Rating: 4 out of 5 birds
LeAnn and I have a date night every week. Because I'm not a fan of routine, LeAnn has graciously allowed us to do various activities for our date nights. One of the activities we do together roughly once a month is read a chapter of a book. When we started reading books together, we focused on marriage topics. But this past year we decided to branch out from relationship books. With the blessing of a gift certificate, we purchased Wild Goose Chase by Mark Batterson. And we both feel it was a gift certificate well spent!
The premise of the book is that Christians should be pursuing God - specifically the Holy Spirit. Mark, who is a treasure trove of historical, scientific, and lingual illustrations, says that the Celtic Christians called the Holy Spirit "An Geadh-Glas, which translated into modern English is "the Wild Goose." At first, it seemed irreverent to me to refer to the Holy Spirit as a goose. "If the Spirit is to be equated with a bird, it should be a peaceful dove, not a dirty, noisy goose," I thought to myself. But Mark uses the goose idea adeptly, carefully, and respectfully. Within the first chapter, I was comfortable with the goose imagery.
Through the book, Mark works through six "cages" - responsibility, routine, assumptions, guilt, failure, and fear. These are areas of your life you allow to hamper you and keep you from pursuing the call God has on your life. Mark does an excellent job of working through each "cage" with personal stories, powerful illustrations, and Scriptural insights.
I feared the book would be too similar to Mark's first book, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day. While there was much overlap in ideas, I found the books to compliment one another very well. However, I am hoping that Mark's third book, Primal, will depart a little bit from the "risk-taking Christian life" theme. Because I read Mark's blog from time to time, I know he has more to give to the Church than just this one message.
On a personal note: The first half of the book really irritated me. Not because of Mark's writing or content, but rather because of my own life last winter when LeAnn and I began reading. I felt like I had made some steps to follow God in a certain area of my life, but I felt that others had shut me down. My irritation was that Christians talked about taking risks and following God, but when I began making steps I felt the Lord wanted me to take, I was either discouraged, left on my own, or told it wasn't time to take the risk. Looking back, I realize this was just part of what God needed to do in my life, that those I thought were "stopping me" weren't truly stopping me, but rather giving advice for what they thought was best for me. If anyone was stopping me, it was probably God - or perhaps it was just myself. As the months rolled on, and God matured me, I began to appreciate the book more and more each time LeAnn and I sat down on the couch together to read.
On a Biblical note: Mark's writing assumes you have a fairly good grasp of Scripture. If you've been a Christian for a long while and know many of the stories found in the Bible, you won't think twice. But if you are sort of new to the Bible or just feel unfamiliar with it, you may stumble from time to time feeling ignorant because you don't know the story that Mark is sharing. There are endnotes with the Scripture references, but I think it would have been helpful for brand new Christians who are very eager to chase the Holy Spirit but new to Scripture to either have the references more readily available, or give them a little more background to the Scriptural glances Mark occasionally makes.
On an interesting note: Wild Goose Chase was released in 2008. Just a couple of weeks ago, the church Mark planted and pastors, National Community Church, found out the theater they have used for the past several years was suddenly closing. NCC had 6 days notice. It seems that Mark and NCC are suddenly "chasing the Goose." I know with my own unpublished-and-probably-never-will-be book that God uses the very thing we write to turn around and teach us ourselves. I wonder if Mark will be reading his own book allowing God to give him and his church leadership insight on what to do next, and what cages to be careful of in these uncertain days. It will be exciting to see what NCC does and learns through this time in their church history.
On a concluding note: Because of my work with young adults, I hear of various dreams from twenty- and thirty-somethings. Dreams to be a missionary. Dreams to go to seminary. Dreams to start a business. Dreams to travel, or marry, or have kids. Wild Goose Chase will definitely be a book I refer to those who like to read and want to pursue God's dream for their lives.
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