This book bothers me, but it’s not book’s fault. Yes, like most self-help books, it’s overwritten and it restates the obvious – you have to learn to say ‘No’, even if you’re a Christian. This is similar to other self-help genres: You must live within your means to stay solvent, and eat less while exercising to lose weight.
It’s not like these things are rocket science.
Thing is, I have boundary issues, but for a weird reason: I’m very, very selfish. For most of my life until I became a Christian, if something benefitted me or made my life easier, even if it was WRONG, I could rationalize it. This lead to me being a friendless, fat, whiny, sociopathic, self-righteous sot. Envision Comic book guy, and you’d have me, circa 14 years old:
So, as I grew up and found God, I went back the other way: Wanted to please everyone, serve everyone–do pennance for how much I’d taken from people emotionally my whole life.
Anyway, so this book….Not so much the book, the CLASS surrounding the book. It’s your standard “watch a short video, then have a discussion” class. Here’s where things go wrong. The authors of the book are presenters in the video series, and they ick-me-out, and they’re repeating what they said in the book, almost verbatim.
Anyway, I don’t like the facilitators, either. There, I said it, and I’m ashamed to say it. There are just times they peg my BS meter, and for the life of me, I don’t know why. I’ve been praying about that, and I really don’t have an answer…
Might just boil-down to personality, preference, etc. Dunno…
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But anyway, “Boundaries” is a valueable book if you’ve forgotten how to say ‘No’, or you believe that a Christian can never say ‘No’.