From Blah to Awe - Book Review

I tried bribing my teenage daughter to read the New Testament in exchange for a desperately-desired belly-button ring. Why would I do such a thing, you ask? She says the Bible is hard to understand and terribly boring, so she rarely cracks it open. By resorting to bribery, I hoped that if she at least got into it, she would find it interesting, even intriguing. Deep down I hoped it would touch her heart and soul so much that she would decide she didn’t need that belly-button ring anymore. I have yet to see if she will persist past the 4^th chapter of Matthew.  Maybe I need a different approach, and this is what attracted me to Jenna Lucado Bishop’s new book for teenage girls, From Blah to Awe: Shaking Up a Boring Faith.

Jenna Lucado Bishop doesn’t promise a vibrant soaring faith or a dynamic 24/7 awe achievable by the end of her book. However, she somewhat accomplishes her point – to shake us up a little so that we can stop settling for dull and blah and enter into a fuller, richer season of faith. She explores the questions of why we might get bored with God and how to shake our faith out of boredom.  By finding out why, we can then ask ‘how’.  She touches on the issues that teen girls face today that compete for time with God, like sensory overload. Through stories of other teen girls, she provides relatable examples. Opportunities to interact are presented throughout the book with thought-provoking questions and spaces to write out answers.

My teenager felt like she was being lectured at in between the stories, what little bit she read. I think this would be a great book for a teen, young woman, or even a preteen girl raised in the church who feels like she knows it all, struggles with self-righteousness, and is bored in her faith. When I was a teenager, I would have underlined and written all over this book! Considering the things my own teenager faces though, I think the reasons for boredom with God go much deeper than mentioned in this book and would be very little help for those in a full-blown war against Satan and the flesh.

To comply with regulations by the Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255, I am disclosing that BookSneeze® provided me a complimentary copy of this book.  I was not required to write a positive review and the opinions I have expressed are my own.