Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Archives for June 2013

Stuck {How We Got Here, Part One}

On Friday we signed a lease for a new place to live. We’ll be moving soon, a process that has been a long and winding road. Here’s the story of how it happened.

The story begins last summer at the Tomato Pie Cafe in Littiz over fair trade coffee, tea and rich dessert.

Mario Alberto Magallanes Trejo | Stock Exchange

Mario Alberto Magallanes Trejo | Stock Exchange

Maybe the story starts a few months before that, when my husband graduated from seminary but learned he wouldn’t have a placement in a church. Or maybe this is just a set of chapters in the middle of our life story.

But really, I think, this part of it starts at the Tomato Pie Cafe. 

Phil and I met a pastoral couple from our denomination there to talk over what it would look like for us to join their congregation in Lancaster in an unpaid, unofficial ministry capacity. It was an introduction, of sorts. I barely knew either of them. Phil knew the husband a little better. Anything I knew was mostly from afar, and I had no idea how this get together would go down.

What I remember is feeling like we’d always been friends. We shared some of our stories. We caught a vision for ministry. We connected.

Though we’d been practical strangers when we walked into the cafe, we ended our time with hugs. And hope.

Phil and I began narrowing our job and housing search to Lancaster.

It was there that we both had circles of support that were important to us.

It was there that we believed we had a church we could attend and enjoy and love and help.

What we needed to get us there was a job.

Phil spent hours each day searching and searching for jobs and growing frustrated. Because who wouldn’t be frustrated that they had a master’s degree and no place to use it?

During these days we battled disappointment and anger. God, don’t You want us in Lancaster? we cried.

Nothing was changing. Not for months.

We were stuck. Wanting to be there. Still living here. Feeling like we didn’t really belong anywhere. It was impractical to commute that far for church, so we delayed our arrival, continuing to hope that it would be soon, all the while preparing our hearts to say good-bye to our current church family. Any day now, we thought. We felt like we’d overstayed our welcome.

And in the midst of our state of stuckness, we wondered: Had we heard God wrong?

To be continued …

What it's like to step into the pages of the Bible: Review of The Well by Stephanie Landsem

I’ve read the biblical story of the woman at the well, recorded in John 4, enough times for it to become familiar. Maybe too familiar. Which is why I appreciate what Stephanie Landsem has done with her debut novel The Well. (Disclaimer: I received a free copy of The Well from Howard Books in exchange for my review.)

The-Well-cover-1-201x300In it, we meet Mara, a teenager taking care of her crippled brother and despondant mother, in first-century Samaria. The mother, Nava, we will later discover is the biblical woman at the well who talks with Jesus and receives living water. That scene is uniquely imagined by the author and led me to look at the biblical passage in a new way.

And that’s only part of the story.

Nava is living sinfully in the village and Mara has almost no prospects of marriage. They struggle to find enough food to eat and they survive mainly on the charity of the other villagers, who equally despise Nava and feel sorry for her children. Then an outsider comes to the village, a man named Shem who has come to his grandfather’s olive farm to escape for a time while he’s hunted by Romans for killing a soldier. Shem has a soft spot for the weak and those treated unjustly. He finds himself unintentionally intertwined with Mara’s future.

When Jesus visits their village and speaks with Nava at the well, her life is changed and the course of Mara and Shem’s future is set in motion.

The ending, I think, will surprise you.

Landsem presents a believable picture of life in first-century Samaria, and the liberties she takes with familiar biblical accounts is refreshing. The Bible leaves a lot to our imaginations, and it’s fun when an author chooses to fill in the gaps. The plot is plausible and captivating.

The Well is Landsem’s first novel, but it won’t be her last. Look for more imaginative biblical stories from her in the future.

For more about the author, visit her at http://www.stephanielandsem.com/.