I love Alia Joy's honesty about her personal experiences of faith, doubt, weakness, and more. Thoughtful Christians who appreciate great writing will enjoy reading Glorious Weakness.

I am so impressed with this book. Alia is so real and vulnerable and it is so comforting to know someone knows what I've been feeling. I've spent my life feeling shame for being so weak, for feeling like I lack so much. It's absolutely encouraging and eye opening to read the truths of God, how He so beautifully shows up in our weaknesses, and draws us close.

Alia shows us the gospel in a mighty, gentle way and I'm really grateful for this book. One of my greatest treasures. I just love it. I want a copy for all my friends.

Real, raw, excellent read! I highly recommend this book to everyone interested in discovering the strength and greatness of God through weakness. Author Alia Joy doesn't hide who she is or where she's from. With vulnerability and transparency, Alia refuses to hide her hurt in order to share her heart...and the heart of God.

If you have suffered, it is impossible not to have empathy for Alia, you feel she just understands. You just wish you can know her and hug her and help. But you know you can not help, and she can not help you... only God can, she knows that for sure, so will you. But oh! how much hope and relief you feel while you read and cry. What she has is a gift, to put into words with such musicality and cadence in a beautiful way the most painful parts of her life... and what it is to come. This book is a plain reality in this fallen world and complete hope in what is to come. You just don´t get why some people get so much pain, tears, and brokenness. And then every time you turn the page, you get it, their soul turns more beautiful each time. The book is divided into 4: Weakness, Hope, Strenght, and Glory. It is such a beautiful book you just want to highlight all. Capture all. Quote it all. I highly recommend this reading not just for the one who suffers, but for the one who wants to try and understand who is in deep pain.

Hard to read, but oh so worth it! Alia you certainly put yourself out there and into this book we can re-read again. This book is open and honest, and you need to read it if you or someone you know is struggling.

“No one wants a ministry of weakness.” So many bestsellers focus on being a successful Christian, shiny and perfect: this part-memoir, part theological exploration of the value of weakness is a healthy dose of biblical truth-telling and a breath of fresh air.

Alia Joy presents a compelling yet uncomfortable truth: glory and weakness go hand in hand, both in Jesus’ life and ours. She had me at the first chapter:

“We admire pain only if it’s healed, only if it’s endured with perfect grace, with perfect faith, and never succumbed to in weakness, in f-bombs, and rants and curses raised to the heavens.”

I kept highlighting other tweetables too:

“It’s easy to say God is good when we’re #blessed.”
“Why would we need a Comforter unless he knew we would be uncomfortable?”
“We’re going to have scars too if we want to look like Jesus.”
“In lament, we acknowledge we are powerless to fix it. The good news is God never asked us to.”
“What if we started to see weakness not only as something to endure, but as our spiritual gift?”

Alia Joy talks with authority on suffering, having experienced abuse, poverty, and severe mental illness and she does so with grace and truth. Her writing is lyrical and poetic, with beauty in every sentence, and her storytelling is hypnotic. I found myself underlining line after line to go back and think more deeply. Her work will unsettle the comfortable and provide rich comfort for those who feel weakened or excluded by their suffering. Beautiful and profound – highly recommended.

Poignant and powerful. Alia's gorgeous writing calls the reader to the kind of honesty about our culture and circumstances that few are willing to risk. It's a call to climb down the ladder, rather than up; to embrace the hard and holy; to sit with others in pain and sorrow without answers. This is a book that gets better page by page and the last few chapters are particularly challenging and beautiful. A must read for anyone who wants to know what the gospel actually calls us to.

“Weakness is a holy invitation to allow grace to do its work.”
– Alia Joy

Being poor in spirit might have been something Jesus valued. But do we? At least not at first. And not until we take a deeper look.

Alia Joy takes a deeper look. I understand when she says this in her new book Glorious Weakness:

“When I have errands like returning something to a store, or asking for a discount, or knowing I will be dealing with someone and their perceptions of me, I dress up. Over time, I have learned it’s easier to get help if you look like you don’t really need it.”

We all need help. But our need for help isn’t supposed to indicate failure. In fact, Alia reminds us that,

“Being poor in spirit is the richest place of all. That’s where the treasure is buried.”

