Wrecked: When a Broken World Slams into Your Comfortable Life, by Jeff Goins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Jeff Goins is a blogger, speaker and author. He works for Adventures in Missions, a nonprofit, where he serves as the Communications Director. In his free time, he writes books and shares ideas worth spreading. Catch up with him on his very popular blog, GoinsWriter.com.


BOOK DESCRIPTION:  This book isn’t for everyone. It’s for those brave enough to make a change. Do you:

• Feel like a misfit in a world lulled asleep?
• Secretly wonder if there’s more to life?
• Dream of living an adventure but feel stuck in the mundane?
• Want to do something important with your life?
• Long to make a difference?

Maybe the answer you’re searching for is closer than you think. Maybe it’s time you had your life turned upside-down. Maybe it’s time you got wrecked.

MY THOUGHTS: I listened to this as an audio book read by the author himself, and am I ever thankful for that pause feature on my mp3 player!  Every few minutes, I found myself pausing to take notes or to process what I'd just heard.  I am sure I'll be wading through some of those ideas for a long time.

The book starts by outlining the status quo--the person loving life in his safe little world, content to watch other people have adventures on reality TV and keep a nice distance by spending most of his free time on the couch.  But occasionally something happens that rocks his world.  Maybe he has an encounter with someone much less fortunate, or he goes on a short-term missions trip.  How does this person work through what's happened to him and let it help shape his future?

Jeff Goins issues the challenge of stepping into those opportunities, recognizing the impact they can have on our lives, and then figuring out how to put into perspective these paradigm shifts. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book doesn't advocate running off and doing abnormal things just for the sake of the adventure.  Instead, the author encourages us to use these experiences to teach us that life isn't all about ME.

I was particularly encouraged by the section that explained why reaching out to meet a need often hurts us more than it gives us that warm fuzzy feeling, because it causes us to recognize how small we are and how broken the world is.

I'm particularly interested in the implications he makes for young adults, who are typically on a quest to find themselves.  Goins recommends that instead of looking at the world as it revolves around me, find a need that calls to my heart and determine what I can do to help meet it.

So many people came to mind as I worked my way through these chapters.  I will be recommending this to older teens and twenty-somethings, as well as to anyone coming on short-term mission trips.  This book would be a great debriefing tool for mission teams, especially for those people who don't know what to do with the reality-check they've just been exposed to.  And I'd definitely recommend it to other long-term missionaries, as it's a nice tool for examining our motives and our vision.

If you want to be wrecked, of if you have been and you don't know where to go from here, get your hands on this book.

I received this book free from christianaudio in exchange for an honest review.