Heart Sisters by Natalie Chambers Snapp

This is a great book for women concerned about their relationships with other women. Maybe you've sworn off friendships because you have been deeply hurt. Maybe you're seeking an authentic relationship. This book has a vast amount of information and encouragement to help you establish the friendships God has for you.

Expecting your husband to fulfill all your emotional needs is setting him up for failure, Snapp writes. Women are relationship seekers and need women friends. Before we set out on that friendship quest, we must be right with God. “Getting right with God is a crucial step before we can get right with anyone else.” She reminds us that we have a God-shaped hole inside of us that we cannot expect human friends to fill.

Snapp covers just about every topic on friendship. She looks at the lies we might believe, keeping us from authentic relationships, and also how we can get back on track. She shares how she reached out for friends when she and her husband moved to a new community. She shows how Jesus is our model. She writes about the roles friends have in our lives, about the types of friends there are and how they relate to us.

She has an excellent section on how friends function, ministering to each other. She has great suggestions on making it through conflict (and it will come). She emphasizes the need for forgiveness and humility. She has a really good section on boundaries, what they are and are not. She gives practical suggestions on how to use technology wisely. She also has many ideas on directing our daughter's trajectory when it comes to relationships, including topics like bullying. She also writes about women working together in ministry.

She emphasizes that friends will not show up on our door step. We might have to get outside of our comfort zone, do things that might even scare us, to find friends. She reminds us it can take years to form the kind of friendship she discusses. She concludes her book with a great section on what friends do and don't do.

This is an excellent book for women in authentic friendship or wanting to be in them. She has included discussion questions at the end of each chapter so this would be a good book for a group of women looking to make deep friendships.

“Heart Sisters are essential to our mental, physical, and spiritual growth,” she writes. She has also provided additional resources at her own website, www.nataliesnapp.com.

I am taking part in a blog tour of this book and you can read other reviews here.

Natalie Chambers Snapp chose to follow Jesus at age twenty seven. She became passionate about sharing the grace, mercy, and truth about God's love. She is a regular contributor to the Mothers Of Boys Society, Deeper Waters, and the Whatever Girls Ministry. Her work has been featured at (in)courage and in Life Beautiful magazine. She and her husband, one spunky daughter and two spirited sons live in Indiana. You can find out more about her at www.nataliesnapp.com.

Abingdon Press, 208 pages.

I received a complimentary egalley of this book through Litfuse for the purpose of an independent and honest review.