When we realize our need for grace, we’re most open to receiving it. And sometimes our greatest need for grace comes not just in big, broken moments, but in the moments of ordinary life.

Alia says,

“Ordinary life has been the hardest calling I’ve ever answered, the hardest thing to bear witness to, because who could possibly care about the mundane and ordinary life? I had no idea the depths of my own selfishness until asked to share myself with my family. To lay my will down day after day and seek God’s.”

Perhaps this line from Glorious Weakness sums it up best:

“My deficiency was the strongest thing about me because God was fully present in my lack.”

There are so many great lines and insights in Glorious Weakness. Alia is brutally honest, weak, and delightful. “God was never interested in my strength; he’s most pleased with my surrender.”

Thanks to Net Galley for the review copy.

I must have highlighted half this book. It's not the easiest to read - Alia's difficult journey can be hard to bear at times - even harder when you realize you are reading it but she is bearing it; or perhaps harder if you are bearing it too. Yet she reminds her readers often that God is bearing it with her too, and that her greatest glory is indeed in weakness (as it is in all of us). In this way it is a generous book, as Alia generously shares her arrives for the sake of others and despite the risk of being vulnerable. She manages to make a scathing critique of North American Christianity while also recognizing that imperfect churches are made up of imperfect people who will still come through in times of need. Alia's writing is beautiful, and I will be returning to some of her analogies regularly. My favorite one is towards the end so I won't ruin it!

Where is God when we suffer? Our cries of lament can turn us away from God – but can also help us embrace him in the midst of our pain, writes Amy Boucher Pye. Through our tears and anguish, we come to know that God is right there with us.

Alia Joy’s Glorious Weakness explores finding God in our suffering. Her words of prose pulse with poetry, catching our attention and then sinking in deeply: “My saltwater tears have mixed with the ash from the Refiner’s fire, and they form the ink to pen my story, a story that helps me find my way to the beauty that was always buried and waiting.” I found myself highlighting so many sentences, as her words are a thing of beauty in and of themselves.

Alia's book centres on four areas: weakness, hope, strength and glory. As she says, “It is my story of discovering God in all the places I thought were lacking – and seeing how he is good when life is anything but. It’s about the cycles we live in and the stuff that happens not only before you believe, but long after, when you realise that believing, hoping, and knowing God isn’t reciting a sinner’s prayer and calling it good. It’s remaining fluent in our language of hope on an expedition that often feels foreign and hostile.”

She writes of living with a bipolar disorder, of the loss of a baby, of her father’s descent into dementia and eventually his death, of experiencing racism, of the struggle of poverty, of battling a sense of being an imposter and not belonging because of not boasting a lot of degrees and awards. We may not have experienced the host of hardships she’s endured, but I’m guessing many of us can relate to feeling like an outsider, or wondering why God seems to have abandoned us, or what our purpose should be.

Alia shares stories from her life and upbringing with her insights about God’s surprising way of redeeming what is weak and seemingly lost. What she’s learned in the dark she offers to us with humility and grace.

Those of us reading her book in Britain may breathe a prayer of thanks for the NHS as we read. Alia has endured many health issues, and at times she didn’t get them treated because she couldn’t afford the fees in her native America.

My only small niggle with the book is how sometimes she’d repeat an idea in various ways throughout a paragraph or two, which could have been trimmed down. But overall her strong writing overcomes that slight criticism, and I highly recommend her book. You’ll find it encouraging and filled with faith and hope – and authenticity.

When I turned the first page of Glorious Weakness, I felt such a sense of vicarious accomplishment because I had cheered the author on at times through the process of writing. I expected a beautiful word journey, and maybe a sense of how a Christian woman handles a mental illness.

The book turned out to be everything I never expected. Yes, the words flow and eddy like a beautiful river. But no one can call Glorious Weakness a comfy read. No one calls the act of rebirth ‘comfy’ either.

Alia Joy divides the book into four parts: Weakness, Hope, Strength, and Glory. Part memoir, part Christian living, and all beauty, the author takes us on a journey that starts in a place most of us avoid—weakness.

Weakness

As Christians, perhaps more than other religions, we pride ourselves on our strength. We say the strength comes from God our Father. But all too often, it comes from our poker face, our stiff upper lip, and a lingering belief that God’s elect should succeed. We avoid the appearance of weakness at all costs.

