Somebody Everybody Listens To by Suzanne Supplee.

The Heart Is Not a Size by Beth Kephart.

These are two very different books with a common theme: how does a young woma grow up, get past or through her issues and problems and imperfections, and change her life— and the lives of those around her?

In Somebody Everybody Listens To, Retta Lee Jones is a singer with a dream; she wants to go to Nashville and somehow sing songs that will be on the radio where everybody will listen to her music. It’s not so much that Retta wants to become rich or famous, although living somewhere besides the old car she drives to Nashville would be a welcome change. Retta just wants someone to listen to her, someone besides her best friend Brenda. She wants to escape her unhappy home and her estranged parents and become her own person. And as unlikely as it seems, Nashville and the country music scene become her path to adulthood.

It’s a good story that doesn’t pull many punches about the danger and the improbability of even tying to make it as a singer in Nashville. Retta Lee meets drunks and bitter wannabes and lecherous men and star-struck teenagers. But she also makes friends with Ricky Dean, the tow-truck driver who fixes her car and gives her a job, and Emerson Foster, a student at Vanderbilt who becomes Retta’s encourager, and even Chat, the skeptic whose harsh criticism will test Retta’s resolve. Any girl who plans to “make it in the music business” should be given a copy of this book along with some sage advice. However, as Dolly Parton once said, ” You’ll never do a whole lot unless you’re brave enough to try.”

Bravery and taking a chance on a dream are also the themes of Beth Kephart’s newest book, The Heart Is Not a Size. This one felt a little weird to me because it’s about two girls, Georgia and her best friend Riley, on a mission trip (or a good works trip) to Juarez, Mexico. I’ve been to Juarez, and although I’ve never worked in that city, I have been on several mission trips to other border towns, Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, and Acuña. I’ve worked in the hot summer Mexican sun, and I’ve been to the colonias, the poverty-stricken villages that grow up around Mexican border cities. So a lot of what Ms. Kephart was writing about was familiar, and yet there were distinct differences from my own experiences.

The group of teens in Ms. Kephart’s book, who were working to build a neighborhood bathroom and shower facility in a poor colonia called Anapra, were working with a secular group called GoodWorks, loosely associated with a church in Mexico, but with no Christian focus. I kept expecting the young people in the book to come together in the evening and pray for each other and for the success of their work in Anapra. I kept expecting them to turn to God for help in understanding themselves and their relationships with each other and with the villagers. But Georgia and Riley and the other teens just continued to dig down deep within themselves and to pull out inner resources that they didn’t know they had.

In fact, as I think about it, the message of both of these books seems to be that if you need to change, if your life is going in the wrong direction, dig deep and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, maybe with a little help from your friends. In fact, in Somebody Everybody Listens To, a preacher gives that exact message, telling a funeral congregation: ” . . . you are the one that’s got to change yourself. The good Lord just cheers you on.” And in A Heart Is Not a Size, Georgia just has herself: “I wasn’t letting anything else get in my way–not the dogs, not the dust, not myself, not the blackbird that banged in the place of my heart. I wasn’t going to be beat by panic. Not this time.”

Wonderful stories, but ultimately a discouraging message. What if you don’t have the inner resources to change yourself? What if your friends desert you? What if God seems more like an angry judge than a cheerleader? What’s the message for those of us who fail and fail again and finally can’t even get up off the ground?

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. ~Ephesians 2:4-10

A friend of mine was quoting someone not long ago, and she said something like, “Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good; he came to bring dead people to life.” There’s a corollary to that statement: We can’t save ourselves by working really, really hard. If God’s not more than a cheerleader, if He’s not a saviour, we’re a bunch of dead ducks.