The Dream-Centered Life - Book Review

It's really not fair to Luke Barnett's The Dream-Centered Life that I read Chrystal Evans Hurst's She's Still There first. That's what I'm going to chalk my indifference toward the book up to.

I picked it to review through the Blogging for Books program because I am somewhat of a self-help junkie and thought that a book with the subtitle of "Discovering What Drives You" would totally fit into the "what am I doing with my life" personality I've been cultivating since my quarter-life crisis almost nine years ago. (Yikes.)

But I couldn't help but compare The Dream-Centered Life to the book that really spoke to me, She's Still There.

Barnett spends the first half of the book telling his life story, while Evans Hurst interweaves her personal stories throughout the book as they apply to the topic at hand.

Barnett provides key principles at the end of every chapter for review, while Evans Hurst provides end-of-chapter review questions and a larger self-assessment at the back of her book.

One of Barnett's requirements for living a "dream-centered life" is to fast, although some of the suggested fasts are essentially diets. You don't have to diet in Evans Hurst's book, which is good news for those of us who can't fast for medical reasons or who have had bad experiences in the past with dieting.

And while both books come at their topic from a Godly perspective, with The Dream-Centered Life, all of the dream examples have something to do with working for God: start a church food pantry, expand a church to multiple sites, build a new church lobby, join a ministry team. (That food pantry one really stumped me because Barnett writes that we can't just sit back and wait for our dreams to happen, but aside from praying, that's exactly what his wife did with her food pantry dream. She needed $400,000 to buy a building and she did nothing to try and raise the money so the food pantry could be built. Luckily [or divinely?], some people donated just that amount of money to the church to be used for such a purpose as helping to feed the poor...)

Meanwhile, Evans Hurst wants you to discover whatever dream you have. If that's serving in the church ministry, that's great! If that's running your own boutique, great! It's about finding what you're good at, you're God-given talents, and uncovering the latent creativity and imagination inside of you. I did not get that same feeling from The Dream-Centered Life.

It's not that I don't want to do anything for God. It's more that The Dream-Centered Life's "dreams" didn't feel like dreams as everyone knows them. Barnett's story wasn't about him discovering ways to do the thing he had always wanted to do. (He gave up on wanting to be a pro golfer and getting a business degree because he didn't feel either was God's dream for him.) Instead, he waited for God to tell him what he was supposed to do, but to me, those aren't dreams.

So this book might be a little disappointing to readers who are going into this with the typical definition of what the word "dream" means.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.