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    When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over
    When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over
    When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over
    Audiobook8 hours

    When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

    Written by Addie Zierman

    Narrated by Jaimee Draper

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In the strange us-versus-them world of the '90s Christian subculture, your faith was measured by how many WWJD bracelets you wore and whether or not you'd "kissed dating goodbye."
     Evangelical poster-child Addie Zierman wore three WWJD bracelets, led two Bible studies, and listened exclusively to Christian rock. She was "on fire for God," unaware that the flame of her faith was dwindling until it burned entirely out.
     With candor and transparency, Addie chronicles her journey through church culture, first love, and her entrance - unprepared and angry - into marriage. When she washes out of church and nearly her marriage on a sea of tequila and depression, she isn't sure if she'll ever go back.
      When We Were on Fire is a funny, heartbreaking story of untangling oneself from cliché in search of a faith worth embracing. It's a story for anyone who has ever felt alone in a crowded church. For the cynic. The doubter. The former Jesus freak struggling with the complexity of life. It's a story about the slow work of returning to love, Jesus, and (perhaps toughest of all) His imperfect followers. And in the end, it's about what lasts when nothing else seems worth keeping.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOasis Audio
    Release dateApr 15, 2016
    ISBN9781621885917
    When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

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    Reviews for When We Were on Fire

    4/5

    29 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I have recently started reading Addie Zierman's blog and so decided to go back and read this memoir. She describes her growing up in the North American evangelical church, her early fervour and determination to be a "missionary wife" (not a missionary, I noted), her gradual disillusionment with evangelical culture and depression which almost leads to the end of her marriage. Finally she describes the restoration of her marriage and tentative steps to rejoin the church.It feels odd to be critiquing something so personal, but I found the way sections switched in and out of the second person a bit unnecessary (and at the very beginning it was downright confusing.) She clearly identifies the church as the root of her problems, but I found myself blaming Chris for manipulating and denigrating her, Addie herself for choosing a Christian college to study at and then finally most of her difficulties seemed to me to be due to her depression. Her own mother and husband are clearly examples of "normal" evangelical Christians and while her interactions with the women in her bible study groups did seem superficial, I struggled to believe there was no truly welcoming, sympathetic church in the whole of the Chicago area. I wonder if she realizes how very young she did marry and how part of her rejection of her teenage and college ways was merely the process most of us (who do not choose evangelical colleges to study at) go through at college, when we meet people from a variety of culture and backgrounds and work out who we really are.
    • 2/5
      Faith or a social club?
      Yes, for many people, especially those with stable lives and a fat bank account, church is more a social club to make them feel good about themselves and their spiritual standing, with no real concern about anyone else. In America, it is worse, because of the superficiality of the culture and their tendency to belong to groups for social advancement. She got that right.
      However, the author seems to care more about finding her perfect church, perfect friends, having a great life, than about her faith in Jesus, to the point it becomes annoying, makes the book boring and the author look self-centered. She is not concerned that the church does not reflect Jesus' teachings, she is only upset that the social club didn't work for her.
      Actually, the book is about a person who would be clueless were she an atheist or a Buddhist.
      I got tired of her frivolous stories of drinking margaritas with her friends. The narration with a voice of an overexcited teenager is awful. Skip this one.
    • 5/5
      Besides being a local author and being able to identify with all the references to local places, I was also able to identify with the evangelical background having also grown up in it. The struggle to meet a certain formula to be a successful christian, always trying harder and harder but never getting it right. Then you give up and christianity begins something simple. Not something you have to get right, but just something that is because you are broken. You never really become unbroken, but you know there is something bigger, something meaningful that is there. And life moves on.