Category: Books

Thank you, Rachel Denk!


Very thankful for Rachel Denk’s wonderful review of my latest book, Mad About God.

An excerpt from her review:

“How many times do you feel like you have to be ‘in the right mindset’ or at a ‘good place’ with God in order to come before Him? Don’t you ever feel like you’ve been told since God is almighty and righteous that we have no right to be upset or angry with Him? And when we can’t suppress pain, anger, or bitterness, all of that is somehow transformed into guilt.

“… J.S. Park beautifully deconstructs all of these notions that have been drilled into us for far too long. And guess what? It’s okay to be upset. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to doubt. It’s okay to not understand why things happen and question God.

“J.S. asks the hard questions. He prompts the difficult ideas. He opens the can of worms that may never truly be shut. My favorite passages from the book include Hijacking And Reclaiming Jeremiah 29:11, Our Hollywood Craze To Live An Epic Life, and The Problem With Job: As We Bleed, We Find Our Deepest Need. Sound intriguing just from the titles? You better believe it. These passages floored me – I often caught myself reading this and thinking how someone seemed to understand this little aspect of my heart and soul that had been secretly struggling for so long.”


I Don’t Have It All Figured Out Yet / Perpetually Skeptical


Hello dear friends! This is an audio preview of my book Mad About God: When We Over-Spiritualize Pain and Turn Tragedy Into a Lesson, about persevering through pain and suffering.

Preface 1 – I Don’t Have It All Figured Out, and That’s Okay
Preface 2 – Perpetually Skeptical: Screaming Through The Red Sea

Preface 1 is about our crazy need to connect pain with a lesson.
Preface 2 is about the constant, uncomfortable doubts about the existence and goodness of God.

Stream here or download directly here. The book is both in paperback and ebook.

Love y’all and be blessed!
— J.S.


Table of Contents for “Mad About God”


This is the Table of Contents for my book on trials and suffering, called Mad About God.

The book also talks about True Detective, Louis C.K., the Serial podcast, the pressure to be “radical” and do “great things for God,” the romanticism of third world missionaries, overly inspirational Instagrams, The Shawshank Redemption, the misquoting of Jeremiah 29:11 and David & Goliath.

It’s now in both paperback and ebook. Be blessed and love y’all!

— J.S.


The Amazing Art in My Latest Book


This is one of the chapter titles for my latest book, by the amazing and talented Crae Achacoso. [From followandreblog​ and her Instagram here.]

This is for my book on persevering through pain and suffering, Mad About God. The art is in the paperback version!

— J.S.


An Open Letter to the Christian Who Has Left Church and Is Hanging on By a Thread.

ChurchPlants hanging by a thread 2-5-15


This is an excerpt from my book What The Church Won’t Talk About on the online mag ChurchPlants.com!

It’s called “An Open Letter to the Christian Who Has Left Church and Is Hanging on By a Thread.”

My book is here. Be blessed, dear friends!

— J.S.


The Miracle of Moving Forward.


You’re in the middle of your motion, so it’s hard to see where you are. But so long as you’ve been taking one heavy step forward after another, no matter how awkward your stumbling, then this is worth celebrating. Every moment you’ve done right is a miracle in itself.

We believe in a God who knew we couldn’t ever reach perfection, so perfection came to us. If you feel like you’ve failed today, the very reason Jesus came was to take on your failures, your ego, your pride, your pain, your sorrows, your sin. And He’ll keep working on you until glory. Everything good in you is God in you: and anything bad in you, He’s working on that.

— J.S. from What The Church Won’t Talk About


Meeting Fellow Travelers


Finally got to meet my dear brother Todd and got his book as a gift! Todd also wrote the Foreword for my first book. My wife and I got him onto Korean food in K-Town of Atlanta. Love you brother and so glad to have met you face to face!

His book here: Unwritten Letters To You


See As God Sees You.


