Praise for Teach Us To Want

Now Featured at the Patheos Book Club
Teach Us To Want
Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith
By Jen Pollock Michel

What People Are Saying

"As women, we often feel the urge to hide our longings, especially in the church. Through her own story of fear, loss and God's goodness, Jen stirs us to recover and reshape these desires in light of the kingdom of God."
—Rebekah Lyons, author of Freefall to Fly

"Jen Pollock Michel fuses three things that make her book essential reading: deep insight, raw honesty and radiant prose. She's a terrific writer, an agile thinker and—if that were not enough—a fearless witness to her own heart's darkness and light. By inviting me deeply into the mess and beauty of her own story, she has given me courage to step into the mess and beauty of my own—and, with her, to meet afresh the One who awakens, names, purifies and meets all the desires of my heart."
—Mark Buchanan, author of Your Church Is Too Safe

"Michel artfully weaves together Scripture and story to point us straight to the truth of God's love, grace and provision. This is not a Christian guide to success or a biblical condemnation of desire. This is a book that rightly resets our human desires into the context of God's good news."
—Kathy Khang, coauthor of More Than Serving Tea

"'Lead me not into ambition,' I have prayed, sideways, with the weight of ambition on my shoulders. Who has not wrestled with the tensions between what we desire and what (we think) God desires? Michel has brilliantly lit a way through our own dark, tangled brambles. I've been waiting for this book for a long time."
—Leslie Leyland Fields, author of Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers

"Jen Pollock Michel's Teach Us to Want is a beautiful spiritual memoir that weaves the author's story with passages from Scripture that address—and even gracefully redress—her restless fears and questions. Intelligent, honest and inspiring, the book invites readers to understand their own stories of loss and "loving wrongly" in the light of that which is truly the antidote to our fears and dissatisfaction, the good news."
—Jennifer Grant, author of Love You More, MOMumental, Wholehearted Living and Disquiet Time

"Seriously, one of the most beautiful nonfiction books I have ever read."
—Bethany Jenkins, founder, The Park Forum