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Nice Girls Don't Change the World
By Lynne Hybels Zondervan
Copyright © 2005 Lynne Hybels
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-310-27231-9
Chapter One
I want to tell you about someone I used to know very well.
She was a nice girl: obedient, polite, socially acceptable. A bit too reticent, some might say, but so very pleasing, nonetheless. A really nice girl.
Oh yes, her gaze seemed empty at times and her words sometimes rang, well, not false really, but perhaps a bit flat.
Okay, I sometimes had the feeling she was just going through the motions of life, but they were such nice motions. Everybody liked her.
She had an uncanny ability to keep almost everybody happy almost all the time, though she didn't truly seem to be very happy herself. But I could be wrong; she was always smiling. I don't know that I ever heard her laugh-and no one ever accused her of being wildly in love with life-but she had such a nice smile.
She was a very caring person, though in a passive sort of way. She was not the type to turn the world upside down.
Still, she was a very nice girl.
What I mean to say, as you might have guessed, is that I was a very nice girl.
A nice girl. There's nothing wrong with being a nice girl, especially when you consider the alternatives:
A naughty girl?
A mean girl?
A bad girl?
Who wants to be like that? I didn't.
I really didn't.
What I wanted was to be a godly girl. From the time I became a Christian at age seven, I wanted to please God, and I took that desire very seriously.
a nice girl
I grew up in the 1950s and '60s in a small Michigan town, where I attended a church that was a fine church in many ways. But the preaching during my most impressionable years was pretty much hellfire and brimstone. I heard a lot about sin and punishment, guilt and shame.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nice Girls Don't Change the World by Lynne Hybels Copyright © 2005 by Lynne Hybels. Excerpted by permission.
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