Friday, July 20, 2012

The Touch

I just read The Touch by Randall Wallace.  Andrew Jones was once one of the few surgeons in the world to have that rare, God-given ability called The Touch. But after failing to save his young fiancĂ©e, Faith, at the scene of a car accident, Jones abandons his gift and shuns the operating room.

Lara Blair owns a Chicago-based biomedical engineering company developing a surgical tool that will duplicate precisely the movement of a surgeon’s hands, reducing or eliminating failed surgical procedures. Lara has pursued the best surgeons in the world to test this surgical tool, and all of them have failed.

As Lara pursues Jones’s skill for her project, Jones’s stubborn resistance cracks, and he begins to open up to her about the wounds that still haunt him. But when Jones discovers the urgency behind Lara’s work, he must choose to move beyond his past. As each is forced to surrender secret fears, they are bonded together through the lives of the people Jones serves and by the healing secret that Faith left behind.

This is a really good book.  There are many twists and turns that I didn't see coming.  Lara and Andrew were so much alike that it was hard to think they could get along.  But in the end they each needed love that they had been denying themselves for so long that they couldn't stay apart.  It reminded me that your faith can really help you get through anything.  You just need to keep looking up.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Winning Balance


I received a copy of Winning Balance: What I've Learned So Far about Love, Faith, and Living Your Dreams by Shawn Johnson from Tyndale Blog Network.

Twenty-year-old American gymnast Shawn Johnson is a four-time Olympic gold and silver medalist; a national- and world-champion athlete. Already a popular role model to all ages, in 2009 she captured the national spotlight again when she won the widely popular Dancing with the Stars. Yet Shawn is no stranger to hard work and adversity. Her loss of the major gymnastics prize everyone expected her to win in Beijing, the all-around Olympic gold medal, was the loss of a dream she’d worked for since childhood. And later, she suffered a potentially career-ending injury in a skiing accident that forced her life to a halt and made her rethink what was really important. She wasn’t sure who she was anymore. She wasn’t sure what her goals were. And she wasn’t sure she was satisfied with where she was with her faith and God. Could she find the right kind of success in life—the kind that doesn’t involve medals or trophies, but peace, love, and lasting joy? This is the amazing true journey of how the young woman who won an Olympic gold medal on the balance beam became even more balanced.


  I didn't watch the 2009 Olympics and really hadn't heard of Shawn before reading her book.  I really enjoyed it.  There were many times that I had to remind myself that she was only a teenager when most of the things that she talked about happened.  She's done and learned so much more than most of us have in our lifetimes.  She showed me that there are many times we need to trust God and realize that he's got bigger and better plans for our lives than we can ever image.  I was very disappointed to find out just before I finished reading her book Shawn had to retire from gymnastics.