The Search for Significance

      Search for Significance

Mason Dehmlow

The book is called, The Search for Significance; it was written by Robert S. McGee. The genre of this book is Christian living personal growth. The Search for Significance is a book about growing in your faith and how we can apply some of what God has said and done for us to our lives. I read this book in a new members class I took to become a member of my church and as part of my profession of faith.  We skipped chapter one.

Chapter two is titled, The Origin of the Search. This chapter talks about how we need to stop trying to gain righteousness on our own. We need God. Chapter two says, “we must give up our own efforts to achieve righteousness, and instead believe that Christ’s death and resurrection alone are sufficient to pay for our sin and separation from God. The book also talks about the equation, “self-worth = performance + other’s opinion.” I really liked this equation because it is so true in how most of us live our lives. We feel like we need to have to approval of everybody around us and that we have to be perfect to feel worth anything. This is so true in our society today. We are constantly being pressured to look better, talk different, wear different clothes, eat different food, and to do about everything that God has commanded us not to do.

This book also talks about how important self-image is. Our self-image is important because it determines so many different things. It determines how we view ourselves as well as others. If we have a bad self-image, we feel as if we are below everyone else and we think we can’t do anything right.

If we have a good self-image, we see ourselves as capable of completing difficult tasks and if we fail we need to learn from our mistakes and try again.

This book also talks about forgiveness.  God forgives us even  when we mess up and make mistakes. He forgives us when we feel like no one can forgive us. We do not need to beat ourselves up for our mistakes. We need to learn from our mistakes and move on and try and forget about them.

I really loved this book. It has taught me so many things. It has taught me how to better view myself and I know I don’t have to worry about what other people think. It has taught me not to be “afraid” of God punishing me for every mess up that I have. The Search for Significance has also taught me to view others in a very different way. I try not to judge everybody because I know that they have problems that I could not ever imagine.

The Search for Significance also includes a diagram called the Feeling Wheel . This is a way to help identify your feelings so that you know how to handle certain situations. For example, the middle of the circle starts off with the emotions: mad, sad, peaceful, powerful, joyful, and scared. From there you find your first emotion in the middle and work outward from there.

It also talked about how our action reflect our beliefs. The process was writing down an act that we had done, then identifying our emotions that led us to that act. After the emotions, you figure out what thoughts led you to have those emotions. Finally you see how the action that you took reflects a negative belief of God. This process helped me. It helped me think before I even acted and then it helped me after I made a mistake and messed up.