Showing posts with label generosity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label generosity. Show all posts

Thursday, April 7, 2022

The Broken Way - Book Review

Hands cupped together and holding seeds
Read an Excerpt

So much of life is paradox.  Like, for instance, how the having is in the giving.  Or, how abundance flows through generosity.  And, as Ann Voskamp models in The Broken Way, how healing emerges from the shattering pain of brokenness.  

Truth be told, we are all broken, yet few of us want our broken laid bare for all the world to see.  Voskamp, with astonishing vulnerability, makes it safe for us by being the one to expose her cut lines, her cracks, and those moments when bad brokenness made way for good brokenness.  

As is especially apparent right now, we live in a broken world.  Yet, it is those things that break our hearts that provide us with the openings needed for a healing that can only come through union with other broken hearts.

In the introduction, Ann asks us this: How do we live with our one broken heart?  This is a book that challenges us to take our time with that question.  What else is time for if not for that?  

Voskamp shares:

Maybe what matters isn't what we want from the time we have to live... but what time wants from us.  There is a time to be broken and given into all the world's brokenness.  

With Easter fast approaching, I cannot think of a better time to reflect on what that means.  

This book came to me when I needed it most and I know there is someone reading this who will feel the same way.  A sure sign of an impactful reading experience, for me, is how much I write while absorbing a book.  I filled an entire journal with notes, insights, reflections, and quotes.  

Ann Voskamp's broken heart met up with mine through her exquisite way with words, her raw honesty, and her immense capacity for communion.

How do we live with our one broken heart?  We live by giving it away.  We live by connecting our broken to another's broken.  

Brokenness is our unity... our common ground... our gift to one another.  










Note: The author may receive a commission from purchases made using links found in this article. “As an Amazon Associate, Ebay (EPN) and/or Esty (Awin) Affiliate, I (we) earn from qualifying purchases.”


Thursday, May 21, 2020

The Honey Bus - Book Review

the honey bus book cover
Read an Excerpt
Honey has long been known as the elixir of life.  For Meredith May, a young child whose life had been turned upside down and inside out by parental discord, the miraculous powers of honey, bees, and her beekeeper grandfather would be a vital lifeline.  To read Meredith's memoir, The Honey Bus, is to be mesmerized by how honeybees took the raw material of a confused girl and turned her into something golden.

At five years of age, May found herself uprooted from everything familiar.  Due to the divorce of her parents, Meredith and her brother were suddenly moved cross-country to live with their grandfather in California.  This was an incredibly upsetting, and confusing, turn of events.  For May, things no longer made sense, as no one had explained what was happening.  To make matters worse, her mother barricaded herself behind a bedroom door, and entered a seemingly endless season of child abandonment.

Sensing the need for connection, nurturing, and something to fill the deep hole in his granddaughter's psyche, Franklin Peace began to introduce Meredith to the wonders of beekeeping.  That journey began with a flurry of bee stings—which would terrorize most children.  Counter to what one might expect, the temporary pain of that surprise attack by swarming bees built up a kind of immunity to the deeper sting of feeling alone in the world.

Like a bee drawn to honey, May's curiosity about the rusty old Army bus in her grandfather's back yard was not to be denied.  The ramshackle honey bus was the object of Meredith's great desire.  She longed to be granted entry into that portal, for she knew that magical things happened inside her grandfather's top secret laboratory.  On the day when she was finally deemed old enough for a membership into the honey bus's secret society, May's joy knew no bounds.

As her grandfather's beekeeping apprentice, Meredith not only entered into the fantastical world of honeybees, but more importantly, she found her forever family.
Bees need the warmth of family.  Alone, a single bee isn't likely to make it through the night.  A beehive revolves around one principle—the family.  I knew that gnawing need for a family.
May's sage, quietly unassuming grandfather used the language of bees to reveal the ancient ways that were relevant to learning how to persevere through collective strength.  As she fed off of this Way of the Bees, Meredith learned all that she could not learn from her birth parents.  It was the bees that were, in essence, raising her.  From them, the author gained insight into compassion and how to thrive by caring for others. 



In following Meredith through the mystical portal into honeybee society, we find ourselves joining in the dance of the bees.  You will revel in the poetry of what it is to be in the presence of sacred creatures that exist for the greater good.  The artistry of Meredith May's writing was, to this reader, the sweetest of nectars.

Just as honeybees make themselves essential through their generosity, this book is essential reading in that it gives us what we need to enter into the bee's state of grace.  Bees give far more than they ever take.  Spending time in The Honey Bus has given me the desire to be more of what someone else might need right now.  And, perhaps, that is the true elixir of life.









Note: The author may receive a commission from purchases made using links found in this article. “As an Amazon Associate, Ebay (EPN) and/or Esty (Awin) Affiliate, I (we) earn from qualifying purchases.”


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