Review: SEARCH AND RESCUE
Friday, March 18, 2011 at 12:52PM Here's my review of the new book, SEARCH AND RESCUE, by Michael Thompson:
Disorientation is rampant among contemporary Christians [and it’s not their fault.] Our attempts to become biblically-centered, faithful students of Scripture who can drill down deep, exegete, analyze and dissect, have often left us with a hodge-podge of beliefs, sermon sound-bytes, and scriptural fragments—much like dissected and disembodied specimens in a biology lab that clutter the work bench, but no longer form a body that’s whole.
We've lost the story-line.
We need a Story to help us make sense of the scriptural shards and spiritual sound-bytes. What we have now is a random page torn from its context: What we need is the whole story. We are bloated with information but starving for an interpretation that binds the random scraps together.
A loss of situational awareness can get a hiker killed: Like Christopher McCandless [Into the Wild] venturing with youthful hubris and naivete’ into the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness, we’re woefully unprepared for this journey. The unprepared quickly become the unconscious. [McCandless’ body was finally found inside an abandoned school bus deep in the Alaskan wilderness. He died alone, stranded in a wilderness he underestimated.]
If you know the Story you’ve been dropped into, certain things will become clear to you. The Story gives you your bearings and restores a significant degree of situational awareness. Certain things can’t be revealed on this side of the Story, but if you know where the narrative has been and is going, you need not live at the whim of randomness. Randomness will kill your heart. The opposite of randomness is Story. What we need to see is a glimpse of what the Director sees. Pan back; see what we’re up against.
Search and Rescue gets beyond the canned religious formulas, bullet-points and “should’s” [be a more faithful church attender, get more serious about spiritual growth, or fad programs] to offer a seasoned perspective you’ll seldom hear in church. Michael Thompson is a trail guide who knows the terrain and how to help others use a truer map and a more accurate compass.
Search and Rescue, the inaugural book from Heart and Life Publishers, will serve as a refreshing introduction to the Story we’ve been missing, yet find ourselves faced with at every turn. It exposes the real world we can't see, and desperately need to. ~ Jim Robbins