Jake Owensby - Looking for God in Messy Places: A Book About Hope

Praise for Looking for God in Messy Places

This is beautiful and brilliant stuff, profound and plain, incredibly human, wise and charming. I trusted and enjoyed every word.

Anne Lamott, New York Times best-selling author

For any who feel frustrated and world-weary, and who want more than just wishful thinking or superficial spirituality, this book is for you! In these pages, my friend Jake Owensby poignantly shows how LOVE is what can truly give us hope to carry on: real love, Gods love for us, our love for each other, right here, right now, in all the struggles of this messy life. And God knows, we need this book NOW!

Bishop Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church and author of Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times

Jake Owensby doesnt hide from the messiness of life. He invites us to live with our eyes wide open, finding God in beauty and pain, wonder and sorrow, clarity and mystery. This is a book to heal broken hearts and restore weary souls.

Brian D. McLaren, author of Faith After Doubt

For any of us who has struggled to hope in these dark days, Jake Owensby illuminates the most important theological truth I know: If God is truly a God who loves, then help is always on the way, and hope is never in vain.

Greg Garrett, author of A Long, Long Way: Hollywoods Unfinished Journey from Racism to Redemption, and (with Rowan Williams) In Conversation: Rowan Williams and Greg Garrett

I read a lot of books that leave me feeling smarter, funnier, or more entertained. When I put down Jake Owensbys Looking for God in Messy Places, I had grown wiser. In these times when we could easily despair, Owensby digs deep into his life and the human experience in order to unearth a solid hope, rooted and grounded in faith.

Rev. Carol Howard Merritt, Senior Pastor of Bedford Presbyterian Church and author of Healing Spiritual Wounds

Looking for God in Messy Places

A Book about Hope

How to find it. Practice it. Grow in it.

JAKE OWENSBY

LOOKING FOR GOD IN MESSY PLACES

A BOOK ABOUT HOPE: HOW TO FIND IT. PRACTICE IT. GROW IN IT.

Copyright 2021 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission can be addressed to Permissions, The United Methodist Publishing House, 2222 Rosa L. Parks Blvd., Nashville, TN 37228-1306 or e-mailed to .

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950680

ISBN 13: 978-1-7910-1322-6

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org/

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MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Addi and Bennett
Love, love, love

Love and goodness... are the reasons we have hope.

Anne Lamott,
Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

Do not depend on the hope of results.... You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.

Thomas Merton,
The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters by Thomas Merton

by Diana Butler Bass

I want to introduce you to a friend of mine, Bishop Jake Owensby. Several years ago he invited me to teach the clergy in the region of Louisiana where he serves. After the event, he invited me to join him on a drive around the diocese. Usually when hosts take me on such tours, the itinerary includes historical sites, lively downtowns, elegant church buildings, and streets of nice houses with tidy gardens. People like showing their best to guests. Ive seen much of America this way.

Jake, however, bypassed the typical venues. Instead, he showed me a closed rural hospital, neighborhoods of shotgun houses, struggling farms, and small churches. Along the way, he told me stories of bad government, purposeful neglect of the poor, racial tensions, and political division. He also shared stories about some of the people hed come to know, revealing how much faith and joy could be found in the Louisiana countryside. And he talked about his mother who, as a teenager, had been held in a Nazi prison camp.

On that drive, I also learned that Bishop Jake was a philosopher, a former college professor. I laughed inwardly, because I cant say that Im entirely comfortable with either bishops or philosophers. Perhaps it is just my experience, but Ive often found bishops distant and philosophers preoccupied, more interested in the machinations of arcane institutions or intellectual conventions than in the messiness of everyday life. However, in the driving tour around rural Louisiana, I forgot about Jakes titles and roles. Instead, I found myself trusting the most gracious and thoughtful of guides, a person who was taking me through the landscape of his heart.

That landscape was inhabited by people who lived on the marginspoor Southern folks often ignored by middle-class church, both white and black; alcoholics and the barely recovered; immigrants hidden from view; abused and impoverished single mothers. To him, all these people are the body of Christ, whether they are members of his church or not, the body he has been called to serve. And, above all, God inhabits every placethe woods and marshes, the sky and the storms. There, in western Louisiana, a geography overlooked or held in derision by more elite Americans, Jake finds hope. Authentic hope. I had never imagined Louisiana as a holy place until that dayuntil that drive. By the time he dropped me off at the airport, I had both seen his world through the eyes of faith and made a new friend.

I wish Jake could drive you through his Louisiana diocese, but this book is the next best option. In Looking for God in Messy Places, he will take you through the working-class American South to Nazi Germany and all manner of everyday places, where hope arises in the most unlikely and despairing circumstances. And although he writes of faith and philosophical ideas, his itinerary is neither churchy nor academic. Instead, he invites you to join him on a journey through the landscape of God. By the time you wend through these pages, you will see what he seesthe world nested with love, the very nidus of hope. And, trust me, you will have made a new friend.

Diana Butler Bass