Wide Awake: The Future Is Waiting Within You

By Erwin Raphael McManus

The alarm sounds. Your feet hit the floor and carry you into another day. But what does that day hold for you? Will you be punching your card at work, catching up on TV at home, and crashing into bed before you rinse and repeat the next day? Or will you dare to dig deep and discover the incredible potential lying dormant within us all?

In Wide Awake, renowned speaker and church visionary Erwin Raphael McManus challenges us to put an end to all the sleepwalking and settling, for each of us was created by God for a reason. He has called you to live as Jesus did—a heroic life, void of monotony, teeming with danger, adventure, and the unknown. Living wide awake is about realizing that the world desperately needs you to live up to your potential.

There is a future that needs to be created, and it is waiting for us all to wake up and get out of bed. The alarm has sounded, and it is time to shake off the slumber.

It’s time to live, to create, to imagine, to dream . . . Wide Awake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Jul 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781418566487

Erwin Raphael McManus

Erwin Raphael McManus is an iconoclast known as a cultural pioneer for his integration of creativity and spirituality. An artist, entrepreneur, and thought leader, he is also the founder of MOSAIC, a community of faith in Los Angeles, California. McManus is the author of Soul Cravings, Chasing Daylight, and other leading books on spirituality and creativity. His travels have taken him to over fifty countries and he has spoken to over a million people from a wide variety of audiences, from professional athletes to Wall Street investors, universities, film studios, and conferences around the world. McManus has a bachelor of arts in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a master's of divinity from Southwestern Theological Seminary, and a doctorate of humane letters from Southeastern University.

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Reviews for Wide Awake

[jared_runck · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To be honest, I usually like very few of the inspirational Christian authors, mostly because of Simon Chan's observation that much of Christian devotional literature is theologically weak (while much theological literature is also devotionally weak). Many books are filled with platitudes, meager exegesis, and tepid insights, all the while slathered with generous helpings of pop psychology that makes them little more than self-help manuals.For some reason--and I can't quite put my finger on it--I connect with McManus more than with most others in this genre. Perhaps it's more his selected topics than his actual writing style that intrigues me. (Especially in this book, I found some of his attempts at maintaining a "conversational" tone to his writing rather annoying.) However, I came away with an odd dozen or so REALLY pithy phrases and quotes that were, all things considered, profound. I suppose what I liked most about this book is its unique anthropological assumptions. Most Christian books about "living your dream" are undercut by the premise of innate human rottenness (thank you, John Calvin). As such, the human role in the world is reduced to passive spectator of divine action. In McManus' calculus of dream-fulfillment, human choice and action are REAL factors, alongside divine grace and providence. This book is as much a call to human responsibility as to human submission to God's will for us. Perhaps for some, the book's claims will be too generic. At points, it seems that it could be a book for budding entrepreneurs as much as for beginning Christians. Perhaps this is intentional: I think McManus would be THRILLED if a person's journey into the Christian faith inspired them to launch a new business enterprise. However, for me, this played as part of the book's strength, not a glaring weakness. I also am aware that many other will probably give this book a much lower rating than I have. Part of the reason that I enjoyed this work by McManus is probably because it's been a good while (several years) since I read the last book by McManus. And in between, I've finished a doctoral thesis. Part of my enjoyment of this book, then, is clearly that it presented me a nice break from the much heavier reading I've been doing in the past year or so. With all those provisos on the table, though, this is still a good book, filled with good Scripturally-based insights and clear challenges to be our best "imaginary" selves for the service of God's Kingdom!