Divine Detours: When God Messes Up Your Plans

by Sion Alford

This is a book about the dream that God places within each believer to fulfill His mission in our lives. However, sometimes God interrupts our dream because he knows we need to grow, learn, and mature. During those times, we can focus on God’s glory and our humility.
Sion opens his own life to reflect on these themes. Through his years of ministry service, God has taught him about these lessons. God gives His most precious gifts; however, then He leads us to an altar and asks us to lay down everything, including His own fulfillment of the promises He gave to us. Does this sound crazy? It seems counterintuitive, as if it doesn’t make sense.

When God is the hero of the story, it never ends in death. In fact, it is quite the opposite. God’s stories always end in resurrection and life. Just as the cross wasn’t the end for our Savior, the death of your dream isn’t the end for you. The death of your dream opens the doorway to something better, more real, and more life-giving.

Genres: Christian

255 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 19, 2016

Reviews

[cloudyskye · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do agree with Scott's review. Sion Alford preached at my church two or three years ago, and that was wonderful. The book was a little difficult. Perhaps his insights don't translate so well into writing, I don't know.
What I liked were the chapters on pride-humility-manipulation, that really hit the spot. Also about brokenness as a prerequisite to humility. Interestingly enough today's sermon at my church was about messing up and being healed and repaired by God, with some lovely pictures of a Japanese technique of repairing broken dishes: by filling in the gaps and fractures with gold, thus creating beautiful patterns, unique to each dish, and making it more valuable in the process. A beautiful picture of God's work in our lives.
One typo towards the end: "diving detours". ;)

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit of a tough book to get through. The writing style is short chapters, full of pithy sayings, and it's sometimes hard to follow along with what the author is trying to say. There's not really a flow to the book - Sion really "detours" all over the place. A couple of chapters were good, where the author actually shares some personal details about his life, but the rest of the book is mostly a grab bag of Bible verses and the Western "read-and-apply" application to maximize our calling.

[Edward Arrington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I am a slow reader, I tend to rush through books at times and miss much of the message. I took my time reading this one so I could grasp the message better. After all, a book about God messing up your plans needs to be taken seriously. We all want to know why God messes up our plans, don’t we? He gives us a big dream and every way we turn, He seemingly has other ideas. As the author shares, God had given Joseph some truly big dreams about ruling over his family. Did Joseph wait for God to lead him in fulfilling those dreams? According to what we read in the Bible, Joseph acted just like practically every other teenager who has ever lived: it was full steam ahead for him. He thought the dream was for yesterday and he had already missed it. God quickly sent him on a detour. The author uses the Bible and events from his own life to help us get a better view of what God is up to when He sends us off on a detour. What we do while on that detour will have a huge bearing on whether or not the dream is ever realized as God intended it to be. Take your time and read this one carefully.

[Jaakko Ahola · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an inspiring book. It's kind of Bible condensed in 250 pages. I have heard the author preach about this 4 years ago so the subject was somewhat familiar. I think the structure of the book was logical and the story was carried through well. It had a lot of teological and interesting details. Sometimes it was a bit hard to follow but towards the end it got easier.