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I read Kate Bowler’s new book in one sitting while a gurgling, nocturnal eight week old breathed into my neck. I am not sure I recommend reading another mother’s account of dying while still squinting through the haze of postpartum depression. But I am not sure I don’t recommend it, either. Sometimes solitary communion is just the thing for a dimmed heart. Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved is many, many things.

It is:

A rumination on the questions many believers ask at one point or another,

“Why?”

“God, are you here?”

“What does this suffering mean?”

A call to believing women – during an earlier health crisis and then the months leading up to her cancer diagnosis Kate is told by doctor after doctor that her pain is exaggerated, misplaced or indicative of nothing more than emotional distress. Both times they are very wrong.

A guide for anyone who loves someone who is in mental or physical pain. Her advice on what not to say to people in the midst of crisis is the best read on the subject this daughter of a cancer victim has ever read. And while there are a few things I’d add to it, most contain four letter words and so for the sake of the gentle BCC reader, I will leave them to another post, another time.

A document that gives the sick and hurt express permission to feel no shame, to abandon all guilt over not knowing how the hell to respond to right now or what may be.

A nod to a God that waits and does not always heal.

An opportunity to witness a sister’s hopes, hurts, uncertainty, unraveling, peace and path.

And for me, while I rocked my baby and read about Kate contemplating leaving hers, it was an affirmation that much of the work of living life is preparing to leave it. To leave the babies we’ve made, to leave the relationships we’ve forged, to leave the people we’ve touched. To leave them better for the pressure of our hands upon their heads.

As a friend says to her, “we are all terminal.” Kate has an idea of what will take her from her time here and I do not. Still, we will both be taken just the same.

In confronting her cancer, in accepting that yes, she will die but there is a good work to be done until then, Kate teaches us the same lesson God seems intent on spilling out across mortality.

Life doesn’t keep. But Love does.

And so we are saved, even when all seems lost.

Amen.

(Find her book here.)