Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World

I’m not much of a reader but I bought this book because I love Jennie Allen and it was so helpful and good!! She has a way with words.

If we have learned anything during the past two years of the Global Pandemic, it's that we need people. We were not meant to live life alone. God has created us to be relational. Finding friends can be difficult. How do we find people we can trust enough to let them into the deep parts of our lives? Jennie Allen's new book, Find Your People answers that question. She gives us the tools to find those people who will enrich our lives and make us better, stronger humans as a result. Jennie is real about the struggle of the being new kid and trying to Find Your People. With a strong Biblical foundation, she invites us to the challenge of being awkward and vulnerable to find the people we were meant to do life with. It's a hard challenge - a rewarding challenge. One that is definitely worth taking on.Jennie writes with passion and conviction, out of her personal experience. She is very relatable and opens up her heart in a way that I found very familiar. I've moved a lot and often found myself at a loss for friends, waiting for someone else to initiate a conversation. As an adult, and introvert, it is still a challenge to break in to well-established groups. Find Your People is exactly the book I've needed to help be the right kind of friend and to find the right kind of friends. Thanks Jennie!

Only one chapter in and I love it!!! Excellent info and great perspective. Very vulnerable and honest.

I have loved Jennie for years and knew from the title that whatever she had to say was what I needed to hear. This book made me totally rethink the way I was approaching friendship and community. She talks about initiative we need to take, hard things we need to accept, and the possibility of what life could look like if we do. Her words give encouragement in an area of life so many are secretly feeling hopeless about, and will shift my approach for years to come!

“From the moment you were born until you take your last breath, deep, authentic connection is the thing your soul most craves.”Many people who pick up this book will do so hesitantly. You may not think you need community, or maybe you no longer believe that deep and lasting friendship is really out there for you. Many of us will question if it is worth the effort, especially if we’ve been hurt before, and who among us hasn’t? But the vibrant picture Jennie paints of the life we’re meant to live together is so compelling, you can’t unsee it. You’ve simply got to get a hold of it.Despite the cheerful looking book cover and the relentlessly hopeful message, the book does not make light of the deep hurts many of us have experienced, but it makes a convincing argument that bravely pursuing healthy community is totally worth it. Is it a risk? Absolutely. We are going to fumble at friendship, and we are going to get hurt. But it definitely beats retreating into isolation, Jennie promises us, because while we may feel safe and comfortable being alone, we also feel undeniably sad. We were made to know and be known, and we need each other desperately. We are all growing physically sick from loneliness.This book will not make you feel self-conscious about your social shortcomings. Rather, it’ll let you breathe a sigh of relief that you’re not the only one, not by a long shot. Jennie’s vulnerability in sharing her own experiences with rejection and other relationship struggles reassures her readers that we are not alone in our loneliness, our awkwardness, our anxiety, our failures or our longings but that, actually, we’re all in this together. And there’s hope. Jennie shares how she fought back against the lies she was believing and the isolation she was experiencing. She and her family fought hard for the kind of community God intended for us to have, and she lays out an invaluable roadmap for how we can get there, too. There are actual diagrams in these pages explaining how we can think about and build our communities. There is science, there’s a numbered plan for handling conflict, there are Q&As, and there are honest quotes from real people. You’ll find practical ideas for turning acquaintances into friends, and plenty of real life stories to encourage you.This book is honest about the fact that in order to step into the connected life our hearts tell us we were made for, we will need to change how we live, but Jennie comes alongside to show us how. Find Your People will convince you that a life full to the brim with deep and healthy relationships is possible for every one of us, and it will give you the insight and tools you need to step bravely into this life you were made to live with others. You won’t be the same person you were when you picked up the book. You’ll have found your people.