Freefall to Fly: A Breathtaking Journey Toward a Life of Meaning Author: Visit Amazon's Rebekah Lyons Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1414379366 | Format: PDF
Freefall to Fly: A Breathtaking Journey Toward a Life of Meaning Description
Review
The author narrates triumphs and troubles, freckled with Bible quotes, as she reaches for self-understanding. She opens with a dramatic move from an Atlanta suburb to manic Manhattan, symbolized by her elder son’s meltdown smack in the middle of Park Avenue. Anecdotes disclose her panic attacks, her lifelong connection to words, and her salvific Tuesday-morning meetings with women who insist that she tell the truth about her worst fears. (Publishers Weekly)
From the Back Cover
The Dark Night of the Soul in the City That Never SleepsAt first glance, Rebekah Lyons’s life path seemed straightforward: walk the aisle, take the short road to motherhood, and build a family on a suburban cul-de-sac in the South.
But life looked radically different when her family relocated to the heart of New York City. She was forced to navigate a new normal with three kids, two toy poodles, and a minivan. Blindsided by crippling despair, Rebekah wrestled with bigger questions women often ask: Why am I here? Does my life matter?
In a Western culture driven by performance and Pinterest fantasies, her story echoes the rise of loneliness, depression, and anxiety that women are facing at all-time highs. Why are expectations and lifestyles breaking us down in unprecedented ways?
In this beautifully moving memoir of vulnerability, courage, and ultimately transformation, Rebekah shares her journey into the unknown—a thrilling, terrifying freefall that eventually led to flight. Searching for meaning, she stumbled on surrender, discovering that meaning
follows surrender.
Rebekah found freedom when she faced her greatest fear, and she invites other women to do the same. For it is only when we freefall that we can truly fly.
- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. (April 9, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1414379366
- ISBN-13: 978-1414379364
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
The whole time I read this disappointing book I kept wondering where the adults were. The personal anxiety of one woman, shallow by her own admission, who perceives that her panic attacks must mean God wants her to become a writer may seem like an epiphany to her but shouldn't to anyone else. Her story is very familiar to thousands of (mostly) women who for a variety of reasons find their lives paling in comparison to those around them. But the voice calling one to a career/call of fame and fortune is rarely misconstrued as God and certainly shouldn't be promoted in print. Common sense and a grasp of basic theology brings into question whether the author understands what the bible means when the word "call" is used.
Also, the mental health angle falls flat. The author makes it clear she has a temporary form of mental disease so it's not clear why she deems herself an authority on the subject when talking to the 1/4 of women with mental illness. Those women often have a more permanent form of mental health issues and this book is patronizing and dismissive towards them. For example, she speaks lovingly about her father who has been battling chronic mental health issues for years but in the next breath tells women that their anxiety and depression is due to their resistance to following God's call. Is the same true for her father? Is the chapter devoted to him a thinly veiled admonition that he isn't close enough to God and should follow her much more Godly example? The story in which she relates her father-in-law agreeing with his impertinent grandchild that he "buried" his artistic gift by not accepting a scholarship years ago made me cringe, both for the disrespect of the child and to the man.
I'm not quite sure what to think about this book. While there are many things to appreciate about Rebekah's story, there are more things with which I'm not quite connecting. To be honest, the subtitle to the book, "A Breathtaking Journey Toward a Life of Meaning" is what caught my attention and made me want to read the book. Who doesn't want to live a life of meaning? I'm always interested in knowing what people consider as "a life of meaning"; especially influential people such as Ms Lyons.
Here are some of the things I marked from the book:
"Limitations of the mundane that used to come so easily. This city would push me to get on my knees, to grovel, to fully enter into my weakness. To strike a child's pose. Rest there. In my cries of lament, I heard a word so clearly it almost sounded audible. Stay. What does that even mean? Stay in the freefall. A truth hit me in that moment. All my life. I've been running. Running to the next greatest thing" (pg. 35)
"We aren't depressed because we are getting old; we are depressed in the prime of our lives. During the years when we ought to be making some of our greatest contributions to others and to the world, we are stuck. Caught in a quagmire of confusion, hardly able to put one foot in front of the other. What is going on? And why now? I'm no medical doctor, and I have no degrees in psychology, but I do love to listen to the stories of women. Women who are in the sweet spot of this demographic who are fighting to make sense of their lives. I hear the stories, unpack their pain, and consistently find a common perpetrator. We don't know who we are." (pg. 67)
"Every life path always works this way, crooked and bending with every decision we make. As difficulty presents itself, do we retreat?
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