In case you've ever wondered, "Why Should I love myself?" my friend Beth Gormong and I wrote
Hello, Beautiful! This interactive devotional journal for women contains 40 stories from Beth's and my own journey--not an easy one--to finally love ourselves just as we are. At the end of each chapter is a journaling prompt or a coloring page.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction:
Our parents and church leaders taught us when we were
children that we could find the secret to fulfillment in the acrostic JOY
(Jesus, others, yourself). If you put Jesus first, others next, and yourself
last, your life would brim with happiness. In theory, this sounds like the
humility and servanthood Jesus taught and practiced. Yet we’ve all known women
who’ve put their husbands, children, and friends ahead of their own genuine
need for value and love, only to end up mentally burned out, physically beaten
up, or emotionally bruised.
There is a better way to a life of joy: love yourself.
Jesus told us in Luke 10:27 that one of the greatest
commandments is to love your neighbor as yourself.
The writers of Romans, Galatians, and James reiterate Jesus’s truth by
telling us that if we love our neighbor as ourselves, we are fulfilling the law
and doing right. (Romans 5:14, Galatians 13:9, James 2:8). So, the principle to
love ourselves in order to love others comes from God’s Word.
Yet we see low self-esteem and even self-hatred around
us every day. Women who can find something good to say about anyone but
themselves. Women who mistakenly think they’re acting in sinful pride if they
say, “I’m happy that I refused to gossip today when I had the opportunity.”
Women who even starve themselves to look like the latest fashion model or to fit
into a smaller size of pants. Women beaten down by society—and even by well-meaning
but mistaken church leaders—that they like very little about themselves.
That’s why we wrote
this book.
We want to see women take Jesus’s words seriously enough
that they are set free from erroneously thinking they are never good enough, that
they must be perfect to be loved, and that skinny equals pretty. We want to
help women break free of faulty teaching and bask in the reality of God’s high
esteem and deep love for them. To love themselves without guilt or shame. If
women catch the Master’s meaning of true love—starting with themselves—as
precious ones made in God’s image, they’ll hold their heads up high. The gleam
in their eyes will reflect the love they’ve willingly received from God. And
there will be no end to what they can achieve to make this world a lovelier
place.
Because once women realize a truth and act on it, no
power on earth or in hell can stop them.
Are you ready to start an adventure that will shake up
the old ideas you’ve had about how God sees you and how you should see
yourself? Are you ready to find out how greatly you are valued by your heavenly
Father? Are you brave enough to learn that you’re allowed to finally look in
the mirror and say—regardless of your size, shape, or social standing—“Hello,Beautiful!”?
