Rarely does a book come along, at just the right moment in your little life, and serendipitously nod in affirmation to the thoughts and feelings you contain as your eyes read the words on the pages. Jonathan Martin delivers a honest and beautiful look into the dark parts of our being where life has seemingly destroyed something we thought would keep us afloat. What do we do when the bottom falls out? When we feel abandoned — forgotten by God, friends or even ourselves? Martin– in poetic fashion– seeks not so much to answer these questions as he does to ask new questions and provide solace through solidarity.
I was just beginning my second journey into the deep abyss of my own journey with doubt, vocation, failure, etc. I had just moved to Hawaii to take a new job at a mega church as a youth pastor– my second church job and my second at-bat in the realm of youth ministry. It lasted 4 months before I knew I couldn’t stay there. I wanted to. I just wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t prepared for all the things the job was asking of me and I was so so tired and burned out on American Evangelicalism. I needed to breathe but I felt like I was being held under water.
I read Martin’s book, How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is On the Way and Love Is Already Here, while on the precipice of my very own metaphorical shipwreck. It felt like everything I had planned out in my short 26 years of life was being challenged and turned upside down. I found much in Martin’s book to be inspiring and helpful, but for the sake of time and brevity I will include my top three takeaways.
1. Martin writes from experience.
His own shipwrecked life is the basis of his writing and, like I mentioned, this does not serve to provide an answer to readers as much as it does to comfort, “amen”, and grieve alongside them. I felt like I had a friend who could relate to my pain and struggle when Jonathan said, in the first chapter:
“While I would not recommend a shipwreck to anyone, any more than I would recommend cancer, car accidents, or the plague, I can yet attest to a mysterious truth I have since heard over and over from people who have survived their own shipwrecks: On the other side of them, there is a stronger, deeper, richer, more integrated life. That on the other side of the storm that tears you to pieces is a capacity to love without doubt, to live without fear, to be something infinitely more powerful than the man or woman you were before it happened.”
His words bear the scars of someone who has lost a thing or two, and that means something in a world where real pain is hardly talked about. Martin’s book, for this reason, gives hope to those are still on spin cycle and can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.
2. How to Survive a Shipwreck is more about God than it is about us.
Without undermining or silencing the reality of pain in our lives, Martin places the real emphasis of the “shipwreck” on God’s present faithfulness rather than seeking to build out a step by step guide on how to pick yourself up from off the floor. He dedicates a large amount of his writing to encourage readers that God is near. You aren’t forgotten. You are being loved and cared for. Martin transcends traditional evangelicalism and it’s cliches while embracing the best of contemplative and mystical Christian influence. There is a weightiness to the influence of Spirit sensed in his writing. He writes, in chapter five:
“The God who sustains all created things with love sustains you. The God who created the world not to be exploited, dominated, or needed, but to love and to enjoy without clinging, is awake in your belly. And so in you is the capacity to love and to live without needing the world to work out a certain way in order for you to be okay. Your life, your existence, is contingent on that Spirit. But it is not contingent on anyone else, or anything else.”
3. The Wind, the waves and a heart that is open.
Chapter seven was probably my favorite chapter. Jonathan Martin combines the prophetic with poetry, writing of the presence of the Spirit/Wind of our lives. The preacher in Martin really comes out in this chapter. You get that sense that he’s calling his readers into something greater than just observing the storms and shipwrecks of our lives and pragmatically rebuilding something that can withstand the next gust. He believes we’re born to be Spirit-people– connected to the Source and swaying with the Wind around us and within us. I wish he could have kept going, but I’ll give you a snippet of chapter seven here:
In some ways, the most terrible part of the experience of shipwreck is allowing yourself to be powerless to fix things you think ought to be fixed. You have to let everything shake that can be shaken, in the imagery used by the author of Hebrews. If the relationship can be shaken, it needs to shake. If the job can be shaken, it needs to shake. If the religious belief system can be shaken, it definitely needs to shake!
If I ever am privileged to meet Martin in person, I hope I can give him a big hug for being a distant mentor in a lonely time of my life. For speaking words that my heart needed and for sharing his vulnerable story, I’m forever grateful. You’ll love this book no matter what time of life you find yourself in right now because the truth is, regardless of how your life looks now, you will find yourself in many shipwreck moments. Here’s to life beyond the shipwreck and God with us in the midst of them!
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