I won this book from Goodreads. When it arrived, I appreciated the personalised touch the author had enclosed with the book, but I was disappointed to discover the book was not what I had expected. It took me until recently to finally pick it up and read as I knew I would need a lot of time committed to it to get through it.
Unfortunately I have not been able to continue reading it, and definitely won't continue in the future. Firstly, the way the actual book is published, with so much bolded and italicized text, I found it hard to read smoothly.
Secondly, as a Christian, I don't agree with anything the author has written. I would have been happy to read the book and see what she had to say, even though I didn't agree, but the way she wrote, it was quite hard to follow (as well as grammatical and spelling errors - a pet peeve of mine in published books) and there wasn't anything at all that I could agree with, to keep me interested and ignore anything that I didn't find was 'for me'.
The author has made assumptions about what the church teaches about God. As I said, I didn't read the whole book (I didn't read much, in fact), but here are a couple of things I picked up on:
(from pg 2) "God's love is unconditional and that means there is nothing you can possibly do to loose [author's spelling] God's love... Have you live all your life on eggshells because although you have heard of unconditional love, you have been taught that God's love is given when you meet certain conditions? Has this been reinforced by ... teachings in church?" I have grown up in the Church and this has never been taught to me. We are taught that God's love IS unconditional and that no matter what we do or don't do, it will not change how much He loves us. I skimmed through some more of the chapter, but nothing really grabbed me, so I went to the next chapter to see if that would be better.
Unfortunately I was disappointed within the first page of the next chapter:
(pg 17) "Keep in mind that understanding some of what was written many years ago in the Bible could take on a new view in today's world. The message has more to understand than what was revealed so long ago. God is about always becoming more and so the Bible, as written so long ago, has hidden messages that can now come forth because God knows people are ready for a higher understanding." What a statement. According to the Bible that the author in fact believes in herself (even though a misconstrued belief), God is unchanging (James 1:17 - "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows."). Therefore, she is incorrect in writing that "God is about always becoming more" and if God doesn't change, then certainly His word does not either. The same message that was written many years ago, is the same message for us today.
After reading that, I then skimmed over the rest of the book and in particular, the other chapters and still did not find anything I could agree with in anyway.
I once again, acknowledge that I have not read this book in its entirety, so may not have a full picture of the author and her intentions, but from what I have read, I don't believe I'll find much in there to agree with.
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