Bekah's Bookshelf: My 2025 Reads So Far

 

Once again, this month, I did a lot of reading. As a reminder…I was challenged by a gentleman at the school where I’ll be starting class this fall to read an hour each day. He said it would help me get in the groove of studying and learning if I read for work starting now. I read seven books in June, and this first one in today's lineup was actually the final one from that month. It was recommended to me by my friend, Jodi, who sent me a robust list of books she learned from when she worked with the hospitality teams at her church.

                I’ve loved most of her recommendations, but this one wasn’t one of my favorites. The book is called Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business by Danny Meyer. Danny has made a (wonderful) career of establishing restaurants in New York City, including Shake Shack. Most of his restaurants are high end, and perhaps that was part of my disconnect with this book: I’m not high end! (Ha!)

                I told Ryan that there were pockets of pages throughout the book that really stuck out to me. I underlined several things and found some great nuggets to take into my work in church hospitality. But parts of it didn’t apply to me because the chasm between restaurant hospitality and church hospitality can be wide. And there were extended sections of the book that just felt like long bits of storytelling and name dropping. (Except when you don’t know the names, it’s not as impressive.)

                Danny really has done a great job of learning how to go above and beyond to learn the kind of staff he needs and how to motivate them to represent his brand. And he’s done an amazing job of going above and beyond to treat his customers well. I did learn much from him on that. But I actually fell asleep multiple times reading the memoir-feel side of the book.

                If you work in customer service and can get around the long, high-end restaurant stories, I think you’ll find some great nuggets in this book. I just wish it would have been about 1/3 the length and skipped straight to the parts that were actually about the transforming power of hospitality.

                The first book I actually read in July was a delightful read that I finished in two days flat. It’s called Now and Not Yet by Ruth Chou Simons. It was just released last year, and because I follow Ruth on Instagram, I’d read a bit about it in recent months. I had it on my wish list, but because it was so new, the price was on the higher end of things, so I hadn’t bought it yet. And guess what? I found a copy in a thrift shop a few weeks ago.

                I was so happy! It had been marked up by the original reader, and that was a little bit distracting for me, but it was so worth it. What a treasure of a book! Ruth is about my age, married, a mom of six, and ministers through art and writing. This book is written for those who ache to live a life that isn’t their current reality. Maybe one day it will be. Maybe it won’t. But either way, it’s not present-day life, and that makes it hard.

                Ruth’s words are full of encouragement to understand that God has bigger, broader priorities than doling out neat, tidy lives to us, and that we can live fully by trying to live well in our present-day circumstances, even if we’re praying for change. She saturates her words with examples from Scripture of people who lived well in the now while waiting for the not-yet.

                Ruth poses fantastic, thought-provoking questions throughout the book, and I did a lot of chewing on her words. I’ll be doing even more of it in the days to come. I wish I would have purchased this book for myself when I was in the waiting season for my job. I want to think it would have helped me wait more productively. But I’m so glad to have read it now. I’ve already shared its words with friends, on social media, and with a group I spoke to at church.

                If you’re in a season of waiting, I highly recommend this one! She can’t fix the dilemma, but she can urge you to wait well in the Lord!

                When Ryan and I helped lead GriefShare this past spring, one of the ladies in the group recommended a book called Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament. I wrote the title on my TBR list and was delighted to find a nearly-new copy at Half Price Books not long after that. Beside it was another book by the same author, called Waiting Isn’t a Waste. I decided to buy them both, and after I finished Now and Not Yet, I decided to keep the waiting theme going and read Mark Vroegop’s book Waiting Isn’t a Waste.

                Fun fact: Mark is a pastor in Indianapolis, so it felt a bit like reading a home crowd book! Let me skip straight to this, though: this book was transformational for me. I don’t often sling that word around with books. Many books impact me. This book was transformational. I absolutely wish I would have had it earlier in my life, because I think it would have transformed my heart.

                Waiting – for anything – isn’t the most fun any of us have in life. It’s true for me, and I’m guessing that is a fairly universal perspective. Mark doesn’t pretend to be above that in his own life. But he writes about how to shift our perspective away from viewing waiting as a surprise or something to endure with irritation and to instead recognize it as the common happening it is and to approach it as an chance to allow God to shape us.

                Mark points to places in Scripture that show us waiting is commanded by God and has consistently been part of how He chooses to work in this world and through His people. We would do ourselves a tremendous favor by learning how to wait actively and well.

