Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day by Kate Bowler...
Kate Bowler believes that the cultural pressure to be cheerful and optimistic at all times has taken a toll on our faith. But what if we could find better language than forced positivity to express our hopes and our anxieties?
Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! is packed with bite-size reflections and action-oriented steps to help you get through the day, be it good, bad, or totally mediocre. This is a devotional for the rest of us—which is to say, the people who don’t have magical lives that always work out for the best. As she composed these meditations during a season of chronic pain, Bowler understands how every day can be an obstacle course. She encourages us to develop our capacity to feel the breadth of our experiences. The better we are at identifying our highs and lows, the more resilient we become.
Like modern-day psalms, Bowler’s spiritual reflections look for the ways we can expand our capacity for courage, love, and honesty—while discovering divine moments with God. With bonus sections to use during the seasons of Advent and Lent, this is an easy book to read along with other people too.
If you want to build your daily habit of spiritual attentiveness, this book is here to say: May all your days be lovely. But for those that aren’t, have a beautiful, terrible day!
I first heard about Kate Bowler when someone I knew reviewed her book Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved. At the time of writing that book, Kate was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer and wasn't expected to live. It was a book "tells her story, offering up her irreverent, hard-won observations on dying and the ways it has taught her to live". Kate went on to survive and is now cancer free. This book, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!, is a book of daily meditations, "small reflections and blessings" that Kate hopes will help in our daily struggles. The table of contents is broken down with descriptive labels so we can flip to a specific reflection that hopefully targets what the day is bringing to us. She meant this book to be flipped through as needed. I look forward to flipping through and starting my day or ending my day or just living the day with words that can put what may be going on in perspective.
Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! by Kate Bowler will be published January 23, 2024 by Convergent Books, an imprint of Random House. And I was lucky to be sent a eBook for review by the publishers! Look for my review coming soon...
No comments:
Post a Comment