Alia Joy gently points out that when we refuse to embrace our weakness, we miss out on really knowing the absolute goodness of God. Weakness and poverty only prove that we need a Savior. Although I grew up on the poorer side of middle-class, I have never experience poverty.

Reading Alia Joy’s words about weakness awoke me to the fact that I spend most of my life avoiding the poor (in heart and in wallet). Above all, I deny my own weakness. But as Alia Joy says, “Our need might be the thing that most blesses the body of Christ.”

Furthermore, she convicts me with these words:

“We’ve valued one side of the equation and not the other because we don’t imagine the poor have anything to teach us about God. We go with our gospel but don’t always understand grace. We are not students of the poor, the weak, the broken, the outside, or the other. We don’t learn from the margins, we still esteem power and success and skill.”

And without knowing our heart poverty, we may never understand the true language of hope.

Hope

“But as Christians, our native language is hope.” Alia Joy’s words smacked me. I know the truth of this, but I only acknowledge it during those times when I find myself out of my comfort zone. All too often I live as if my native language is comfort.

I avoid community out of sloth (and perhaps a little fear). I enjoy my close circle of family and a few friends, but for the most part, I like to avoid the messy, hurtful, confusing, irrational swirl of community. But Alia Joy reminds me that we need to embrace community—even if it scars us. After all, “We’re going to have scars too if we want to look like Jesus.”

When we engage in community, we have opportunities to use our native language. And when we fail to practice hope, we can soon lose the ability to speak it.

“What the world desperately needs is a church that looks more like Christ and less like a parody of how to be respectable, comfortable, and safe.”

We need to practice our native tongue in community in order to find true strength.

Strength

The strength of the gospel lies in the fact that we can speak the language of hope even if the situation looks dire, the diagnosis defeating, and the mission impossible.

“What does the gospel offer us I the pain if we cannot be people who grieve even as we believe?” Alia Joy asks. Good question. We can find strength in lament (and God can handle our anger and angst).

Perhaps we also need to rethink the list of spiritual gifts. “What if weakness was a spiritual gift?” Alia Joy asks. And I can’t help but mull over her question. Birth and rebirth involve a marriage of weakness and strength. It’s not an easy process and always involves pain. But that pain and weakness build our strength.

When we focus on our strength and accomplishments, we fool ourselves into thinking that we can live self-sufficiently. We leave out wonder and awe. “A wonder-filled life is grateful attentiveness to the awe in our ordinary.” Alia Joy reminds us.

This section of the book acts as a call to remember my origins. And when we keep our thumb on the pulse of our poverty, hope, and source of strength, we can experience glory.

Glory

Glory, but not the kind that comes from winning accolades from our peers or notoriety on the Internet. No, the kind of glory that that comes from realizing our source and giving Him the credit.

“But God is not about upward mobility so much as inward expansion.” God doesn’t exist to make us prosper. God exists to help us expand from the inside out and firmly place the glory where it belongs.

Alia Joy H’s life has not been easy. Some people deal with cancer. Some deal with mental illness. Some deal with poverty. Alia Joy has had all of this and more in her life and continues an existence in which any given day can be a struggle. Thank goodness Alia Joy is an articulate writer who gives most of us readers an insight we’ve likely been blinded to by our “North American Christianity”.
I’m flagging Glorious Weakness as one of 2019’s most significant books. It reads like the Book of James. If your toes are too sensitive, don’t read it. If you don’t want to develop any compassion for the poor or disadvantaged, don’t read it. If you have no room in your theology for the mentally ill, homeless, addicted, uneducated, obese, abused, or marginalized don’t even check it out from the library.
If you’ve found yourself needing to justify your existence because you think you aren’t contributing anything to the church or society; if you’ve gone “all-in” for God but every circumstance still seems to conspire against you; if experience teaches you that actually relying on God brings sideways looks from the established church and sometimes it is best not to share what you know; if you believe no matter how hard you work you are always going to be God’s “secondhand kid” relegated to receive scraps and leftovers; you should read this book. In Alia Joy’s words:
"We have merit-based ideology so ingrained into our cultural identity and theology that we often fail to see the great imbalances Jesus constantly pointed out. Much to the irritation of the respectable religious people, Jesus was always elevating the poor and the weak. He knew something we so often forget: none are worthy, not one."
I hope we will hear more from this new author. Stay fluent in the language of hope!
@aliajoyh @ReadBakerBooks
#GloriousWeakness #NetGalley

I am not alone in the world. Jesus comes for me again and again.' It was a privilege to read this book. Alia Joy is an artist who puts words on the pages that flow from her heart. I felt like I came alongside her through her life journey of mental and physical illness and poverty. God never left her even when she felt alone and abandoned.

