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 | Title: Nice Girls Don't Change the World
Author: Lynne Hybels
Publisher: Zondervan
Format: Print book
Reviewer: Lynn Fowler |
A small hardback - just 96 pages of widely spaced print, interspersed with pictures, this will not take long to read. However, it is likely to speak strongly to women who have found themselves in a similar position to the author.
The cover flap comments state, "Nice girls are taught early that serving God means earning God's love and sacrificing oneself to meet the needs of others." The author tells how here early years were influenced by "hellfire and brimstone" preaching: "I heard a lot about sin and punishment, guilt and shame."
The result was that, from the age of 10, she set out to earn God's love: always trying to do the right thing, always sacrificing her own pleasures, always putting herself out for others. She was in every possible way a "nice girl."
This lifestyle continued after she married her husband Bill, and moved with him into very busy full-time ministry.
As a result, by the age of 39 she was so deeply depressed that she wanted to die. Instead, she sought help from a counselor, and through her learned that the alternative to a nice girl is not, as she had believed, a naughty, mean or bad girl, but a good woman. Being a good woman, she learned, "means moving from the weakness and immaturity of girlhood toward the strength and maturity of womanhood."
It took her ten painful years to make the shift, and now she seeks to help other women do likewise, hopefully with less pain in the process.
She also learned that there is an even greater alternative, but for that you'll have to read the book.
The cover flap also notes that portion of the author's royalties from this book will be donated to ministries in South Africa and Zimbabwe that serve widows, orphans and people infected with HIV/AIDS.
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