���ϸ�����

“You need to toughen up.” “You need to develop a thicker skin.” Or, as Charaia Rush heard it, “You’re too soft, baby girl.”

Thankfully, author Rush is having none of it. Instead, she offers readers a new paradigm for healing rejections and wounds that are inevitable in a fallen world: Becoming “courageously soft.”

When Rush’s marriage fell apart due to a cheating spouse, many offered platitudes, but Rush did not skip the messy middle of her pain to get to some kind of socially acceptable—but fake—healing. She chose to deal with the mess inside and attune herself to painful wounds. It was here she found that God was holding her and healing her, but it wouldn’t be easy. Wounds have a way of pushing back.

“Heroes have this in common just as much as villains: Their storyline begins with a wound,” she writes. “And by the wounds of Christ, the deepest wound of our origin stories are healed.”

As she pressed into “the secret place,” Rush learned to be bravely honest to God about not just her hurts but the way those hurts had constructed stubborn and deceptive “beliefs that bubbled up from (her) scars.”

God’s great tenderness is also shown in the story of the prodigal son’s older brother and Joseph. “When we allow Christ to enter our disappointment, our wonder and hope for life are preserved,” Rush writes.

She reveals the power of lament and the habitual nature of forgiveness, not a one-and-done choice but an “active path.” In the Christian world we are often pressured to “forgive and forget,” but as Rush points out, “the axe forgets but the tree remembers.”

But “(t)here is a softening when we grieve the love we never received, the words we never heard, and the safety we weren’t afforded,” she writes.

We are all disappointed and are dealing with wounds big and small, old and new. This rich and beautiful book calls us to “return to tenderness.” A tender heart is a resilient one, as strong and soft as water that cuts through rock and also keeps us afloat.

A heart softened and held by God, Rush asserts, “is still a force.” (Baker Books)

We know what it means to do good. But in today’s tense and complex world, when political issues, theology, and current events so often divide us, how do we say good?

“Upholding and reminding others of the innate value of dignity of every human being is not always going to be easy or comfortable,” Eiland, a pastor and educator, writes. “That’s the risk of saying good.”

This is a book for our terrible and complicated cultural moment, rife with polarization and division, where we could all use a little guidance and fresh courage as we decide whether to speak the truth into our communities and relationships or stay silent. Thankfully, not every person must speak out on every loaded topic, Eiland says. We won’t all have the same passions, experiences, and convictions, and that’s OK. But how can we know what to say and when?

Wisdom is crucial, and so is compassion and speaking from “a deeply-formed place.” It can feel like walking a high wire, which is why Eiland uses just that as her working analogy throughout the book. Just as a highwire artist starts practicing on the ground and then on low wires before stepping across Niagara Falls, we too must learn how to perceive a situation and navigate our voices well across strained and complex circumstances.

Yes, bridging a canyon is hard, deep work, for the likes of the Wallenda family of tightrope artists and each one of us. But when we join God in this work, he guides us every step of the way. “The chasms will be there as long as we live, but that’s not the grace in this story,” Eiland writes. “God’s miraculous grace is that we choose to walk across, choose to talk across tensions and heights … somehow chasms turn into bridges.” (NavPress)

As a biracial Filipina-American “othered” her whole life, Jenai Auman discovered a new and disturbing level of “othering” in the place she should have felt the safest: her church.

“Never in my life have I felt so alone as when I was singing hymns of thankfulness and grace alongside church leaders who were actively working to push me out,” she writes. Her crime? Holding toxic and controlling leadership of her megachurch accountable. “When people with tremendous power—especially spiritual power—believe they are “not enough” they’ll use their power to other the neighbors around them. And to alleviate their anxiety and insecurity, they call it faithfulness.”

Hurt and traumatized though she was, Auman does not settle into a victim mentality. Instead, she forges a path of healing for herself and others, pointing readers to the hesed of the God who compassionately clothed Adam and Eve in the Garden and will also pursue each of us with his tender care. “He continues to seek those cast out of his sanctuaries because the othered bear his image too.”

For anyone who has been hurt and othered in a church setting, Auman’s book is an essential companion on the road to healing. She points the reader to lament and other practices that help us process what has happened to us to move forward. Church systems and structures and people might fail us, but God never will. Othered helps those who feel cast out and marginalized to reclaim the goodness of their lives, hidden in Christ. Readers will find healing and new wholeness as they learn to walk with God, generate life, and cultivate a spacious place of connection wherever they go next. (Baker Books)

Our culture defines self-care as bubble baths, a rom-com with a glass of wine, and a half day at the spa for a facial and a massage. Those are all good things, but according to this barrier-breaking devotional from Tiffany Bluhm, they don’t begin to touch on what self-care truly means and how it can restore, energize, and even galvanize us into being agents of justice and renewal.

In 40 in-depth, lyrical devotions, readers discover a weightier, more transformative definition of self-care, including rest, lament, advocacy, and empowerment. Bluhm and a group of contributors, including Ashlee Eiland, Kayla Craig, and Pricelis Perreaux-Dominguez, knit together Scripture, prayerful liturgies, and stories of historical figures to “show women that caring for themselves is the first step toward renewing their own souls and tackling the social problems they care most about.”

