Learning to Bounce Back

Lately there have been a lot of storms. Serious storms that cause a lot of damage and cause issues that we never want to face.  And the constant is that somehow people need to get over things, even when it seems that ‘getting over’ the storm will never be possible. And for some people, stuck in a rut from which they see no possible escape, that might be the case. But fortunately, that’s not the norm.  Aaron Früh, in his book BOUNCE: Learning to Thrive through Loss, Tragedy and Heartache (BakerBooks, 2017), dispels the myth that we can’t thrive despite the storms.

And as Früh points out in this book, we were meant to get over things, to bounce back, regardless of how impossible that might seem at the time. He offers some tips, simple ones actually, that can have a major impact. (think about Naaman who didn’t want to bathe in the river to cure his leprosy because that was such a simple solution…it took a servant to say like ‘why not try? If the prophet Elisha had asked you to do something big, you would have done it.’ (See 2 Kings, 5:1-13))

Aaron lists four things that get in the way of our bouncing back, and expounds on them: self-pity, disappointment, Resentment toward God, and Indecisiveness. But there’s more to our inability to bounce back, than just that: all too often we don’t know where to start the path to healing, and so there are some helpful hints there too. (and the biggest one for me is CRY OUT FOR JUSTICE!)

I received a copy of this book from BakerBooks in exchanged for my review.

4/5