The next time you’re about to take up that blade, you’ll have to make a conscious decision to tell yourself, I know God loves me. As corny as that is, even if you don’t feel it, even if you don’t want to believe it’s true, even if every ounce of you is pushing it away, please see yourself as God sees you. Just a glimpse, You are loved, God wants for you, you are His child … you are better than all this, you are made for more, and you can set that thing down and walk away.

— J.S. from What the Church Won’t Talk About


Letting Jesus Speak.


In Luke 12, when Jesus says what the master will do to the wicked servant — “He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers” — I can’t turn this around by saying, “Jesus is really saying, I will never stop loving you.”

In John 6, Jesus preaches a sermon so hardcore that every single follower except the appointed twelve end up leaving him. Jesus asks the remaining dozen, “Do you want to leave too?” I don’t see this in any church growth books or discipleship workshops.

In Matthew 10, Jesus says plainly with zero disclaimers: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” I don’t see a hidden meaning in this passage. He said what he meant; he meant what he said.

If you’ve ever really read the Sermon on the Mount, it’s absolutely horrifying. Whether you believe Jesus was real or not, it completely clashes against all our notions of a sheep-petting, halo-wearing, perfect-teeth Jesus.

Can we try to let Jesus speak for himself?


— J.S. from What the Church Won’t Talk About


More Than Sex.


Your sexual identity is not everything about you, because you are a God-created individual who is much more than your urges and appetites and desires.

Both the secular talk show host and the red-faced preacher who set a laser-sight on our sexuality are just squeezing attention to their platforms while reducing human beings to human do-ings. That’s a no-win.

— J.S. from What the Church Won’t Talk About


Lean In To Love.


When I lean in to love on someone, I don’t want to tell them how they should be, I want to tell them how they could be.



— J.S. from The Christianese Dating Culture


It’s Not What You Run From, But To.


The Christian life can’t just be about running away from sin: but is ultimately about running to Him. That means finding His mission, His purpose, and His heart for you. It means asking for His wisdom in how to discipline yourself, to be shaped by His truth, to be restructured in His image. It means bonding with other like-minded individuals to live out your God-given calling. It’s so fully experiencing the love of God that you are shaken down to your very core, melted and tenderized by His grace to never go back, but only pursue Him forward.

— J.S. from The Christianese Dating Culture


Who God Has Called You To Be.


Who God has called you to be
is the you that you’ve been wanting to be all along.

— J.S. from What The Church Won’t Talk About


Releasing Expectations, Letting Go Control.


We often demand of people what only God can give us — encouragement, affirmation, strength, motivation — and we end up wringing them dry. It’s okay to expect some things from people, so long as you know they’re just human beings who thirst like you. They need an Infinite Well as much as you do. If you drink deeply of Him first, you’ll be less controlled (and controlling) by your expectations, and you’ll actually seek others not to squeeze from them but to encourage them by your overflow.

When you can let go of the idols of relationships, wealth, intellect, success, beauty, and career: you can actually enjoy them for what they are. You don’t expect salvation or redemption from them. You don’t crush them with expectations or demand them to serve your every whim. You instead see them as gifts, as privileges, as an honor to respect and to cherish. Treat the earthly as divine and you will lose both; treat the divine as your treasure and the earth will be just as beautiful.

— J.S. from The Christianese Dating Culture


God Is Going To Work With You On This.


When we hear sermons about sex and dating, a piercing guilt sets in — It’s too late for me, because I’ve already messed it up.

In a Christianese church culture, there’s no room for sinners like you and me. You’re either in or you’re out. You got it or you don’t. It’s one-shot or it’s over.

[This] can make you feel you lost out on something, like you’re somehow beyond His reach. We get locked into a cycle of compensating for our wrongs. The Christianese way is to run, jump, and kick our way through faith.

The truth is that no matter where we are in our “identity” or “purity” or “maturity,” God is going to work with you on this. This is who He is. God cannot help it. He loves His children, and even those like you and me. Nothing you do could ever change God’s heart towards you, and it’s His unchanging heart that changes you.

