Most of the books I review tend to be helpful and provide good insight into a topic I find interesting. A few books I read would fall into the truly life changing, life altering category. Books that shape me and my preaching, marriage, leadership or life. To fit into that category, it must be a book that I think everyone should read. Tim Chester’s book You Can Change: God’s Transforming Power for Our Sinful Behavior and Negative Emotions was one. The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection by Richard Plass & Jim Cofield is another one.
The authors walk through why we fail at relationships so often and show how that begins the before we are even born, but then our inability to deal with what our lives have been like and how to move forward. Many people cannot work well with others, can’t engage in their family or marriage, struggle to make work connections and all because of something in their past that has not been deal with. This isn’t to say that it is easy, only that, to live in true freedom and be our “true self” as the authors put it, we must deal with those things.
For me, this book was incredibly eye opening into my own heart and relationships.
Here are some things I highlighted:
- Loneliness is one of the most universal experiences.
- We are designed for and defined by our relationships.
- We are structured by and for relationships. Our relationships determine whether we have and enjoy life.
- To be appropriately close in relationships flows out of our capacity to trust others and ourselves well.
- how important people in our life feel about us is remembered not “in words, but in our emotions, body, and images in our gut-level way of knowing.”
- Not every emotion needs expression, but every emotion needs recognition.
- God chose to create us with the capacity for relational connection. God also chose to develop and nurture this capacity by relational connection. Reflect on that for a moment.
- It’s impossible to change what is false if we don’t take responsibility for it.
- We are masters at creating an image, but we are novices at recognizing and repenting of the image we have created.
- God longs for us to express our giftedness and to believe that he delights in us.
- We do not find our true self by seeking it. Rather, we find it by seeking God.
- Our truest identity is not a self we create but the self that God creates and freely gives to us in Christ.
- The greatest gift any of us can give another is a transforming, receptive presence.
- True-self living requires the willingness to embrace and tell our story. All of our story.
- Our story is composed of three things—events, emotions (surrounding the events we experienced) and interpretations (what we think we learned from the events and emotions of our lives). Events and emotions don’t become a story without an interpretation. Our interpretation is the script of our lives. It becomes my identity, and I become my interpretation.
- Whatever we do not own will eventually own us.
- God sees and knows us more fully than we can see or know ourselves. His interpretation of me leads me into a truer way of being me. His interpretation of me reinterprets my interpretation of me. What we discover from God’s story is that God longs for me and I long for God. We discover our true self in Christ.
- We cannot make peace with others without making peace with our past.
- we are nurtured by relationships. In the community we learn what it means to live out the story of redemption. In the community the Spirit of God resides, encouraging, teaching and guiding its members into a deeper love for God and others.
- Soulful relationships are a gift that requires our intentionality.
- Strong relationships are the fruit of doing certain things well.
- We learn to give love by first receiving love.
- We cannot engage well with others without accepting our limits and losses.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. This is one of those books that you should stop reading what you are reading and buy this book.