Loveable: Embracing What Is Truest About You, So You Can Truly Embrace Your Life by Kelly Flanagan

About the book: (from the publisher) It’s time to remember.

Dr. Flanagan is a clinical psychologist and father known to millions for the letters he writes to his children and shares on his blog. Loveable is written to the little one in each of us, who is all too ready to be reminded: you are enough, you are not alone, and you matter.

In Loveable, Dr. Flanagan reveals the core insight gleaned from his years of clinical work: you are here for a reason, yet you cannot truly awaken to it until you have first embraced your truest, worthiest self and then allow yourself to be truly embraced by others. In other words, we are here to experience worthiness, belonging, and purpose, but they can only be truly experienced in that order.

Weaving heart-warming storytelling, gentle insights, and the wisdom of Dr. Flanagan’s Christian tradition–including his belief that we are all “the living, breathing bearers of the eternal, transcendent, and limitless Love that spun the planets and hung the stars”–these pages invite you to remember the name you were given before all other names: Loveable.

About the author: Kelly is a licensed clinical psychologist and co-founder of Artisan Clinical Associates in Naperville, IL. In 2012, he discovered writing was the thing he never knew he always wanted to do, so he began the now popular blog, UnTangled, where he writes weekly about the redemption of our personal, relational, and global lives. Kelly is married to another clinical psychologist named Kelly, because they decided to make life even more confusing than it already is. The Kellies—as they are called by friends and family—have three children, and they have a deal with them: they teach the kids how to grow up, and the kids teach them how to grow young.

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Genre: Non-fiction/Christian Life/Spiritual Growth

[bctt tweet=”We are here to experience worthiness, belonging, and purpose…in that order. #Loveable @DrKellyFlanagan” username=”KatherineSJones”]

My take: Sometimes I underline key sentences in the books I read. Not always (and never fiction), but when a book really grabs me — when page after page I’m gathering fresh ideas and aha moments — I underline. Kelly Flanagan’s Loveable is now the most underlined book in my personal library. Of all the books I’ve read recently on Christian living and spiritual growth, this is the one that hits me closest to where I am, right now, today, at my age, in this stage of life.

In other words, it’s a book for folks who have lived a little. Who have grown up and are fully engaged in lives they’ve more or less created for themselves. Good lives that may now be viewed with some perspective, through the lens of experience, in order to make a few judgments that lead to adjustments.

Loveable helped me to identify my unique, God-gifted place in this world in a way I found both refreshing and surprising. For me, this book was one big, sustained YES.

It is not, however, a book I will be loaning out . Sorry, but go get your own — which is what I recommend anyway, because you certainly don’t need to read your way through my underlined copy. Loveable finds its place on my forever shelf so that I may return to it again and again for its grace-filled wisdom and life-giving truth.

Thanks to BookLook Bloggers and Zondervan for providing me this book free of charge. All opinions are mine.

After words: What’s the most underlined book on your shelf these days?

P.S. Also highly recommended, these two interviews with Kelly on the Open Door Sisterhood “Hey Sister” show and Susie Davis’s “Dear Daughters” podcast.