Book Review: Butterfly In Brazil by Glenn Packiam

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History is full of the narrative fallacy, our desire as humans to package well-known events and people into pithy, oversimplified stories. It makes sense for us to think that great things happen due to great people rather than ordinary people doing nothing more heroic than showing up to work every Monday; or that events are shaped by a few moments of incredible magnitude rather than a series of seemingly insignificant and otherwise dull sub steps. It is this weakness in human logic that Glenn Packiam takes aim at in his book Butterfly in Brazil: How Your Life Can Make a World of Difference, stressing that greatness is not achieved by that “one moment in time,” but rather over years of faithfulness in the small things…an idea not too attractive in today’s culture of instant success.

Packiam delves into this idea with precision, using the story of Nehemiah as an example of, “an ordinary man who ended up making an extraordinary difference.” Showing how God has chosen to intertwine himself and His supernatural nature into our mannish and gritty lives, Packiam paints a clear picture of how we should go about living a life of lasting impact…as participants in a divine improv, not chained to a script, but nonetheless completely ineffective and awkward outside the director’s basic framework.

Most of all this is a book about creating lasting change. His main points: 1) change is small 2) change is local 3) change is gradual 4) change is costly. He explains that while Christian culture often encourages its youth to change the world, “Trying to change the world is the surest way to guarantee that we won’t.” Instead Packiam encourages us to be faithful in the small things over a long period of time and as Jim Elliot so simply, but profoundly put it, “Wherever you are, be all there.”

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