If you want to sell millions of books, tell readers they can be their own hero. Tell them if they don’t have what they want, they need to demand it. Tell them that they can have everything if they work hard enough: the beautiful family, the booming business, the world-changing nonprofit venture.

For Ruth Chou Simons, being her own hero doesn’t seem all that freeing. It looks exhausting.

She has one overarching message in her new book, When Strivings Cease: Replacing the Gospel of Self-Improvement with the Gospel of Life-Transforming Grace (Nelson): “The one thing I want you to know, more than anything else, is that if you are truly in Christ, you can stop trying so hard to be who you already are in Jesus.”

Simons is an artist, entrepreneur, and speaker. She and her husband, Troy, have six boys. Her previous works include GraceLaced. Simons goes on to explain in When Strivings Cease, “We’re working so hard to bloom, to bend, to please that we’ve neglected the soil from which we flourish.” And she concludes with a question: “What if our striving is really worship of ourselves as god?”

She joined me on Gospelbound to discuss how she came to realize that God’s grace is enough and to help us do the same. A lot of us can relate her struggle with belonging and fight for grace especially through the trouble of 2020.