Under The Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness
In my mid-thirties, when I (James) still foolishly thought I was first a pastor, youth worker and sociologist, and secondly a child of God, spouse and parent, I experienced an unresolvable falling-out with a dear friend who was a ministry co-worker. This event plunged me headlong into a dark, raging sea of bewilderment and despair.
It was then I stumbled across this Peterson book, which became for me a lifeline. I slowly and begrudgingly learned about my own stunted imagination; how I, like Jonah, was in the confining belly of a fish; and, most importantly, how this was an invitation to develop an interior spirituality adequate for my exterior roles. And in time I experienced some transformation, learning to let go of my own need to manipulate outcomes and to listen more carefully in order to recover my vocation. Through this book, I learned about respecting my own limits and living my ordinary life, fully alive. I learned to be okay with living under the unpredictability of God, my smallness absorbed in His largeness. No book I have ever read has been more personally, and joyfully, life-altering than this one.
