Your Best Life Now

YOUR BEST LIFE NOW: Joel Osteen: Warner Faith: nonfiction: 320 pages

A well-known pastor from Texas, Joel Osteen, reveals seven steps that will enable you to live at your full potential. With Your Best Life Now as the title, my expectations are high that the book will contain some life-altering suggestions as to how to live better. After all, who doesn’t want to learn how to do that?

Based largely on the Bible and his religious sermons, Pastor Osteen reveals seven basic steps to guide an individual towards living the best life you possibly can. The steps are: Enlarge Your Vision, Develop a Healthy Self-Image, Discover the Power of Your Thoughts and Words, Let Go of the Past, Find Strength Through Adversity, Live to Give, and Choose to be Happy.

The book has some good points although the majority of the book contains self-help advice similar to that in other self-help books. For example, in learning the principle of Enlarging Your Vision, we are reminded to live with an attitude of faith, raise our levels of expectancy, and to envision the positive outcomes rather than robbing ourselves of opportunities due to our self-limiting negative thoughts and actions. In the Developing a Healthy Self-Image part, some of what he writes is that we receive what we believe and challenges us to dare to believe for greater things.

Pastor Osteen illuminates his seven points with the use of many Bible examples as well as examples from people he has met and counseled and his own life experiences. He emphasizes God’s role in our lives very much throughout the book but the way in which he describes God’s role in some areas of our lives may be a turn-off to some. Overall, this is a book that will leave you feeling more uplifted and motivated to move forward with your dreams and goals. In a world where too much negativity exists, a book with a positive message is a very welcome read.

EE