The Secrets Women Keep

As I was helping my brother to get the book he wanted from the Popular Bookstore in Sunway Pyramid yesterday, I accidentally came across this amazing little book. After flipping some pages and reading the brief description behind, I took the book to the counter and paid for it.

The Secrets Women Keep... Hmm... Well if you're a guy and you're attracted to the title of this book hoping that it would give you a sneak peak of what's in a woman's head, I guess you should be quite disappointed. It's more than the secrets women keep from men. It's the secrets that weighs and burdens us. The secrets that we hide from the world and even ourselves.

What are secrets? Secrets are the things that we hide. Are there good and bad ones? Yup. Good secrets are things like your private prayers, your tithes and offerings, things that we do not need to parade for the world to see. They are the secret we keep between us and God. What about bad ones? Bad ones are often associated with lies and it serves to cover up the ugly part of us. Even as kids we learn to keep bad secrets. We keep these secrets to escape from the responsibility or consequences that we need to bear. We do it to keep ourselves comfortable.

Be it Christians or non Christians, we keep secrets. But as Christians, we tend to do it more often. Why? That is because we often tell ourselves that as Christians we must keep a good witness, we must keep Christianity looking good. So we hid all the sins that we've done, bad decisions that we've made and burry it to ourselves. But at the end of the day, we turn ourselves into a timebomb of guilt ticking rapidly and ready to explode anytime. But being holy or being a good testimony is not only to be portrayed infront of the people around us. It is a commitment that we make to live a life that is right before God.
One of the examples quoted in the book are Christians in an unhappy or problematic marriage. Just because all these people believe that as Christians we're suppose to portray a healthy marriage and its against God to divorce, they hid the problems that they face to themselves. Be it the communication problem between spouses or sexual problems, they take it on themselves. As a result of that, they harvour bitterness in them, blinded by the truth, thinking that this is their fate, the will of God in their lives and nothing else could be done to change that. The more we stay in the dark with our secrets, the more bitter we're going to be. The enemy loves to keep us there and he often uses guilt to make us feel shameful and embarrassed to seek for help.

I always tell my disciples and members that if they find any area of their lives that they could not share openly with me, it will certainly be sin or something shameful that they do not wish that it would be exposed. Don't be a bondage of sin and shame. If you keep hiding it, you will be tortured by guilt and condemnation of not being accountable. But when you choose to expose it to light, you will not only find out that all the judgements that you fear would happen will not happen but also to find another person that will fight this battle with you. You're now 2 times stronger to fight the battle. Isn't that a better choice?

In this book, Dr. Jill Hubbard brings up issues that are messing with a women's heart and provides solutions for them to be set free. She talks about secrets of Marriage and Relationships(being single, friendship), Sexuality(different sexual needs between husband and wives, sexual addictions), Our Inner Lives(spiritual disconnections, depressions), Our Sense of Self(feeling inadequate, haunted by our past) and about Our Personnal Issues(finances, drugs and alcohol). This are the struggles that we do not talk about over the dinner table. It is often issues that leads us to cry in our beds alone at night. If you are the person who faces all these struggles, I highly recomend you to get the book and take radical steps to be set free from it.

As a girl myself and as a cell leader, I'm glad that this book is once again a fruitful investment that I've made.
My vision for 2009 is to be a tower of refuge. Thanks to this book, I'm now one step closer and stronger. =]