Girl Wash Your Face

I will get right to it. I read a critical review of Rachel Hollis’ book, Girl Wash Your Face that, in my opinion was wrong. It claimed that she isn’t really a Christian. Some of the reasons is her lack of bringing everything back around to God. Also, she wants to be in the top Fortune 500 and wants to be like Beyoncé. Rachel writes about our ability within ourselves to achieve our dreams and goals. Instead of bringing a Bible verse into every solution, she gives tactical examples of how to proceed and mentally create habits that are for achieving goals. Her real life experiences are less than squeaky clean and her candid honesty is raw and unapologetic.

Ya’ll, I recommend this book for anyone. I have books that I love that bring Biblical truths into real life situations like Sheila Walsh’ book, Its Okay Not to be Okay. I am in a book club reading through Bob Goff’s book, Everyone Everywhere. Both these books bring a solid relationship with God to the forede front of everything in our lives. I love that about these books. Regarding Rachel’s book, as a counselor I am aware of how important it also is to have real tactical tools to apply to achieving goals. On one hand, you need to know that God will provide for you the water you drink. You also need to know how many ounces you need to drink each day for optimal physical success and how to build the habits necessary to achieve that goal for each day. In my line of work, that is also referred to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, real life applicable tools for success.

I don’t care much for Beyoncé but Sandra Bullock is my example of how I want to hit 40 with a healthy body. I don’t want to be in the Fortune 500 but I would love to achieve my current goal of being an amazing counselor. I am an amazing chaplain. I dream of writing a book and doing speaking and a book tour. I know I can achieve this. I know God is guiding me. That is not pride. I lay every day at his feet. I also know how to utilize the tools at my resource.

Maybe it is our warped sense of humility that has people questioning Rachel’s salvation. Let me clarify that here. Humility is knowing that we are lost and bound for eternal death without God. With the grace of Jesus Christ’s death, resurrection we have eternal life with God, our father. That is humility. It is not humility to deny our dreams, to not know how to utilize the tools God has put in our beings for dreaming, goal reaching and exploration. False pride is pretending to not be confident about your abilities and success.  I am confident in my ability to work with children, to comfort the hurting and make homemade pizza like a boss.  It isn’t humility to pretend I am less than what God has created in me, an amazingly talented woman capable of so much more than I can ever comprehend because I was made by the Creator of the universe. Rachel makes that clear that she is a Christ follower. She also makes it clear real life applicable tools to develop successful habits to achieve your goals and dreams. Also, when you reach those dreams, pretending to not do an end zone dance, that’s not humility. That’s stupid.

There is an audience that can be reached with Girl Wash Your Face that will see a Christian being successful and ask more questions. There is an audience that will see a successful Christian in Sheila Walsh and in Bob Goff. Read the book if you want. Don’t read it if you don’t want to. Do not speak out against someone you don’t know. For the love of all our sanity and Christian unity, lets stop this bashing of our fellow believers. The church is experiencing a major divide in America. That however is a post for another day.