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Home > Fathers of the Church > Life of Constantine (Eusebius) > Book III her the stormy troubles of intestine discord, in the midst of a period of peace and joy. .. Delay not, then, dear friends: delay not, you ministers of God, and faithful .. of blood: that there might be no sacrifices consumed by fire, no demon festivals, nor.
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It's horrible.

I know this about depression - so I don't want to minimize her experience. I want to respect her experience, but I also want to be honest. I have the utmost respect for people who put their story out there. BUT I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who has experienced great pain in life. If only we could all be so lucky to experience a life like she wrote about. There is a definite, specific audience for this book.

I am not it, but I know some people that will love it. I can relate to much of her neatly written story. I stood out in the rain on See You at the Pole. And I went to the rallies. And I gave up my lunch to pray and I came early for Bible Study.

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I wore a purity ring. And I watched God work. Seriously, it was like I was reading what my high school experience would have been if I lived in my current town - which was also weird. I've never read a book that so intimately describes the places, the people My favorite quote came from page As a Christian school girl who prayed for God to do mighty things in my school and watched Him do mighty things in my school, I thought "falling on the sword of the Spirit" was my job and Biblical.

Time and time again, I fell on the sword and my heart got broken. And then, I picked up the pieces and moved on.

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And I wonder what my life would be if we all stopped blaming God for the things "He led us" to do and spoke the truth. I think my broken heart might have mended easier if boys didn't blame my brokenness on God's will. I think her story is like many of us who grew up as teenagers in the 90s. When it was easy to be on fire - because everyone around us was.

There was Brio magazine and it was cool to go on missions trips and we could listen to Christian music at Berean bookstore with our friends for hours on end. When even if we didn't want to talk about "how our walk was going" we still knew we were okay because God was shoved in our face every step of the way.

He didn't seem far away. But there is so much more to this conversation. What has happened to us after the youth group went away? What happened when we realized the things we had done for God actually became our god? What happened when you realized you put too much faith in people and not enough faith in God? What has happened after we started getting involved in a church and then the church hurt us not once, but twice and more?

What happens when you're waiting, waiting, waiting on God?


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What happens when you're daily faced with the brokenness of the world we live in? How do we pick ourselves up from the sword we really fell on I realize this is a memoir, so it can't give answers.

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But it left me wanting more. More conversation on faith, on God, on recovering from the sad parts of life. When the book ended, I felt like I had read a Karen Kingsbury book - it was a neatly written story, with a little messiness, and then it got tied up with a pretty bow. Nov 13, Leah rated it it was amazing Shelves: nonfiction , spirituality. This book was a revelation.

And I say that in the true sense of the word. Where do I begin? First of all, it was scary. The similarities were so freaky, I could barely stop myself from yelling out loud while I was reading it. And I kind of want to read it again, to take notes or something. I'm glad that Addie and her husband were able to work things out, but in the middle when things were uncertain and he was still churchy and she wasn't I kept thinking to myself, she's going to have to leave This book was a revelation. I'm glad that Addie and her husband were able to work things out, but in the middle when things were uncertain and he was still churchy and she wasn't I kept thinking to myself, she's going to have to leave him, this will never work.

And the reason I thought that is because a guy I dated in college, is still a preacher, still living in his same home town doing the work of the Lord, and if the person I am today ran into the person he still is today, there wouldn't be anything in the whole wide world that could convince me to be with him.

I got the feeling while I was reading that I had been duped somehow. I kept thinking that it was a sham, I lived through a sham. Even the whole dating a guy and loving a guy because of his relationship with God and not who he was as a person My rebellion against the church I grew up in, and I say church as a general word, happened on Martha's Vineyard when I was at a semester away from college. A defining shift in my life occurred during that time and I have never been the same.

I think it was the people I was around, the creativity, the liberation to be a Christian and embrace the beautiful things in this world, like music and art and comedy. My mind was blown in the best possible way, and when I went back to college, it was as though everything there was exposed for what it was, a fraud. And I still believe that, I still feel that the environment is one that perpetuates an ideology of judgement and the fakeness of the perfect Christian life.

What I see on the conservative southern right is a tendency to believe that the way they live is the ONLY way to live, that people who live or believe in any other way are wrong and that the world is black and white. The older I get, the more gray things seem, the more complicated life becomes when friends die and people get sick and those you thought you could count on just tell you to pray your way through it.

My boyfriend says, "All we can do is hope our hearts are guiding us in the right direction. What our mothers believe has no bearing on who God is to us.

An open letter to my beloved church

The part in the book where Addie mentioned throwing the word "shitty" into conversation to see what the facial expression was, because if the person could handle the word "shitty" they were a safe Christian, and I realized that I unconsciously do that same thing. I guess, this book made me feel normal. I love the Lord. I am imperfect, a screw-up. I mess things up every single day and live the most imperfect life ever and kick myself all the time for my lack of filter and for the ways I probably unintentionally hurt people.

But to say that because my life is damaged and broken and imperfect that I am an offense to God I makes me want to never be around "unsafe" Christians again. Jesus could handle the offensive people, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the duplicitous pharisees, the dare I mention fuck-sayers of the world He told them where their mistakes were, but he also told the righteous idiots to lay off, to leave them alone, to cast the stones if they themselves had not sinned.

So yes, my life doesn't look textbook Christian, but I hope that someday I can apologize to Jesus for that and know that his love will still encompass all that I am, all that he created me to be. I could be very flawed in this logic, but again, just hoping my heart will lead me in the right direction View 2 comments.

Aug 21, Anne Bogel rated it really liked it. I might come back and give this one 5 stars, but I want to sit with it for a little longer before I do that. I only give 5 stars to excellent books that are life-changing, and this just might be one of them. What I loved: I know the author through her blog, but this is not a blogger's book. It is a true memoir, not a collection of essays, and certainly not a padded, glammed-up collection of blog posts. And like the author, I grew up in the evangelical church and have a lot of baggage I might come back and give this one 5 stars, but I want to sit with it for a little longer before I do that.

And like the author, I grew up in the evangelical church and have a lot of baggage there--especially boy baggage--and I appreciated how the author was able to imbue events that may not sound super-significant on the surface I dated a guy, he turned out to be a jerk, etc with the weight they deserved. Typically with a memoir like this, I'd like to see a little more distance between the time of writing and the time of the events. But this was a great read, so I'll give it a pass.