This is my first time doing a book review, and I am honored to do so. Especially when it is a book entitled with a topic I am so passionate about…Motherhood! And, it is written by one pretty cool lady and mom, Chimene Shipley Dupler, the Founder and President/CEO of Pink Polka Dot Productions and Passion4Moms ministry.
My review today is a part of a month-long blog book tour of her new book The High Calling of Motherhood. Yesterday the tour stopped at www.emeralddaysandsapphirenights.blogspot.com and tomorrow it will be at www.thebamblog.com. Be sure to check out their posts for their own unique perspective on the book. The publishers are holding a “Winner’s Choice” giveaway for blog participants and for blog followers. The winner will get to choose between a custom made “World Changer” necklace by The Giving Keys or two tickets to attend the Passion4Moms conference being held in DC, May 5-6, 2017. You can use this link to access the giveaway! https://gleam.io/iAlu8/the-high-of-calling-of-motherhood-blog-tour-giveawaywww.facebook.com/passion4moms
And you can also preorder this book at the following links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/
Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/
Ambassador’s online retail store: https://squareup.com/store/
Let’s get started…
So first let me say, I have not read the book in its entirety, but I am almost finished. However, as I am in the middle of this reading and now writing this blog, I don’t feel too guilty that I am not finished yet. After all, this book focuses on the calling of motherhood, and it is my own calling (Mother of 5) that has kept me from reading as quickly as I had hoped. 🙂
As I started reading, I really appreciated Chimene’s transparency as a wife, mom, and a daughter of the King. She is open and real as she shares her own struggles, failures, and successes. I feel like she is the kind of lady I would love to grab coffee with and just chat about all that God is doing in our lives and of course, chat about our kids. I really enjoy reading this type of a book, when the reader gets to know the author in a more personal way.
As I continued reading, I appreciated the clean fresh approach of just getting back to basics of godly parenting. It was a good reminder of 2 things I had been taught… “Remember who you are, and whose you are!” (In fact, later on I think she even said these same two statements in a future chapters). My mind also began to recall many of the past parenting Bible Studies I had attended and parenting books I had read along the way in my own journey these last 10 years. So much so, that I had to stop reading and just think about some of those principles I had learned along the way. I even found myself performing a healthy self evaluation or heart examination, to determine if I was following through with some of those principles that meant so much to me during some of those studies. I really am thankful for this, because life IS really busy and children keep on growing up (breakout the tissues!) and it just made me pause and talk with the Lord about my own Motherhood journey, my calling, and recall the basics that have always been an important foundation in our family and my parenting.
One of those books I have read in the past is Shepherding a Child’s Heart, by Ted Tripp. This book had a major impact on my husband and I and our philosophy of parenting. I share that to say, as I read through more than half of The High Calling of Motherhood, I felt a similar undertone in Chimene’s book. I believe this book can have a great impact on the reader as far as biblical parenting, but even more uniquely for a Mom. And, lets face it we need this kind of encouragement! As Chimene shares early on in her book… How quickly we moms can lose our joy in parenting, because we are exhausted, we are wearing many hats, we are comparing ourselves to others, fighting against a culture that is pretty different from what the Bible says about living and parenting… BUT we are called, chosen, and appointed for the job.
Here is a little excerpt from the book…
“Often the joy of motherhood vanishes when we don’t fully grasp
the value and significance of the influence we have in motherhood.
We get caught up in a culture of comparison and self-serving grati-
fication, neglecting to understand the mission of motherhood. We
wrestle with the antithesis of motherhood in our culture. But if we
truly believe that life is created by God, then we must fully under-
