Also by this author: Welcome: Loving Your Church by Making Space for Everyone, Gather, Belong, Welcome
Published by Crossway Books on March 3, 2020
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life, Theology
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
Women today feel a constant pressure to improve themselves and just never feel like they're "enough." All too often, they live their daily lives disheartened, disillusioned, and disappointed. That's because joy doesn't come from a new self-improvement strategy; it comes from rooting their identity in who God says they are and what he has done on their behalf.
This book calls women to look away from themselves in order to find the abundant life God offers them--contrasting the cultural emphasis on personal improvement and empowerment with what the Scriptures say about a life rooted, built up, and established in the gospel.
In Enough About Me: Find Lasting Joy in the Age of Self, Jen Oshman dismantles the false promises and burdensome demands of the self-help movement, encouraging women to find joy and rest in Christ. At the beginning, she charts the history of ideas, showing how cultural movements over time led to the contemporary belief that women can do it all, have it all, and manage everything themselves. She then challenges these messages with the gospel story, explaining that God designed us to glorify Him, not ourselves, and that when we root ourselves in Christ, we can live out our callings with peace and joy, instead of experiencing the angst, disappointment, and panic of believing that everything depends on us.
Jen Oshman also addresses problematic distortions of Scripture, explaining that salvation is not a project that we have to manage by our own power and determination. She writes in detail about the gospel’s implications for different areas of life, drawing on Scripture, personal stories, and other people’s testimonies to provide tangible, concrete images of what it looks like to fix our eyes on Christ and live in His power. These teachings were all familiar to me, but Oshman reinforces them well and will open the eyes of women used to shallow theology.
Enough About Me is great for personal reading, but it is also an excellent choice for a church reading group. Unlike many books for women, this one speaks to a variety of different ages and life stages, and Jen Oshman never assumes that all of her readers are mothers, or that everyone has the same background and life experiences. This book can be an encouraging resource and relationship-building opportunity for women in reading groups, since the thoughtful, open-ended discussion questions give everyone an equal opportunity to connect and share.