Serials and Scenarios ~ Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

I've been going to read this book for months....maybe even a year. Finally, while driving the many miles to and from New Mexico, 24 and I read it out loud.

The thing that amazes me...is how we gum up, gunk up and confuse the clear and repeated teaching of Christ. "Christ in me, the hope of glory." among others. But we do. And since we are sheep we often need sharp whacks upside the head. So. You looking for a smack? You might want to look into this one. And it dovetails beautifully with the Cut the Crapathon.

Description

The Christian faith is supposed to produce deep, positive change. So why doesn't it seem to work in "real life"? That question screamed at Pastor Peter Scazzero when his church and marriage hit bottom and every Christian remedy produced nothing but anger and fatigue. As he began digging under the "good Christian" veneer, he discovered entire emotional layers of his life that God had not yet touched. And that emotional immaturity had fed his spiritual immaturity. In this book, he unveils what's wrong with our conventional means of "spiritual growth" and offers not only a model of spirituality that actually works, but seven steps to transformation that will help readers experience a faith charged with authenticity, contemplation and a hunger for God.

My Review:

Peter Scazzero has hit on the heart of the problem with Christianity...in a nutshell, the heart. The heart of each individual who has claimed the term, Christian.

I think many of "us" have mistakenly accepted the belief that we can just add Jesus to our lives rather than give our lives to Him for Him to do with as He pleases.

The problem with just adding Jesus to our lives is that Christianized religiosity gives us a glaze of sugar substitute with an awful aftertaste, or extreme self-sanitization complete with noxious bleach fumes, and both extremes allow us to "function" as "Christians" without dealing with our junk.

Scazzero tells his own story toward that discovery and what he had unearthed as help along the way. Sometimes the book feels overwhelming. There is SO MUCH to do to get emotionally healthy, but then he boils it down to simplistic additions and subtractions in life. It ends up being simple as in fairly clear, as in cause and effect, but not simple as in easy. Because the bottom line for emotionally healthy spirituality looks a lot like dying to self and letting Christ live His life through us -- giving up our control for His -- and that is not easy at all. Do I recommend this book...yes, if you are really serious about changing, this one can help. But if you don't want to put the work in, you'll be frustrated.