God Never Blinks
Author: Regina Brett
ISBN: 9780446556521
God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours by Regina Brett is an amazing book filled with wisdom, stories and life lessons written by a journalist and cancer survivor.
A family friend recommended this book to me after a tumultuous few months and two deaths in my family. She said this was the perfect book to read that would put my life in perspective and make me think about things in a completely different way. I wrote the name of the book in my Blackberry and remembered a few days later to put it on reserve at the library. Thank goodness I did. This book is life changing.
Each short chapter in this book is a life lesson that was previously published in Brett’s newspaper column and later went viral online. Now the lessons are all compiled in this one small, but meaningful book. After a childhood of feeling like she was always just another face in the crowd in a large family, becoming a mom as a teenager and later a cancer diagnosis, Brett sat down one day at age 45 and let the lessons flow.
Some of my favorite lessons in the book include:
Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good
Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
God never gives us more than we were designed to carry.
Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
No one else is in charge of your happiness. You are the CEO of your joy.
If you don’t ask, you don’t get it.
Honestly, it’s hard to narrow my favorites down to just those few because as I was skimming the titles, I wanted to type them all!
The best part about this book is that each chapter is quick and easy to read. This book is perfect to read just a chapter a day to help get you in the right mindset to start your day on a positive note. Each story usually ties in to something Brett has experienced in her life or a story someone has told her or submitted to her newspaper column.
This book really did make me think about my life in a different way. Despite all the bad in the world, life really is good. It’s important to remember the positive things and to focus on the NOW, because that’s all that we can control. Brett’s simple reminders have helped me to think about how I can make my life more positive and meaningful.
Perhaps the most major takeaway I got from this book was, “When in doubt, just take the next right step.” Life can often be daunting and thinking about goals and plans can be overwhelming. Brett advises to just focus on whatever the next right step is. Examples include: if you want to lose 40 pounds, order a salad instead of fries. If you want to write a novel, sit down and write and single paragraph. Life seems so much more simple when we break things down into a series of smaller steps, instead of large, scary tasks. After finishing this book last week, this is the one lesson that keeps popping up in my mind as I go through each day.
I encourage everyone to pick up this book or give it to a friend as a gift. I promise you won’t regret it. This is definitely the kind of book I want to add to my collection to be passed on to friends and family.
5/5
Lovely review, Jess! I’m so glad this one was so inspirational for you, and it sounds like something we would all benefit from reading. I’ve seen a few of those “lessons” in emails friends and family have forwarded to me — I guess they really did go viral!