                There aren’t a ton of books I read that I immediately want to gift to everyone and lead a group through in a study, but this one is just such a book. And if you are thinking, oh I’m not in a waiting season right now, so I’m exempt, I disagree! One of the specific points he makes in the book is that we would do ourselves a tremendous favor by learning to wait well before we are in a season of waiting. So this book really is for everyone.

                (PS – it’s just over 100 pages and SUPER easy to read. Even if you hate reading, you can do this.)

                On the heels of reading Mark Vroegop’s book on waiting, I went on to read Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, his book on Discovering the Grace of Lament.

                This book wasn’t as wowing to me as the book on waiting, but I fully imagine it’s because I’m not walking the road of grief right now. (And I’m grateful for the respite from it for this season.) But the book IS powerful because it’s not just a “book about grief.” It’s a book that explores how the Bible teaches believers to lament, and how it has a deep purpose. Throughout the entire book, cover to cover, he comments on dozens of things that lament is.

                “Lament is how you live between the poles of a hard life and trusting in God’s sovereignty…Lament is how we bring our sorrow to God…Lament is how Christians grieve…Lament is how we learn important truths about God and our world…Lament is a prayer…Lament is a path to praise…” On and on he writes about the many things that comprise lament.

                Mark also writes about how we have been conditioned to avoid true lament. Funerals are more commonly called celebrations of life, and while it’s good to celebrate lives well lived, those services miss out on giving family and friends a space to lament the loss and sorrow.

                I found this book powerfully helpful for me in the work I do - and I've already gifted a copy to a friend! - but I will also be coming back to it the next time I walk through grief. The idea of grieving in the way the Bible teaches is something I want to weave into my life.

                Another leadership book recommended to me by my friend Jodi was Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney by Lee Cockerell. Until he retired, Lee was the Executive Vice President of Operations for Disney and was/is instrumental in the teaching for the Disney Institute, which guides organizations in increasing effective customer service.

                I was nervous about this book because I had shared the titles of my entire TBR list with a friend, and she read this one early on and didn’t like it. But guess what? I loved it! I don’t know why we differed, as we often feel similarly about books we’ve both read, but I was just grateful I enjoyed it.

                Throughout the book, Lee generously shares about what it means to be a good leader, and how that differs from being a manager or even a professional. I also appreciated that he explained that in his life, good leadership was learned, not a natural inclination. He writes vulnerably about how his hot temper in his younger years made him a terrifying leader and how his wife encouraged him to examine and change his ways, and he did.

                He gives really practical examples about how to care for your people, train them, learn from them, be accessible to them (yet balance your personal life), encourage them, and celebrate them. He shares real-world examples from his career, first in hotel management and then at Disney, and from organizations he has coached along the way.

                While there isn’t anything faith-based about this book (and I didn’t expect there to be), many of the “common sense” approaches he teaches are very much in line with what Scripture teaches, even if that isn’t how he suggests them.

                I will be keeping and referring to this book quite often and am glad I read it. It felt like a classroom experience condensed into a book, which was quite helpful to me.

                Our church used to have a dedicated library space, and in the layout of our new church, we won’t have the same type of book-holding layout. The church family was invited to adopt books that won’t be going back into a library room, and I found a few treasures in the mix!

                One was Lysa TerKeurst’s book Made to Crave. It’s not a new book, but I’d never read it. (It was published in 2010, for a frame of reference.) I wanted to read it because one of my health coaches mentioned it was a great book on helping to transform the mind away from unhealthy eating cycles and toward things the Lord and the work He has for me to do.

                If you aren’t familiar with her, Lysa TerKeurst is a pretty popular author and speaker in Christian circuits, and she’s had some hard battles that she has faced publicly along the way, including her husband’s infidelity and their subsequent divorce. This book was written while she was still married to him, and she does mention him in the book, FYI.

                This book is focused on the truth that isn’t stated very often: cravings aren’t bad, wrong, or sinful. God created us to experience them. The problem enters when we choose to fulfill them with things that aren’t actually fulfilling in the long-term. I appreciated her insights and found them timely for where I am in my own journey.

                One thing I loved about the book is how saturated it is in Scripture, and I actually went through my Bible and flagged the verses she mentioned so I can read through them in moments when my heart is tempted to run toward cookies and ice cream, when those things aren’t really what I need most.

                Lysa is quick and careful to say it’s not a typical diet book, but rather an outline of the principles she leaned on as she went through a health-gaining journey. She worked with a nutritionist and had friends keeping her accountable, but she also had to learn to replace lies and triggers of her life with truths from the Lord to help her not just reach her goals, but stay with them long-term. (That’s the part I feel like most people don’t talk about…how to keep goals in sight.)

