How to Wreck Your Daughter {A Review of ‘A Voice Becoming’} + A GIVEAWAY

If you have a daughter, A Voice Becoming provides practical ideas for how to walk beside her with intentionality and humility as you guide her into what it means to be a woman.

We didn’t bathe or use toilet paper other than crumpled-up leaves and ferns for two and a half weeks. As an 18 year old, in-coming college freshman from the suburbs of Tampa, Florida, this rustic experience in the Upper Peninsula of Wisconsin wrecked me. Carrying 25 lb backpacks, we hiked, canoed, hiked some more, spent the night alone and shivering on the shore of Lake Superior, then, leaving our bags to be transported, we ran ten miles back to camp.

As a professional educator, I can testify that experiences are better teachers than books, writing papers or listening to lectures could ever be.

Blisters, freeze-dried food, digging holes for a fire pit (and “toilet”), and leading nine other girls using only a compass and 1960’s logging topo map smashed my nose up against the window of discovery.

Who was God? And who was I apart from my family? I wasn’t sure, but walking into the room the first day of freshman orientation sure seemed less daunting after encountering my physical capabilities and deficiencies.

Ancient cultures often subjected their pre-teens to rituals and experiences to celebrate and honor the rite of passage of children becoming adults. Noticing a void in these types of rituals in American culture, Beth Bruno planned an entire year of adventure, homework and exploration of what it means to be a woman for her 12 year old daughter.

She set out to wreck her daughter, then wrote about it in A Voice Becoming: A Yearlong Mother-Daughter Journey into Passionate, Purposed Living.

Instead of prescribing how to live, she wanted her daughter to discover a paradigm of being that “elevates God to being so big we can’t fully understand Him and yet small enough to intimately know us” (p. 22). Beth planned a year to examine what breaks God’s heart in hopes her daughter’s heart would also break for those things.

Raising daughters requires us to do some soul-searching of our own. Who do we want her to become? How do we as mothers help her get there? How does our story impact hers? Though my daughter is just three years old, as her mother, I am already laying the foundation for the type of woman she will become.

If you have a daughter, A Voice Becoming will provide practical ideas for how to walk beside her with intentionality and humility as you guide her into what it means to be a woman.

Everyone else is vying to raise our girls—the internet, T.V., schools, their friends, and even Sunday school teachers. But what if we mothers took our roles as our daughter’s first teachers more seriously? What if instead of waiting for her to absorb the messages of the culture around her, we equipped her with the tools she needs to analyze, assess and one day even alter that culture?

A Voice Becoming is a challenge to women to step away from lackadaisical parenting and take back our girls. Beth models a move from passivity to actively engaging our daughters and walking beside them as they encounter the world.

She expertly weaves biblical stories, as well as her own tale of “becoming” throughout the book as she tells the story of guiding her daughter from the launch trip, through the five scaffolds of her year of Becoming, then culminating in a “legacy” event tailored to her daughter’s interests. She spends eight weeks on each of the five scaffolds: women lead, love, fight, sacrifice and create, integrating service projects, films, books and articles for her daughter to analyze throughout.

It would be difficult to read A Voice Becoming without being moved to action. That action requires purposeful planning to implement. It forces us mothers to excavate our own pasts to uncover and share our stories with our daughters. Planning this rite of passage for our daughters exposes our own fears, questions, gifts, and passions, so beware.

If you have a daughter under the age of 18 and long for her to love God with her feet and not just with her lips, I highly recommend reading and implementing the ideas in this book. Although some of the suggestions may be out of range for those with modest budgets, Beth provides creative ideas for funding and planning your daughter’s Becoming year.

In the final pages of A Voice Becoming, Beth’s activist heart bleeds with these words: “I want to be a hope-pusher, a darkness-disrupter, a justice-warrior, a grace-clinger. As I lead, love, fight, sacrifice, and create, I want to bring the fullness of who I am to the kingdom of God” (p. 162).

As mothers, one of our greatest privileges in life is to walk with our daughters in their journey of becoming strong women who love and live lives of love in a broken world; A Voice Becoming is a welcome companion on this journey.

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WIN A FREE COPY OF A VOICE BECOMING!!!

ThA Book Review of A VOICE BECOMING {plus, A GIVEAWAY!}is week, I’m giving away two free hardback copies of A Voice Becoming.

One will be to those who comment on my Instagram post by midnight (MT) of January 18th and tag friends you think would be interested in this book. I’ll enter you one time for each new friend you tag!

Another will be for new subscribers to my newsletter between now and midnight of January 18th. Sign up for my mid-month digest and end-of-month SECRET NEWSLETTER here: 

On January 19th (my birthday, just FYI;-) ), I’ll announce the Instagram winner in the comments section of that post and email the winner of the newsletter sign-up!

 

You can buy A Voice becoming from Beth’s site or here on Amazon:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

BETH BRUNO traded the Blue Ridge for the Rocky Mountains after two decades in mega cities. Upon graduating from Northwestern University in Chicago, she and her husband moved to an even larger city, Istanbul, where they led campus teams with Cru. Ten years later they moved to Seattle where Beth received an MA in International Community Development and launched a nonprofit aimed at preventing domestic minor sex trafficking. Beth regularly speaks and trains around the topic of trafficked youth, including interviews with local radio stations and lots of coffee with the FBI, Homeland Security, and local law enforcement.

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