The dedication before the book begins sets the tone: “To the women who have gone before us, the ones who have dismantled systems that made no room for our flourishing: May we glean from your lives well lived.”

Lives well lived indeed. The women highlighted here are brave, prophetic, strong, and attuned to their deepest emotions, including lament. Women such as Deborah and Jael work with God to remake their communities into those that flourish and enjoy peace and shalom.

The daughters of Zelophehad—Mahlah, Noa, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirza—courageously advocated for themselves as brotherless daughters of Israel. There is a prayer at the end of each devotional, and this prayer reads: “God of Zelophehad’s daughters, grant me wisdom to advocate for myself and others.” Every devotional also ends in a “declaration,” and this one reads: “What I deserve is not defined by others but is given by the God who loves me.”

Each reading gives the reader an increased understanding of how self-compassion and care can lead to a life of meaning and purpose that restores the world around us.

“Within our commitment to follow the creator is a measure of self-denial, but this is not at odds with our actualized self-care,” Bluhm writes. “These two things work together to forge an embodied life of deep trust in the Divine and wise decision-making that centers the flourishing of our heart, mind, soul, and strength.” (Brazos Press)

Chuck DeGroat has written a masterwork of Christian inner healing books. The author of When Narcissism Comes to Church gently and compassionately guides the reader in peeling back the layers of shame and hurt to reveal their heart’s true home within. “Disconnection,” he writes, “is the tale as old as time.” How we reconnect with our wounds (a necessary process) will lead us back to home, where our curious and loving God dwells, waiting to help us process the things that harm us in this broken world.

Adam and Eve are a through-line of the book, woven beautifully into the pages from start to finish. When they disconnected from God and each other in the Garden of Eden, they stood naked and ashamed, but God pursued them tenderly and asked them three questions.

“‘Where are you?’ God asks with heartache, longing to find us,” DeGroat writes. Though we might have always heard the question as punitive and accusatory, he contends that God’s questions to our original parents were infused with love.

“‘Who told you?’ God asks with compassion, curiously pursuing us. Where are we getting our messages from?

And finally, God asks, “‘Have you eaten from the tree?’” “God … is bringing our eyes to where we’ve chosen to cope—to numb, to soothe, to avoid—instead of abiding in his care and compassion.”

DeGroat invites his reader to soak in the presence of God, our compassionate witness, whose kindness never ends and who gently helps his children attune to their inner wounds, listening for the words of belonging and purpose being sung over us.

With vulnerability, superb word craft, and deep wisdom into the heart and soul, Healing From Within beckons readers to “return and retune, to awaken to the ancient whisper of love amidst the ache of alienation.” (Tyndale Refresh)

As my husband and I drove 1,000 miles over mostly snow-covered prairies to spend Christmas with my elderly mom in a Canadian hospital, we decided to listen to the audio version of a new Christmas book, not realizing how much depth and meaning would be added to our holiday.

Maybe because it was a very weird Christmas anyway—far from home, away from our three kids for the first time in 28 years—but the sage, sweeping insights in this book sank roots into our tattered souls. Along the hushed stillness of Northern highways, the ancient story of a baby born to save us was stripped bare of 2,000 years of trappings and tinsel.

Sherrill, a former Evangelical pastor and now Anglican priest, brings the best of both traditions to this exploration of the first Christmas. In Emily Dickinson’s words, he tells the truth, “slant,” which means that he cuts through the overfamiliarity of the story and presents it from new angles and vantage points.

Before our trip, I wasn’t sure I had time to read a Christmas book before Christmas, but Sherrill hooked me with the idea of bread being crucial to our understanding of the holiday. Jesus, he points out, is the bread of life, born in Bethlehem, which means “house of bread,” and placed in a manger (a feeding trough).

This idea of bread nourishes the book, the first part delving into Advent and the second part into Christmas, all the way to Epiphany.

Each chapter focuses on a character from the story, meant to be our “close companions to help form us rightly.” Some of the characters are obvious—Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and the wise men—but the way Sherrill unwraps them made us feel as if we were hearing about them for the first time. The shepherds, for example, have been reduced to cute caricatures but should be considered “controversial,” he writes. They were rough, thieving, thuggish—and yet God chose them out of everyone. “Why would God invite them to be the first guests to worship the Messiah? Because he is a God who loves to turn tables on the values of this world, inviting those least expected to be the honored guests.”

Other less-known characters enthralled us. The Innkeeper probably didn’t even exist as we’ve been told; rather, he was likely a relative of Joseph’s who made room for Mary and Joseph in the section of his home where animals lived because there was no guestroom available. He practiced radical hospitality as opposed to the “no room at the inn” narrative. Chapters on Gabriel, Herod, and Anna also stirred new meaning and insights into the story.

So, yes, it’s unusual for a Christmas book to make the year-end best-of lists. But I had to include this one. It profoundly reshaped my Christmas—and hopefully the ones to follow. “It’s one thing to know the story; it’s another thing to let the story know you,” Sherrill writes. “From beginning to end, God was writing a poetic (and true) story. … But the story—true as it is—does not end there.” (Waterbrook)