Anything:The prayer that unlocked my God and my soul by Jennie Allen.  Jennie and her husband Zac  are in full-time ministry that as a pastor’s family and Jennie Blogs as well.. She has written this book about their journey about saying ANYTHING to God and how when they prayed anything that it was a true test of their willingness to trust God because when you pray anything you have no idea where God is going to take you.
The book is broken up into three sections. Part one is everything keeping us from anything and it talks about all the things that we should abandon when we are trying to give God anything. So we should abandon unbelief. We should abandon pretending, abandon shame, abandon approval, abandon entertainment, abandon fear, and abandoning this whole life. It really comes down to If he’s going to use our entire life for anything he needs to have all of it.
Part 2 is about praying anything and it talks about waking up, new eyes, and real change, big God , praying anything , a thousand little problems, got brushes and dominoes, no turning back and spreading insanity lots of yeses. This talks about how we don’t know where God is going to ask us for or do anything; whether we can give anything over or we can give our homes, we can give our children, we can give God our cars,our ministries, ourselves and being willing to say yes to whatever he has for us. It’s a very scary process but as Jennie points out, in the end it is one of the most rewarding and exciting processes.
And section 3 Living Anything. Seeing God:our purpose here, Blast Off: Overcoming doubts, Out of control:God in the Chaos War on: fighting brave, backward: where freedom hides, better dreams: poured out, and wind:everything different. It takes a lot to give God Anything. and when it rains it pours…it can be downright craziness. God may ask for a whole lot of Anything all at once and that can be very overwhelming. God blesses those who pay attention and so we want to make sure that we understand that even though God blesses those who are willing to give anything that also can be really difficult as we are promised that things aren’t always going to be good or easy, bad things are going to happen, that we’re going to be tested and the trials are going to come and we need to be willing to step out in faith and give him anything anyway.
One of the my favorite chapters in this book is chapter 15 and it talks about doubts and so many times when we step out in faith and we give God anything and one of our biggest struggles can be doubting whether or not God wants us to do something. I struggle with this a lot. We can either let those doubts rule and give in and say I’m not going to do that but if we’re really really giving God anything we’re willing to step out and if it’s not from God, God will close the door but we need to be willing to take that step and trust God with anything….and everything.
I must confess I really enjoyed this book though I don’t know if it necessarily struck me where I am at this moment. I think that it’s a perfect picture of where today’s churches are. I see a lot of what Jennie’s talking about in our church and in churches across the Christian spectrum. I believe that she’s in touch with the nerve of those who have inherited their faith. (I don’t believe that you can go to heaven on your inherited faith that you must accept Jesus as your personal savior ) but when you do that in the young age when you’re raised in a family that trained you to trust and to believe in Jesus especially her first chapter that talks about A plastic God that she hits the nail on the head with how we we feel like God is sitting on our mantle and we do things to please him but he isn’t real to us and so I think she strikes a chord within the church today. I gave anything to God at a young age (16) and so I can see as she was explaining throughout her book about anything, those processes that I too went through as a young girl giving anything to God and anything took me halfway around the world. anything took me to Bible college . Anything married a pastor, anything gave me children, anything gave me a child with special needs, anything gave me something I didn’t want something I didn’t expect. Anything means to extend grace and to love far deeper than I ever expected! What anything taught me in Romans 8:28 and 29 is all things work together for good for those who love and serve the Lord isn’t just what my “good” is but what God’s good is. God’s good is that I grow and I become more and more like Christ and that’s really really hard to fathom, In the entire book which I I pretty much enjoyed there wasn’t anything that I disagreed with. I believe that Jennie is right on. There was one negative : it was slightly confusing because in the forward of the book Jennie says to do the study that comes with the book with friends OR ON YOUR OWN however when you get to the study in the back of the book it says do not do the study on your own. It is very explicit in saying that you should not do the study alone that you should do it with a group of friends for accountability purposes. I’m fine with either one of those however if if you want me to do it with somebody probably shouldn’t say it’s okay to do it alone in the forward of the book. So that’s my only gripe about the entire book, it’s really not much though. I do give it a five out of five stars.
HERE ARE A FEW FAVORITE QUOTES FROM THE BOOK
One of my favorite quotes comes from chapter 10 Big God
“ if God is really real and we are going to live with him forever shouldn’t he be the only thing.”
Another favorite quote comes from chapter 9 New Eyes and it says
“until there is total surrender there is no vision”
And another quote comes from “scrapbooks” and it says
“God gives us enough faith for whatever the stories of our lives will hold even in the worst of days”
and this this struck a chord because this last year was one of those worst of days matter fact it held six months worth of worst of days and it’s so refreshing now that we are coming out of those dark dark times that we have these promises and it’s so true and God gives us that faith . Another quote from that same chapter is
“God builds our lives whether we give him permission or not”
so if you give him permission and you’re willing and you’re watching and waiting you’re going to expect that. However if you don’t give God permission God still grows your life. It can be excruciatingly painful, worse then if you were expecting it.
This book was provided free of charge for review from BookLook Bloggers.
