Some of you may be familiar with Holley Gerth as a writer for DaySpring and the conceiver of inCourage.  Her newest work is a book for women called You’re Already Amazing.  After tackling the question of why “it’s so hard to believe I’m amazing,” Holley dives into helping us discover how God made us, individually, and what He wants us to be/do.

The tone is conversational.  It’s full of stories and examples.  Most importantly, it oozes with reassurance that God loves us.  It is not a slow or difficult read, and you may find that you can breeze through it — if you ignore the opportunities for introspection and growth offered by the activities of each chapter.

I have to confess that, despite the obvious intention for the book to be an encouragement, despite the fact that the words themselves are one encouragement after another, I found myself rather frustrated and discouraged through much of the book.  This is not the author’s fault; it’s not a fault of the text; it’s a shortcoming on my part.

Whenever gifts, skills, talents, and/or purpose come up, I always find myself frustrated and discouraged.  For some unfathomable reason, God saw fit to endow me with gifts beautifully suited to those roles he specifically stated are only for men, and to withhold from me any abilities that go well with feminine tasks.  This has been an ongoing source of discouragement to me for many years, and books about “discovering your purpose” have never managed to get around that — just to exacerbate it.  (I know that what is true is true, in my head, but I can’t convince myself to believe it, because it doesn’t seem to work out that way in real life.)  If this is you, you might not find the book as encouraging as it was designed to be.

If you don’t wrestle with my hang-ups, you will probably walk away very encouraged.  (Even the cover is beautiful and soothing!)

I would love to see a little girls’ version of this that I could use with my daughters, so that I can reinforce these things to them while they’re young and (hopefully) before they develop feelings of inadequacy from exposure to our cultural climate.

Disclosure: Revell provided me with a review copy of the book to facilitate this post.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.