Nothing to Prove // Book Review

Don't you want to believe you are enough?  Don't you want to stand confident in your enoughness {smart enough, strong enough, pretty enough, funny enough, godly enough, good enough...}?  I know I've been there much of the time.  Striving.  That's what it equals out to: striving to be enough.  But who of us frail humans ever makes it - really?  That's right {& I'm learning it's freeing}.  You aren't - & you won't ever be - enough.  That goes for all of us.  Every last one.

In Jennie Allen's book Nothing to Prove, this radical idea is presented & opened up to all us not-enough-striving-ones.  The answer she gives as salve to our hurt egos & misinformed we-can-do-it-all-ourselves / we-are-the-heroes-of-our-stories self confident students schooled in self help & self madeness is this...  Jesus.  We are not enough, but Jesus is.  Always & every time.

Nothing to Prove is divided up into 2 parts: "Our Desert of Striving" {speaking to ways we try to be enough & are never satisfied, because hello, the big truth here is we aren't enough!} & "God's Streams of Enoughness" {with words of how He is always our enough}.  And yet she doesn't sugarcoat that in this passing away world we will experience thirst & ache, because we aren't home yet, & this is our dusty journey to where we belong - with our heavenly Father - our enough.  One of my favorite things in this book are the Bible stories Jennie starts each chapter in part 2 with.  She puts them in her own words & in the words of the biblical characters living them out all those thousands of years ago.  And, sure, there's some liberty taken on minor details left out of the original text, but the true meat is there & it is so relatable & it gives new eyes to old stories that I now want to go back to in the Bible & pour over once more, because I have new eyes to see.

Confession Time:

I am one to say things like, "the only thing good in me is Jesus" & "it was only through Him..." & other perfectly true statements when the time arises, that point to Jesus as my enough.  But looking back in the files of my mind, I wonder how much of the time those were realizations only after the massive striving.  I wonder at my application of what I can easily quip.  I wonder at my daily living-it-out of this head {perhaps not always heart-&-soul} knowledge.  This book has challenged me.  I want to live & breathe with Jesus as my enough, & I want to walk out His purposes in His - not my - power.  I don't want to try to be enough anymore.  I can't be something I'm not.

"I am the vine; you are the branches.  If a man remains in me & I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."

-John 15:5

P.S.: It's Good Friday at the time of this post, & it feels especially fitting, because there is now no doubt: Jesus is our enough.

P.P.S.: I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review.