Empty Shelf Challenge Book #2: The Circle Maker

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I finished my 2nd book for the #EmptyShelf challenge.


The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson

I don’t plan on doing full book reviews, or summaries even. Rather, I will share a few quotes as well as my personal takeaways from the book.

I’ve been hearing about Mark Batterson for a long time. I have a few friends that are on staff at the church he leads, National Community Church, which isn’t far from where we live. I have spoken at conferences alongside some of his church members. The free download at Christianaudio.com a few months ago was his book In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day. I have begun to listen to that. Then our church started reading The Circle Maker at the midweek service (which we don’t usually attend), but a good friend started talking about it a lot.

So I checked the book out of the library.

(Side note – for the #EmptyShelf challenge, why not find out what your library might have to offer? I just asked my library to order 2 books I wanted to read, and they did!)

I really enjoyed The Circle Maker. This book has a lot of great takeaways. Mark Batterson uses 3 main themes to structure the book:

1. Dream Big
2. Pray Hard
3. Think Long

I had a 4th takeaway: Praise Through.

The book hit a bunch of themes and Scriptures that God has been challenging me with so the past year, especially in light of the book release. I was simultaneously reading this book as I reviewed words and impressions that God spoke to me over the last year. It actually almost became comical after a while to see the parallels. OK, God, I’m listening!

God has been calling me for a long time to dream ludicrous dreams, and this book reinforced that ludicrous dreams are, in fact, Biblical. Here is the main quote that I’ll leave you with:

At one point, God spoke to Mark, “Stop praying for it and start praising Me for it.” At the beginning of 2013, I wrote in my journal: 2013 = Sacrifice of Praise. I didn’t do so well with that last year, so God is giving me another chance to learn what that looks like as a daily practice.

I’ll be making a little virtual bookshelf at the end of each update:

I may also include some other meaningful quotes at the end, like these:
“God isn’t offended by your biggest dreams or boldest prayers. He is offended by anything less.”
“To me, writing is praying with a keyboard.”
“If you want to see crazy miracles, obey the crazy promptings of the Holy Spirit.”
“What we perceive as unanswered prayers are often the greatest answers.”
“Goals are dreams with deadlines.”

3 thoughts on “Empty Shelf Challenge Book #2: The Circle Maker”

  1. Brenna, I’ve been doing so many book reviews for great Christian publishers, that I haven’t had a chance to pick a book out of the wild-blue-yonder in a while. 🙂
    This is definitely going on my to-read list!

    Reply ↓

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