From Fear to Faith
By Merlin Carothers
(Reviewed
by Paul McShane
“Do
the things you fear and the death of fear is certain.” From this quote
of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carothers, who I have always associated with “praise”
more than “fear,” begins a work which I found to be even more
compelling than his international best seller, Prison to Praise,
the book for which he is probably best known.
The
premise of this new book is that we live either by faith or by fear and that
the choice is entirely up to us. Using examples from his early career as an
Army paratrooper, the 76-year-old San Marcos resident, whose books have been
translated into 53 languages and distributed around the world by his Escondido
based ministry, exposed his own unvarnished fears. As I was drawn into the
telling of his stories of his training and jumps into pitch-black nights,
I felt a knot growing in my own stomach as I shared the fear with him.
Learning
to control that fear got him through those jumps and through the Battle of
the Bulge into his next mission a chaplain in the Army, where he helped others
defeat fear with gratitude and faith.
As
this book unfolds, you get the idea that Carothers really has packed a lot
of living into a mere 76 years. Aside from jumping out of perfectly good airplanes
in the middle of the night and dodging tanks in a German forest, he has climbed
mountains with his wife and managed to take a moment or two from evangelizing
around the world to learn to become a private pilot. I got the feeling about
halfway through the book that he took a nap once for about an hour in 1967.
This is one of the Lord’s really busy soldiers and one for whom we should
all be grateful. This is a book that will make you understand that last line.
It will give you a greater understanding of how you can live a more complete
and rewarding life and how you can meet the challenges of daily living with
a smile, knowing that faith can conquer all.
There
is so much to this book, it’s hard to know what to include in such limited
space. It’s a primer on learning to believe you can come to the joy
that will inevitably conquer the fear that at one time or another has paralyzed
us all. It’s a roadmap to a more productive prayer life. In many places
throughout this wonderful book, I found things I could identify with and wondered
why someone hadn’t told me that before. It sure would have made things
easier at one time or another.
Carothers
promises in this book that you’ll have “new pleasure every day,
new peace of mind, new excitement over the endless achievements you can enjoy.”
Merlin Carothers is refreshing and a joy. This book is a rare and wonderful
gift for us all to cherish and to share. And we should!
Paul
McShane of Carlsbad is an author, businessman and journalist.