I struggled with this one. On the one hand, I had flashbacks from growing up in charismatic and Pentecostal churches, and in the late 90s/early 2000s, a lot of this is pretty typical of the culture. So it was very familiar and somewhat comfortable.

On the other hand, the culture back then, and in this book, were full of many unrelatable Christian-ese statements and sentiments, as well as dangerous thought processes that all you had to do was pray or have faith and God would take “it” away. Have PTSD? “That’s easy” - It’s just demonic and you can pray for immediate deliverance. Have cancer? Get saved and pray and God will heal you. And there will always be someone to prophetically speak to you when he needs you to know something. And while I’m certainly not saying that was 100% of the time what the book was saying, there was a enough of it that made it frustrating.

In real life, God doesn’t always (or often) take things away when they’re hard or you’re weak or things are bad. His strength makes up for our weakness - but our weakness still remains. That’s the point. Yes, God can heal or deliver or speak thru someone. But quite often, he wants us to struggle thru things so we learn to lean on him rather than constantly have the problem removed and “fixed”.

(And the emotional immaturity and lack of ability to control the characters’ reactions with other ppl so often, and doormat-codependency of the mother were also really annoying)