Girl, Live in Grace: A response to “Girl, Wash Your Face”

I set out to read Rachel Hollis’s Girl, Wash Your Face with a less-than-open mind. Most theologians and Christian commentators have found good reason to cast Rachel Hollis’s self-help, lifestyle, quote-unquote “Christian” book into the fires of modern millennial semi-religious self-help mumbo jumbo, and for good reason. 

Published in February of 2018 by Thomas Nelson, a blatantly Christian publishing company, Girl, Wash Your Face is marketed directly to Christian women as the answer to all of their worldly problems.

Topics include career, motherhood, purpose, health, fitness, sex, relationships, marriage, and the wisdom you need to become “the hero of your own story.” 

The book is formatted simply. It is made up of twenty chapters, each detailing one of the “lies I believed” and deconstructing each lie by detailing the “things that helped me.”

There is nothing sinister in the telling of one’s own story. Certainly, if Rachel Hollis is “like your girlfriend telling you what worked for her” then women everywhere would be able to take her advice with a grain of salt, much like the books of any celebrity, Instagram-famous blogger, or self-help guru.

And yet, women are changing their lives, routines, and rhythms at Hollis’s command. Women throughout Christendom are collectively “washing their faces,” itching to wipe away the drudgery of the messy, monotonous, or less-than-perfect parts of themselves in order to apply a squeaky-clean rose-scented go-getter attitude.

And before you tell me that no one is actually reading this and loving it,  Girl, Wash Your Face was released in February 2018 and stayed in the top 10 best-selling books in the USA for seven months, holding the No. 1 spot for at least 12 weeks. It’s categorized under “Christian Books” and labeled a bestseller on Amazon. Over 80% of its Amazon reviews are five-star.  

Hollis’s book is pushing women to find a way to “Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be.” Not necessarily a sinister goal. However, as I read (or, rather, listened to) Girl, Wash Your Face, I did not feel motivated.

This book exhausted me in a way that no book has before.

To try to get an idea for the type of writing going on here, here’s the book’s clincher, the final paragraph of the entire book.

Girl, get ahold of your life. Stop medicating, stop hiding out, stop being afraid, stop giving away pieces of yourself, stop saying you can’t do it. Stop the negative self-talk, stop abusing your body, stop putting it off for tomorrow or Monday or next year. Stop crying about what happened and take control of what happens next. Get up, right now. Rise up from where you’ve been, scrub away the tears and the pain of yesterday, and start again . . . Girl, wash your face!

Out of context or not published as a Christian book, this could be considered good advice. But it’s not what’s there that made me feel simultaneously anxious and exhausted by this book. It’s what’s missing.   

Should Hollis have presented her theories about life without bits of Christian philosophy peeping through, her ideas wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous. 

But her book is peppered with pseudo-Biblical concepts and stories from her journey from small-town pastor’s kid to successful Los Angeles businesswoman. Considering her audience is mainly Christian women in their twenties and thirties and that her book spends an entire chapter on motherhood and its many facets, there is definitely cause for concern here.

Are women free to pursue that which they desire? 

Sure.

Is there value in personal growth?

Of course. 

But the very idea that women need to do the right things or perfect all areas of their life to reach their “full potential” breeds dissatisfaction and feelings of hopelessness or inadequacy. Yet, Hollis goes one step further, placing all of the pressure on you to be happy.

If you’re unhappy, that’s on you. When I say unhappy, I mean unhappy. I don’t mean depressed.… When I say unhappy, I mean discontented, unsettled, frustrated, angry—any of a number of emotions that make us want to hide from our lives instead of embracing them with arms wide open like a Creed song. Because happy people—the ones who are enjoying their lives 90 percent of the time—do exist. You’ve seen them.

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“If you’re unhappy, that’s on you.”  

Hollis’s “just do it” slogan doesn’t give even a hint of how to actually achieve your personal goals. There are insanely fit people, rich people, successful people, my-dreams-have-come-true people, people never caught without a smile who still feel doubt, fear, and discontent on a regular basis. Your pastor does, your kid’s teacher does, your mom and dad do, your mentor and your therapist, too.

