Overcoming Is A Choice

Dripping In Grace

Author: Kim Chadwell

Publisher:Self-Published under Kim Chadwell Ministries, Inc., Louisville, KY, 2018

“Overcoming Is A Choice”

Yes, I have heard stories about meanness. There was Cinderella, and the mean reindeer that didn’t like Rudolph, the Mean Sisters, etc. – all in fiction. And of course, there’s real life meanness that is a thousand times worse. We hear about them all the time and some of us wonder how man (or woman) can be so cruel to another man (or woman), or worse still, to a child.  No one has yet come up with a satisfying answer – save and except perhaps that there’s a spiritual void in our very being that we haven’t filled appropriately.

With this book, Kim Chadwell, takes her readers into her very difficult experience. I’m sure some will not be able to get through it all – but if you do, it’s well worth it.

From day one, Kim’s life was, let me put it mildly – horrible. The cruelty she experienced as a child is what no child should ever live through.  Sadly, many do not survive. The meanness she had to absorb mentally and physically would leave a grown man in tears. The criticism thrown at her was of the nature that even an accomplished politician could not withstand, causing him/her to resign. And all of these were constant over many years.

Kim’s life was a constantly controlled life – in both big and petty ways. The examples will make you either scream or vomit.  It’s hard to know whether that hurt her the most or if it was the fact that she was constantly told “you don’t deserve” anything? After you’ve heard that time and time again, you begin to believe. And that brings about both emotional and physical loneliness.  And loneliness leads to a desire to commit suicide. She tried.

Several years into her ordeal, Kim was dragged by her ‘parents’ to an appointment she knew nothing about. After the psychologist spent 90 minutes with her ‘parents’, while she waited in the hall without a clue as to what was going on, it was time for her to go in alone. What that psychologist said when he first spoke, changed Kim’s life. You’ll need to read her book to discover what he said and how this started Kim on the road to healing.

In letting us in on her journey, we travel with her to places where those abused because of dysfunctional relationships often get to and unfortunately, often can’t move beyond.  One such place is where the abused gets to the point where, even though there are wonderful pastries to be had, he/she only asks for “crumbs”. Because again, “you don’t deserve anything else” is continually playing over and over in your mind.

And then there is Kim’s vision about Forgiveness with its four pillars – each one playing a critical role in the process. That is worth the price of the book alone. And pastors can easily develop several sermons using Kim’s material.

She did lose me for a few pages when she introduced her “quadratic formula” which somehow ends up equating freedom to forgiveness, but I am sure many of her readers will be able to enlighten me as to how that works after they read the book.

Kim shares with us the feelings (including fear) that she experienced for years and how certain triggers will bring those feelings back. She tells us what it took to make sure that the cycle of abuse would not continue from her to her children. She shares how hard she worked to help her children deal with their mother’s abusers.

The book ends with one incredible scene that I would call the “climax” of it all – bringing together her abused life, her present situation, her children, her faith, and the battle she needed to win.  And amazingly, it’s all real life – not fiction.

Her material throughout is solid.  This is a highly recommended work for those who are abused, those who are abusers, and those who love and minister to either of them.

My favorite quote of the author’s is: “Overcoming is a choice.” Kim made that choice. She overcame.

Ken B. Godevenos, President, Accord Resolutions Services Inc., Toronto, Ontario, December 21, 2018, www.accordconsulting.com

It would be great if you would share your thoughts or questions on this blog in the comments section below or on social media.

This Message, If Understood by the Common Man, Could Free Millions

Crossruption: The Journey of A Disrupted Life

Author: Jacob William

Publisher:Westbow Press, Bloomington, IN, 2017

The author, Jacob William, has experienced life – the good, the bad, and the ugly. He has been a successful businessperson. Yet he was being haunted by an inner emptiness that he calls the “cosmic vacuum”. Possessions and achievements, of which he had hordes, didn’t cut it.

William has done a great job of communicating what it really means to be a Christian, comparing it to what so many of us are actually practicing – a phenomenon he dubs “twenty-first century Christianity”. And as much as I wanted to argue with him, I found I could not.  I knew many of us had bought into what he describes as “outsourcing our salvation” in exchange for our actions. Our religious Christianity of today, he writes, “offered a product called God. I had outsourced its production to an enterprise network called the church where events were staged every week. . .. I was paying people to do my religion for me, because my time was too valuable, and my life was too busy for a real personal relationship with God.”