Many times throughout her life, she felt like God abandoned her, but she realized, like we all do, that God was there even when she didn't feel His presence. You will be challenged as you read her story and how God calls to her in her weakness.... her glorious weakness!

I highly recommend this read that will surely touch your heart as she allows God to carry her through her brokenness.

First I want to say that Alia is a beautiful writer and that this book has some really encouraging and powerful things to say. BUT, as it says in the introduction, this book is not for everyone.

Alia’s story spans a number of themes and I kept getting broadsided by things that I didn’t see coming. If you have had medical or sexual trauma in your life or you have unresolved/unhealed wounds around transitions, family, church, mental illness or end of life losses take some caution approaching this book. When the publisher’s description says this is a deeply personal exploration they aren’t kidding. These are the kind of stories that I hear often as a spiritual director and several times I set this book aside feeling a weight of compassion fatigue just from reading what Alia so openly shared. It is one thing to hear tears dripping through your telephone line and have the opportunity to be present with someone. It is another thing altogether to read about raw pain and have no way to interact with the one telling you the story.

The thing that I love is that in the telling of these deeply moving and personal stories Alia kept finding the places where God was filling her own lack with His fullness, even when she couldn’t see it. I also loved how she kept returning to the idea of living out the language of hope in the midst of our circumstances.

In summary I think that Glorious Weakness was a beautifully written, but emotionally demanding memoir of finding God in our weakness and seeing His hand-print of glory on our lives.

I received a free digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

"What does it mean to become foolishness, to confound the wise? To become weak to shame the strong (1 Cor. 1: 27)? To be broken in order to be used? To trust even when trusting seems like the stupidest option of all?"

Alia Joy exquisitely explores these questions in Glorious Weakness. With the soul of a poet, she weaves her story of finding God in all that she lacked. Alia writes from one heart to another, making me feel I'd found a kindred spirit, a friend, a confidant. If you've ever felt broken and weak, this book is for you. Alia knows what it means to be broken and she shares those stories with grace and vulnerability, always pointing toward hope. As Alia says:

"And maybe that is the gift of suffering, the gift of weakness, of being poor in spirit. Maybe being poor in spirit is the invitation to truly see the kingdom of God as one who is so loved, so valuable, so recognized by Jesus, a person can come reeking with need and not be found wanting."

"Glorious Weakness" by Alia Joy is one that will stick with me. I highlighted such beautiful passages that there is no doubt I will return to her words over time. Alia shares her roller coaster of a life: from defeating leukemia in her childhood, living on the mission field, experiencing abuse, to overcoming doubt and fear as she learns to live with being bipolar. I don't know if I have words adequate enough to describe the depth found in these pages--the transparency and vulnerability seep through the paragraphs. The reader can tell this book has been well thought out and ruminated on for some time and for that I am thankful.

While "Glorious Weakness " is not an easy read, there are many lampposts of hope throughout the book. In the midst of challenging circumstances, Alia shares the ways Jesus has led her, provided for her family and changed her perspective on her illness. Life may be hard, but we can persevere, even in our weakness.

I loved the way Alia chose to confront the things she can't control--instead, leaving Jesus to handle it, admitting she wasn't able. Often as Christians we try and slap a smile on weary faces, choosing to only show the good sides of ourselves. We forget that when we do that, we lose the opportunity to minister through connection, vulnerability and honesty. To not be afraid of being weak, to admit we are not a perfect, Sunday School Christian has a power few understand. Alia deftly describes new motherhood, family dynamics, depression and self image issues that many of us can relate to. I found myself reading portions aloud to my husband, as they have been mountains we, too, have traveled together. I was truly sad to come to the conclusion of the book.

I was part of an early reader group thanks to #NetGalley and feel very blessed to have taken part. All opinions are my own and I was not required to leave a review. "Glorious Weakness" is a book that will challenge and inspire. Please do not miss out on this one!