Miracles and Other Reasonable Things: A Story of Unlearning and Relearning God

8 October 2019 – NOW AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE

A deeply moving and life-affirming account of wrestling with faith and God and finding miracles in the most unexpected places.

In the brief instant Sarah Bessey realized that her minivan was, inevitably, going to hit the car on the highway on the bright, clear day of the crash, she knew intuitively that it would have life-changing consequences. But as she navigated the winding path from her life before the accident—as a popular author, preacher, and loving wife and mother—to her new life after, inhabiting a body that no longer felt like her own, she found that the most unexpected result wasn’t the way this shook her body, but how it shook her deeply rooted faith, upending everything she thought she knew and held so dearly.

Weaving together theology and memoir in her trademark narrative style, Sarah tells us the story of the moment that changed her body and how it ultimately changed her life. The road of healing leads to Rome where she met the Pope (it’s complicated) and encountered the Holy Spirit in the last place she expected. She writes about her miraculous healing, learning to live with chronic pain, and the ways God makes us whole in the midst of suffering. She invites us to a path of knowing God that is filled with ordinary miracles, hope in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and other completely reasonable things.

Insightful, profound, and unexpected, Miracles and Other Reasonable Things is a wild, spirit-filled story of what it means to live with both grief and faith, suffering and joy, as we wrestle with God.

“This book—the fullness, depth, and beauty of Sarah Bessey’s faith and artistic genius—is a miracle. Sarah, a prophet who cries out with fury from the pulpit and who whispers tenderly from the page, is simply my favorite faith writer. With Miracles and Other Reasonable Things, she invites us to lives of wonder by opening our eyes to the ordinary, extraordinary miracles of our days.”

– Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising

“Miracles and Other Reasonable Things will surprise and delight you. Sarah’s writing is so breathtaking, sometimes you think you are reading poetry. The story is so thrilling, sometimes you think you are devouring a novel. And the Spirit she describes is so compelling, you’ll swear you experienced a revival. You won’t put it down once until you close the last page. We are so lucky to be readers in the era of Sarah Bessey.”

– Jen Hatmaker, New York Times bestselling author of For the Love and Of Mess of Moxie and host of the For the Love Podcast

“Sarah Bessey is a writer of remarkable gifts. Beyond her ability to make a breath-taking sentence, and to tell the truth about the dying and rising of faith, she can tell a story as if she is whispering it straight into your heart. She is, by her own definition, a dangerous woman, with wisdom to spare about learning to love the broken miracles God offers us once we’re honest about where it hurts.”

– Barbara Brown Taylor, author of Learning to Walk in the Dark

“In Miracles and Other Reasonable Things, Sarah shows us how pain and loss can teach us to let go of what binds us in our faith stories while clinging to that which helps us survive—and ultimately thrive.”

– Mike McHargue, cofounder of The Liturgists and host of Ask Science Mike

“Wise and funny, Sarah Bessey writes with hard-won hope that the space between healed and sick can be sacred ground. Thank God for Sarah, a faithful companion to those of us on the losing side of life.”

– Kate Bowler, New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens For a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved

“Sarah Bessey, the self-described introvert, has given us all a witty and intimate personal reflection on faith and life that borders on liturgy. She walks the walk of an evolving faith, with power and vulnerability, guiding us through the common experience of listening to God’s nudge (and painful jolt) so we can relearn God again and again, and in so doing witness our own process of unbecoming and rebecoming people of faith.”

– Pete Enns, author of How the Bible Actually Works

“Sarah Bessey’s Miracles and Other Reasonable Things is immediately one of my favorite books. I can’t think of a single other work that brings together such raw, vulnerable pain with such a real sense of enchantment. Sarah is not too pious to tell us the truth about suffering, but not too cool to tell us the truth about the magic, either. In this trail-blazing, bush-burning book, anything can happen: the Pope shows up, and God does too . . . except of course, when God doesn’t.”

– Jonathan Martin, author of How to Survive a Shipwreck and Prototype

Releasing on 8 October 2019 – preorder now

Amazon.com

Amazon.ca

Barnes and Noble

Chapters Indigo

Independent Bookstores

Darton, Longman + Todd (UK Publisher)

Amazon UK

It is also available as an audio book! Here’s a little sample (it is read by Erin Moon, not by myself #CanadianAccentProblems). You can buy the audio book at Audible, Google Play, or Apple Books.

Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

3 November 2015

From the popular blogger and provocative author of Jesus Feminist comes a riveting new study of Christianity that helps you wrestle with—and sort out—your faith.

In Out of Sorts, Sarah Bessey helps us grapple with core Christian issues using a mixture of beautiful storytelling and biblical teaching, a style well described as “narrative theology.”