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goodreadsTitle: Do You Think I'm Beautiful?
Author: Angela Thomas
Genre: Christian non-fiction
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 208
Date read: October 2006, February 2010
"Do You Think I'm Beautiful?" is a non-fiction book about the love affair we (ought to) have with God. It points out scripture after scripture of how God loves us, is enthralled by our beauty and wants us to not be wall-flowers but come dance with him. I often found myself moved to tears by the beauty of it. Even if nobody else seems to, God loves us above anything else. It took some getting used to, to read of God's love as a romantic love, but then it struck me, why not? There are different kinds of love - romantic love, friendship love and family love, just to mention the most obvious ones. If I'd ever thought to categorize God's love (other than 'just' being divine), I'd have called it family love. But isn't that limitting God's love? After all, Jesus calls us friends (John 15 somewhere), so obviously there's friendship love involved as well, and a marriage is pretty empty without romantic love, so when we're called to be the bride and Jesus the bridegroom, shouldn't that be included as well? I'd never thought of it that way before, but put like that, I guess it makes sense?
I now regret it took me so long to read it, as it might have been able to help me through some of the hard times by teaching me not to rely solely on others for my happiness and feeling of self-worth, but leaving that in the hands of God.
Reread in 2010: While I still greatly appreciated the message shared in the book, I wasn't quite as blown away by it as on my first read through, and therefore had to downscale my rating to 4/5. I'm not sure what the difference is, only it jumped out at me on this read-through that Angela Thomas spends a lot of time on the theory, and very little on how to put it into practice. I think just about any Christian woman would want to dance with God, but if a person doesn't know how to actually go about doing it, they won't necessarily learn it from this book.
On the other hand, they might. And it's still a beautiful sentiment and theory, so I'd still highly recommend it.
Author: Angela Thomas
Genre: Christian non-fiction
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 208
Date read: October 2006, February 2010
"Do You Think I'm Beautiful?" is a non-fiction book about the love affair we (ought to) have with God. It points out scripture after scripture of how God loves us, is enthralled by our beauty and wants us to not be wall-flowers but come dance with him. I often found myself moved to tears by the beauty of it. Even if nobody else seems to, God loves us above anything else. It took some getting used to, to read of God's love as a romantic love, but then it struck me, why not? There are different kinds of love - romantic love, friendship love and family love, just to mention the most obvious ones. If I'd ever thought to categorize God's love (other than 'just' being divine), I'd have called it family love. But isn't that limitting God's love? After all, Jesus calls us friends (John 15 somewhere), so obviously there's friendship love involved as well, and a marriage is pretty empty without romantic love, so when we're called to be the bride and Jesus the bridegroom, shouldn't that be included as well? I'd never thought of it that way before, but put like that, I guess it makes sense?
I now regret it took me so long to read it, as it might have been able to help me through some of the hard times by teaching me not to rely solely on others for my happiness and feeling of self-worth, but leaving that in the hands of God.
Reread in 2010: While I still greatly appreciated the message shared in the book, I wasn't quite as blown away by it as on my first read through, and therefore had to downscale my rating to 4/5. I'm not sure what the difference is, only it jumped out at me on this read-through that Angela Thomas spends a lot of time on the theory, and very little on how to put it into practice. I think just about any Christian woman would want to dance with God, but if a person doesn't know how to actually go about doing it, they won't necessarily learn it from this book.
On the other hand, they might. And it's still a beautiful sentiment and theory, so I'd still highly recommend it.
