John Woods reviews Spiritual Health by Rachel Bedford.
I begin most of my emails with the statement: “Trust you are well.” Most of us are happy when we are told, “You are looking well,” (even though at a certain age it means: “I see that you are still alive!)
Rachel Bedford speaks to an age that is obsessed by wellness, something that appears to be a desirable but an elusive pipedream.
This book is divided into four sections.
- Understand Your Soul
- Recover Spiritual Health
- Strengthen Your Spiritual Anchor
- Build a Spiritually Healthy Future
In section one the author establishes a Biblical understanding of “soul” and reminds the reader that if we need help to be well, it does not come from self-help but from another source. I appreciated the honesty with which the author writes: “Within a Christian framework we have permission to say: ‘I have not got this’. In fact, it is essential to acknowledge this.”
One of the things that I enjoyed about this book is how the author was able to speak about her own life and experience without the book becoming about her. This makes it highly relatable and accessible.
The second section is on how to recover spiritual health, where the author explores the importance of the spiritual disciplines in relation to prayer, church, communion and The Bible.
Here I appreciated the reminder that this is not a to-do-list: “But what I want to say, loud and clear, is that Christian teaching about religious practice should never feel like you’ve just been given more things to do.”
Instead of seeing spiritual disciplines as a to-do-list, the author encourages the reader to see them as gifts given by God to promote our spiritual health.
The third section helps the reader think about the key anchorage points that help us stay well: tradition, stewardship and heaven. Knowing where we have come from as Christians, being grateful for what we have been given, and knowing where we are going help to orientate us and anchor our lives in the unchanging faithfulness of God.
The fourth section deals with how we prepare for the challenge of the future.
Making wise decisions about our lives, staying spiritually full, investing in the next generation and viewing spiritual health as a vocation that we pursue wholeheartedly are ways in which we can promote spiritual health in ourselves and others.
There were a few quibbles about this and that. Calling Christian ministers “priests”, a perspective on communion that not all will share, and aspects of the author’s spiritual experience might not sit well with everybody, but this is a really good book that I hope people will read and say: “It is well with my soul!”
This is a fresh, contemporary book that will help people navigate life and learn how to develop greater spiritual resilience.
SPIRITUAL HEALTH: In Pursuit of Resilient Wellbeing
By Rachel Bedford
IVP. 164 pages. £13.99
ISBN 978 1 789 745 900
