It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way: Finding Unexpected Strength When Disappointments Leave You Shattered is Lysa TerKeurst’s book about what happens when your life stops matching the life you expected. Thomas Nelson published it in November 2018.
This page was reviewing it as a fitness book
We have to say this plainly. The previous version of this review opened with a heading about your fitness journey. It talked about missing workouts due to fatigue, described the book as covering physical stewardship and energy management, and recommended it to men wanting to conquer their fitness struggles and honor God through healthful living.
The book is about grief. TerKeurst wrote it out of a stretch of genuinely devastating circumstances in her own life, and it deals with the gap between the life you thought you were going to have and the one you actually got. There is no fitness content in it. None of that review was real.
This is the second time we have found this exact failure, and both had the same cause: the post had been filed in a fitness category, and the review was generated to match the label rather than the book.
Who it is written for
The other correction. This page was titled “A Christian Men’s Guide.”
TerKeurst leads Proverbs 31 Ministries and writes primarily for women. Her illustrations, her voice, and her assumed reader are all female. Calling this a men’s guide was our invention, not her framing.
That said, we are not going to overcorrect into telling you not to read it. Disappointment is not a women’s subject. A man whose marriage has gone wrong, whose career collapsed, who is burying a parent, or who is sitting with a diagnosis is dealing with precisely what this book is about. You will simply be reading something written to someone else, which is a normal thing to do and worth knowing in advance.
What it actually offers
The core of it is the space between what you expected and what happened, and what to do with God while you are standing in that gap. TerKeurst does not resolve it quickly and she does not tell you the disappointment was secretly good. She writes from inside it, with Scripture, and without pretending to have finished processing.
That refusal to tidy things up is the book’s real strength. A lot of Christian writing on suffering rushes to the lesson. This one sits still longer than is comfortable, which is why it has helped as many people as it has.
It is a book to read while something hurts, not a book to study.
What we removed
Essentially the entire previous review, since it described a book that does not exist. Also fixed: the page opened with broken markup, an unclosed heading and an empty bold tag, which had been sitting in the live HTML.
Who should read it
Anyone in the middle of a disappointment large enough to have changed the shape of their life. It will not give you a plan. It will keep you company, which at the right moment is worth more.
Skip it if you want argument, theology of suffering, or a framework. Read Job, or read a book built for that, and come back to this one when you need company rather than answers.
And if you came to this page looking for help with fitness and discipline, our apologies. That is a real subject, we review real books on it, and this was never one of them.
It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way on Amazon