Book Review

TerKeurst, Lysa, Uninvited, Nashville, TN, Nelson Books, 2016, 275.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AUTHOR

Lysa TerKeurst is a wife to Art and mom to five priority blessings named Jackson, Mark, Hope, Ashley, and Brooke. She is president of Proverbs 31 Ministries and author of nineteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Best Yes, Unglued, and Made to Crave. Additionally, Lysa has been featured on Focus on the Family, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and more. Lysa speaks nationwide at Catalyst, Lifeway Abundance Conference, Women of Joy, and various church events.

To those who know her best, Lysa is simply a woman who loves Jesus passionately, is dedicated to her family, and struggles like the rest of us with laundry, junk drawers, and cellulite.

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: I’d Rather Ignore Honesty: Honesty finds us and speaks to us the truth about our inner selves. The truth prevents us from accepting the self that we try to convince ourselves of by pretending and positioning. Honesty wants us to bring to the core of who we believe that we are and hold it up to the light of what’s really true. Honesty is not trying to hurt us. It’s trying to heal us. Our own self-rejection we assign to others making their rejection our own. Rejection isn’t just an emotion we feel. Rejection causes us to believe lies about ourselves, others, and God. Rejection steals the best of who I am by reinforcing the worst of what’s been said to me.

CHAPTER 2: Three Questions We Must Consider: Lysa describes her early childhood in which she found comfort hidden away from others. She felt safe and in control. She discovered two core fears that feed a person’s sensitivity to rejection. They are the fear of being abandoned and the fear of losing one’s identity. Her fear was that her daddy would leave her. Our identity to Christ must be anchored in the truth of who God is. We need to develop an “intimacy based identity” by answering three core questions: Is God good? Is God good to me? Do I trust God to be God? The mind feasts on what it focuses on. What consumes my thinking will be the making or breaking of my identity.

CHAPTER 3: There’s a Lady at the Gym Who Hates Me: Lysa learned from a woman in the gym that her perceptions of others is not really the truth. We should live from the abundant place that you are loved, and you won’t find yourself begging others for scraps of love. This is living loved, but it is not easy to live loved when your life is filled with feelings of rejection. The world entices your flesh but never embraces your soul. We run at a breakneck pace to try and achieve what God simply wants us to slow down enough to receive from Him. God’s love isn’t based on me. It’s simply placed on me. And it’s the place from which I should live … loved.

CHAPTER 4: Alone in a Crowded Room: Lysa describes an experience in which she was alone in a crowded room feeling all alone. She learned that proximity and activity don’t always equal connectivity. People don’t mind doing CPR on a crisis victim, but no person is equipped to be the constant lifeline to another. Do I walk into situations prepared with the fullness of God in me, free to look for ways to bless others? Do I walk into situations empty and dependent on others to look for ways to bless me? When past rejections make me so prone to satisfying or at least numbing the flesh to avoid more pain, it’s hard to resist. The more fully we invite God in, the less we will feel uninvited by others.

CHAPTER 5: Hello, My Name Is Trust Issues: Lysa has lived being hesitant. She wants certainty and prays that everything will align with her own way of thinking. She wants everything to be like a math equation. The answer never changes. Life and relationships are unpredictable and success requires trust. What we see will violate what we know unless what we know dictates what we see. God pursues us and fills us with His goodness. If we seek fullness from any other source we must let some of the fullness of God leak out.

CHAPTER 6: Friendship Breakups: In friendships we hope that our “I” turns into a “we.” In spite of doing your best friendships often ends. We want to be right, but those who care more about being right than ending right prove just how wrong they were all along. Truth says that I have an enemy, but my friend is not the enemy. Ephesians 6:12 tells us who the real enemy is. Truth proclaimed and lived out is a fiercely accurate weapon against evil. We rise above the circumstances and determine to hold to the greater good in the grand scheme of things. We honor God when we remember that our job is to be obedient to God. Everything else is God’s job.

CHAPTER 7: When Our Normal Gets Snatched: Rejection can be summed up as feeling that your normal has been snatched away. Rejection is worse than death. You grieve both, but rejection means that you must grieve the loss and wrestle through the fact that the other person wanted to leave. Rejection stings because everything that was once normal is disrupted and taken away. God is there and He is good to us. We can’t continue to fully embrace God while rejecting His ways. If we step over the hurt feelings and turn from the box of bitter rot, we are then free to pick up the box of sweet, pure lilies. Grace is necessary to choose the box of lilies. It is impossible to hold up the banners of victim and victory at the same time.

CHAPTER 8: The Corrective Experience: Relationships don’t come in packages of perfection; relationships come in packages of potential. It is best to approach others with a “me too” instead of a “you should.” The “me too” approach puts all parties on the same team looking for a solution. Abigail in 1 Samuel 25 used the “Me too” approach when she talked with David who was preparing to kill her husband. David was feeling rejected and not belonging. Acceptance is like an antibiotic that prevents past rejections from turning into present day infections. Revisiting the past rejections with healing words that correct or rewrite the lies that wounds people is call “the corrective experience” in counseling.

CHAPTER 9: Why Does Rejection Hurt So Much? Lysa was rejected for a position because of the other person’s Bible brilliance. She saw also the difference between their physical bodies. MRI studies show that the same areas of the brain become activated when we experience rejection as we experience physical pain. Rejection isn’t just an emotional feeling. It’s a message that alters what you believe about yourself. God If we have humility we can know that God does not set us aside. Rather, He sets us apart for something better that we have imagined.

