I love introducing you to my writer friends who are bringing beautiful, important books into the world. This book is by my friend Kaitlin Curtice, and it’s one you’ll want to check out. Kaitlin is a fantastic writer and a wonderful person, and I’m honored to have her writing here at the blog today – please feel free to ask her a question about the book in the comments.
As children, our worlds revolve around what we can do with our imaginations.
As we get older, we lose that ability little by little.
We begin to see the darker side of things, the broken side. We begin to wonder what’s good and what’s bad.
And by the time we’re adults, we’ve forgotten what it means to let the wonders of the world call us back to themselves again, back to glory.
My book, Glory Happening: Finding the Divine in Everyday Places is out November 7th.
I’ve thought and dreamt a lot about what this book will give to the world, what I want its legacy to be years down the road.
What I know right now is that we have plenty of things to worry about. We have plenty of brokenness around us—in our nation, in our world—and it’s not possible to always hold on to that childlikeness. It’s not possible to shut out the news, not completely, and so we carry with us the whole world, it seems.
So I want this book to enter the world as a breath.
The definition of glory is something that is extremely beautiful, and in Glory Happening I share eight ways that glory has shown itself in my life.
I believe this is what we need today, in the midst of everything. We need space to breathe and we need to tether ourselves to everyday goodness. Glory.
Even in the midst of pain, we find it. We find it in our labors, in our regrets, in our stretching and waiting and searching. We find it in small moments and in momentous ones.
One of my favorite stories in the book is about a woman my five-year-old son introduced me to at the market. She was an older Muslim woman from India who wore a hijab around her hair. When my son complimented her, she decided to offer a hijab to me, his mother.
A week or two later, I had a brand new hijab and bracelet to match. It hangs in my dining room today, to remind us that everyone is welcome and expected to be welcomed to our table.
The prayer that goes along with this story is one said by someone who wants to remember these kinds of spaces, who wants to sit in glory because it literally tethers us to God in a world that is tired and desperately trying to find God:
O God,
In these corners of our lives, speak.
These days, govern and pour
out the gift of your truth
over our daily lives,
so that when this
is over and done with,
we are still there with you,
still surrounded by Christ-grace
and Spirit-breath
and God-provision.
Hallelujah, for where we are now
and where we’ll be tomorrow.
Amen.
You can pre-order my book now, and I hope that you do. I hope that you make space for my stories to enter your home, your workplace, the coffee shop that you frequent. I hope you let my stories call your own stories to the surface, so that together we can say that in all of the chaos that was yesterday and is today and will be tomorrow, we are tethered here– together.
Hallelujah and Amen.
Preorders are super important to helping a book get off to a good start, so if you’re remotely interested in finding out more about Kaitlin’s book, please preorder it today!