He Saw That It Was Good Book Review

I sure hope this review can do this book justice.

Sho Baraka's He Saw That It Was Good: How Your Creative Life Can Change a Broken World is a mixture of poems, stories, anecdotes, and Biblical scripture. Essentially, it's a call to the Christian church to embrace other voices than "white", and it's a call to African-Americans to embrace the truth of their own stories and tell it.

Not gonna lie, I was a little confused as to where to book was going during the first two chapters. But after that, things started clicking. I wrote several notes in my GoodReads updates, and I took a lot of screenshots of favorite passages in my ebook version.

I'm not familiar with Sho Baraka's music, although now, of course, I'm going to seek it out. But I enjoyed reading about his experience making hip-hop music in the Christian music world, and how when he's being truthful in his craft, the Christian community doesn't always like that. (That reminded me of when Derek Webb used an expletive in one of his songs to make a point that Christians would be in an uproar over the use of that word as opposed to the hypocrisies he was calling them out on. He was right.)

The title of the book comes from the book of Genesis when "God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good." We are good. That's our true story. That's where our identity starts. That's our truth.

This book reminded me of a discussion that an old Bible study group of mine had about creating art that glorified God but also stayed true to the realities of the world we live in. Do we censor language even though that's how people talk? Do we create a sugarcoated happy world, even though that's not reality and won't resonate with anyone reading or viewing? Why are we creating? For money or for God? How can we reconcile our messiness to be good people and create works that do good? How can we recognize other cultures and other voices in what we create?

There are a lot of good takeaways in this book, and I'd encourage everyone (black and white) to read it.

He Saw That It Was Good is published by WaterBrook and is available to purchase now. I received a free eARC in exchange for my review.