For the Love
For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards
Author: Jen Hatmaker
220 Pages in Hardback
Published: August 8, 2015
Dates Read: September 21-28, 2016
My Rating: 2 stars
Book Summary from Amazon:
Best-selling author Jen Hatmaker is convinced life can be lovely and fun and courageous and kind. She reveals with humor and style how Jesus’ embarrassing grace is the key to dealing with life’s biggest challenge: people. The majority of our joys, struggles, thrills, and heartbreaks relate to people, beginning with ourselves and then the people we came from, married, birthed, live by, go to church with, don’t like, don’t understand, fear, compare ourselves to, and judge. Jen knows how the squeeze of this life can make us competitive and judgmental, how we can lose love for others and then for ourselves. She reveals how to:
- Break free of guilt and shame by dismantling the unattainable Pinterest life.
- Learn to engage our culture’s controversial issues with a grace-first approach.
- Be liberated to love and release the burden of always being right.
- Identify the tools you already have to develop real-life, all-in, know-my-junk-but-love-me-anyway friendships.
- Escape our impossible standards for parenting and marriage by accepting the standard of “mostly good.”
- Laugh your butt off.
In this raucous ride to freedom for modern women, Jen Hatmaker bares the refreshing wisdom, wry humor, no-nonsense faith, liberating insight, and fearless honesty that have made her beloved by women worldwide.
My Review
I had never heard of Jen Hatmaker until two friends raved about For the Love in the same week. I looked it up and it sounded interesting, so I eventually bought it. She is on a popular HGTV show, has written a couple of books, has five children, and a pastor’s wife (and daughter).
I expected a different book based off the title than what I read. I did not feel I got much out of the book. Part of it could be that she talks a lot about her kids and I don’t have children. I did not feel that The “Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards” was met. Maybe I am just not in the target demographic for this book. It didn’t have a “book” feel to me; it felt more like a blog. I was also surprised how much she talks about drinking. I don’t have an issue with people drinking, but was surprised how much it was mentioned, especially being a pastor’s wife.
Chapter 15 dealt with “Supper Club” where several couples meet together to fellowship, and they take turns cooking. I liked the idea, and she tried to show how easy cooking is and anyone can do it. I’m not a cook and it did not inspire me to want to cook. It’s a good thing my husband enjoys cooking, because otherwise we would starve!
The book is written in four parts and she ends each part with humorous thank you notes. Those “thank you notes” were the best parts of the book. The chapter I got the most out of was chapter 21 “Poverty Tourism”. It was talking about how can we really help the countries we visit where they actually get something out of the missionary work that is done for them. Not just painting the same building every year, but find out what that community actually needs and do that instead. And don’t just visit one time after that terrible event, continue the relationship with the community.
Overall, I can’t recommend this book. It just wasn’t for me.