The Answer to Our Cry by Rick McKinley: A Book Review
Everyone is looking for freedom. Most of us are looking in all the wrong places with the idea that freedom involves getting what we want. The Answer to Our Cry is not a series of steps, but a spotlight on the truth that true freedom is the ability to:
1. Live fully — As an author, Rick McKinley has a unique voice: casual, pastoral, with a touch of urgency. He calls his readers away from the awkwardness of standing around at the junior high dance and into the self-forgetfulness of David’s dance when the ark of God returns to Jerusalem. Moving away from self-centered living is a move toward fruitfulness.
2. Love boldly — As the father of a special-needs child, Rick McKinley has seen first-hand the heartbreak of feeling unloved. He reminds his readers that we are already the beloved of God as His children, and this is not a status based on our competence or our merit. Based on this safe foundation, we move beyond the safety of “nice” and into the grace of loving like Jesus, because we see His face in “the thirsty, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned.” The result of this kind of love is the courage “to work where things are not the way they should be,” thereby effecting change and justice.
3. Fear nothing — As a pastor, Rick McKinley has a high view of God as One who can be trusted in the hard places of life. The freedom of trusting changes the desert from a place of fear “to a place where God is meeting me in His love.” Letting go of the need to control and to fix everything opens the hands to receive freedom.
From this kind of love, boldness and others-centered living comes a “persuasive life,” free of guilt, compelled by love, and, therefore, imaginative, grounded in Truth, and completely new:
So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here! (I Cor. 5:16,17)
I received this book free from Baker Publishing Group. The opinions I have expressed are my own, and I was not required to write a positive review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/16cfr255_03.html.
Living Our Days 