"For the love of Moses, get your shoes on."
"For the love of everything holy, please pick up your wet bathing suit from the carpeted floor."
Sound familiar to anyone? I use the phrase "for the love" as a stand in for "good grief" or "I can't believe I'm saying this again." It's better than cussing, but just barely.
This phrase was the inspiration for Jen Hatmaker's new book For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards. Jen is one of my favorite writers (I've written about her books here and here).
I simply cannot imagine where I'd be in my Christian walk without her guidance along the way. She has helped me let go of so much guilt and anxiety about trying to be the perfect mom, the perfect pastor's wife, and the perfect Christian woman and has replaced it with grace, wisdom, and gratitude. And I'll be checking her off my famous-people-I-want-to-see-in-real-life bucket list in September when she speaks at MomCon, the yearly Mothers of Preschoolers (MOPS) convention in Indianapolis.
In the introduction of For the Love Jen writes: ..."As this book started taking shape and I discovered it's contents, the title became instantly clear: For the Love. This is why we live and breathe: for the love of Jesus, for the love of our own souls, for the love of our families and people, for the love of our neighbors and this world. This is all that will last...Because as Paul basically said: We can have our junk together in a thousand areas, but if we don't have love, we are totally bankrupt. Get this right and everything else follows. Get it wrong, and life becomes bitter, fear-based, and lonely."
Amen, sister. Isn't that all we're really trying to do here: love our people, and the people around us, as best as we can?
Amen, sister. Isn't that all we're really trying to do here: love our people, and the people around us, as best as we can?
I pre-ordered my copy of as soon as I heard it was available. And then something awesome happened: I got another copy as a freebie when Jen Hatmaker partnered with Noonday Collection to help launch her book and Noonday's new fall collection. It was a perk to hold a trunk show, which I would have done anyway. Win, win!
Dear readers: I want this book in your hands, not on my shelf. If you're running on the hamster wheel of marriage, motherhood, work, and church and are terrified that you're not doing any of it well, this book is for you.
Here's how to enter:
Comment on this post (not on Facebook or Twitter) by midnight on Thursday, August 27. I'll choose a comment at random and will contact the winner by email. You may enter as many times as you like!
Here's how to comment:
Jen Hatmaker dedicates a few chapters in For the Love to thank you notes (a la Jimmy Fallon). To enter, comment below with your own version of a thank you note. Here's an example:
Dear children,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sitting so quietly during church and allowing the Holy Spirit to fill me overflowing only to have the Jesus sucked right out of me the minute we get in the car and you start fighting over where you are sitting, and who gets to play mommy's phone.
Thank you tween attitude for making parents question sanity and why they wanted children in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThank you, bolivian government, for making me realize that any DMV office in the United States of America is like a lovely stroll in the park compared to doing one tiny piece of paperwork in your beautiful country.
ReplyDeleteThank you, random stranger, for asking when I am due, even though I last gave birth nearly a year ago... Clearly, growing and birthing five children has not been kind to my figure...
ReplyDeleteThank you, favorite brand of jeans, for deciding to rename all of your style so that I can no longer search your store or website for the style I once liked, but instead have to come into the store thirty minutes away & try on jeans in the florescent lighting of your store (one of my least favorite activities)... And especially for doing this right before a big sale, so the whole town is in your store and I get to fight the crowds.
ReplyDeleteThank you Instagram for having 15 different filters and 30 different ways to edit my pictures to make it "42 minutes to edit my darling agram"
ReplyDeleteThank you Boom Chicka Boom lightly sweetened popcorn for toting only 35 calories per cup, but having 18 cups in your bag; thus making me consume 18 cups of lightly sweetened popcorn.
ReplyDeleteThank you food in the microwave for sounding all boiling-ie snap, crackle, and pop hot but being cold in the middle.
ReplyDeleteThank you my dear children for being dry through the night every night except for every single time I give you a nighttime bath.
ReplyDeleteDear sweet kids thank you for answering daddy's question, "What did you do today?" with the (lie) we watched tv ALL day long. That's the only thing we did.
ReplyDeleteCheck your email...you're the winner!
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