the Sacred Chase

We hear a lot about having an intimate relationship with God.  We hear about it, and want it for ourselves, but often it seems like we’re stumbling in the dark, waiting for the electricity to come back on so that we can see where we’re going. We’re close, and want to be closer, but we don’t know where to go next, and how to reach the destination.  I wish I could say that this book offers a road map, and one that is much more accurate than anything Google Maps, MapQuest, or your GPS device has to offer.  But I can’t—for one thing that journey is an individual one, and we each have to find our own route, and secondly, I never got the impression that providing a detailed road map was the ultimate objective. 

                What the reader will find in The Sacred Chase: Moving from Proximity to Intimacy with God (Heath Adamson, Baker Books, 2020) is something much more valuable: a sense of what is available once the destination is reached, and the necessary encouragement to motivate you to set out on the journey. This is a reminder that there is more, much more, to Christianity than just going through the motions: church on Sunday, maybe a small group or bible study, tithing (or at least regular giving) are all good things, but without the relationship with Jesus, it doesn’t mean a lot—if anything.

                Adamson uses many familiar passages from scripture and illustrates them with stories from his own faith walk. I’ve never met the author, and I’m sure he was writing about himself, someone he knows personally, or about people in general, but I felt that he could have been writing about me:

“We become discouraged when our religious experience does not line up with God’s

good heart. Lacking identity, we develop a version of who we pretend to be, and we put

on a show at work, in front of our spouse, at the gym, on the golf course, at church, or in

the coffee shop. We are just terrified that people won’t like who we really are. in our pretension, we can even forget the truth ourselves. We can perform for the approval of others until we are unaware it is a performance.”

               

                Just being close to God isn’t always enough, we want to be next to Him.  It’s not too late to set out on your own journey from proximity to intimacy.

                The biographical info on the back cover says that the authors life was ‘changed dramatically when… he was rescued from a life steeped in drug abuse and the occult.  I enjoy that type of conversion story, so I was disappointed that some of those experiences weren’t included in this book.

                 I received a copy of this book as a member of the publisher’s bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review.

4/5