Corey Shannon's Reviews > The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery

There are few books that tangibly change the disposition of your being, and The Gift of Being Yourself is one of those books for me. The depth and breadth of this book that is literally less than 100 pages is absolutely outstanding to me. I read this for a course in undergrad that was structured around Identity, and this book clearly discusses this with its subtitle being “the sacred call to self-discovery”, but reading It in post-grad has been a true balm for the soul.

There are heaps of books that encourage individuals to journey the road of self discovery, but this work does it in a way that anchors every moment of that process in the person of God. Bennett has such a gift in articulating the Gospel, while also expounding on the historical churches dialogue surrounding the self in relation to God, that invites the church of today to return to the important work of knowing ourselves in relation to God for the sake of the world.

I think this is a particularly poignant read for those like myself who have grown up in the contemporary Protestant church, for rather than demonizing the self, it redeems and reorients the reader to a kinder, more gracious perspective in which the love of God literally transforms an individual into their true self - the person we were made to be in Christ. The only way we can 1)experience the person of God and 2) be a declaration of his love in our current moment and to our neighbor, is through the conduit of our individual selves. So knowing and journeying deeper into God to find the fuller versions and purer images that God has made us to be allows us to pursue these two essential goals of the Christian life with more clarity and intention.

Bennett consistently maintains this work in the love of God, and is constantly ensuring that this work is not for the sake of the self alone, but for the purposes of the Kingdom of God seeing its fuller realization in and through us by the power of the Spirit. What a gift this book is. I highly recommend. Plus there’s a tiny portion of enneagram discussion in there for my enneagram lover friends.

A few quotes I loved (although there’s literally something underlined on every single page in my copy of this book):

- “True knowing of our self demands that we know our self as known by God, and true knowing of God demands that we know God not just as an abstraction or as objective data but in and through our lived experience” - page 19

- “Jesus is the image of the invisible God. Thus he is the filter through which we need to pass all our ideas about God as we seek to move from knowing God to meeting God personally in Jesus.” - page 35

- “We are graven on the palms of God’s hands and never out of the Divine mind” - page 45

- “I only know Divine unconditional, radical and reckless love for me when I dare to approach God just as I am. The more I have the courage to meet God in this place of weakness, the more I will know myself to be truly and deeply loved by God. And the more deeply I know this love, the easier it will be to trust it as Christ did - preferring God’s will to my own” - page 49

- Genuine Christ-following will always make us more, not less, human” - page 88

- “Christ’s way onto self-fulfillment is not like any way we could ever have imagined. His way involves losing our life so that we might find it, dying so that we might live. His way is always the way of the cross. Death always precedes new life.” - page 94

“The mystery of the Christian gospel is that our deepest, truest self is not what we think of as our own separate self but the self that is one with Christ.” - page 101-102