BOOKS
Words are the “food” I find most delectable and nourishing in my life of faith. When I don’t know something, I write into the mystery of that unknowing, trusting light to emerge out of the shadows. When I find that my spiritual life has become abstract and unfocused, I craft sentences so that I can find God in the details, and learn how to behold again. When I can’t pray, I grab a pen and move my hand across the page until the writing becomes praise and petition, gratitude and lament. When every other tool I know of fails, I come crawling back to words—my first solace, my first power—and somehow or other, they bear me up.
When your faith begins to feel too small, too confining, you could choose to leave it. But what if the faith we inhabit is roomier than we'd thought? What if our collapsing faith is just a closet in a much larger dwelling? Disillusioned by narrow theologies, church dysfunction, and constricted readings of Scripture, people are leaving Christianity in droves. But Jesus describes the reign of God as a house with many rooms. The kind of God who decided to experience the world as a guest likely feels constrained by our pinched theologies too. What sorts of ruptures and revisions would it take to find a more spacious faith--and then to inhabit it with authenticity and joy?
A Faith of Many Rooms: Inhabiting a More Spacious Christianity
A Faith of Many Rooms: Inhabiting a More Spacious Christianity
He was a disrupter and a peacemaker, a rebel and a rabbi. His friends were the riffraff, and his enemies the religious elite. He was the wounded man who healed the sick, the homeless man who fed the hungry, the convicted criminal who released the captives, and the dead man who conquered the grave. The stories he told were scandalous, and the stories he lived changed the world. To reflect on the Jesus of the Gospels is to reflect on paradox, mystery, wonder, and messiness. It is to find God in the shadows, the tensions, and the ambiguities of life on earth as it is. These essays on the stories of Jesus are invitations to faith in all its complexity and untidiness. The Jesus who emerges here is not the sanitized Christ of piety and platitude, but the Christ of complicated joys and transcendent sorrows. The Christ who weeps, wonders, loses, learns, and seeks. These are the stories of the Incarnate God who finds and loves us in the messiness of our lives.
Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories: Reflections on the Life of Christ
TESTIMONIALS
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Debie Thomas cracks my heart wide open. She writes as midwife to Jesus’s invitation for vulnerable wrestling towards a beautiful and costly way of following. It’s worth it. Her words are tender, gorgeous, and brave, and they have replanted me in a more robust faith—one better equipped to evolve and weather what storms may come.
LIZ TICHENOR
Author, The Night Lake
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While most Gospel commentators offer you information, when Debie Thomas speaks of the text, she offers you insight. Into the Mess is just the kind of honest, grace-soaked, beautiful, heartbreaking view of Jesus that makes me want to believe.
NADIA BOLZ-WEBER
Host, The Confessional with Nadia Bolz-Weber
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A lot of religious writing is devotional but not particularly thoughtful. Some is high on scholarship but low on personal engagement. Debie Thomas brings head and heart together. Her beautiful new book will help you understand Jesus better, and yourself too. Highly recommended!