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Review: Empty Promises by Pete Wilson

Empty promises. The things that don’t live up to expectations. We’ve all experienced that disappointment and in this book Pete Wilson works through the most common varieties of empty promises. He not only draws from his own life, but also from the lives he has seen lived around him for his examples. Biblical examples abound as backdrops to show us that this is not a new thing. What is new, for me anyway, is calling the problem broken promises rather than idolatry. While the latter is at the root of the problem, the symptom most of us experience is that emptiness when we expected fullness.

It is an easy read, but not trite. It is a familiar read, and sadly one that we just don’t seem to heed. It seems every time we try the next gimmick dangled in front of us first and have to relearn this lesson. This is true not only in our religious life, but the secular as well. Keeps the presses turning on either side of that great divide.

Happily, Wilson does add some helpful ideas at the end of his book, and if even one of the suggestions is practiced, we’d all experience more fulfilled promises instead of the empty sort.

Overall, I recommend this book for the reminder it brings and for the review of our own inventories. If you are looking for yet another quick fix, don’t bother. This isn’t it, even if one actually existed.

This book was provided for review by Thomas Nelson via the BookSneeze blog.

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