Going into this book, I very much hoped that it would be practical and not merely a pep talk about getting over fear. I was very pleased to find that he presented very heavy hitting and solid truth! He talked about how the Western World is more afraid as a whole than lots of different poor nations are - and he analyzed why. He also went through different things that we are afraid of such as suffering and taking risks. Stephan Bauman has seen a lot of hard and difficult things through his years of relief work in other countries - and yet I was intrigued by his perspective on suffering. That was probably one of the things that I enjoyed most about this book. He didn't shy away from difficult subjects - and suffering is included in that. As one who works to alleviate the sufferings of others, he had an intriguing perspective. He talked about how suffering is not something that we need to avoid and push away, but suffering is something that we can embrace without fear because God uses to draw us closer to Him than we could imagine.
I really appreciated the experience that he has. He was able to share many stories about believers and people in other countries and their stories. That added a lot of depth to this book!
Overall, this book was great and I'm glad I read it! Definitely something that left me impacted. We are really good at ignoring our fear and sometimes we need to face it head on with the truth - and that is what Bauman did in this book.
Here are a few links for those interested:
http://waterbrookmultnomah.com/books/234659/break-open-the-sky-by-stephan-bauman/#details
http://waterbrookmultnomah.com/authors/185732/stephan-bauman/
I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review. The opinion and content are entirely my own.
