Book Recommendation

This is one of my favorite books of all time. A book about truth, celebration, not having it all together, learning that your friends have messy basements, too, and hope. It is satisfying. Encouraging. Enjoyable.





And big Z has made it possible for you to read an excerpt online. Here.

But here is a passage that sadly isn't included on Zondervan's website. She is talking about how she has an old house and struggles with jealousy over the new house of a friend. And it is one of my favorites:

On my worst days, I start to believe that what God wants is perfection.
That God is a new-house God. That everything has to work just right, with
no cracks in the plaster and no loose tiles. That I need to be completely
fixed up. I think that God's kind of people are squeaky-clean people whose
garages don't leak, but really a lot of the people God uses to do amazing things
are people who don't necessarily have it all together. A lot of the best
stories in the Bible, the ones where God does sacred, magical things through
people, have a cast of characters with kind of shady pasts, some serious
fixer-uppers.

On my very best days, as an act of solidarity with my house, since we're both
kind of odd, mismatched, screwed-up things, I practice letting it be an old
not-fixed-up house, while I practice being a not-fixed-up person. I wear
my ugly pants, the saggy yellow terry-cloth ones with the permanently dirty
hems, and I walk around my house, looking at all thing things that I should fix
someday, but I don't fix them just yet, and I imagine God noticing all the
things about me that should get fixed up one day, and loving me anyway and being
okay with the mess for the time being.