CHAPTER 10: Her Success Does Not Threaten Mine: Lysa hoped to get a book writing offer from a publisher. She was disappointed when a friend received an offer but she did not. On the outside she said the right things, but she was hurting on the inside. Lysa learned that the raw essence of honest hurting rarely produces pretty thoughts. If we allow our thoughts to stink, that smell will leak out of every bit of us—our words, our actions, and especially our reactions. We honor God when we have a mentality of God’s abundance instead of our scarcity. We must learn to celebrate the success of others. There is an abundant need in this world for your exact brand of beautiful.

CHAPTER 11: Ten Things You Must Remember When Rejected: The enemy, Satan, loves to take our rejection and twist it into a raw, irrational fear that God really doesn’t have a good plan for us. The more consumed we are with rejection, the more he can control our emotions, our thinking, and our actions. Lysa list ten things to remember and proclaim to take back control from something or someone that was never meant to have it. Failure at other pursuits all helped Lysa to come to know her true calling. God isn’t afraid of your sharp edges that may seem quite risky to others. He doesn’t pull back. He pulls you close.

CHAPTER 12: The Enemy’s Plan Against You: Lysa describes a missionary trip to Africa, a place where lions roam and seeks food from any source. She compares this with the devil who roams the earth seeking to destroy us. He destroys our minds with cravings when we are lonely. We lust when we feel deprived, and we boast when we feel rejected. The devil is vicious, but he is not victorious. When tempted by the devil Jesus exposed the way of escape for us from feelings of emptiness, deprivation, and rejection—with truths straight from God’s word.

CHAPTER 13: Miracles in the Mess: Lysa confessed that too many times she highlighted the verses telling of Jesus’ miracles but skim right past those telling of deeply human realities. Jesus healed the daughter of a synagogue ruler (miracle), but they laughed at him (realities). Don’t get so consumed by and focused on the mess—that you miss the miracle. We can be changed if we apply the word of God to our everyday personal lies. The voices of condemnation, shame, and rejection can come at you, but they don’t have to reside in you.

CHAPTER 14: Moving Through the Desperate In-Between: In chapter 14 Lysa shares some very personal feeling of being rejected. Rejection drowns a very alive soul with sorrow. It’s like oxygen is being blocked. Love is like oxygen. When relationships are good we breathe easily, and we hardly notice breathing. When love leaves us we panic as we sense the desperate need for oxygen. Love is double edged with the most beautiful potential and the most dangerous pain. We find freedom and healing when we place our hope and future in the hands of God. We must embrace pain as necessary for healing. Lysa offers ten prayers based on Psalm 91 to help us go through the process of healing.

CHAPTER 15: I Want to Run Away: Lysa shares her feelings of rejection each time she experienced the loss of a potential love mate. Lysa learned that no one could fix her inside from the outside. The only answer was to turn to the Lord. Jesus experienced rejection and had to stand alone. He had to choose to suffer the pain. He accepted God’s will—“Yet not what I will, but what you will.” The facts of our past does not determine God’s plan for our lives. The olive tree goes through various phases before it can produce olive oil. Our destiny is brought to fruition through experiences both good and bad.

CHAPTER 16: What I Thought Would Fix Me Didn’t: Lysa was picked to by her third grade teacher to be in a writer’s contest. A wasp sting prevented her from participating in the contest. She thought that this would be a quick fix for her feelings of rejection. She learned that the spotlight never fixes our insecurities. It only magnifies what we thought popularity would cover up. God wants to give us good gifts, but he will not honor our chasing the chase of these things. Overcoming rejection can never be dependent on overcoming a perceive obstacle. Rejection does not have the final say. With Jesus we are safe because grace has covered our imperfections and rejections. With Jesus we are forever safe, accepted, held, loved, and invited.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

In Uninvited, Lysa TerKeurst opens herself up to the readers showing her vulnerability. She openly admits to the truth about herself and others. She begins this work expressing that we must be honest with whom we really are so that we can assess ourselves based on truth. Otherwise, we blame others and God for our feeling of rejection. The truth that Lysa trust in is found in the word of God. Lysa has learned to identify with Jesus. Jesus was rejected, but He understood that His purpose was to suffer rejection by a world that He came to die for.

Suffering rejection leads to loneliness. Lysa learned to pray, not to escape rejection and loneliness, but to find strength to endure the pain. We must believe that God is good and He is good to us. God loves us and He will be with us in our times of rejection and loneliness.

Although Lysa apparently wrote this book primarily to a female audience, I found that the principles that Lysa expressed are gender neutral. God is God regardless to the person that is feeling rejected. I found this book to be beneficial to my own life. It helped me to understand that my feelings of rejection I had covered up by rationalizing that it was not me personally that had been rejected. I simply thought of my rejections as being the result of my choice of the positions that I stood for in my life. I believe that if we stand in faith for the truth of Jesus those who are opposed to Jesus will be rejected.

I would recommend this book to all persons that have ever felt rejected and lonely. Lysa uses personal experiences, scripture readings, prayer and faith to help her to know the truth about herself, others, and God. We can do the same for ourselves.