For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards
Jen Hatmaker, 2015
Thomas Nelson Press
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780718031824
Summary
Best-selling author Jen Hatmaker is convinced life can be lovely and fun and courageous and kind.
She reveals with humor and style how Jesus’ embarrassing grace is the key to dealing with life's biggest challenge: people. The majority of our joys, struggles, thrills, and heartbreaks relate to people, beginning with ourselves and then the people we came from, married, birthed, live by, go to church with, don’t like, don’t understand, fear, compare ourselves to, and judge.
Jen knows how the squeeze of this life can make us competitive and judgmental, how we can lose love for others and then for ourselves. She reveals how to...
- Break free of guilt and shame by dismantling the unattainable Pinterest life.
- Learn to engage our culture’s controversial issues with a grace-first approach.
- Be liberated to love and release the burden of always being right.
- Identify the tools you already have to develop real-life, all-in, know-my-junk-but-love-me-anyway friendships.
- Escape our impossible standards for parenting and marriage by accepting the standard of “mostly good.”
- Laugh your butt off.
In this raucous ride to freedom for modern women, Jen Hatmaker bares the refreshing wisdom, wry humor, no-nonsense faith, liberating insight, and fearless honesty that have made her beloved by women worldwidea (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1973-74
• Where—state of Kansas, USA
• Education—Oklahoma Baptist University
• Currently—lives in Austin, Texas
Jen Hatmaker is a mom to five children, a pastor’s wife, sought-after speaker, best-selling author and star of the popular series My Big Family Renovation on HGTV.
She is best known for her books 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess (2012), Interrupted: When Jesus Wrecks Your Comfortable Christianity (2014), and For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards (2015). (From the publisher.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
There is humor out there in the real world we live in, and Jen points it out. She doesn't sugar coat things, so don't dig into this book expecting it to be all hilarious. There are some jagged points in there too. Maybe it is different for everyone. It will all depend on you, and what you need to get out of her writing.
AnotherChanceRanch.net
There’s wisdom doled out in Jen’s humorous style and I think all women should read this. From beautiful thoughts for her kids, to the chapter on marriage, to encouraging women, friendship, social justice, the church and our calling as believers, this book will not only make you smile (and laugh out loud), but encourage you in so many ways.
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, conisder using these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for For the Love:
1. Discuss one of the central quotations from Hatmaker's book: "Live long enough and it becomes clear that stuff is not the stuff of life. People are." What does she mean? How do you relate this statement to your own life?
2. What about the Thank You Notes? Whom would you write thank-you notes to...and why? Why are they important?
3. Another quote: "Anytime the rich and poor combine, we should listen to whoever has the least power." Talk about what that means. Do you agree...or disagree?
4. Many reviewers use the word "hilarioius" when talking about this book. Do you feel Hatmaker's humor enhances or detracts from her message?
5. Talk about the reasons Hatmaker gives for young people leaving the church. Do you agree with her assessment?
6. Read what Hatmaker says below about raising children. Do you agree?
The best we can do is give them Jesus. Not rules, not behaviors, not entertainment, not shame. I have no confidence in myself but every confidence in Jesus….Jesus is the only thing that will endure. He trumps parenting techniques, church culture, tight boundaries, and best-laid plans. Jesus can lead our children long after they’ve left our homes.
7. What other sections—or passages—in the book strike you as particularly powerful, insightful, or perhaps even controversial...and why?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)