Review: Simply Tuesday

Are you tired of not feeling important enough? Does your everyday life feel too small in a world that pushes you to have big dreams and great goals? Emily Freeman has a few thoughts about that. In Simply Tuesday, she shows readers how we can embrace today's work, how to deal with the inevitability of disappointment, and ways to find contentment in our lives. This book is a balm for the reader who feels like their small life will never be enough.

Throughout Simply Tuesday, Freeman talks about the concept of benches. She writes about her instinct to do more, to help, and to fix things. Instead, she suggests that we need to take the time to sit and take life in. Sitting on a bench with someone is an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation and really listen to another person without having to rush away.

Freeman takes the bench metaphor further to challenge readers to be bench builders. We want to have answers, to know that our work will produce results, that people will respond the way we want them to. But we can only do so much and then we have to wait and see what will happen. We are not in control of the outcome, in our lives or in our work. We build our benches and then wait to see who will come and sit on them.

"As I begin to slow, I see smallness is not a punishment but a gift. Rather than something to fear or run from, my smallness can be a celebration, an invitation for me to lie back on the wide, green earth and let the world spin the sun right up above me. I can breathe a sigh of sweet relief as I realize I had nothing to do with it. The effort is in believing it's true, not in controlling the outcome. I have to remember this. I must."

This is a really good and, dare I say, an important book. This book changed my perspective about everyday life and I can see myself reading it again and again. Simply Tuesday will confirm that you don't have to run the race faster than everyone else. You are already enough as you fold that load of laundry or drive that same commute for the millionth time.

"What if God's intention for the world and me begins here, on my regular Tuesdays? What if we decided to take back Tuesday from the wasteland of to-do lists and give it a prominent place in our walk of faith? What if, instead of thinking we have to choose between our ordinary life and an extraordinary life, we began to realize they're the same thing?"  

Simply Tuesday: Small-Moment Living in a Fast-Moving World

By Emily P. Freeman

Fleming H. Revell Company August 2015

256 pages

Received for review from Icon Media Group