Oxford Brookes University. - English lessons: the crooked path of growing toward faith

Luminous patience and insight lights these uncommonly thoughtful pages. Andrea Lucado is a winsome, wise, and unwaveringly honest companion for the wonderer and wanderer, and the lines on these pages offer a tangible lifeline to every God-wrestler. These are pages that are hard to put down, that you will want to return to and reread. Andrea not only offers a genuine way to love the questions themselves, she offers an authentic way to love the Answer Himself.

A NN V OSKAMP , author of the New York Times bestsellers The Broken Way and One Thousand Gifts

This book brought me right back to a younger selfa bookish pastors daughter living abroad, making sense of her faith, of the world and her place in it. Andrea is a lovely writer, and this story will make you ache for the feelings and memories and experiences of your early twentiesboth the wonderful ones and the challenging ones. And it will make you want to go to Oxford, of course.

S HAUNA N IEQUIST , New York Times best-selling author of Present Over Perfect and Bread & Wine

English Lessons is positively paradoxicalboth mature and youthful, entertaining and challenging, full of light and full of depth. Written by a pastors daughter, it is the perfect book for those trying to own a faith handed to them by someone else. Whether youre a spiritual seeker or a hardened skeptic, this book will both honor your doubts and open your heart to grace. A wonderful paradox, indeed!

J ONATHAN M ERRITT , contributing writer for The Atlantic and author of Jesus Is Better Than You Imagined

To have a strong faith we can stand on, we all need to wrestle well with hard questions and come face-to-face with our gut-honest feelings. Andrea does this in such a tenderly beautiful way that will leave the deep parts of your heart feeling comforted and understood.

L YSA T ER K EURST , New York Times best-selling author and president of Proverbs 31 Ministries

In English Lessons we discover an honest voice exploring life and love, finding that its okay and even common to not know where the journey will take you. Andrea Lucados memoir is a story of love and friendship, saying goodbyes, and seeing yourself in a mirror to find out more of who you really are, perhaps for the first time. Her year in Oxford was a wide-open space for a life of grace.

S COT M C K NIGHT , Julius R. Mantey Chair of New Testament, Northern Seminary

English Lessons is one of those beautiful books that you can just fall into. Andreas story, her retelling, her insight, her heartit all shines. I love this book, I learned from it, and I cannot wait to read it again.

A NNIE F . D OWNS , best-selling author of Looking for Lovely and Lets All Be Brave

In this vivid and vulnerable memoir, Andrea Lucado allows readers to experience both the charms and the challenges of living in a foreign place. Andreas story gives readers permission to have faith like a child, questions like a teenager, and steady trust like an adult. If you want your own faith to grow and to grow up, this well-rendered story is for you.

K ATELYN B EATY , editor at large, Christianity Today, and author of A Womans Place

Life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

Ill tell you how the sun rose,

A ribbon at a time

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldnt it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isnt it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Dont worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts