Emmy Kegler - One Coin Found: How Gods Love Stretches to the Margins

To my mother,
who first heard my stories and gave me my voice.

To my beloved Michelle:
every next chapter of my life has you in it.

Emmy Kegler is the best kind of weird.

She is a Lutheran pastor with an impressive command of Scripture and a passion for innovative worship; she considers doodling one of her spiritual gifts. Her boardgame nights are legendary, and her one-of-a-kind cackle will set even the staunchest wallflower at ease. Emmy recently led a sermon series on the animals of the Bible, drawing insights from everything from the chicken of Matthew 23 to the beast of Revelation 13. She created a database for cross-referencing her friends Enneagram numbers, zodiac signs, Hogwarts houses, and Myers-Briggs types, just for fun, and made a protest shirt to wear with her clergy collar that reads, My Boss Sent Me. This book includes 111 endnotes and six pages of suggested further reading... and its a memoir.

But what I love most about Emmy is her fierce, unrelenting love for her fellow oddballsfor religious burnouts and political misfits, for queer Christians seeking refuge and healing from toxic faith environments, for doubters and dreamers and wilderness wanderers, for recovering know-it-alls like me. Hers is a church that colors outside the lines, a church full of what she calls the impossibilities of God. And indeed, as her own impossible journey unfolds in the pages before you, it becomes clear that Emmy understands better than most what the disciple Philip knew when he baptized the Ethiopian eunuch on the wilderness road to Gaza that day: that the Spirit moves in the margins, that ours is a God who meets us in the stories of impossibility, of water in the desert and food in time of drought.

This book is water in the desert, a table of fresh food in the wilderness. It nourished me in ways I didnt expect, inviting this lifelong church nerd to see stories from the Bible in fresh, startling ways. With tenderness and skill, Emmy weaves the strands of her own story into the grander story of Gods relentless love for the world, but in a way that is never preachy and never self-satisfied. Ive been grateful for Emmys work for many years now, but as I turned the pages of this beautiful memoir, I found myself grateful too for the ragamuffin souls who helped her along the waythe mother who loved her unconditionally, the liberation theologians who gave language to her experience, the eccentric bearded pastor who plopped a plate of communion bread in her hands and said, There you go. Youve been trained.

To think of all the impossible stories that led to this one being told!

Of course, the impossible story at the center of this book is the story of the lost coin, but Ill let Emmy tell that one; she does it more justice. Im just here to encourage you to read on, to remind you to savor, to urge you to slow down and pay attention because every last one of these hard-won words is for you

you, who are immeasurably beloved by God,

you, who know a thing or two about coloring outside the lines,

you, who, with the help of the great communion of saints, can embrace all the best kinds of weird,

you, who will always and ever be found.

Rachel Held Evans
author of Searching for Sunday and Inspired