Unafraid

Living with Courage and Hope in Uncertain Times

By: Adam Hamilton

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

Learn how to face and overcome the fears we feel about loneliness, illness, financial insecurity, disappointing others, failure, insignificance, and aging.

“A thoughtful, literate, faith-filled guide to reclaiming our minds and our lives.” (John Ortberg, senior pastor of Menlo Church and author of I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me)

You’d be hard-pressed to overstate the extent to which fear, anxiety, and worry permeate our lives today. Fear wreaks havoc on our relationships and communities. It leads us into making bad decisions. It holds us back from the very pursuits that promise fulfillment and joy.

As the senior pastor of a large, diverse church in America’s heartland, Adam Hamilton has seen the cost of fear up close. When he surveyed his congregation on how fear affects them, 2,400 people responded - and what they said was eye-opening. Eighty percent admitted to living with moderate or significant levels of fear. Unafraid is Hamilton's insightful and impassioned response. Drawing on recent research, inspiring real-life examples, and fresh biblical insight, Hamilton uses a mixture of facts and faith to help listeners understand and counter fears related to such outsize perils as death and illness, as well as the everyday anxieties all of us encounter. He invites us to:

• Face our fears with a bias of hope
• Examine our fears in light of the facts
• Attack our anxieties with action
• Release our cares to God

Writing with generosity and intelligence, Hamilton shows how believer and unbeliever alike can develop sustaining spiritual practices and embrace Jesus’ recurring counsel: “Do not be afraid.” For anyone struggling with fear or wondering how families and communities can thrive in troubled times, Unafraid offers an informed and inspiring message full of practical solutions.

©2018 Adam Hamilton (P)2018 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Fear is the great thief. It steals our peace. It quietly deprives us of one present moment after another, without our even knowing. In Unafraid, Adam gives us a thoughtful, literate, faith-filled guide to re-claiming our minds and our lives." (John Ortberg, senior pastor of Menlo Church in Menlo Park, California, and author of I'd Like You More If You Were More Like Me)

"Fear cannot be cured with a self-help book. We need a get-help book, and Adam Hamilton has provided exactly that. Informed by psychology and neuroscience, he applies practical wisdom gleaned from the Bible and from his years as a pastor. I could almost feel my blood pressure go down as I read." (Philip Yancey, author, The Jesus I Never Knew and What's So Amazing About Grace?)

"Fear is a powerful and paralyzing emotion. It can save us from danger, or lead us to resent, or even hate our neighbor. Adam Hamilton's new book offers a roadmap for facing our fears with faith, one that leads readers to a life of courage and hope. This book is important and one I highly recommend." (Richard Rohr, author of Falling Upward)

great advice

it's all about CONFIDENCE. Do you believe what He said/did and DOES ? If so, then TRUST Him.

Encouraging

This book presents several examples of life experience of a church pastor. It's interesting and encouraging though, somehow I felt like it missed something: more accumulated experience (I guess). It's just a recounting of personal experiences, I believe it would have been more enriching if other people's experiences had been shared, ore maybe other pastors as well...I'm not sure, but it felt incomplete in some way.

Great read for these times especially.

Well written and helpful, Adam Hamilton once again delivers and offers a path toward faith improvement. His process and examples to overcome fear with faith and trust are so useful. I found it especially helpful during this time of Covid 19 pandemic worries.

Slow to Start but gets better

I found the second half of the book most helpful, slightly more in-depth and realistic human experiences than the first half. I disagree with one other reviewer who stated the book focused mostly on the pastor’s/author’s experiences. I felt the author took great care to focus on a myriad of experiences, those of other people and their reaction to their life experiences.