No matter how hard we all try, no matter how much we want to, we can not avoid the plague of sin or the unhappiness that comes with it.  

If my own happiness relies on my abilities, I’m going to fall short. 

If I’m supposed to find contentment in this world, I’ll end up lost. 

If I’m looking to the rest of the world, to other people who seem happy 90% of the time, to find my own happiness, I’ll never be happy or content enough.

Hollis paints over God’s story with her own, leaving just enough spiritual wisdom to disguise the gossip, materialism, and self-worship that she espouses as a part of God’s mandate for every woman’s life. She quickly covers over any real truth or honesty that can be gleaned from God’s word, picking out the parts which appeal to the most people, so that she might not enrage or ostracize any portion of her audience or readership. (Biblical Truth does not a bestseller make.)

Even when reading purely out of curiosity, I struggled to avoid getting swept away by this woman’s self-righteousness. I couldn’t help but feel that I should be working harder to be better in every area of my life. I couldn’t help but think that somehow I am not enough, even for my all-knowing, always-loving, arms-wide-open God.

Now, here’s where Hollis’s real lack of Biblical roots bares its face. In her chapter titled “I need a hero,” (Which is categorized, remember, as a “Lie I believed”) she speaks about a revelation she had while running a marathon at Disney World:

I don’t need to find anyone (to be my hero). Right now, in this moment, I’m my own hero…. That was all me.  And the things you’ve achieved? The big and little stuff that peppers your life and adds flavor, the achievements that have made you who you are—those are all you. I heard once that every author has a theme, and they basically just write the same message over and over in each book despite the plot or the characters. This is absolutely my truth, even if I was totally oblivious to it at the time. Every book I’ve ever written is based on this core theme of my life….

…It is the greatest lesson I have to give you.  This is the truth. I ran an entire marathon with Philippians 4:13 written on my hand in Sharpie, and I believe that my Creator is the strength by which I achieve anything. But God, your partner, your mama, and your best friends— none of them can make you into something (good or bad) without your help. You have the ability to change your life. You’ve always had the power, Dorothy. You just have to stop waiting for someone else to do it for you. There is no easy way out of this; there is no life hack. Just you and your God-given strength and how much you desire change.

Let me paraphrase that because on the initial read I’m not sure I caught exactly what she’s saying beneath all of the fluff:

Only YOU have the power to change your own life – this is the truth. I ran an entire marathon with Philippians 4:13 written on my arm with Sharpie, and I fully believe my Creator is the strength by which I can achieve anything. But God can’t make you into something without your help. You have the power to change, you have to stop waiting around for someone else to do it for you.”’

Here’s the thing:  While I’m sure that God was there for Rachel Hollis when she ran a marathon meditating on the strength God has given her, I’m also not confident that she’s actually read Philippians.  Here’s an excerpt:

For it is… we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh— though I myself have reasons for such confidence. But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.  What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. “

Philppians 3:3-13

I desperately wish that “Girl, wash your face” were replaced with “Girl, live in Grace.” I wish that women were being led to believe in their value because it comes from Christ. I wish that the woman with 1.6 million Instagram followers and a massive online platform were telling women that their actions do not determine their value, because they have been gifted the one thing that is needful. 

Instead of hearing that they have what it takes to be their own heroes, instead of pushing them to hustle more, to be more, to make more, to accomplish more, what if the answer to the nagging lies in all of our hearts was to let the grace of Jesus rest in our souls and rule in our hearts? What if we all let go of the hustle and accept that, because of Jesus, we can all rest securely?

The battle has already been won. The person you were “meant to be” is God’s beloved, a recipient of the grace of Jesus Christ, a citizen of heaven.

You are absolutely NOT your own hero. It is NOT all you, and you are not alone in this life. All you have accomplished belongs to God. It is God whose power works in you, and it is by the death and resurrection of Jesus that your life has changed: this is the truth. 

God has already made you his own. He will guide your life, he will lead you in the way you should go. Best of all, you will someday have a life with him forever. It is a future which we groan and weep and wait for, a future which God has firmly secured for us already so that we need to do nothing but trust in him.