TEXARKANA, Texas -- Cassandra Speer's book "Her True Worth" is all about women getting to know themselves through Christ and finding their value.
The book's subtitle is "Breaking Free from a Culture of Selfies, Side Hustles, and People Pleasing to Embrace Your True Identity in Christ." So exactly how does one break away from this culture? Speer and her co-author Brittany Maher decided to write a book about it dedicated "to every woman who has ever questioned if she's worthy of the space she takes in this world."
"A lot of us are looking for our worth in all the wrong places, and we tend to scroll the feed because we are hungry for answers. And we can't find them online. So we decided to write a book," Speer said in an interview for the Gazette podcast "On the Line."
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Listen to the full interview:
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The process begins with contemplating what one is not, she said.
"I think that in order to understand our worth and value, it's very important that we reckon with where our worth is not. I think it's important that we acknowledge the things that we're not. We are not other people's opinions. We are not our relationships or our financial abilities. We are not our careers. We are not other people's views of us.
"We are not anything that is external. Our being -- our innermost being -- is within us, and it's God through us," Speer said.
Speer spent most of her childhood in Wisconsin until she moved here when she was 16, eventually graduating from Pleasant Grove High School. She calls Texarkana home because this is where she spent her formative years, went to high school and college, and later met her husband. Speer was not raised in a Christian household, she said.
"Where I grew up, there were bars on every corner. When I moved here, there was a church on every corner, often across the street from each other. And so, as someone who came from a family that did not know Jesus ... I wanted to write approachable theology," she said.
(Listen to the whole interview at onthelinetxk.castos.com. For more information about "Her True Worth," visit hertrueworthbook.com.)