THE BEST BOOK

*this is the BEST book I have read this year....maybe ever.  It is at the very least in the top five favorites of books read in my lifetime.  

SO, SOOOO achingly beautiful.

Hope Heals 

by Katherine and Jay Wolf

This book is so incredibly beautiful as it tells the story of God's faithfulness in the midst of horrible circumstances.  I cried through a large portion of it.  As a mom to special needs' teens...this touched my heart in such a deep way.  Both the perspective of what fellow patients see and think when they see someone struggling (that was hard to read!) but also how no matter what, Katherine and Jay turned again and again and again to God and His promises - kneeling in surrender to God instead of giving in to the temptation to despair.  

This book was full of wisdom and pain and joy and encouragement...so many quotes buffered my heart and yanked my mind out of its natural bent to self-pity...I don't have room for them all (plus it is worth reading this book instead of reading what someone else has to say about it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) but these are the ones that I don't want to forget:

"To know you will be saved, even if you don't dare envision how, is to have the wick of hope kindled."

"Don't wait to celebrate the life you have been given, even if it looks different from the one you thought you would have."

"Would we still be able to thank God for what He had given, for what He had allowed to be taken away, and for what He had allowed to remain?"

and my most favorite of all:

"One day, we will see. One day, the arc of our stories will all make perfect sense. One day, we will trace the lines of our scars and find them to have fallen in the most pleasant of places, to see in them our great inheritance. One day, we won’t need to hope, nor will we need to be healed because we will be face-to-face with the source of both, the source of everything . . . Jesus. And in the glory of His face, the darkest suffering and loss we have endured will fade like shadows at daybreak. Until then, the moments of releasing our lives into the hands of a God we cannot see are the closest to wholeness we will come on this side of eternity. This is our truest healing—the healing of our souls—and it sustains us when we wake up tomorrow to an unknown but hopeful new day."