IS THIS IT?
The difference Jesus makes to that where-is-my-life-going-is-God-even-there-will-I-end-up-alone-will-this-ever-feel-like-home-I-hate-my-job-I-have-no-real-friends-I-wish-I-was-back--at-school-am-I-failing-at-life…feeling.
By Rachel Jones
The Good Book Company. 207 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 1 784 983 314
Rachel has the uncanny ability to able to look inside my mind, express the longings of my heart in such a truthful but comical way, that I’m left chuckling and then fist pumping ‘Yes! Exactly!’
This book is useful for anyone with existential-based angst, though its target audience is clearly the (oft-maligned) millennials, who find themselves cut adrift from the structures of home and education and surfacing in adulthood wondering: ‘Is this it?’
Promises of ‘you can do anything’ have turned into the daily grind of an unsatisfying job, or perhaps no job. Ideas of marriage or even dating haven’t materialised, close friends are now scattered, options are fewer and life seems dull at best and meaningless at worst. This book clearly articulates the feelings of doubt, rootlessness and loneliness of this generation, empathises with them, but then points clearly to God’s word, and to Christ as the solution and fulfilment of these longings. Rachel says: ‘My whole life feels segmented. No one knows the whole 360 degrees of my existence. Except, that is, God.’
The chapters are helpfully divided into common emotive/relational states and she delivers each with a chatty style which feels like the honest friend you needed.
There are a couple of missteps, where complex situations are a little over-simplified, and she correlates too closely the relationship between God’s wrath at sin to our ageing and ultimate death in the chapter ‘Getting Older’, almost implying that we as Christians are experiencing some of God’s wrath.
One chapter I found particularly impactful was ‘Rootlessness’, where the reader is encouraged not to spend every weekend endlessly trying to keep up every friendship made in Uni, but to look at cultivating relationships in your local church setting, getting to know your spiritual family where you are, and plugging into the life of community and service to God. Advice I badly needed back in my own 20s.
The final chapter on self-doubt is so encouraging. It lifts our eyes from our own measures of success – the unattainable Instagram dream – and upwards to God. It highlights the important work that his indwelling Spirit is doing, and our place in the glorious narrative arc of God’s story.
