Girl Meets God: A Memoir (Paperback)

An unlikely book to pick up-you're likely to find it wrongly placed in the Teen section of your bookstore-yet hard to put down. Winner's first effort (a second, Mudhouse Sabbath, is about Jewish traditions) offers brilliant spiritual insight throughout. A sign of a good book is when you keep thinking about it after you put it down. If the adage that readers make good writers is true, it applies here. Winner is a gifted wordsmith and wise beyond her youth. The pace is happily fragmented, not always chronological, spiritual, and down-to-earth at the same time.

Winner is a free-thinker, so her writing departs from the typical style of devotional books. Her story reinforces the truism that believers are works-in-progress, and God's steady inward grace is on display as she shares her faults, struggles, and lessons learned on her journey. "My life is like a disciple's nap in Gethsemene." She lives with a distinctly Hebraic-tinged grace: "I hadn't given up the shape in which I saw the world, or the words I knew for God, and those shapes and words were mostly Jewish."

The daughter of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, and raised Jewish, Winner learned that she had to formally convert to Judaism, which she did...but gradually she is drawn to Jesus and another conversion. Winner wasn't entirely embraced by the Jewish community (yet I wonder if those who rejected her knew as much about Judaism), which perhaps was a factor that led her to Jesus, although she makes it clear that her faith came not by one influence or event but rather by many factors.

Another amazon.com reviewer calls Lauren Winner the perfect dinner guest. She is without question someone who would provide a substantive discussion of life, books, faith, and struggle. Trained at Columbia and Cambridge universities, and a contributing editor for Christianity Today, she is now pursuing her Doctorate. The title and cover may be mistaken for a teen devotional, but this is a book for serious Christian disciples and devout Jews who may want to consider Winner's love affair with both Orthodox Judaism and Christianity.

This book is her tale of walking into Orthodox Judaism, out of it to Christianity, and her attempts to synthesize some elements of her Jewish background with her newfound faith in Christ.

The story is valuable to Christians simply for the insight it gives into Judaism. Lauren was a convert to Judaism, she wasn't born in an orthodox Jewish household. Thus, she became an orthodox Jew by conviction, and through much study. She didn't merely adopt the ways of the Jewish faith in an unthinking manner, she studied it in depth and adopted it throughout the process of a long intellectual and spiritual struggle.

A similar thing happened with her conversion to Christ. Through a period of study and a series of events she felt Christ calling her. As, little by little, she came to believe that Christ was real and that He had truly come in the flesh, she found herself irresistably drawn to Christ.

None of us can ever escape our own biases when reading something and I can't escape mine in reading this account. Lauren came into the branch of Christianity known as the Episcopal Church. As one who is from the Reformed tradition, I would wish that in her journey to Christianity she had continued all the way to Geneva, and not stopped in London. I recoil at her use of icons in worship. She seems to me to rely too heavily on the Book of Common Prayer, and not the Bible. So, I doubt that I will wholeheartedly recommend this as an evangelistic tract, simply because she doesn't "speak my language." Yet, I do recommend it to the discerning reader of a wonderfully honest, earthy story of the struggles involved in one person's journey to faith.

Also, one of the benefits of this book is that she is just so well read. She understands the nuances of the different evangelical subcultures, talks intelligently about historical events in the church and raises important theological topics. Although she doesn't always come down on my side of things she talks intelligentl about them all. If nothing else, this book is a testament to the value of reading in a person's life. She is very young and yet very well rounded, and this well-roundedness can only be explained by her voracious appetite for reading. One of my favorite anecdotes in the book is her story of how her mother used to have some kind of obligation she had to attend each week. Her mother would take Lauren, with her, give her $5.00 and send her to the pizza place next door and tell her to get something to eat. Trouble is, there was a bookstore right there to. So, Lauren says that she was faced with her weekly dilemma of whether or not to eat dinner or buy a book - I love it.

It's a good book and I can enthusiastically recommend it, with the aforementioned caveats.