Winning Balance: What I've Learned So Far about Love, Faith, and Living Your Dreams by Shawn Johnson

Winning Balance:

What I’ve Learned So Far about Love, Faith, and Living Your Dreams

by Shawn Johnson and Nancy French

Reviewed by Sharon Clark

About the book – Twenty-year-old American gymnast Shawn Johnson is a four-time Olympic gold and silver medalist; a national- and world-champion athlete. Already a popular role model to all ages, in 2009 she captured the national spotlight again when she won the widely popular Dancing with the Stars. Yet Shawn is no stranger to hard work and adversity. Her loss of the major gymnastics prize everyone expected her to win in Beijing, the all-around Olympic gold medal, was the loss of a dream she’d worked for since childhood. And later, she suffered a potentially career-ending injury in a skiing accident that forced her life to a halt and made her rethink what was really important. She wasn’t sure who she was anymore. She wasn’t sure what her goals were. And she wasn’t sure she was satisfied with where she was with her faith and God. Could she find the right kind of success in life—the kind that doesn’t involve medals or trophies, but peace, love, and lasting joy? This is the amazing true journey of how the young woman who won an Olympic gold medal on the balance beam became even more balanced.

~Tyndale Momentum (June 5, 2012)

Sharon’s Review

Winning Balance: What I’ve Learned So Far about Love, Faith, and Living Your Dreams’ by Shawn Johnson with Nancy French is a book that tells about Shawn Johnson’s life and more. Shawn shares insights that she has learned, poems she has written, the progression of her ambitions, her triumphs, failures, honors, and embarrassments. Shawn opens up and shows her readers who she is inside and out.

Shawn manages to stir up a sense of ‘you can do it’ even while telling about things that most of us will never experience. She boosts a feeling that with hard work and commitment, we might not achieve what we aimed to do, but in doing it we will attain something much more rewarding than simply realizing a goal.

‘Winning Balance’ isn’t a cheerleader or motivational speaker type of book, but the end result of reading it is having a renewed feeling that ‘all things are possible through Jesus’. Shawn’s book isn’t heavy on Christian theology or preaching, but she does share her faith and love of God with her readers in a low-key way.

Regardless of whether you have followed Shawn’s career as a gymnast, a celebrity on Dancing with the Stars, or never heard of her as in my case, this is a delightful book to read and I highly recommend it.

Read more reviews by Sharon Clark at https://lightatheart.wordpress.com/