Brotherhood of Betrayal

"Brotherhood of Betrayal" by Randall Arthur

This was a very good book. I love the honesty in it. The book is about a missionary family serving in Sweden. The husband, who is the pastor, mysteriously disappears. The wife doesn't know who she can turn to and can't find any answers for her husbands disappearance. Her family and her faith get turned upside down. This book holds such truth. "Life for a Christian, no matter how out of control it might appear, is never truly out of control at all. God in His sovereignty is always holding the Christian's circumstances together in His loving and almighty grasp." Did you need to hear that? I certainly did. Sometimes I feel like life is so out of control and it isn't, God knows what is happening and He loves me. "May God somehow miraculously embrace you till you once again feel secure." I love that sentence. Sometimes we need His miraculous embrace to feel right again and I so need it. "Humans tend to pardon or condemn, based strictly on their view of a person's actions. Christians especially, because of our moral expectations, look so closely at a person's conduct that we often forget there's a life going on inside that person's heart." I do this so often and have to remind myself that I have no idea what a person has or is going through and that I can not in any way judge their actions. There is always a bigger issue, a issue of the heart and people act out of that hurt. The abandoned wife reaches a point where she has nothing left to face what may lie ahead and says, "I...I just don't have the strength...I-" A pastor says, "I would like to be your strength for you." Sometimes we just don't have it in us anymore and we need someone to lift us up, someone to be our strength for us. What an awesome picture of Christ. "Pain does not have to be wasted. If we can be taught, with the help of God and others, to review our pain and learn from it rather than to fritter away our life regretting it, we will discover that pain, like no other source, can supply our heart and soul with compassion, mercy and understanding for the hurting world around us." What a great perspective on the hard things that we go through and how to use it for good. This book touched me and I highly recommend it. I really appreciate when a book can be so honest even about some of the ugliness in our churches today.