Book Review: Miracles and Other Reasonable Things

When I was reading this book I thought, who in the world could write a book about miracles and unanswered prayers? About miracles and finding God in suffering? I couldn’t imagine, even as I was reading. But Sarah Bessey can. And that is what Sarah can do like no one else: stand, explore, and lead in that impossible tension.

Tension is something we are becoming increasingly intolerant of. What I mean by that is we seem to have little to no space in our wondering and processing for a little grey, a little mystery. We seem unable to hold two different things together at the same time. We resort to black and white thinking out of our fear of dialectical (both/and) thinking. I think we’re scared.

But this story takes us gently out into the middle of the lake and before we know it we are very far from either shore of our rigid and familiar ways of thinking. And we look around and can accept the middle of it, the mystery of it, and it isn’t so very scary after all. And we feel that Sarah isn’t afraid. And so we mustn’t be either.

Rigid, this or that, thinking creates so much hurt for us. It is something that I run into all the time as a sneaky back-door culprit for pain and anxiety. We find ourselves metaphorically swinging from one extreme to another, and it leaves us feeling dizzy, disoriented, and frankly anxious. Because, the thing is, so often what is happening inside of us, or what is unfolding in front of us, is not clearly categorizable into boxes of all good or all bad, of all this or all that. 

This book is an experience of what it is like to walk forward through our rigid thinking into a both/and kind of thinking. Sarah generously leads us by the hand through her own story and it is a beautiful story of how complexity can not only be accepted, but be glorious, or even something we are grateful for. We so often want to throw out the complicated things, or sit on the sidelines because it is just too messy for us, but this journey invites us to consider our own places where we might feel two things at once, or where two things that may have seemed in contradiction to one another, can in fact be true at the same time.

This book is important to me for so many reasons. 

It holds together the idea of unity with diversity in a way that is not just lip service. You walk with Sarah as she experiences that internally and among other people. This is a message we are so thirsty for in a desert of dualistic (or us versus them) thinking where we are not only taking sides, but building whole lives and communities around those two sides.

And there walks Sarah. All at once gentle and shockingly powerful. Her unrelenting devotion to what is truly happening, whether it is messy as hell, or inconvenient, or disapproved of, gives permission to all of us to allow our messy truths.

It also blows through the idea of a before and after. Bad before, healed and perfect after. We often feel left behind when we are still hurting and talking to God about it if our only idea of healing is the squeaky clean shiny after.

I never experienced a sudden before and after in my own journey with anxiety. In fact, my darkest night was walking home from hearing a wham bam sudden-change story at a campus ministry. I walked home wondering if God had forgotten me. Sarah shows us that no, in fact God hasn’t forgotten us. Perhaps God is there all the while, perhaps we are experiencing the miracles in the mire.

Finally, Sarah somehow stays faithful to the truth of her own experience, while making room at the table for everyone else’s. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do. We so often want to make our experience true for everyone else in order for it to be true, or we feel the need for our story to be identical to others in order for that to validate our experience. But Miracles and Other Reasonable Things stands on its own.

I often tell clients who want to talk about God that I don’t think he is very scared when we are worried he is, nor do I think he is very impressed when we try to impress him. This book will be one I recommend for those wanting to walk into an experiential knowledge of knowing themselves and knowing God, in the messy, beautiful complexity of it all.