Values and Evaluations: Essays on Ethics and Ideology Book

This is a marvelous read! Kay Warren carefully recounts the walk of faith and growth in trusting our Lord through key events that have shaped her life to this point. She is a champion for the eradication of AIDS in this world. She is convinced that the church has much to offer in reaching this goal.

Her story begins with a life that I could identify with...church kid ,one who saw missionaries come through on their furloughs but none who particularly changed her life.
As her story unfolds, we see a woman who is growing in awareness of her comfortable life versus the challenge to speak to larger, global issues: specifically the devastation of AIDS in the lives of 12 million (at the time in 2002) children in Africa.

Her journey takes her through some honest appraisals of
the encumbrances in her life that needed to be identified and given over to God. She is transparent and clear on issues of pride, self absorption and comparison with others.
I know that I could identify with her starting place.

With the Lord's call on her life to become informed and then organized about responding to the AIDS epidemic, she faces cancer...twice. These chapters are worth the read as I have known the call to a particular ministry and then a time of "sitting on the shelf" while other things are brought
before me, and my confusion as to what God was really trying to do (after thinking I'd figured him, and the plan for my life out!!!)

She describes her venturing out, first to Mozambique, and then to other African countries. She later on travels to Cambodia, to Thailand, to India. By now, she is praying for, and visiting with not only those afflicted and affected by AIDS but also those in the sex slave industry-children. She travels to India and meets with and prays with those battling leprosy. The descriptions of suffering in these chapters are graphic, and she acknowledges that the reader might have an urge to skip the rest and head to more uplifting passages. I grit my teeth and my resolve to complete every chapter.

Kay speaks with an everywomen voice. She relates her experiences and at the same time she recounts her misconceptions and her stumbles. She doesn't overly spiritualize not does she write to manipulate. She simply recounts her path on which God has been leading her.

Yes, Rick Warren and Saddleback church show up in the pages now and then, but this is not a promotion for her husband or her church. It's a promotion for God and his desire to move us from complacency to thoughtful, intentional action.