This books helps the reader take a hard look within oneself, and this is necessary to have a healthy relationship with God, self and others. The book begins with a page called "Growing Healthy Fruit", which helps the reader identify some of the issues within at a glance. This page relates the fruit of the spirit with their opposites, i.e. alienation (love), despair (joy), anxiety (peace), intolerance (patience), selfishness (kindness), harshness (gentleness), malice (goodness), reactivity (self-control), and faithlessness (faithfulness).
This is a book to be read reflectively, and when done with that perspective, the reader would get a lot out of it. It takes a hard look at who we are, and suggests that the wholeness and identity begins with us understanding and living out being children of God (adoption). As we grew up, we are searching for our identity, and we begin to find them first through our parents. However, to truly know who we really are, we need to find our identity in our heavenly Father.
The author also helps us to understand how we receive from others and how we respond to them. I found the chapter Monkeying Around enlightening because it helps us to look at the motivation by which we do things. Sometimes, we can be doing something seemingly good, like helping someone out, but the truth of the motivation is that we were doing it no so much for the person we are trying to help, but for ourselves, i.e. to fulfill a deep need.
