Review: Embracing Obscurity: Becoming Nothing in Light of God’s Everything

Embracing Obscurity: Becoming Nothing in Light of God's Everything
Embracing Obscurity: Becoming Nothing in Light of God’s Everything by Anonymous
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

We all crave some sort of attention. We like to be known and thought well of. We want our ideas, contributions, and efforts to be acknowledged. In fact, most personal offenses are little more than a wounding of our pride. We are upset when we are not treated in the way we feel we deserve.

We like to be noticed and often are little better than a young girl with a pretty new dress moving about just so she is within eyesight and hoping to get noticed and complimented. We think we are more discrete and subtle, but are we really?

“Embracing Obscurity” addresses these many ugly traits of the human heart. The author exhorts us to stop pursuing praise and notoriety. At times, the book is really uncomfortable to read, but it is a much needed word to us today.

Social media has given us a pleasure button available 24 hours a day. We can post self-pictures and feign deprecation and people will begin telling us how good we look instantly. We can retweet compliments and promote ourselves relentlessly and receive likes and congratulations. We can post our travel itineraries or other success indicators to be envied and admired by our “friends.”

True Christ-like humility is not attractive to us, if we are being honest. We are generally proud of what little humility we do have. We are not content to suffer, sacrifice, and serve when no one is watching or knows what we have done.

This book is not all we need on this subject. It left me craving a theologically heavier treatment and the use of liberal mistranslations of the Bible were more than annoying. Nevertheless, it is certainly worth reading.

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