Jennie Allen’s Find Your People: Book Review + Giveaway
This is not what I normally do, but this book I’ve been reading meshes so perfectly with the ripple-effect lifestyle of neighborhood missional living we’ve been leaning into together that I just had to share a review. This is a book that can change your life. Change your relationships. Change the way you feel lonely and unknown and empty.
Hang on until the end because I’m going to share how you can win a free copy of this poignant and timely book. Yes, I want you to read this book so badly I’m going to give one of you your own hard-cover copy as soon as it releases (Feb. 22).
If you read the title, you’ve already caught on that the book is none other than Jennie Allen’s new book, Find Your People. I’ve been meeting with a lovely handful of neighbor ladies to discuss Jennie’s podcast, Made for This, and that’s where I first heard her talking about the book she was writing.
Jennie shared about a way of living that resembles village life, and I’ve gotten a taste of it here in my own neighborhood, but I long for more and deeper. More neighbor-friends popping in unannounced. More meals shared. More meals cooked together or cleaned up together afterwards. More showing up and less tip toeing. More showing up unannounced and less planning it all out. More real and relational and vulnerable, and less polished and prettied and guarded.
I couldn’t wait to soak up all the wisdom Jennie had to offer in Find Your People because I want to keep growing, keep doing this life-on-life stuff with neighbors better. And I want to be better at helping you grow deeper friendships with your in-real-life neighbors and step into your God-gifted purpose to join Him on His mission in your everyday life.
By the way, if you’re dying to read the book as soon as possible, you can still join Jennie’s inside team too! You just preorder Find Your People, then sign up at jennieallen.com.
Now, onto the book.
First, it’s harder than you can imagine to put down. I’ve said this about other books too, but there is a special pull to this message and grace to Jennie’s words. She’s lived the without and fought for the relationships that now form her closest friends and her village. And she will tell you where she failed and what she learned, and all of it will help you grow. You get that from the book—that she wants more than anything to help you grow so you can live in the fullness of together with your people.
Second, it’s going to make you a little uncomfortable, but you’re going to want it to. It’s going to feel like Jennie is reading your mail, but she’s also willing time and time again throughout the book to meet you in the middle of the messy and pull you up with the truth of God’s Word. She doesn’t shy from the truths that are hard to swallow, but she offers them wrapped in grace and her own transparency. She won’t ask you to do anything she’s not also willing to do. Even if it’s hard. Even if it’s messy. Even if you have to try again and again and not give up.
I know you must be curious, so I’ll share a few lines from Find Your People that especially wrecked me.
“Only when we let down our guards and allow ourselves to be known can we get over ourselves and get on with loving people,” Jennie writes. Let’s stop right there, because this is so very important. We take ourselves too seriously some of the time. Or most of the time. And I’ll be the first to raise my hand. But we can’t see the people right in front of us when we’re focused on building walls. And we can’t love our right-in-front of us neighbors when we don’t even notice them. Jennie invites us to the brave path of vulnerability that allows others to actually know us. When we stop trying to be anyone but ourselves, we love those around us much more fully.
More from Jennie: “If you are trying to make friendship an addendum to your busy schedule, it will never work. You have to build it as you’re going. Relationships should arise out of your everyday places and your everyday activities.” Yes, yes, and YES!!! I want this for my neighborhood, and I want it for yours too—friends that bump into each other throughout the week because we’re in and out of each other’s houses (even when they’re looking all the way lived in) and borrowing ingredients from each other’s kitchens and congregating in driveways and garages and houses and watching each other’s kids and dogs and helping each other with projects and joining each other at the gym.
Here’s another quote I kept circling back to: “I believe that God is asking you and me to let people into our daily lives, into our deepest struggles, into our sin, into our routines, into our work, and into our dreams.” Jennie lays it all out there, and I realize how much I want this too: the proximity, transparency, accountability, shared purpose, and consistency that Jennie unpacks in the chapters of the book.
I’m not one to sign up willingly for conflict. It’s something this peace-preferring Enneagram 9 is working on. Yet Jennie shares that conflict is part of knowing our people really well, and it can strengthen friendships if we choose to not walk away. Listen in: “Without people pleasing, pride, and personal happiness at the center of our relationships, we live free enough to fight and humble enough to apologize and safe enough to work it out. People can disappoint you, and you can hurt other people, and forgiveness can be issued when we’re looking to God, not others, for our hope, our identity, our purpose.” Don’t you want this too?!
I’ll leave you with one final line that hit home for me because I’ve been practicing this since 2019, when I chose open as my word of the year: “And yet whenever I hide behind my walls with the doors locked tight to keep out the potential of being misunderstood, or wronged, or devastated, or disappointed, or disillusioned, or mistreated, or hurt, I’m also keeping out the good things—everything we are built to crave: being encouraged, being held accountable, being seen, being loved, being known.”
Find Your People will speak to your deep longing to know others well and be known well by others. To be really yourself and part of true community. To find (and keep) your people. And it will give you a path that will get you there.
Enter the Find Your People giveaway!
This isn’t just a book I highly recommend, but one I want so badly for you to read that I’m going to mail one of you a hardback once it releases. I wish I could give each of you reading a copy. I can’t, but maybe you too can buy one extra copy of Find Your People and give it to a friend. Even better, read it with a friend, or a few friends.
Here’s how you can enter the giveaway:
May you be brave with Him,
10 Things You Might Be Doing That Keep Your Friendships Shallow
(+ 1 Simple Habit to Shift Your Direction)
If you long for deep, meaningful relationships, this is for you!
Change your actual life in less than 5 minutes per day!
You can change your actual life in less than 5 minutes a day because baby steps truly can change the trajectory of your life. If you want 2021 to be the year you actually start living on mission in your neighborhood, this little book (available as a paperback and on Kindle) will help you get there. Each of the 30-day devotions takes but a few minutes to read, but they will lead to lasting life change.
