Meet Jeanette Levellie, co-author (with Beth Gormong) of Hello, Beautiful! Finally Love Yourself Just As You Are, hot off the press this week from Elk Lake Publishing. Hello, Beautiful! is an interactive devotional book for women. The book impressed me so much that I asked Jen to meet me here on Faith Songs for a cyber-interview.
As you might guess from that mop of red hair, adjectives like “spunky” and “lively” tend to pop up in descriptions of Jeanette. She’s a pastor’s wife, a prolific writer, and a popular speaker. She has authored five books and hundreds of stories, articles, greeting card verses, and calendar poems.
Interview: Jeanette Levellie with Linda Bonney Olin
Linda: Hi, Jen! Welcome! To start off with, tell us why, in general, you write the things you write.
Jen: Hi, Linda! Thanks for having me today. The goals of my writing are to help others know God as a real person, to bring more laughter into the world, and to offer hope for broken souls.
Linda: You certainly did all those things with your previous inspirational books.
Two Scoops of Grace with Chuckles on Top
The Heart of Humor: Sixty Helpings of Hilarity to Nourish Your Soul
Touchable God: Finding the Lord’s Friendship Through Prayer
But I think your new project is the most special of all. Why did you decide to write Hello, Beautiful?
Jen: I saw that women, even Christian women, did not think of themselves as beautiful. Our self-images are skewed by the world around us and what we were told as children. We need to see ourselves through the eyes of love: God’s.
Linda: So true! As my age and weight keep increasing, I avoid looking in the mirror, because I don’t much like what I see. To be honest, though, I half expected from the subtitle (Finally Love Yourself Just As You Are) that Hello, Beautiful! would be one of those self-empowerment books that tell women they can have anything they want, and do anything they want, and be anything they want, simply by believing in themselves. Happily, I was wrong. Hello, Beautiful! is a Bible-based Christian devotional, not a self-devotional. What religious point of view did you bring to the devotions?
