Lisa-Jo Baker was a speaker at a conference I recently attended, and while I knew of her, I had never read her book Surprised by Motherhood. The conference was selling copies, so I bought one - and consumed it in a day.
Throughout the book, Baker traces her journey to motherhood (which she never thought she'd take) and recounts hilarious and poignant stories of mothering. She also writes of her own mother who died when Baker was still a teenager and how her experiences without a mother have shaped her as an adult.
If you have children, you need to read this book. She writes about how "...you continue to labor long after the baby is born," and I'm not sure truer words have ever been typed. This passage, I adore: "There is no part of our everyday, wash-and-repeat routine of kids and laundry and life and fights and worries and playdates and aching budgets and preschool orientations and work and marriage and love and new life and bedtime marathons that Jesus doesn't look deep into and say, 'That is Mine.'" What a great reminder!
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Wild in the Hollow: On Chasing Desire & Finding the Broken Way Home by Amber C. Haines
This book is one I happened to stumble on, and it is excruciatingly honest and beautifully written. Holding nothing back, Haines (a writer I was not already familiar with) describes her wanderings in her youth, looking to drugs, fun, and sex for answers. She also writes of her dramatic conversion and hard-fought faith. Her book reads like poetry, so I'll just leave you with her words.
"What I remember of that rebellion is that so many of us never had a space to work through difficult circumstances. There was no open culture to discuss pain or injustice. For many families, God was the answer, and he was a God who thought up good youth group T-shirt slogans, who said, "If you just believe hard enough, you'll not suffer anymore." Look around at the cinder-block houses and the kids whose feet grow holes in their shoes. Look around at the beautiful clothes on the girl whose daddy finds her at night. The God of the bumper stickers doesn't add up here.
"So much hammered doctrine was an effort to control, as if it were our own job to uphold the morality standards of Jesus for the world, rather than to be embodied by the actual Spirit of the living God."
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"Know that when you meet someone working hard to be outwardly beautiful and fit for consumption, inside they may be wasting away."
I would not say that this is an easy book to read, but it is lovely. Sometimes I just needed to put the book to the side and digest what she was saying, perhaps wrestling with my own thoughts a bit. So many truths spoke directly to my heart, and that's the value of this book. Her story is very different from my own, yet it was eerily familiar.
So there you have it - two more great books that are worth the time and money. Happy reading!
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