Nice Girls Don't Change the World

My Dad gave me this book a few weeks before I was married this last summer. I clearly remember receiving the book and getting quite emotional because of the words he had written to me in the inside of the cover. He told me to be all that God wanted me to be, and that he believed in me and the woman that God had created.

I picked up the book last night and started up where I had left off. I am horrible at beginning a book and then forgetting about it until months later. I was dissapointed in myself that I had let this book slip away like all the others. It is such a powerful read. Nothing too long, just a few chapters...but it will change your life and get you thinking, I promise.

The book is written by a lady named Lynne Hybels. Lynee is married to Bill Hybels who is the senior pastor of a very large church that many of you might have heard of, Willow Creek Community Church, http://www.willowcreek.org/ . Lynne has also written other books such as Fit to be Tied with her husband Bill, and Rediscovering Church.

I identified with so many of the things that Lynne mentioned in the book. Nice girls, she says, are taught early that serving God means earning God's love and sacrificing oneself to meet the needs of others. Lynne kept living a life that she thought others wanted, what she thought God demanded, and her husband wanted and her kids wanted and her church expected. She finally discovered that she was completely exhausted of pleasing others, of feeling like she had to measure up and she always failed. She was tired of trying to earn God's love.
It just clicked in my head. How many of us have felt this way? I know I have on SO many occasions. I don't measure up. I need to earn God's love and mercy and grace. I need to do better, be a better wife, a better friend a better youth leader. I try to be someone that, truth be told, I am not, because God didn't make me that way.

This book was such an eye opener to me, in realizing that I have made God out to be a harsh and demanding taskmaster. I never realized until reading this book that I didn't fully accept God's love because I thought I needed to be at a certain place in my life to do that. I needed to pray enough, or do enough "good" to be loved.

Lynne so beautifully and so honestly talks about her struggle with trying to live someone else's life and how she learnt to reclaim the gifts, strengths and passions God has given her. We so often think we need to have certain gifts, and forget to use the ones that God has purposefully given us. We spend so much enegry trying to be this woman or that woman and compare ourselves. (I know we all do it ladies, I do all the time!). It is so easy to forget that GOd made us each individually unique. He has a purpose, and we are special. Our gifts are special and we can use them. If you don't know what gifts God has given you, I dare you to find out what they are:) You will be amazed when you just find that place where you fit, where you feel your passion is and you can watch to see how God will use you!
This isn't meant to be a power trip that woman are the only ones that can change the world, go woman go! It is so much more than just changing the world...it is changing who we are, how we think about ourselves. Realizing that God loves us, for everything that we are. That he has given us things that we are good at, and he wants us to shine in those things.
Lynne says at the end of the book, Nice girls don't change the world, dangerous ones do:)
Just read the book..you'll love it!

"I hope you realize how much your family, your friends, your church, your community, and this world needs you. Don't allow who you truly are to be lost, buried, or devalued...what is most trully you MATTERS" Lynne Hybels.