ENOUGH ABOUT ME by Jen Oshman (Fan and Flame Book Reviews)
Jen Oshman, Enough about Me: Finding Lasting Joy in the Age of Self. Wheaton: Crossway, 2020. 176 pages.
Although strange at first, I grew to love it—the whole summer I rarely looked in a mirror.
During college I worked at a Christian sports camp in southern Missouri, and mirrors were not hung around campus except for the one I stood before as I brushed my teeth at the beginning and end of the day. I wouldn’t have realized mirrors are everywhere about our homes and schools and businesses, but you notice the contrast right away when mirrors go missing. You notice how mirrors invite occasional glances to check and recheck your appearance. And I admit all this as a dude, even one who’s wardrobe for a hundred days that summer consisted of an unbroken recycling of five gym shorts and t-shirts. The absence of mirrors, in a small but significant way, gave camp counselors the gift of self-forgetfulness.
Jen Oshman recently published Enough about Me: Finding Lasting Joy in the Age of Self with Crossway. The book doesn’t talk about mirrors and sports camps in southern Missouri, but the book does aim to set us free from our obsession with us, an obsession that steals our deepest joy rather than cultivating it. Jen and her husband Mark served as missionaries in Japan and the Czech Republic and now serve as church planters in Colorado. Oshman is the mother of four daughters, a podcaster, and a regular blogger on her own website, a guest contributor to places like The Gospel Coalition, and a staff-writer for Gospel-Centered Discipleship.
The audience for Enough about Me is primarily women, likely those in their 20s–40s who would show up to a women’s Bible study at a church. But the book intentionally aims at accessibility for those new to the faith. For example, Oshman writes near the middle of the book, “If you’ve ever been to church, you’ve likely heard the word gospel” (p. 69), which she then goes on to explain. New and non-Christians will feel at ease with statements like this and the stories of women grappling with what it might mean to follow Jesus and find lasting joy. Throughout the book, she introduces readers to many of evangelicalism’s favorite authors from the past and present, people such as Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Timothy Keller, Jared C. Wilson, Gloria Furman, and Jen Wilkin.
Oshman opens the book with the story of her tears as a young college student. Reaching goals hadn’t provided the comfort and joy she had expected they would. On the floor of her college dorm, she grabbed the Bible she brought to college but had never opened. “Although I believed in God,” she writes, “I didn’t know his word. That night, however, I grabbed it like a lifeline, reaching out for something more, something to help me catch my breath, find peace, and heal me” (pp. 20–21).
I found the final chapter particularly compelling, where she argues that a sub-Christian life is a life with a “safe, small god,” and “weak, meager faith” leading us to a “doable, manageable calling.” In short, a small god who beckons small faith who demands small obedience. The chapter made me think of a pointed question I recently heard posed by author and pastor Ray Ortlund. Ortlund asked something like whether Jesus was the glorious miracle worker that he says he is or if he is more of a “chaplain to our status quo”? Ouch. His question popped me in the nose before I had time to put up my guard.
But when we ordain Jesus as the Chaplain of Our Status Quo—or to use the words Oshman uses of a small god calling us to small obedience—our lives shrink and shrivel; they enfold inward until they collapse. The biblical story of redemption, however, tells a different narrative, one that expands our life rather than snuffing it out (p. 164).
Oshman closes the book by returning to where she opened, the story of her on a dormitory floor finding joy in God’s Word and the big God of the Bible calling her to big faith and big obedience. Oshman writes, “God, in his mercy and power, lifted my eyes from myself to him. It was in beholding him, that joy came” (p. 164).
I loved the book so much because, as Oshman tells her story of awakening, she also tells mine. And although the details may be different, if Christ has captured your heart, she’s telling your story too. Jen Wilkin writes in the foreword: “What is more fulfilling than a life spent chasing self-actualization? A life spent giving glory to the God who transcends” (p. 12). Enough about Me helps us embrace this paradoxical truth, the truth that we find life when we lay down our own to follow Jesus.
* Photo by Laura Lefurgey-Smith on Unsplash