addictive I can’t put it down right now! Kinda’ good that I started it right before I got sick so that I don’t have to put it down, huh? It’s making me think about things from a perspective I hadn’t ever considered before. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is mostly about the art of telling a story and how Donald discovered bits and pieces of it while editing what was supposed to be a movie about his life (based on his other book Blue Like Jazz). I love his ability to write just like he’s sitting across and table chatting it up with you and then “BAM,” he lays the most thought-provoking comments on ya’! I’ve had to put the book down a few times and just process what he says! Here’s a couple that have knocked my sick head to the floor:

“If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.”

- I put that one on the front of my journal. 

“I’ve wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don’t want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgement. We don’t want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn’t remarkable, then we don’t have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims rather than grateful participants…I wonder then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is their lives are meaningless. I wonder if they’ve chosen to believe their whole existence is unremarkable, and are just projecting their dreary lives on the rest of us.”

- See what I mean about “BAM!”

“If the point of life is the same as the point of a story,the point of life is character transformation…(Marcus) didn’t know what the point of the journey (of life) was, but he did believe we were designed to search for and find something. and he wondered out loud if the point wasn’t the search but the transformation the search creates.

And that seemed fascinating to me.”

- Me too, Mr. Miller…me too. [side note: I love the way he said that the guy "wondered out loud." I wish I spoke like that. It makes such a mental picture of what was really happening in the conversation.]

Ok now I’ve quoted enough of the book that you already can’t wait to go pick it up! You’ll be addicted like me in no time…now I gotta’ go and finish my book! When I find some more life altering quotes within this cleverly written story I’ll let ‘cha know!