Book Review: The Good Life

First, before you read this…go here and download this book for free on Kindle.  You’ll be glad you did!

In light of Chuck Colson’s recent death, I’ve been reading a lot about him and his ministry with Prison Fellowship.  A few years ago, I read his book How Now Shall We Live, an incredible work that caused me to carefully consider my worldview and why I believe what I believe.  I just noticed The Good Life available for free on the Amazon Kindle store and decided to pick it up.  Who hasn’t asked themselves…What is the good life?  What is the good life worth?  How big a deal is the good life?  Should the good life be my ultimate goal?

As both a growing Christian and history enthusiast, I really enjoyed the way that Colson weaved together his own Watergate story and several other key figures throughout history to demonstrate what the “good life” is really all about.  In our postmodern culture, Colson’s dogged pursuit of the truth is both inspiring and convicting.

I highlighted several things while reading and have posted those below…

• Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher and mathematician, once said that there are only two kinds of people in the world: seekers and non seekers. Either we are pilgrims looking for answers in order to make sense of our world, or we are wanderers who have turned off onto byways of distraction or despair, alienating ourselves from wonder. If you are reading this book, you probably are a seeker. That’s good. To be alive is to seek.
• Thinking and living are bound together: We think in order to know how to live, and we learn what’s true through living.
• The most shattering thing about prison was the thought that I would never again do anything significant with my life.
• What we strive for can often be what we least need. What we fear most can turn out to be our greatest blessing.
• G. K. Chesterton defined a paradox as “truth standing on her head to get our attention.”1 You cannot search for the good life without stumbling over paradoxes: seeming contradictions that turn out to be true.
• Out of suffering and defeat often comes victory.
• No particular virtue comes from having undergone a trial. The outcome depends on how we choose to react to the crisis. It’s not so much what happens in life that matters as how we react.
• I’ve discovered in my own life the truth of a second great paradox: We have to lose our lives to save them. Losing our lives means getting ourselves out of the way. This is a profoundly radical message in today’s popular culture, which has produced an entire industry devoted to teaching us how to “find ourselves.” But the good life isn’t about finding ourselves; it’s about losing ourselves. Once self is subordinated, we can discover a new identity with others—and a new understanding of who we really are.
• I never truly understood people until I was crushed. Until I lost everything and ended up in prison, I was never genuinely empathetic. My defeat allowed me to experience a compassion that I had never known before. Through losing my life, I began to have more genuine relationships with those around me, and through them with life itself.
• Freedom lies not in conforming to the world’s expectations or even realizing what we take to be our deepest wishes; it lies in following the call on our lives.
• Freedom, I was discovering, had less to do with being inside or outside of a prison than with not having to live up to false expectations.
• We have to understand the evil in ourselves before we can truly embrace the good in life.
• Seeing who we really are may be the greatest gift we receive from a significant personal defeat.
• We can find the good life only when we understand we aren’t good.
• Paradoxically, striving for possessions and money, the things we think will bring us pleasure and happiness, actually strips the meaning from our lives.
• The truth is that happiness demands far more and far less than the sum total of our possessions and pleasures.
• Our character is determined not by our circumstances but by our reaction to those circumstances.
• The good life is realized in our ability to hold fast to the truth and our human dignity that rests upon it.
• When people are idle, they lack purpose and begin to corrode like an unused piece of equipment.
• Not all of us are composers of great music or architects of beautiful buildings, but we are all craftsmen or artisans. All of us appreciate doing our work well.
• True happiness is achieved not through material comforts and satiating our appetites. It is found in fulfilling our higher nature, shaping our lives and our circumstances to reflect the way we are hardwired.
• Living a good life begins with exposing the great lies of modern life.
• We have to understand the evil in ourselves before we can truly embrace the good in life, and we have to lose our lives to save them.
• If we truly examine our own lives, we encounter the agonizing distance between what we should be and who we really are.
• We are meant for community.
• The good life is found only in loving relationships and community.
• As we give away our lives in service—as we lose our lives in order to save them—we discover the true meaning of our lives in the midst of fellowship and community.
• Sacrificing ourselves for others gets us only part of the way. The most important question is whether what we sacrifice for is the truth.
• Living the whole truth, living with integrity, means that we do not compartmentalize our lives but live each facet from a truthful center.
• The dignity of the human person consists in the ability to know the truth and to live it.
• Integrity and seeking the truth go hand in hand.
• The present generation’s horizon is limited to accommodation to the way things are. They live within the evil enchantment of believing that finding truth is utterly impossible.
• What is most shocking about great evil is how often it comes in the guise of the good, done for what seems a noble end.
• The compromises that pity wants to make won’t work because pity does not search to the depths of the truth.
• The good life cannot be found in living in opposition to the natural order, no matter how difficult its moral demands may be.
• God, the Creator, made us to be creators as well.
• The universal experience of gratitude leads us to know that there is a source of our being—God.
• When you compare worldviews, you realize that hope is a unique characteristic of the Christian understanding of the world.
• The question of origins: Where do we come from? The question of evil and suffering: What’s wrong with this world (and possibly with us)? The question of remedy, or redemption: Can we right ourselves and fix what is wrong? The question of purpose: What are we here for?
• THE REALITY OF Christian hope, freedom, and happiness—and their effects in the world—makes the truth of Christianity credible.
• Our fallen nature causes us to do wrong even when we know what is right, and it can distort our vision to the point that we can no longer see the truth.
• Providence is often something that we understand only in retrospect.
• Christians believe that God has a purpose for history and that He works this purpose out through people’s lives.
• Living the good life means not only living it to the fullest every moment we’re alive but also facing death with equanimity and then dying well.
• The intelligent seeker has good reason to reject the big lie of the postmodern world and to find the sources of renewal offered by Christianity.
• Ultimate meaning and purpose and reality can be found in the ultimate paradox of the Cross, where humanity’s evil is converted into life and eternal hope.
• My most abiding hunger today is to better understand God’s Word.