In fact, walking away from the search for absolutes is often the best thing I can do for my mental and spiritual health: accepting that, just like none of those books can change my life in any radical way, choosing to be a person of faith isn’t about having all the answers, either. Rather, it’s about embracing imperfection as the very thing that connects me to others and to my Creator, an acceptance that I like to call grace.
I got a gift card for a bookstore for Christmas, so early this week I went to use it, get me a book or two. And right at the front of the store, almost sticking out into the mall, was a big island with a massive number of self-improvement books. From financial hacks to losing weight fast, to the secret to happiness and why your mother-in-law will never love you – there was something for everyone.
“New year, new you”, said a sign standing tall above all these books, making it nearly impossible for me to walk by without second-guessing my life choices. Inevitably, I couldn’t just move right past the island (literally, since the island was covering most of the entrance), so I stopped to see what the selection was.
And with each
book title
I read,
I felt worse
and a little less
confident.
But that’s the strategy of the self-help business, isn’t it? To make people feel the need to become something they aren’t yet – otherwise, no books would ever sell. It creates the problem and offers a solution. Or, to put it more bluntly, self-help books will only sell if they make a potential buyer feel like sh*t.
If you think about it, the premise of the genre is to provide the consumer with the answers to that specific area/season of life; it offers certainty in exchange for our money, as if deep wisdom – like anything else in a market ideology – could be purchased or traded.
And guess how many of these books were related to the topic of faith and spirituality? Hmm… I got too overwhelmed to count (or maybe too busy imagining an athletic version of myself), but it was certainly more than a few. After all, few combinations are more profitable than faith and certainty.
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