At first, I thought this book was going to be shallow and flip but the further I got in to it, the more touched I was by Ms. Hatmaker’s story. Jen comes to realize she is bled dry inside. As a pastor’s wife, she is doing all the right things but feeling less and less satisfied by them. She discovers that she has taken on the veneer of being a Christian but has not embraced the deep roots of being a Christ-follower. Through humor (I laughed out loud a couple of times) and a wonderful ability to poke fun of her complete cluelessness at times, Ms. Hatmaker invites all of us to look at Jesus as a total life focus rather than as a nice addendum to an already charmed, upwardly mobile life. She challenges us with the statement that in doing any act of service, great or small, with a heart of love (as much as we fallen humans can generate at the moment), we truly are doing it to Jesus.

For example, she talks about the time she took off her cowboy boots, a much-wanted Christmas gift from her husband, and put them on the altar in a poorer area of Austin, Texas as part of a call to give shoes to the homeless. It made me wonder if I had heard that same sermon, would I have taken off my shoes on a rather cold night and left them for a complete stranger?

Ms. Hatmaker quotes Richard Rohr frequently and one of the quotes that particularly spoke to me was the one from his book “Simplicity” on page 91: “We cannot think our way into a new kind of living. We must live our way into a new kind of thinking.”

The one thing that made me a bit uneasy in the book is that the church she and her husband felt called to start, Austin New Church, has only been in existence about two years. I would have felt more confident in her story if there had been a few more years of radical discipleship for her to share about; I found myself wondering where they would be five years from now.

That said, I was challenged to take the Matthew 25 parable of the sheep and the goats more seriously, even as I smiled a lot while reading that challenge.