                Another book I found and snagged from the library books at church? First Impressions: Creating WOW Experiences in Your Church. The author, Mark L. Waltz, was on staff at an Indiana church when he wrote this book (though per the internet, he’s not part of that staff currently.)

                The book is old in book years – written in 2005. The core teachings are still solid and meaningful, but I did smile quite often at his illustration stories – talking about the blessings of MapQuest printouts and explaining this new thing called WiFi. (NOTE: I saw on Amazon that there was a revised version of this book published in 2013, so perhaps some of those issues have been resolved.)

                When Mark worked at the large church in Indiana, he oversaw the First Impressions team and used his experiences in that realm to share with other churches. The book offers practical tips for churches of all sizes to create a clear vision for greeters, ushers, and other hospitality team members and then provide training to empower those people to do their jobs well.

                While the book is heavily focused on welcoming first-time guests, he does a good job of writing about ways to serve ALL those in the church every week. I underlined and starred many of his points to implement in conversations with our hospitality crew at church! He covered everything from looking for loopholes in current offerings to behind-the-scenes operations to reading between the lines when meeting people as they walk through the door. I’m excited to slowly, over time, implement what I’ve learned from this book!

                Another book I picked up from the library was Becoming a Woman Who Listens to God by Sharon Jaynes. I remember Lynne liking Sharon’s work when we were doing Mid-Morning, so I decided to give it a try. The book was published back in 2004, and like the last book I read, there were enough real-world, real-time examples in it to date it a bit, but I didn’t find it overwhelmingly distracting.

                Sharon is a writer and speaker who has had a powerful ministry over the last 30ish years. She ministers primarily to women and this book – as the title says openly – is for women, encouraging them to listen for God’s voice in their daily lives.

                She uses a lot of personal examples in her writing, and I don’t mind that, but I know over the years, ministry styles have encouraged writers and speakers to rely less heavily on their own experiences and stories and more heavily on Scripture itself. It’s personal preference, of course, but if a lot of personal stories bother you, know that this book is full of them.

                I found a handful of nuggets to underline and return to, and I’m thankful for that. As I wrap up my summer of projects and enter into school this fall, I want my mind trained on a listening stance to make sure I am truly hearing God and following the direction He wants me to take.

                It may not have been my most favorite book of the month, but I did enjoy it and found some good things tucked inside.

                My final book for July (at least I thought) was Building a Discipling Culture by Mike Breen. This was another book I found in the church library, and I grabbed it because one of my tasks for this fall is to put in place some new small groups/growth groups/discipleship groups. (Note: Per Amazon, there are also newer editions of this book.)

                Though Ryan and I have both participated in and led small groups in the past, and I feel comfortable with them, I know there is always room to learn, so I was excited to glean information from this book.

                The good news is…I did just that! The book is heavy on explanations for leaders, and I felt both challenged and affirmed in my own leadership in what I read! The bad news is…this book is very specific about the type of group culture it teaches, and it doesn’t match up with what we are doing at our church at this time.

                What the book teaches isn’t bad or wrong. It’s just not what we’re looking for right now. Maybe one day, we’ll try the huddle communities as outlined in the book, but it won’t be our plan for this fall.

                Even so, I underlined many things that are relevant to where we are right now, and they’re things I can come back to as I try to lead and encourage the leaders within our church!

                And then I squeezed in one more! Thom S. Rainer’s book I Am a Church Member was another find from the church library, and at only 79 pages, I was able to read it in less than an hour.

                I know church membership is a hot-button topic for many people. Some don’t like the idea of committing to a particular congregation or denomination and others can’t imagine NOT committing.

                I’ve been a church member since high school and have become a full, covenant member with nearly every church I’ve attended as an adult. For me (and the same is true for Ryan), church membership is an expression to the congregation and to the Lord that we are committed to actively serving, supporting, and worshiping among the people at the particular church where we seek membership.

                I appreciated Thom’s approach to church membership in this book, because he didn’t come in from any denominational standpoint. He simply came with examples from Scripture that explain what it means to be a member of a church. It means we serve those we worship with. We live in unity. We love them. We pray for them. We can all learn from that, regardless of our denominational affiliation.

                The book is obviously short and very easy to read, and I’m hanging onto it, because I want to refer to it if I ever have a conversation where someone has questions about what it means to be a church member!