"Ruthless Trust" by Brennan Manning...

Brennan Manning is an ex-catholic preist who now spends most of his time leading spiritual retreats all over the U.S. and Europe.

This is one of my favourite books, it's one of those books that you find yourself underlining and making notes in the margins, and pondering single sentences for 20 minutes. It makes you think quite deeply about your own journey of faith, and how that journey impacts the people and situations around you.

The whole premise of the book is that Brennnan feels that as Christians we don't need more knowledge about our faith; we need to use what we already have to encourage us to do what it is that God wants most from us: Trust.

However, this trust is not a simple obedience when the going is good, it's a ruthless trust that carries on believing in God's Goodness and Love for us even when all our circumstances seem to deny it.
This book really made me think about my own trust in God, and how unreliable and fickle it is compared to how it should be. It's not a book that depresses you or makes you feel guilty however, because while it challenges, it points out that God gives us this power to trust when all seems lost, and it's not of us. It encourages us with a picture of God as a loving Father who never lets us go, who will passionately use everything and anything to make us the people he wants us to be, because of his undying love for us.

...Unwavering trust is a rare and precious thing because it often demands a degree of courage that borders on the heroic. When the shadow of Jesus' cross falls across our lives in the form of failure, rejection, abandonement, betrayal, unemployment, lonliness, depression, the loss of a loved one; when we are deaf to everything but the shriek of our own pain; when the world around us suddenly seems a hostile, menacing place-at those times we may cry out in anguish. "How could a loving God permit this to happen?" At such moments the seeds of distrust are sown. It requires heroic courage to trust in the love of God no matter what happens to us...