Jonathan Martin - How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is on the Way and Love Is Already Here

Wow. Ive never read a book like this one before! Who would ever guess that a few reflections on wind and waves, shipwrecks and sea monsters, could comfort and challenge so profoundly? Jonathan Martin writes with a pastors heart and poets touch, taking the reader to colorful, unexpected places with each turn of the page. His insights into Scripture are fresh, his storytelling honest and vulnerable. How to Survive a Shipwreck is a book to be savored, cherished, and returned to. I suspect it will take its place among some of the finest spiritual memoirs of our time.

Rachel Held Evans, bestselling author of Searching
for Sunday and A Year of Biblical Womanhood

Be warned: Jonathan Martins title is a bit misleading. What he has packaged as a sort of shipwreck survival kit turns out to be a force of prose by which we are swept to the shore of Malta with a raging velocity that is at once raw and redemptive. Also we are urged to eat cheesecake tonight, for our own good. I love this book.

Steven Furtick, lead pastor of Elevation Church, Charlotte,
North Carolina, and author of Crash the Chatterbox

If Southern gothic theology was a genre of writing, this may be our generations undomesticated, spirit-haunted introduction. Poet-prophet-preacher Jonathan Martin has come to us speaking in tongues of fire as a howl and a song from the sea, from life after everything is lost. This gorgeous book is deep water, terrible and beautiful and cleansing; the words smell of salt water and wine, bread and longing, grief and hope. All of us who have ourselves gone under will weep with aching recognition as Jonathan testifies to the loving God who meets us in the chaos and the swirl and monsters to set us utterly free through a rescue that didnt look at all like we thought it would.

Sarah Bessey, author of Jesus Feminist and Out of
Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

Gritty and transcendent. How to Survive a Shipwreck isnt really any kind of how-to book. Rather, Jonathan Martin takes us on a stunning and stark voyage of his own souls deep dive and near drowning. You wont reach for any well-fixed, handy life preservers hereMartin doesnt throw us any. There are plenty of storm books out there, swollen with platitudes and simple strategies for recovery. These pages are dripping instead with ache and beauty. A harrowing hope. His writing is mesmeric and will fill your lungs enough to ascend and take that first big breath at the waters surface. The breath you thought you might never take again.

Nichole Nordeman, songwriting and recording artist

Anyone who has experienced deep and transformative brokenness will resonate with this book. I did. As Jonathan Martin turned the pain of his interior death into the poetry of resurrection, I found myself saying again and again, Yes, thats what I found to be true. Our childhood understanding of life and faith must give way to a more nuanced view of ourselves, of others, and of God. Our hearts must be broken so they can be remade. We must journey past the illusions of our own adequacy so we can discover the most important truth of allthat at the center of everything is a great Heart of love beating for us. I love this book!

Lynne Hybels, advocate for global engagement,
Willow Creek Community Church

While many people in the Western Protestant church preach a gospel that is too saccharine and simple, Jonathan Martin writes as a Christian who has experienced some real pain and loss, and the gospel that emerges from his writing is more robust and full-bodied as a resulta gospel that embraces even pain as a grace. This will be an important book for a lot of people.

Michael Gungor, singer/songwriter, coleader of the
musical collective Gungor, and member of The Liturgists

No one is more qualified to talk about the forgotten path of spiritual descent than Jonathan Martin. How to Survive a Shipwreck is a breakthrough in the way we are to understand our own spiritual process and conversion. His honesty and unique voicewhich has been drenched in heartache, wrestling, and triumphhas deeply resonated in my life and the lives of countless others. Like so many of us, I was taught to act saved but not how to truly be born again. I believe this book is part of the antidote to help heal the great sickness of spiritual certainty in our world today.

William Matthews, songwriter and recording artist

Jonathan Martin is that rare soul whos been through the fire and has more, not less, hope because of it. Is he a poet or mystic or teacher or recovery expertwho cares? He has something to say.

Rob Bell, author of How to Be Here Now and
What We Talk about When We Talk about God

Bob Dylan said, Behind every beautiful thing theres been some kind of pain. I believe thats true. Its certainly true of Jonathan Martins How to Survive a Shipwreck. From his bitter experience of nearly drowning in a sea of pain, Jonathan has survived to paint a beautiful portrait of a grace that will not quit. He artfully reminds us that even when we feel we are swallowed in a sea of pain, we are still enveloped in the boundless ocean of Gods relentless love. This book will help and heal many shipwrecked souls.

Brian Zahnd, pastor of Word of Life Church, Saint
Joseph, Missouri, and author of Water to Wine

Brilliant and demanding, How to Survive a Shipwreck is Jonathans heart-wrenching comeback storyand it is a hidden parable for us. Can I accept one who is fallen? We are all shipwrecked. We stand in need of grace.

Dr. John Sowers, author of The Heroic Path

This is a stormy bookdark, fierce, jolting. And really it is not about survival but about suffering and deathand just so about resurrection and the life of faith. Over and over from beginning to end, Jonathan Martin does all he can to remind us of the gospels deepest promise: our only hope is in letting ourselves be wrecked so we can sink into the depths of Gods unrelenting devotion to our good.

Dr. Chris Green, professor of theology at Pentecost
Theological Seminary and author of Foretasting the Kingdom

This is no preachers sermon. This book is a survivors confession: even while your life is violently torn apartyour heart, it can break open. Break open to a beauty, compassion, and calling you thought would never again return. Break open to a grace more powerful than the waves of pain, disaster, failure, and devastation that could so easily devour you. If you need more than self-help soothsayers and positive-thinking profiteers, Jonathan Martin invites you to undergo a baptism in grace that is deeper than the seas that would drown you.

Jarrod McKenna, Australian peace award winning
pastor, activist, and cofounder of First Home Project

In this beautifully written, ruthlessly honest, often humorous, and sometimes heart-wrenching work, Jonathan Martin takes readers on a tour that intimately explores the scary, painful, dark contours of his own shipwreck. This raw but hope-filled tour leaves readers with a wealth of biblical insight on how to survive and even be transformed by the stormy times that decimate the ships of our lives.

Dr. Greg Boyd, senior pastor of Woodland
Hills Church and author of twenty books,
including The Myth of a Christian Nation

ZONDERVAN

How to Survive a Shipwreck

Copyright 2016 by Jonathan Martin

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

ePub Edition May 2016: ISBN 978-0-310-34798-9