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Hope Has Its Reasons : From the Search for Self to the Surprise of Faith
You long for love and happiness. But so often you are blocked from satisfying that longing. What are the barriers? Why are they so troublesome? How does spirituality play a role? Rebecca Manley Pippert examines these persistently human questions in this thoughtful and personal book. She invites you to join her on a journey exploring the region between faith and unbelief where your hopes and doubts mingle. Calling as expert guides such thinkers as Albert Camus and C. S. Lewis, she cites freely her own experiences and sets out the questions all face--questions about significance, meaning, love, life and truth, the search for encouragement and security. Pippert offers no canned formulas or saccharine cliches. In this revised and updated edition she squarely engages your uncertainty, disappointment, longing for fulfillment, and the reality of pain and suffering. Such realism rings in the stories she tells and in the ideas she explores. In doing so she leads you beyond the search for your own significance to the reasons you have for your hope of discovering God. Incorporating the insights of modern literature and psychology with her understanding of searching modern hearts and minds, Becky describes a road to knowledge that leads beyond the pursuit of self to the discovery of God. "Compellingly paints the panorama of hope and healing that the Scriptures so beautifully offer."--Charles W. Colson. From the Publisher HOPE HAS ITS REASONS The Search to Satisfy Our Deepest Longings By Rebecca Manley Pippert  Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Excerpt From Chapter One: People have two things in common: We all want to be happy and we all want to be loved. And we cannot understand why something so simple should be so difficult. In fact, we may not even be able to articulate what we feel we desire and yet miss. To paraphrase Mark Twain, “You don’t know quite what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache you want it so.” Part of the ache comes from the fact that in spite of the glut of the mundane and the ugly, somehow we know we were made for something more. Something more seemed promised. There is more for us to live for, to embrace or to be embraced by. We are surely here to participate in something wider and deeper than we have yet realized. We want to know that our lives are significant, that it will make a difference that we have been here. So with the best of intentions we feverishly pursue happiness and significance, love and understanding. Is that too much to ask? Yet something blocks us from achieving such a reasonable goal.
A brilliant
physicist once told me, “I thought establishing my career and
becoming successful would be the toughest challenge of my life, so that
was where I focused my energy. Now I see that was relatively easy
compared to making my family life work and being able
to communicate with my children. At work I write a
memo and everything gets done. Yet I drive only thirty
minutes to my home and all of the rules change. Why is it that I
can relate easily to my colleagues and secretary, who aren’t that
important to me, yet I can’t communicate easily to my
children, who are everything to me? Why are the
simplest things the hardest?” Salt Shaker Ministries |