Unafraid
Living with Courage and Hope in Uncertain Times
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Learn how to face and overcome the fears we feel about loneliness, illness, financial insecurity, disappointing others, failure, insignificance, and aging
“A thoughtful, literate, faith-filled guide to reclaiming our minds and our lives.”—John Ortberg, senior pastor of Menlo Church and author of I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me
You’d be hard-pressed to overstate the extent to which fear, anxiety, and worry permeate our lives today. Fear wreaks havoc on our relationships and communities. It leads us into making bad decisions. It holds us back from the very pursuits that promise fulfillment and joy.
As the senior pastor of a large, diverse church in America’s heartland, Adam Hamilton has seen the cost of fear up close. When he surveyed his congregation on how fear affects them, 2,400 people responded—and what they said was eye-opening. Eighty percent admitted to living with moderate or significant levels of fear.
Unafraid is Hamilton's insightful and impassioned response. Drawing on recent research, inspiring real-life examples, and fresh biblical insight, Hamilton uses a mixture of facts and faith to help readers understand and counter fears related to such outsize perils as death and illness, as well as the everyday anxieties all of us encounter. He invites us to:
Face our fears with a bias of hope
Examine our fears in light of the facts
Attack our anxieties with action
Release our cares to God
Writing with generosity and intelligence, Hamilton shows how believer and unbeliever alike can develop sustaining spiritual practices and embrace Jesus’s recurring counsel: “Do not be afraid.” For anyone struggling with fear or wondering how families and communities can thrive in troubled times, Unafraid offers an informed and inspiring message full of practical solutions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hamilton (Making Sense of the Bible), founding pastor of Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City, Mo., addresses ways of overcoming fears of failure, loneliness, change, illness, crime, aging, and loss in this convincing book. Americans are more fearful now than any time in history, Hamilton writes at the beginning of his investigation into how fear shapes people's personal lives and politics. Hamilton believes that when people are anxious, they seek out information from sources that reinforce their anxiety. On top of this, fear motivates people to vote, which makes the most anxious, fearful citizens into the most dedicated voters and policy advocates. Although he addresses the current political climate, Hamilton never promotes a specific political agenda. Instead, he believes that liberals without a conservative impulse become unmoored and conservatives without a liberal impulse become intransigent. Using research into neuroscience and introducing effective psychological tools for cognitive restructuring, Hamilton provides a way through fear that is intelligent, pastoral, and comprehensive. For instance, instead of turning to cable news to understand political events, he recommends using church and neighborhood communities as resources. Although he writes from a Christian perspective, Hamilton's universally applicable lessons will appeal to a broad audience.
