“What does it take to get a book on your reading list?”  That was the text message from Cara, our daughter who is a Clinical Counseling student at Columbia International University about two weeks ago.

Apparently, that question is all it took.  I ordered the book and read it in a few days.  Linda is reading it now, and Cara wants to talk about it as we travel to Nags Head for a Thompson family Thanksgiving celebration.

The subtitle of the book is “God’s Unexpected Pathway to Joy.”  We don’t usually think of shattered dreams as the way to find joy.  Which is the problem.

Crabb, a best-selling author, counselor, and psychologist, approaches the problem of our disappointment with God with a new twist.  Our problem with God, he says, is not so much that God doesn’t fix our circumstances.  It’s that God doesn’t fix our feelings. 

What we want is to be happy – “soul-pleasure,” he calls it.  Most of the time, we assume that having our dreams fulfilled will make us happy – so we pursue the relationships and things that will bring us pleasure.  But we would probably be OK with shattered dreams if God would only heal our shattered hearts.  When we live day after day, year after year, with anger, grief, fear, anxiety, and so on – in spite of asking God to replace those feelings with trust, contentment, peace, and happiness – we become disillusioned with God.

But what if our “soul-pain” is actually God’s pathway to joy?  What if it is actually part of God’s design to lead us to what we were created for – intimacy with God?  We were created in the image of God to love and be loved. We have glimpses of that in this life and in our human relationships, but ultimately God longs for us to find the joy of that fulfillment in him.  When we seek happiness over joy, we will continually be disappointed.

Read the book.  It’s well worth your time.  For some more thoughts and reflections on Crabb’s book, click here for my November 22 sermon, “Problems with God.”

I would offer three brief criticisms of the book.  First, although Crabb’s use of Naomi’s story throughout the book as an illustration is at times on point, there are places he stretches the analogy by reading more into Naomi’s mind than the text warrant.  Second, I’m somewhat less hesitant than Crabb to suggest that God sends shattered dreams.  I think we need to be careful in explaining God’s motives – in general, but especially so in a given “shattered dream.”  His ways are higher than ours.  And finally, I wish Crabb did a little more at the end of the book in terms of applying what it means to have an intimate relationship with God.

But I crowded my criticisms into one paragraph, even if a long one, because the book is so insightful.  I’ve already suggested it to several people dealing with the frustration of shattered dreams. 

Here’s just one of many quotes I love in this book to which I will certainly return again –

“Satan’s masterpiece is not the prostitute or the skid-row bum.  It is the self-sufficient person who has made life comfortable, who is adjusted well to the world and truly likes living here, a person who dreams of no better place to live, who longs only to be a little better – and a little better off – than he already is.”