Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent

Rating:
Summary: How Timely...
Review: I can't imagine any station in live that wouldn't be enhanced by reading and applying the paridigm shifts Ben Patterson leads us through in WAITING. Those who are barren couples, widows, and single mothers, people with chronic illness; or, like me, simply looking for career fullfillment & hoping to meet and marry a Godly spouse...the list goes on. WAITING speaks to us all, with an honest, sober clarity I've not seen in related works. It presents the scriptures on Job and Abraham in a fresh light, with provoking applications that touch our own daily struggles with tender care, yet leave us humbled. We are encouraged to turn our gaze to the magnitude of God and away from our own desires. If you wonder what is taking the Good Lord so long to attend to you, or if you know anyone who has been hurting for too long, this book will minister. (Other suggested titles: TURN IT TO GOLD, GOD CALLING, GOD IS ENOUGH, SAFER THAN A KNOWN WAY, SHADOW OF THE ALMIGHTY, PASSION AND PURITY)

Rating:
Summary: This book has meant so much to me.
Review: I have read this book at least five times and been involved in at least two study groups with this book. We shared this in my Sunday school class where many of us had lived through situations where we simply did not understand why God allowed the things he did. For one, it was the death of her two year old brother and the bitterness of her father. For me, it was the cancer and painful death of one of the best men I have ever known along with the death of my best friend's baby and her subsequent suicide. About a year after the study, a couple in our group lost their only child at age 15. We gathered around them to grieve, but with a difference. We had learned something about how to wait on God. This couple now has a beautiful adopted son. I understand, in part because of this book, that we don't need to understand the why if we know the who.

Rating:
Summary: Very helpful, not just pat "religious" answers
Review: This book has meant a lot to me personally in the way the author gets right to the point: humility and hope. He brings to the old Bible stories a recognizable level of human struggling.

But I did take issue with two things. In an illustration, Mr. Patterson blithely mentions the 500 billion years of earth's history in a way that seems to dismiss Genesis chapters 1-11. He also speaks of Job as if the story occurred after Psalms and Proverbs were written, saying that Job's friends were only quoting Scripture and that Job could have read in his Bible the same views.

The points he was making were excellent, but getting the details correct does matter and did make me a bit suspicious of the rest of the book, so I needed to mention those two things, and that's why I only gave the book 4 stars.

Overall, I'm very thankful to Mr. Patterson for helping to renew my hope, and especially for the many philosophical references and the story about Einstein that really spoke to my circumstances. I really did need the message of this book.