Does God Really Like Me? A book review

In my work as a spiritual director, I see a lot of dedicated, faithful Christians who believe that God loves them but struggle to experience God’s love in an affective way. Deep down they feel that God is disappointed in them, scolding, judging, frustrated. If that’s your experience, it’s hard to be deeply connected with God, to experience God’s love. And when I suggest that God delights in them, people are often taken aback, disoriented by considering this life-changing possibility. What if it were true that God likes you? What would that mean? How would that change your life?

In their book Does God Really Like Me? Discovering the God Who Wants to Be With Us, Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw challenge us again and again with the reality that God likes us, that God desires us, that God wants to be with us. Their goal is to get that message through to us on whatever level we need it. And the Holsclaws are able to speak to us on many levels, Geoff is a theologian, both are pastors, and Cyd is a life coach and spiritual director.

Some of us have theologies or ways of reading scripture that keep us from knowing that God likes us, that God desires to be present to us. To help us out, Cyd and Geoff have a huge focus on telling the big picture story of scripture in a way that highlights their point. From the creation and fall story in Genesis, through the story of Israel, through Jesus’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection, through the early church and all the way through the new creation of the book of Revelation, they trace God’s desire for us, God’s delight in us, God’s presence with us.

Read the full book review on Englewood Review of Books