Book Review: Loving God with All Your Mind

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: Loving God with All Your Mind (This link goes to a page that announces an "Updated & Expanded" edition. What I've reviewed here was the original paperback edition. I look forward to updates about the updated book.)


Author: Elizabeth George

Author's web page: http://www.elizabethgeorge.com/

Date: 1994

Publisher: Harvest House

ISBN: 1-56507-861-6

Length: 248 pages including study guide and endnotes

Quote: "God uses these Scriptures to give me hope and help me overcome negative emotions."

Well, I suppose that's where she was...I have to admit that this book disappointed me. I was hoping for something more like The Mind of the Maker. Dorothy Sayers really did love God with all her brilliant, creative, logical, witty, and well-informed mind--the sort of mind with which more women need to identify.

Elizabeth George presents her mind, in his book, as able to hope only for relief from her neuroses. Her memory and imagination only ever trigger bad moods, so she feels a need to limit her awareness to the present moment only. She doesn't believe she can make any beneficial changes in her life; she only lets herself try to "accept the unacceptable" and seem content while every neuron in her body is screaming that she's not content. If The Stepford Wives were real, Elizabeth George leads us to believe, she'd want to move to Stepford.

I wouldn't recommend this book to most people...but before burning it, I found myself remembering some of the actors and musicians I used to know, coming down from acid trips--which, we now know, is physically similar to withdrawal from prescription antidepressants. Some of them could have used this book. Temporarily. So it's not that the book is bad or useless; it's just a book about living at a level of consciousness most of us don't want or have to live at.

The "tiny minority audience" needs to be stressed because too many people (including women) assume that anything that's by or about some Christian women ought to interest all Christian women, and most of us aren't where Elizabeth George seems to be. Some of us may never get there. Some of us can imagine this state of mind only by analogy with something that comes along relatively late in our lives.

For example: When I started spending enough time online to "meet" e-friends, I'd sprained an ankle--mildly--and, it turned out, also strained some muscles deep in the hip and thigh, that took longer to heal. After the ankle seemed healed, there was a time when the sensations in the affected foot didn't make sense. It would feel as if I were wearing shoes that were too tight, and I wasn't wearing shoes. It would feel as if I'd stepped into a snowdrift, and it was July and I was sitting in a house in Tennessee where the thermostat was set to a nice Green 80 degrees. Those hip and thigh muscles were pinching the nerve, causing the nerve to "tell" me all kinds of things that had nothing to do with reality. I had to ignore what that nerve was telling me for a few months.

That's as close as I've ever come to the state of mind in which it might be useful to try to ignore all of one's own actual thoughts, feelings, and memories and just try to stumble through life behind that creepy Stepford Wife look and act. Probably it's as close as most of the people who read this review have come to that state of mind. Yet we've been told, often by people who claim to be Christians, that that's where all of our minds are and how we should be living, all the time. I suspect that more of us need to be paying more, not less, attention to our own consciousness and intuition and feelings.

Even people who really do have mood disorders need to pay attention to what they're feeling, when, and why, rather than trying to discount it and tune it out as "negative emotions." For anyone who is sane enough to deal with the reality that unpleasant moods happen, it's much more helpful to pay attention to our unpleasant feelings, to understand what's causing them and solve the real problem...whether the real problem is tight shoes, a pinched nerve, food allergies, lack of creative solitude, or even one of the diseases that really do cause depressed or hostile moods as a symptom. After all, medicating depressed moods won't make cancer go away, but in some cases curing the cancer may make both the depressed moods and the life-threatening disease go away.

If something, like having used various street or prescription drugs, is interfering with the normal use of your mind, then tuning out your real feelings and pasting on a smiley face might help you. You can't trust your feelings to tell you what else needs to be changed. You just have to get through the days until the really crazy mood swings have passed.

Right. Fair enough. This is the state of mind in which many people come to church looking for help; this is the kind of advice they need. But church people need to be very, very, very careful about recommending this book to anybody who hasn't told them she's been on drugs, or in a hospital, within the past year. This is so not the way the entire group "Christian women" need to be living or thinking.
 
If you know one of the minority who can use this book, click here to buy it secondhand at a price ($10 includes shipping) that includes a 10% royalty payment to Elizabeth George.