“The world is broken and remains that way, in spite of our efforts to help it. This is beautiful in a way, because it breaks us of our self-dependency. In a world that refuses to be healed, we must face the fact that we are not the heroes of our stories. It teaches us to rely on something bigger than ourselves and teaches us the source of true compassion.”  – Jeff Goins. Wrecked: When a Broken World Slams into Your Comfortable Life.

One week before leaving for Africa, I picked up Jeff Goins’ first book Wrecked. Since I already have the pre-order of his second book – The In-Between: Embracing the Tension Between Now and the Next Big Thing, I’ve got some catching up to do.

In the first few pages, Goins suggests the American Dream has left many of us dying of boredom and ennui, because suffering is an integral part of the human experience and a lot of us successfully avoid it.

But without a willingness to sit quietly in the paradox of glimmering joy and gritty, carbon black suffering – equal partners in a fully realized life – we’re half living, suffocating under the pillowy down of our unchallenged comforts.

It’s an interesting theory that we somehow already know is true.

Before I started following Jesus like I mean it, I would have chuckled at the coincidence of picking up this book a week before I leave for a bush village in Africa.

But I don’t believe in coincidence anymore.