3.16.2017

Enjoy - A Book Review

The idea of rest and Sabbath and enjoying and delighting in God and His creation is an idea that I've been really thinking about a lot these past few months. So when I saw Enjoy pop up as a book to check out, I thought it would be a good fit for a devotional/bible study addition. I was right.


Trillia Newbell is not an author I'd ever heard of before but she covers this the idea of finding opportunities to enjoy the things God has provided us with in many ways. She talks about food and friendships and marriage and the sabbath and even art appreciation (yes, the arts!). I started reading this book and really pondering the end of chapter questions and thinking about how to apply it. Then I realized while that was great it was going to take me over two months to review this for y'all! So I speed things up. But it's not really a case of mile wide, inch deep because those are practical sides to an underlying issue of how everything in our life really should point back to God and how that fact is freeing. It enables us to enjoy it.

I'm also slowly working my way through a classic education textbook type book called Norms and Nobility. One wouldn't think those overlap much but they have. Norms and Nobility talks a lot about how modern education (and the modern world in general) has become very utilitarian. I don't think the church is immune to the effects of that. But Enjoy tries to combat that in a very practical, yet theologically sound, way.

Part of my wishes it went a bit deeper on some issues although now that I think about that, I see how that's not what she was going here but it will enable me to continue that on my own. I plan to go back again on the chapters I did faster and re-read and answer her questions and then go on to pursue some other books that focus deeper on the one to two issues that I think I struggle most with this. For me that means maybe a few of Flannery O'Conners pieces about Christians and their art which I've been hearing about and maybe a book that focuses on the Sabbath. But other people may have other issues they want to go dive deeper into.

 It's got a great conversational tone; I think Trillia sounds like a woman I could easily be friends and I think Enjoy would make an excellent book for a weekly or monthly women's discussion group.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

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