Book Review: Walking With the Women of the New Testament by Heather Farrell

Have you ever been talking with a friend, the really good kind of friend, who has probably known you for a while and she (I'm using feminine pronouns because I am thinking of my girl friends here) just gets you?  Maybe while you are talking you realize just how great your bond is because she understands the struggles you have had, how much you love to do something, or how much you struggle with a weakness. Maybe she has those same struggles, likes, and weaknesses, but maybe she is just really fabulous at relating to you. Maybe she helps you see how you can become better and maybe she helps you become better. She believes in you, and maybe it's because she's been there before or maybe it's because she just has a great ability to help others reach their potential. Maybe you can see a bit of yourself in her or she can see a bit of herself in you. It might be that not everyone has a friend or a sister or a mother like this, but oh how I hope you do.

But let's back up a bit to where I mentioned seeing a bit of yourself in someone else. Sometimes this can happen with people in our lives, or for me it seems it happens most often with my children. But I have had it happen when I read books before and I love how eye-opening it is to be able to relate to someone, whether fictional or historical, because it gives me an opportunity to reflect. Anything that helps me to be able to improve myself in an uplifting way that doesn't make me feel guilty is a great thing.

I have been following Heather Farrell's blog Women in the Scriptures for almost two years now and was really excited about her book. I started reading Walking with the Women of the New Testament a couple weeks ago and I'm still working my way through it. The artwork is pretty eye-catching, kind of like photographs and watercolors in one. Mandy Jane Williams did such a nice job with these pictures. The book goes in chronological order through the New Testament, beginning with Elisabeth, and details the accounts and experiences of dozens of women or groups of women. I feel like a review needs to be balanced so I will say that I found a few spelling and grammatical errors that bugged me at first but one that made me laugh. In the section about Mary, the mother of Jesus, it refers to Gabriel and then later Gabrielle. :)  I promise the author did not really try to add more women to the New Testament in this book, since that was just a spelling error, but in general it was so great to see that there really are more women in the scriptures than most casual readers would realize. We really need to look for them, and Heather's book encourages us to do just that.

Some of these women we know more about, and others are just mentioned in passing in the New Testament. But instead of just aimlessly speculating about them, Heather puts things into a proper historical and time-period appropriate religious perspective and then makes suggestions about what could have been. And she also does a most wonderful job of relating these women to our day, which brings me back to my earlier points and might be the reason this book resonates with me so much.

The last few weeks have been quite emotionally challenging for me. As someone who has dealt with mild depressive episodes in the past, I know my "warning signs" and can recognize when I need to switch gears to work through the darker periods that I can sense are coming. But the hard part is that sometimes the warning signs phase feels like the dark periods and I just don't know when it might end. I am doing fine, just trying to observe the waterfall of my thoughts from behind it instead of underneath, if that makes sense.  So the other day I was having a pretty rough day, just not feeling great about myself and really not wanting to do the dishes or shower or anything really. My younger kids were down for their naps and there was just a little while before it would be time to pick up the older kids at school. I sat down to continue my reading, even though I really just wanted to sleep and zone out for a bit. I pulled out this book and was so comforted by the passage about Mary Magdalene as soon as I read it. Heather writes, "The story of Mary Magdalene gives me great hope. She reminds me that there is no sickness--physical or mental--that Christ cannot heal." That was something I needed to read, right then. It lifted me up and I felt spiritual strength being poured into me that helped me get through the rest of that afternoon.

Reading about the daughter of Jairus also gave me great peace where the author likened physical death to spiritual death and reminded me that the phrase "she is not dead, but sleepeth" can be applied to people who may be wandering in spiritual darkness right now but who will someday return to the light.  There are sections here about barely mentioned-in-passing women in the scriptures like Paul's sister that remind us that righteous people we read about in the scriptures often had righteous examples to follow -- and maybe those examples came from their mothers, grandmothers or sisters.

We can learn from the women whose stories are in this beautiful book and I believe as we study their lives and experiences that we will truly feel like they are dear friends.

Disclaimer: I was given a copy of this book to review from Cedar Fort Publishing in exchange for my honest review.