Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith Paperback – June 4, 2014

Teach Us to Pray is a wonderful, readable, and also intellectually powerful study of the Lord's Prayer as a prayer that trains our desires. Deeply conversational and confessional in nature, Michel takes the Lord's Prayer step by step, at times leading her readers toward conviction of their sinful and unhealthy desires, and at times positively encouraging the readers, reminding them that God made human beings to be desiring creatures.Throughout Teach Us to Pray Michel reflects and tells stories well. The book is very quotable, and so at the bottom of this post, I will have some quotes I have harvested from the book. Although written by a woman for a line of books directed at women, the book is easy to connect to for people of both genders.This book deserves to be read for years to come."We pray best when we need God most" (p. 197)"Holiness is formed in us more unspectacularly and more incrementally than we expect--wherever the practice of small everyday faithfulness is required of us" (p. 198)"Storytelling and story keeping: these are acts of faith. They preserve faithfulness." (p. 189)."We easily dismiss desire, arguing that the goal of Christian life is obedience" (p. 23)."The Bible is not just information about God: It is the living voice of God" (p. 47)."Holy trust believes that whatever God chooses to give is enough" (p. 84)"To say that God is good is not the same thing as saying that life is good." (p. 101)"Clarity and certainty are not the soil in which faith grows." (p. 112)."Desire expressed in prayer risks on grace" (p. 118)."In asking for God's provision we're admitting our inability to self-sustain" (p. 127).

This book is a reflection on how to make our desires true to our hearts - and also to God's heart. A number of the chapters employ a key phrase from the Lord's Prayer (see Matthew ch 6 or Luke 11, if needed) - often quite effectively. The author is honest in her own struggles with desires, with living out her faith, and with the tension between her desires and needs and those of others. Recommend reading - enjoyed by our small group lunch-time book club.

This book has been healing and inspiring at the same time. There is a tough dance between being suspicious of our desires and trusting them as one of the truest parts of ourselves. Jen Pollock Michel does an incredible job navigating the interior world of desire and inviting us to discover (and trust!) our truest God-given desires. I am really disappointed that I read this book alone and NOT in a book club because there is so much of it that I wanted to discuss with friends. I may have to start my own group. A rare mix of thinking, feeling and WANTING. So. Good.

Teach Us to Want offers a unique, honest and refreshing examination of the desires, longings and ambitions of the Christian life. It explores how those desires can be reshaped and formed by God to be used for the good of others and for God's glory. Readers will enjoy Jen Pollock Michel's beautiful writing style, her gift of words, her authenticity, and the way she weaves together her story with biblical truth and thought-provoking quotes from a variety of sources. This is a book you will enjoy reading, that will challenge your thinking, and that you will want to share with others.

This book definitely made me reconsider the usefulness and application of desire. I am planning to read it again because it is best read uninterrupted. (i.e. It is difficult to follow the author's thoughts and stories relating back to desire/wanting if the book is read in small sections.) It needs to be taken in as a whole. This would be a good book for a women's Bible Study or to read and discuss in a Book Club.

I chose Teach Us To Want for our young moms Bible study to go through together to learn more about desire. I know desire is not often spoken of in Christian circles so it intrigued me. Myself and the women in our group praised this book for the author's authenticity about motherhood, writing, and seeking God on his desires for her life. I loved that she didn't shy away from our sinful/fleshly desires and hit hard on that with Scripture. We paired this book with the author's Rightnow Media video teaching "Teach Us To Want" and it was a wonderful compliment.I will say also that this book does take time to go through and really ingest it all. When you're reading, you'll want to make sure you have time to process the author's thoughts. You may also need to re-read to make sure you are grasping the content. All in all, I think it's a great book to begin thinking about your own desires and what God might be calling you to. You will come away with new perspectives and be excited to pursue God's will in your life. I really enjoyed the author.

This has to be one of my favorite books (and I've read many). Jenn Pollock Michel proposes ideas on wanting/longing that never occurred to me, putting it in the context of desire as a God-given gift. Her prose is beautiful, vivid and evocative. I don't often read books more than once, but this one falls in the category of worthy to be read and re-read.

This is a very well organized and deeply thoughtful journey exploring the desires that tug on us all, through the lens of this author's personal history. Jen marshals her considerable talent to examine what may well be the essence of what it means to be human -- to WANT (stuff, recognition, love... fill in your own blank here) -- and frames it securely within our aspirations for relationship with God. Toss any reservations aside - the title of the book fails to plumb the richness of the text between the covers.Bravo, Mme. Michel. Thank you for giving yourself permission to write this book. :)

Very good material. It digs into the core motivations of our lives.

I bought this book to read with a book club after having read "The Liturgy of the Ordinary" by another author (but this was recommended by Amazon as something similar). We all agreed in our book club that we liked the idea and the drive of the book but it was hard to follow and tough slugging. We enjoyed the personal stories and even the theological conversations but found they weren't tied in well together. There were many parts we did not understand why they were even in the book. It seemed like it lacked a strong editor.I loved the first two chapters and the last chapter because I resonated with them deeply. There's great content in here however all 8 of us would not have continued reading the book if we didn't have the book club around it because of the way it's assembled/written. It would have been better as a memoire style, I think.

Love this book