Get Your Joy Back...Review

About the book:
An invitation and a promise for weary Christian parents of special needs kids from a parent who’s been there.

“It isn’t the long day of monitoring a child’s precarious health or being hypervigilant about her mood and mental health challenges that weighs parents down; it’s the wishing that things were different. . . Resentment, not the intense care they must provide their child, is the parents’ greatest stressor and source of pain.” —Laurie Wallin

Parents of specials needs children are exhausted. They’ve done all the research, consulted all the experts, joined support groups, gotten counseling, fought for the best life for their children. Often just caring for their children’s needs and attempting to maintain a home maxes out parents’ mental, emotional, and spiritual reserves.

Laurie Wallin knows firsthand the difficulties of this journey. With Get Your Joy Back, she steps forward to make a bold, audacious claim: in the midst of this long-term, intense task, it is still possible to have an abundant life, full of joy. The key to radically changing daily life and restoring joy to the weary is forgiveness. Wallin gives parents a lifeline to find that restoration, pulling them back to shore when they feel like they’re drowning.

This book is full of practical, biblical insights and strategies to shed the resentments that leave Christian special-needs parents themselves spiritually, emotionally, and socially drained. Wallin meets readers right where they are, sugar coating nothing, but addressing issues with honesty, humor, and–above all–hope.

As the parent of child on the autism spectrum, I can understand exhaustion. Parenting any children is exhausting, but a special needs child just adds another level of strain. Our children are all different and we are at different stages of life, health, transitions, etc. We join support groups, we talk with other parents and we pray. We just try and get through each day and by the end of it, we have rarely found time for ourselves. My son is high-functioning and I am at a different stage in my parenting as my son is now a teenager and our challenges are different than what they were when he was a toddler. But, there are challenges just the same.

There were many things I enjoyed about this book. The fact that Laurie knows from experience how hard it can be to raise a special needs child is important. She validates those feelings of frustration. She shares scriptures and the principle of forgiveness, which I did not expect to read about here. There are suggestions and lots of encouragement with topics of community, God, family, spouse and others. There are notes and great references.

Easily read in one or two sittings, this is a gem of a book and will inspire and uplift.

Thanks to Litfuse Publicity for the opportunity to review this book. You can learn more about Laurie Wallin here. You can purchase your own copy here.

Read 2/15

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5/5 Stars

Comments

  1. Thank you for an eye opening post. I cannot imagine the stress that parents of special needs children undergo but having support and help must be of importance. Thanks for the review of this book.

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