Creating a Life of Meaning and Influence
200 Pomegranates empowers and inspires readers to develop their God-given talents and contribute something that makes a difference in the world, be it through construction or counseling, doing people’s taxes carefully and ethically, or raising and teaching children. Even if your contribution seems to go unnoticed by others, you can rest assured that God sees and values your work. Readers follow the story of obscure Old Testament figure Huram of Tyre, an artist putting the finishing touches on Solomon's temple. He honed his craft and contributed something of beauty and excellence, though some of his best work was thirty feet off the ground, where few people would notice its intricacies. Likewise, we have the ability and opportunity to create something of worth, be it for the lasting enjoyment of others or for God's eyes only. We may not all be artistic in the traditional sense, but we are nonetheless creators, made in the image of the world's Creator and endowed with skills and talents that can honor God and impact our world. Every good mom is an artist, molding her children as creations of God. Every ethical businessperson leaves a legacy of people seeing God through his or her careful work. Every after-school teacher makes a mark on the young people whose parents are busy just making ends meet. All talents, skills, and work to be creative and potentially God-honoring, from teaching and chemical engineering to number-crunching and packing a child's lunch. Readers will gain leadership and life-management skills, while being inspired for daily living. They will walk away saying, "I am an artist. By being the best parent, coach, teacher, welder, pastor, husband, aunt, (fill in the blank!), I can be, I am creating something beautiful in the eyes of God."
Reviews with the most likes.
This is a good book. The author is funny, thoughtful and has a point. The basic point of this book is that we need to work to the best of our ability and for God. The central biblical story is the building of the temple and the 200 pomegranates that were put on the top of the columns where no one could see them but God. The builder could have just not done anything up there but instead choose to put some of the best work there, for his audience of one (God).
Strangely I think it is a good complement to NT Wright's book on heaven (Surprised By Hope). Wood is talking about what we do we should do for God, whether others know we do it or not. And Wright was talking about how being too focused on heaven prevents us from living in the now. We should view the current life as preparatory for the work that we will have in the next life.
The reason I gave it a four star review instead of five is that I read it on kindle. (Amazon gave it away last week!) The formating on kindle is not the greatest. It is a topaz formated book (which as I understand it is at base and Optical Character Recognition instead of formated directly from the text). There are also a couple places where there are some discussion questions at the end of chapters and those are not at all readable. They are images and just too small. A bit more work formating and this would have been a much better read.
A longer review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/200-pomegranates-and-an-audience-of-one-creating-a-life-of-meaning-and-influence/