Book Swap

• 

Sydney’s choice for Ashlin: Anxious for Nothing by Max Lucado

I’m going to be real with you for a second, when I started this book I had very low hopes. I mean, yeah, it has a lot of good insight on anxiety and how to overcome it, but no fun stories that I can relate to or even enjoy reading. But let me tell you, my thoughts on the book changed quickly. Maybe there weren’t a ton of crazy stories, but there was a whole lot of truth. Max Lucado dives deep into anxiety, what it’s like to have it, and why we should be “anxious for nothing”.

I have just recently started dealing with anxiety. I was hit with it pretty hard after I had my seizures, and it’s been there ever since. But there is a lot in Anxious For Nothing that changes my perspective on anxiety. I started in a place where I thought, “I’ll never get over it” and by the end, this book helped switch it to “Jesus is greater”. One of my favourite quotes is this:

What you have in Christ is greater than anything you don’t have in life. You have God, who is crazy about you, and the forces of heaven to monitor and protect you. You have the living presence of Jesus within you. In Christ you have everything.

Max Lucado

This is such a powerful statement, and there is so much truth in it. So, although I struggled to ‘get through’ the book at first, in the end I truly enjoyed it and found it helpful!

Ashlin’s choice for Sydney: Everybody, Always by Bob Goff

I love this book. Bob Goff is a marvellous story teller. Everybody, Always stays interesting the entire time as he brings in stories from his own life and then gives you this incredible metaphor for it (my personal favourite is a chapter called 3 Green Lights).

Okay, I should probably stop here and tell you that I did read Everybody, Always when it first came out in 2018 but I decided to read it again for this book swap. For this reason, I probably noticed more than most readers would on their first read through, but honestly, it felt like I’d never read it before! I was worried that I was going to be bored because I knew all of the stories already, but I couldn’t put it down! It was stirring thoughts in my heart, and I had this strange desire to just love. It was like the book had reached deeper than before. The first time I read it, I was like okay cool, this guy is a good writer, and he’s got a pretty cool story, but this time, this time was different. It’s like this book unleashed a feeling of desire that hadn’t been unleashed since Peru. It was an absolute desire to serve. So I started serving. I had already been serving in a lot of different areas within my church, so instead of taking on more (& inevitably burning out), I stepped up. I lead a small group, so I decided to try and figure out ways to connect with them more (& love them better). I volunteer at a program for middle schoolers, so I put more effort into developing relationships with my students. There were so many other areas where I just tried to love more. Bob Goff’s book Everybody, Always awakened a desire in me to love the people around me.