Want to find a book to avoid or at least relegate to the plethora of insipid, uninspired Christian writing. Then this is the book for you. A Passionate Life by Mike Breen and Walt Kallestad (no link provided on purpose).
Come on guys give us all a break. We want a journey not a collection of contrived anecdotes that have no one’s names and no context meaning the illustrations lack the reality that we want today. It starts to read like one of those dodgy testimonials that you read in some of the more dodgy women’s magazines that always seem to find their way to a doctor’s surgery. That’w where I read them, honestly. “M” came into my office the other day with this problem.
And please help me I don’t want another series of shapes to mold my life around. This is one of the central themes of the book and the concept of lifeshapes. I don’t need to be a semi-circle, triangle, square etc. to lead a passionate life. I need to find God.
Ultimately “A Passionate Life” is disappointing. It ultimately brings the agenda back to ourselves. I believe the crux of a passionate life discovering something other than ourselves so a book that ends up being about self discovery may inspire some for a moment but it won’t last.
In fact if you want to find something that inspires the book is ‘Finding Flow,’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Although it isn’t written from a Christian perspective it has great insights about being content and finding our place in the world. I need to update my Amazon assoicates and provide some links but put in a search and it will come up straight away.