A Book by David Anes
Surrounded and Unknown
At 211 degrees water is hot. At 212 it boils. This is a book about the one degree between a faithful, comfortable Christian life and a life that actually moves.
Read an excerpt · Paperback, 194 pages, or EPUB for Apple Books, Kindle, and Kobo. Published by 212 Generation, a ministry of The Refining Co.
The Book
Water at 211 degrees is hot. Hot enough to scald you. It rattles the pot, and anyone walking past can tell something is happening in there.
At 212, it boils.
One degree. That is the whole distance between water that sits in a pot and water that moves a train.
The greatest danger in a life of faith isn't walking away from Jesus. It's getting close enough that we stop moving.
For thirty years David Anes watched that happen from fifteen feet behind the last speaker cabinet, in more than sixty countries. He watched rooms of thousands meet God and then file out into the same week they came in with.
Then he found the same thing in himself.
This is not a program. There are no thirty days, no steps to memorize, no plan in the back. It is a book about the one small, specific, usually unglamorous thing you already know the name of, the one you have quietly worked into your faith and decided is just how you are.
That thing is not in your way by accident.
So what is your address? 211, or 212?
Readers Comments
“It felt authentic, interesting, and relatable.”
“Truth told in a way that is so easy to understand, so relatable to anyone.”
“I haven't stopped to read a book in a long time. I started this one and couldn't stop.”
“I could see the areas in my life that I was living at 211.”
From the Introduction
Then I came across a fact so ordinary I almost skipped past it. Water at 211 degrees is hot. Hot enough to scald you. It moves and rattles, and anyone walking past the pot could tell something is happening in there.
At 212 degrees, water boils.
Boiling isn't a hotter version of hot, it's a change of state. The liquid becomes vapor, and vapor moves. That vapor turned turbines and drove trains and powered a century, not because it got warmer but because it became something else entirely.
One degree.
That's the whole distance between water that sits in a pot and water that moves a train. When I read it, something in me went quiet, because I'd been looking for a hundred degrees. I'd been waiting on the dramatic thing that would finally explain the gap between the people who changed and the people who stayed the same.
And what if the gap was never a hundred degrees?
What if it was one?
Inside the Book
Thirteen units. One anchor verse per chapter. It reads like a conversation across a coffee table. Not a workbook, not a sermon, not a study.
Details
Also from 212
The ten-week discipleship curriculum for middle school and high school students, built on the same one degree. Two full editions, Student Workbooks and Leader's Guides, ready to hand to your teachers and leaders.
See the Curriculum →