Book Review: God is not Fair, He is More than Fair by Lee E. Pollock

In the spirit of full disclosure, while I do not know Lee Pollock, I was given this book by Lee’s friend and editor Joy Kear.  Joy and her husband Chuck serve faithfully and well as associate pastor couple at Lolo Community Church.

God is Not Fair, He is More than Fair is not the type of book I usually read.  Please don’t take that as a negative statement.  My “too read” pile is stacked with theology, history, biography and church ministry books.  So a book that is a collection of stories does not often find its way into my reading queue.  But I am glad it did.

The book is self-published through Xulon Press.  At times the writing suffers some, being disjointed or uneven at times.  That aside, there is a wonderful, encouraging message in this book that enables us to look beyond some shortcomings in writing style to see the amazing way God works in our lives.

Lee Pollock ran a hardware store in Hysham, MT, pastored in the Wesleyan Church and is presently retired in Oklahoma.  Over the years, he has collected a variety of stories of how God demonstrated the fact that He is not fair, but rather more than fair.  Many of these 19 stories happen in Montana, with some taking place in the Dakotas or Oklahoma.  In each story, Lee seeks to demonstrate the truth that while from a human perspective, it would seem that God was not fair, when we open our eyes to God’s perspective and take account of His grace, mercy and provision, we recognize that He is more than fair.

At first glance, the stories vary greatly.  Some are about people experiencing personal or family tragedy.  Others are about people going through trials with their health.  Some are set in a ministry or missions context.  For someone like me, who is a missionary with the Rocky Mountain Bible Mission (RMBM), it was encouraging to read again the story of the Miller family who formally served at RMBM's Camp Elohim.

In story after story, God’s grace, His power and His provision are on display.  Some of these stories will stretch your view of God, especially if we are tempted to put God in a box and define what God can or cannot do in our world.  Not all the stories have a happy ending, but all of them are demonstrations of the goodness of God.

Lee does a good job carrying his theme – that God is more than fair – throughout the book.  There were a few chapters where I felt that theme was a bit hard to see, but those were rare.  For me, the theme that resonated the most powerfully was the idea that faith builds faith.  That is the value of a collection of stories like this.  They are stories about ordinary people through whom or in whom God did extraordinary things.  These people are not perfect saints – they have struggles, they have doubts, trusting may come hard to some of them – but God is faithful and He responds to the fact that they have sought Him. And stories like that are an encouragement to me.  They build my faith.  They are a reminder that God is always at work, and even when He allows difficult times in our life, He is there to carry us through those difficult times if we allow Him.  So next time you wonder if God is being fair to you, seek His face, trust His Word, cling to His promises.  And as this collection of stories shows, when we do that, we will see that God is not fair, but rather He is more than fair in our lives.