Sarah Bessey - A Story of Unlearning and Relearning God

Advance Praise for

Miracles and Other Reasonable Things

This bookthe fullness, depth, and beauty of Sarah Besseys faith and artistic geniusis a miracle. Sarah, a prophet who cries out with fury from the pulpit and who whispers tenderly from the page, is simply my favorite faith writer. With Miracles and Other Reasonable Things she invites us to lives of wonder by opening our eyes to the ordinary, extraordinary miracles of our days.

Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising

Miracles and Other Reasonable Things will surprise and delight you. Sarahs writing is so breathtaking, sometimes you think you are reading poetry. The story is so thrilling, sometimes you think you are devouring a novel. And the Spirit she describes is so compelling, youll swear you experienced a revival. You wont put it down once until you close the last page. We are so lucky to be readers in the era of Sarah Bessey.

Jen Hatmaker, New York Times bestselling author of For the Love and Of Mess and Moxie and host of the podcast For the Love! with Jen Hatmaker

Sarah Bessey is a writer of remarkable gifts. Beyond her ability to make a breathtaking sentence, and to tell the truth about the dying and rising of faith, she can tell a story as if she were whispering it straight into your heart. She is, by her own definition, a dangerous woman, with wisdom to spare about learning to love the broken miracles God offers us once were honest about where it hurts.

Barbara Brown Taylor, author of Learning to Walk in the Dark

In Miracles and Other Reasonable Things, Sarah shows us how pain and loss can teach us to let go of what binds us in our faith stories while clinging to that which helps us surviveand ultimately thrive.

Mike McHargue, cofounder of the Liturgists and host of Ask Science Mike

Wise and funny, Sarah Bessey writes with hard-won hope that the space between healed and sick can be sacred ground. Thank God for Sarah, a faithful companion to those of us on the losing side of life.

Kate Bowler, New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason

Sarah Bessey, the self-described introvert, has given us all a witty and intimate personal reflection on faith and life that borders on liturgy. She walks the walk of an evolving faith, with power and vulnerability, guiding us through the common experience of listening to Gods nudge (and painful jolt) so we can relearn God again and again, and in so doing witness our own process of unbecoming and rebecoming people of faith. Thank you, Sarah, for putting yourself out there!

Peter Enns, author of How the Bible Actually Works

Sarah Besseys Miracles and Other Reasonable Things is immediately one of my favorite books. I cant think of a single other work that brings together such raw, vulnerable pain with such a real sense of enchantment. Sarah is not too pious to tell us the truth about suffering, but not too cool to tell us the truth about the magic either. In this trailblazing, bush-burning book, anything can happen: the Pope shows up, and God does too except of course, when God doesnt.

Jonathan Martin, author of How to Survive a Shipwreck and Prototype

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

For my father, K. David Styles.

It wasnt until I wrote the last word of this book that I realized it may actually be a love letter to you. Thank you for the day you told me to go seek God with your full blessingeven if my wandering led me out and away from your familiar paths. You were never afraid for me to go, and so I was never afraid of the wilderness. Your love has been our shelter and our home.

Thank you for a lifetime of ordinary miracles.

Were all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?

The Doctor

Ill just plunge right into the heart of things: Sarah Bessey is one of the best writers writing right now, and this book is Sarah at her best. Frankly, Im jealous of you because you havent read it yet.

One of my worst habits is waking up in the night and, instead of just turning over and falling back asleep, reaching for a book and reading till the light breaks across our courtyard onto the red bricks of the chapel next door. When Sarah sent me the manuscript for this beautiful book, it was almost like its presence on my nightstand woke me, whispered to me in the middle of the nightsort of how leftover pizza in the refrigerator also sometimes whispers to me in the night.

The lights of Manhattan outside our window kept me company as I read this book straight through, and I cried when it was over, like saying good-bye to someone I love after having had the pleasure of being on a long journey together, because thats exactly what this book is like: walking shoulder to shoulder through wild terrain, as pilgrims together along the path, borrowing bravery and perspective from your wise companion.

In friendship, if you want to create the kind of space between you that is strong and durable and deeply valuable, you have to be willing to go first. And part of why books matter and writing matters and storytelling matters is because the best writers go first: the best writers say the unsaid and unspoken, the secret truths we all feel but cant quite speak aloud. And in these pages, Sarahs willingness to go first in all sorts of ways is a sacred gift, a permission slip, a key unlocking doors long closed.

So many people in my life are whispering to me right now, almost like a confession, telling me the things they used to believe but dont or cant anymore. These conversations are holy spaces, and I dont take them lightly. Because for many of us, the truth is that we want to stay. We want to be Christians. But the truth is also that there are pieces that no longer fit, and thats scary, or at the very least, sometimes awkward to speak aloud.

What Sarah does so beautifully is create space and safety and permission to crack open our secret hearts and speak plainly about what were keeping and what were leaving behind. She draws us close, gives us a safe place to land when our minds and spirits are whirling with anxiety about the unknown places were entering, these new lands beyond what we used to know and believe.

This beautiful book about miracles is a miracle itself: an honest account of hoping and losing hope, longing and waiting, screwing up the courage to believe again, and finding it tremendously worthwhile and also not easy. This is a story about love and faith and family and pain and the shedding of one way of believing and the brave pressing into an entirely other way.

This is a grown-up, clear-eyed story of faith, told with so much soul and laughter and grit and elegance and plainspoken truth that it leaps off the page, straight into your heart. What a gift.

Shauna Niequist

Dear Friend:

This is meant to be the introduction to my book. But the idea of introducing this intimate and unexpected book in the way that authors are supposed to do such things seemed too far away and formal to me.