— J.S. from The Christianese Dating Culture


The Giant Gap Between Where You Are and Where You’re Going.


In that Giant Gap between who you want to be and who you really are, every other religion, including the evangelical church, tells you to “close the gap.” That’s religion.

Jesus is the only who said, “I will meet you where you are. I am running backwards through the gap to you. And we will walk this walk together, one step at a time, me in the lead, and I will be with you whether you feel me or not, always.” Faith is being more and more sure of this reality, and it’s not being more sure that you’re sinning less. It’s never just running from sin, but running to Him.

— J.S. from What The Church Won’t Talk About


The Only Pure Sustainable Motivation.


I can do one of two things for you as a pastor, as a Christian, as your friend. I can beat you up with rules and religion — “Do more, try harder!” — and I can make you conform your behavior. Like that guy who makes you jump during worship. It would be an external apparatus working on your outside, but it would never become a part of you. You’ll get short-term change, but Monday through Saturday when the fear is gone, the change won’t last.

Or the second thing I can do is: I can tell you about the grace of God, the goodness of God, and the love of God — where God loves you no matter what, without conditions, even counter-conditionally, through the depth of our very worst, at the cost of His very Son. So then our actions would spring out of gratitude for what He has done for us and for who He is. That comes not just from rules and religion, though those are important, but from a real living relationship with the living God. That’s the only pure sustainable motivation. Grace can take a lot longer than guilt-trips, but in the long-term, grace is the only thing that can internalize to change your heart.

— J.S. from The Christianese Dating Culture


There’s No Such Thing As “Too Late” With God, Ever.


I must also add: God absolutely loves you and He’s crazy about you no matter what. In our rock-bottom moments of ill consequences, it’s easy to think that God’s response towards us is disappointment or frustration. But God sent His Son exactly for this very reason — to draw you near Him in spite of yourself. Don’t ever let self-pity get in the way of this; don’t ever feel you have to pay off your guilt with self-inflicted punishment. God did the work for you already. He preempted your failures and saw your sin coming a mile away, but He loved you anyway. He will not time-warp His Son off the cross. He says in Jeremiah 31:3, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”

I know it feels like you’re walking in a fog you created. and there will be some tough days ahead, but God is with you in this struggle to the very end. Pace yourself and don’t rush the healing process and have grace for you, too. If you mess it up again, get back up. God is there to cheer you on and restore you for next time. There’s no such thing as “too late” with God. When your church or your family or the whole world will not give you a second chance, God is the God of infinite chances. His grace is that big. Continue to stumble after Him.

Please don’t let the weight of your consequences say anything less about you as a person, because God continually has grace for you in the middle of the mess.



— J.S. from The Christianese Dating Culture


Christianese Dating: The Adventure of Dating and The Reality of Relationships

Christianese Dating Logo


Hello beloved wonderful friends!

This is a seminar I gave on dating and relationships to a wonderful ministry of college students and young adults in Gainesville FL, aka Gator Town.

It’s called The Adventure of Dating and The Reality of Relationships. It’s about the exciting prospect of dating and the gritty, difficult, raw reality of relationships. Stream here or download directly here!

Some of the content is from my new book on relationships called The Christianese Dating Culture.

Some things I talk about are: The romantic theology of Taylor Swift, that time I overheard a girlfriend catching her boyfriend with another woman, two soldiers at war gossiping about the Kardashians, the best Christian pick-up line ever, the gritty raw painful sweaty work of theater actors and ballerinas, the difference between “Saving Private Ryan” and “The Hurt Locker,” three directions that every relationship takes, if my fiancé gained 200 lbs, the scary anxious fear of marriage proposal and possibly hearing “Nope,” and a Q&A Session including the truth about “wives submitting” and how to find “The One.”

Be blessed and love y’all!

— J.S.