William challenges us to consider what it means, and what it takes, to be changed forever, like Joseph, Moses, and Saul of the Bible, to challenge the status quo, change the culture, and champion a new trail.

His purpose in writing Crossruption is to answer the question, “What separates the Christian whose life has been changed from the child of God whose life changes the world?”

Using his own life as an example, the author explains step by step, once we realize we no longer can go on just outsourcing our faith or buying a product called God, how to allow Jesus to do what He really came to do in our lives now, today, right here – and that was to disrupt livesand more particularly to disrupt ‘my life’.

After this well written introduction in Part I of his book, William goes on to address the Original Design applied to our creation (Part II), the Fallen Creation (Part III), the New Creation (Part IV) and the Future Creation (Part V).  Each part is a thorough investigation of Scripture relating to the titles.

In Part II, he writes, “To fill the cosmic vacuum inside me, I had to start by understanding that my identity is fundamentally spiritual.” And, “There is something left after the destruction of the body and mind of mankind, and that ‘something’ is where the identify of mankind is defined and experienced.”  He then explains that in detail.  There is a wonderful section in this part where he points out that “Science may be able to offer an alternate body and mind, but the spiritual dimension cannot be programmed.” Later adding, “Human beings cannot commune with fire, air, or water because there is a dimension difference. Humans are designed to have a relationship with God through Spirit-to-spirit communion, to experience communion in the mind and express that communion through the body.” And he shares the benefits of such uniqueness with respect to our confidence and self-worth.

Before bringing Part II to a conclusion, he writes, “If we were the result of the Big Bang or evolution, we might expect that the process of natural de-selection would have removed the stupidity of killing one another over religion by now.” I’ll let you discover what he does with that thought.

In Part III, Fallen Creation, the author goes on to explain sin. He writes, “The first murder was not the cause of sin, but sin was the cause of the first murder.” And then tells us why this is so important to grasp when he continues, “This sequence is not semantics but one that differentiates religion from relationship. . .. The disease is sin, while the symptoms are sinful actions.” As a result of our “fallen creation”, our changed spiritual state “creates a vacuum that causes us to long for something more.” William then goes on to outline thirteen Key Death Indicatorsof Christian behavior that line up “more with the fallen creation than with original design.”  If you’re like me, you’re bound to see yourself in more than one of these indicators.

In Part IV, the New Creation, Jacob William, shares some of his own story and then introduces us to the concept of the “Three M’s: Metric (the outcome), Methodology (the process used to achieve an outcome), and Measurement (that shows the progress of the methodology in achieving the metric)”. He applies these terms to how we can move from a twenty-first century Christianity to the Cross-disrupted Life that Christ died for us to have. It’s an amazing journey.

Here William shares several Key Life Indicatorswith us. These are the metrics, the outcomes, we can experience “as a consequence of the transformational relationship of communion, communication, and companionship with God. . .. Coming home to the Father for any reason other than a relationship with Him is religion.” 

Some key quotes from this section are: “We have a generation today that mimics expressions, thinking that is the evidence of God.” And there’s so much more here, I can’t begin to share it all.

In Part IV, Future Creation, his message is clear and, in some ways, comes as a gentle loving warning to his readers when he says, “Nothing will start in Heaven that had not already begun here. The eternal life of God is born in us on earth.” You’ll find his explanation of this quote in the book.

My favorite sentence sequence in the whole book?  These two: “God is relational. The Enemy is transactional.”

In conclusion, I must say that as a reviewer, I have never been so torn, on the one hand, by the value of a great message (which this book has and is) and on the other, by the style of writing. To be perfectly honest, while I love the book, the author’s insight, and its message, I did not find his several diagrams as helpful as they might have been. I also feel Jacob William is a man of great intellect and as a result, on occasion writes in a way which may require his readers to read a sentence or paragraph three or four times to grasp what he is saying. (My wife who is an avid reader of C. S. Lewis, when shown some of William’s paragraphs commented, “He’s way more convoluted than even Lewis was in some of his non-fiction writing.”) But, like Lewis, when you do grasp his points, you say, “Yes, that’s exactly right.”

Highly recommended for those who seriously want to risk having their lives totally Cross-rupted.

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n Ken B. Godevenos, President, Accord Resolutions Services Inc., Toronto, Ontario, December 15, 2018, www.accordconsulting.com

It would be great if you would share your thoughts or questions on this blog in the comments section below or on social media.