"In every way, you are enough for God." (Is this the conclusion to be drawn from his desire to create me? What is the evidence for this claim? I don't see anything mentioned, scripturally or logically.)
"We will use our thoughts about the goodness and generosity of God as a growing point, to which we will add breathing exercises in order to relax our minds and bodies. Let's begin" (1).
"If I was God and I was thinking about you, I would think that you were just like me. I would think that you were pretty freaking amazing. And I would love you" (3). From the beginning, this premise isn't based in Scripture, though Scriptures are quoted, but rather in some imagination of how things would be "if I was God." Basically, alert, alert, alert!
"You are the beautiful and good creation of an all loving God who made you so that you could experience and enjoy life. But no one ever gave you an instruction manual. People were cruel to you and life began to include much hardship. You have only ever been doing the best you could. The best you know how to do given the circumstances" (21). In some ways, this is graceful truth. But it is not the whole truth. That is a shoddy picture of why God created us, if the explanation is void of any mention of a relationship with him. And I'm not saying that the points he's making aren't inappropriately dismissed by some in certain theological circles (ie, sometimes we really are doing the best we can in our own woundedness and condemnation just leads to further harm), but I'm pretty sure that the omission of even the slightest reference to sin is dangerous, and could be considered heretical here.
"The good news is that your brain can continue to grow and learn new ways of living. You are not stuck in this way. The good news is that God looks to you with compassion and grace. God does not see filthy, God sees beautiful. God does not see wretched, God sees wounded. God does not punish, God restores. All this time you have contained within yourself the glory of God and you have only ever been doing the best could to protect it. Now that you are grown, you can begin the journey back to your original glory, the glory of a human being created perfectly in the image of its creator" (22). Again, the fact that not even a nod is given to sin, atonement, justification, etc in this discussion makes it hard for me to see it as coming from a Christian worldview. And honestly, I just don't have much interested in a worldview that is clearly not a Christian worldview, trying to package itself as that.
So many of us need a message like the one he gives in page 29, where he tells us to speak to ourselves and say, "God dwells in you. God likes you. God enjoys your company. God's capacity for compassion is in you. When God looks at you, he overflows with love towards you. Just the way you are, with all your sins and shortcomings, you are enough for God because you are God's child." This IS TRUE for the believer, and that is glorious, but part of the reason it's glorious is because of what God has done to deal with sin, the fact that our guilt isn't unfounded and he has dealt with the very real shame, not because we were foolish to believe guild & shame ever existed.
"If you encounter presence that was not kind or safe, then it's not Jesus." Is this true for all of us all the time? He mentions this right after discussing the story of God driving out those buying & selling in the temple. Did those whom Jesus drove out with a whip find him safe and kind? I firmly believe and cling to the fact that because of Christ's work on the cross, God'd disposition toward us is always kind and safe. But again, you're leaving out key pieces of the puzzle for this fitting in with an orthodox Christian worldview. This is so frustrating to me because so many of us need to know that for the believer, God's disposition toward us is one of kindness, gentleness, and unconditional acceptance. But if you're saying that he's like that at all times to all people, it just doesn't make sense! Not to mention that such things make me feel unsafe, the idea of God showing the same disposition toward me as the unrepentant abuser of children, the impenitent actor of genocide, etc.
He does have so many good things to say. We need messages like, "emotions are meant to draw your attention to what's going on around you" (91), and pointing out that Scripture teaches that God also has emotions. And that "emotions aren't good or bad, they're just information."
But then... "Your emotions only ever tell you the truth," and "the truth is highly subjective." I think he's trying to say that we don't feel things for no reason, that we need to get curious about what's going on instead of just disregarding/stuffing, that our emotions are showing us how we are interpreting what's happening, or as he expounds later, "emotional processing relies on data from prior events, not from logical reasoning" (92). But for the LOVE, this is so convoluted of course I can't look here for more good info.
I did make myself finish the book. He did have more to say about sin near the end (day 28). He says, "This [his retelling of the Prodigal Son] is a true story. It is the story of every one of us, who went our own way in search of freedom and pleasure, only to end up wounded and alone" (178). That is the most I'd heard him say that could be seen as talking about sin. Soon after, he says, "God became a human in Jesus so that we might experience the revelation of our belovedness and his goodness. That's what the Gospel is all about. God would become his own creation so that we would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were loved and that his intentions towards us were only ever good. The Father didn't require Jesus' blood to be poured out like some kind of vengeful pagan deity, requiring death to be appeased. It was us who needed to see God die at our own hand before we would believe that this intentions were good,that he wouldn't control us or punish us. It was us who was blinded--by sin--to the reality that God is always close at hand, that he has never withdrawn his presence from us. When Jesus died, he sunk down into death itself, taking all the sin of humanity with him, lower than any person had ever sunk before. Because he was God, death could not hold him and he defeated it, rising to the right hand of God, cleansing us from sin and bringing with him every one of us who has ever lived" (179). 🥴 I'm not even sure what to say about that. But these theological views, paired with what I found to be a confusing explanation of emotional issues, made this a book I cannot recommend.
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