Well first of all, I love you. I love the community I have found here- the sisterhood. Your tribe has lit the internet ablaze with your faith and words.

My name is Jennie. My husband and I lead a small and mighty tribe of miniature people (our 4 kids) in Austin, Texas, where I also write Bible studies and books because I believe in the power of God within women. I am also the founder and leader of the IF:Gathering.

Not that long ago my oldest was my only and I vividly remember staring at my ceiling every afternoon. I stared as my one and only newborn slept. I had nowhere to be. Nothing to do.

I would lie on my beige sofa in the quiet, surrounded by everything I thought I’d ever wanted, I felt that everything I’d ever wanted was strangling me.

I loved my family, but in the process of making a family I had somehow lost myself. Passions were pushed aside, dreams had trickled away, and the needs of other people outside my family had escaped me.

I felt restless.

Was this feeling pushing me toward something bigger, or crippling me from loving the life I was given?

Maybe it was both.

The word Calling has always seemed to tease me, like a mysterious secret containing the answer to my ridiculously restless spirit. We wonder if we are missing some mystical great noble purpose that was supposed to squeeze into the holes of our ordinary lives.

We feel numb.

We feel bored.

Let’s assume that if we are breathing, then we have a purpose for being here. Every one of us with breath in our lungs still has something left to do.

I want to dream of what our purposes may be.

This is a book about God.

And this is a book about us and God. And this is a book about the moment we close our eyes and see God. This is a book about facing the God of the universe and answering to Him about the life and the resources that he gave us while we were here. And because I think we all want that moment to go well, this is a book about discovering ourselves and getting over ourselves all at the same time. This is a book about being brave enough to imagine a better world and how we may be used to make it that way. This is a book about changing the world and changing diapers. This is a book about fears and suffering and joy and gifts.  This is a book about all that lays in our control and how nothing is in our control. This is a book about vision and obedience.

Because I know we will blink and be together with God forever and there is life to be lived here, in our generation, on this earth, for our breath.

So I humbly ask you, dream with me.

We will lay out the unique threads of our lives that feel random, potentially even tangling us up, but we will lay them out and dream about eternal purposes for seemingly mundane moments and consider that it is possible to waste our lives.

And then let’s not.

I believe this is from Him and I pray it will spark something in you… a vision perhaps of the unique reasons God keeps issuing you breath.

Today the beige sofa upstairs is unthinkably dirty with the stains of over a decade of beautiful messy life; my quiet, sleeping baby turned into four big kids; and my minutes are overflowing now, filled with it all. Life. But I still feel it sometimes . . . a whisper of more. Not more because what I am doing isn’t important, but because I so rarely believe that it is.

May this be the place where your restless soul meets God, and where dirty, beige sofas become beautiful, and where no life or minute or breath ever feels small again.

Gather some friends & grab a copy of the book today!

Restless Book Trailer from Jennie Allen on Vimeo.

We are excited to be giving away 5 copies of Restless this week! To be entered, simply complete this sentence in the comments:

I am restless for _____________.

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