The Love Dare - Stephen & Alex Kendrick

[goodreads]

Title: The Love Dare
Author: Stephen & Alex Kendrick
Genre: Christian non-fiction
Rating: 2.5/5
# pages: 222
Date read: October, 2010

Too many marriages end when someone says "I've fallen out of love with you" or "I don't love you anymore."

The Love Dare discusses how these statements reveal a lack of understanding about the fundamental nature of true love.

The Love Dare is a 40-day guided devotional experience that will lead your heart back to truly loving your spouse while learning more about the design, nature, and source of true love. Each reading includes Scripture, a statement of principle, the day's "dare," and a journaling area and check box to chart progress

A couple of years ago, I decided to do the 30 day challenge, and found it extremely satisfying. Somebody recommended this book to me as an alternative. I thought it sounded interesting, and got it out of the library about a month-and-a-half ago, deciding to read one chapter a day, and doing the challenges as they came.

It started out being very similar to the 30 day challenge, and I enjoyed following it (think my husband did too, even if he had no clue what was going on ;) ), but I quickly discovered that this wasn't nearly as well thought-through as the 30-day version. The authors made a lot of assumptions that made it less generally relevant, and many of the challenges couldn't be done just any day, but required a certain event taking place that day to even make sense (e.g. the challenge on how to make up after a fight - I'm not about to initiate a fight just in order to complete the challenge!). Also, they used not just one but three chapters on encouraging the reader to become a Christian. A worthy cause, to be sure, but not really appropriate as three challenges in a love dare (just to explain, the love dare is NOT about love in general - in which case these challenges would actually have been very appropriate - but solely about the love between a husband and a wife). Since it's a Christian book, I think it's okay to assume the reader is a Christian and just add an appendix with "If not..."

I finished it partly because I got stubborn and partly because some of the challenges were actually really good, but in general I'd recommend everybody do the 30 day version (even though that's aimed at wives and this book is aimed at both parts of the couple - just ignore any personal pronouns and you'll be fine ;) ) and give this one a miss.

I still want to see the movie "Fireproof" though, as it's apparently either inspired by this book, or this book was inspired by the movie. Sounds like it could be a very sweet movie.