The one with the books I could have written

I've been reading highlighting a couple books lately. Seriously. Someone should have given these books to me completely highlighted. Because that's what I've been doing. Almost every chapter.

With each page I read, I think to myself "I could have written this. This is me."

http://www.shaunaniequist.com/books/

A few examples of sentences that express exactly how I feel (and have a friend who is working on some art work for statements like this to hang in my kitchen!) 

• Preparing food and feeding people brings nourishment not only to our bodies but to our spirits. Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honoring our own createdness and fragility.

• Feeding people I love is a hands-on way of loving them. When you nourish and sustain someone, you're saying that you want them to thrive, to be happy and healthy, and able to live well.

• There's something about seeing your house filled with people you love, something about feeding people, especially on days when it seems like you can't make a dent in any of the larger, more theoretical challenges in life.

• There are a lot of things I don't know....I do know how to make dinner, and to see the people I care about gobble it up makes me feel like something is right, even when it seems like nothing is.

Or how about this one:

When you can invest yourself deeply and unremittingly in the life that surrounds you instead of declaring yourself out of the game once and for all, because what's happened to you is too bad, too deep, too ugly for anyone to expect you to move on from, that's that good, rich place. That's the place where the things that looked, for all intents and purposes, like curses start to stand up and shimmer and dance, and you realize with a gasp that they may have been blessings all along. Or maybe not. Maybe they were curses, in fact, but the force of your belief and your hope and your desperate love for life as it is actually unfolding, has brought a blessing from a curse, like water form a stone, like life from a tomb, like the actual story of God over and over....There is something just past the heartbreak, just past the curse, just past the despair, and that thing is beautiful. You don't want it to be beautiful, at first. You want to stay in the pain and the blackness because it feels familiar, and because you're not done feeling victimized and smashed up. But one day you'll wake up surprised and humbled, staring at something you thought for sure was a curse and has revealed itself to be a blessing- a beautiful, delicate blessing.

I could keep going. Really. I could. Ok, fine, I'll post one more:

I don't know what you've lost this year: a life, a friend, a child, a dream, a job, a home. I don't know what's broken your heart this year.... But I believe deeply that God does his best work in our lives during times of great heartbreak and loss, and I believe that much of that rich work is done by the hands of people who love us, who dive into the wreckage with us and show us who God is, over and over and over. 

Take my advice. Read the books.