HOW TO ATTRACT THE MAN OF YOUR DREAMS

A debut guide aims to help Christian women find true love.

“I want you to recognize how beautiful you are,” writes Van Pelt in her trim work. “You are a treasure waiting to be found.” This simple, straightforward note of personal religious hope runs throughout the inspirational book and undergirds its sentiments about how the faithful should live in contemporary society. “God is so in love with you!” the author writes. “He built this whole world around us.” Throughout the volume, she asserts that she seeks God for clarity, and perhaps as a result, her own book’s precepts show an attractive level of lucidity. She sees the women of the Bible as “power players” operating behind the scenes of the male-dominated stories. She imports this kind of thinking to the modern world, telling her female readers that there are subtle ways in which they must “woo” the men of their dreams, sheltering them, shoring up their faith, and bolstering their strength in all things. She lays out in detail seven steps to achieve this: ambition, vision, belief, a road map, resolve to see it all through despite setbacks, faith in God’s plan for you, and a commitment to growth, both personal and spiritual. In explaining this outline, Van Pelt is a uniformly inviting and enthusiastic companion for her audience. She encourages her readers to ask God to give them “wit and wisdom so you know how to speak in such a way that you attract hearers”—with the most important of those hearers implicitly being the “one man” God has sent to Earth for each of them. The underlying question suggested in this—why would any effort at all be needed to win the affection of someone put on Earth by God in order to give it?—goes unaddressed throughout, but that seems at least partly by design. Van Pelt’s emphasis is more on the interpersonal mechanics of Christians finding fellow Christians than on any spiritual metaphysics that might be involved.

A clear and unabashedly uplifting set of encouragements for Christian women seeking men who are worthy of their time—and their faith.