I was in Wal-Mart today, feeling in the mood for something new to read, so I wandered over to the book aisle… and I ended up with a book that I think every Christian woman should read… especially if she’s a wife who desires to really, truly, be the wife her husband needs. Here’s how I happened to end up with it.
Wal-Mart has a decent Christian section, so I checked it out, mostly looking at the fiction books to see if an author there interested me. But right above them were these two little books that caught my eye. One was called For Women Only and the other For Men Only. I picked up the one For Women Only and read the back:
________________________
…the truth about his inner life
he desperately wants you to know…
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“What’s going on in there? Ever been totally confused by something your man has said or done? Want to understand his secret desires and fears, his daily battles that you know nothing about?
In a woman-to-woman conversation you’ll never forget, Shaunti Feldhahn takes you beneath the surface into the inner lives of men. This book is about the things we just don’t “get” about guys. With findings from a groundbreaking national survey and personal interview of over one thousand men, For Women Only is full of eye-opening revelations you need to not only understand the man in your life, but to support and love him in the way he needs to be loved. Grounded in biblical hope, you will discover how to love your man for who he really is–not who you think he is.”
That was enough to make me open the book and start reading… I won’t start typing out the whole book here, but I will quote the two paragraphs on the second page that really made me want to read it:
“Have you ever been totally confused by something the man in your life has said or done? Have you ever wondered, looking at his rapidly departing back, Why did that make him so angry? Have you ever been perplexed by your husband’s defensiveness when you asked him to stop working so much? Yeah? Me too.
“But now, after conducting spoken and written interviews with more than one thousand men, I can tell you that the answers to those and dozens of other common perplexities are all related to what is going on in your man’s inner life. Most are things he wishes you knew but doesn’t know how to tell you. In some cases, they’re things he has no idea you don’t know. This book will share those interviews an those answers. But be careful, ladies. You might be slapping your forehead a lot!”
Sooo….. have I got you interested? I hope so! Truthfully, I’m not sure exactly why those two paragraphs interested me so much. I’ve read the Mars & Venus books and learned a lot through them about how different men are from women… but those books aren’t written by a Christian. So maybe that’s why this little book (only 200 pocket-sized pages) interested me. But it did… so I read part of the first chapter there in the store, and then picked my rotisserie chicken back up off the floor where I’d set it and carried both over to the cash register. I came home, kept reading while I fixed rice and veggies to go with the chicken, kept reading while I ate, and finally finished the book while hubby was watching his movie.
And I am very, very glad that I bought it.
The thing about this book is… it’s so simple and straightforward… and it’s really “straight from the horse’s mouth.” See… the author was doing research for a novel with a male main character, and she wanted the character to be realistic, with realistic struggles and problems that men deal with. So she started researching for the novel… and she started uncovering things that she couldn’t believe were normal for men to think… so she used her influence to get some major surveys going with carefully crafted questions (so they weren’t “set up” for pat answers) and found more and more that, as she said, “she hadn’t happened to pick the weirdest 100 men on the planet!” With the help of her husband and pastor and other trusted male friends, she worked to truly understand exactly how normal and real these truths were… and then she set out to explain them to women in a way that women can understand!
This book is NOT a “get your husband to do what you want” book… it is rather an explanation of the wonderful way in which our husbands were created by God… which just so happen to be so different from us that we are understandably confused! I really loved the way she wrote it from her heart to the hearts of women who really truly want to help their husbands be all that they can be. She explains why our best-intentions so often backfire… and ways that they are backfiring more than we realize… yet in a way that just filled my heart with so much encouragement and hope. One of the most amazing things was which things men assume we understand… things that are so foreign to most of us women that we’d probably never even imagine it up if we tried!
I have to warn you that, if you are naive as to some of the struggles that men… even Christian men… have on a daily basis… then this book might have some shockers in it for you. Me… I got these shockers a number of years ago, so I was only glad to see that more women are becoming aware of these things. Why? Because the difficult-to-face truths that this book explains are, I believe, necessary for women today to be aware of… to help our men and pray for them. We have contributed to men’s struggles and temptations far too much through our ignorance already.
And I have to tell you that the end of the book proves just how oh-so-worth-it it is, if we will truly desire to understand our husbands and truly desire to be the wives that they need. I actually choked up at the end, and for me, that is extremely rare.
So!… Here is a link to the book on Amazon.com so you can read the first several pages if you like, and also have a mental picture of what you will be looking for in the bookstore:
Me… I am going to go pick up a copy of for men only and find out if she’s as right-on in that book (which is co-written with her husband, so as to be guy-to-guy) as she is in this one. I especially want to find out which things guys have no clue about. *smile*
Tell me if this little book meant as much to you as it did to me…
Definitely makes me want to read it. I also want to read “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands” that Mom and Aunt Diane raved so much about. I know there’s a lot I just don’t ‘get’ about Ben no matter how much I try. I would love an ‘insider’s’ view expecially because questioning Ben about himself always winds up in an “I don’t know.” … and he really means it. Sigh. Thanks for the good recommendation.
Well, well, well …. Although I am the only one who comments on your blog, it does seem that you have a few other readers! The one roughly located in Texas is probably my friend Natalie (you’ll see her link on my page … I’ve got that same dot.) The one roughly located on the Eastern shore … one of David’s friends … probably Johanna, I’m thinking. I don’t know for sure, but it’s out from that area. Again, I have the same dot. Arizona? you got me. Don’t know who that it.
Hey Katie, I read this book probably close to a year ago and I thought it was good too. I saw it in a catalog and the caption interested me. I didn’t realize until I started reading it that it was geared toward married women, but it was still insightful. After I read it, I noticed some of the stuff the author mentioned happening among my guy friends…David inculded. ;0)