“Sorting” is not a word we the people of the United States use very often and certainly not in the British way. But it’s a perfectly apt description of the process of discovering and re-discovering what I believe and why. And Sarah Bessey guides us through this messy work in her new book Out of Sorts.
It is a record of her own faith journey and a guidebook, in a way, of the path through a process that can be disorienting.
Like all good stories, it begins with a familiar phrase:
And while there’s no tidy ending (because all of our journeys are unique), it’s not a story devoid of “happily ever after.”
The sorting of a person’s beliefs can be a beautiful thing. But it’s not necessarily easy.
Out of Sorts doesn’t offer a how-to approach to finding your once-and-for-all set of beliefs. But it offers encouragement to question, to remember, to grieve losses and hurts, to look back on your life and church experiences and theology and determine what stays and what goes. Bessey’s book is like a friend who sits with us as we sort, but who can’t make the decisions for us. Those are for us alone. She offers her own experiences, her own work of finding a fresh look at Jesus in the Gospels, of discovering ancient practices she’d not been exposed to in her charismatic upbringing.
“Lean into your questions and your doubts until you find that God is out here in the wilderness too. I have good news for you, brokenhearted one: God is here in the wandering.”
It’s the kind of book I want to re-read to soak up the richness. Like a guidebook to a favorite vacation destination, I want to consult it again and again until the landscape is as familiar to me as my own neighborhood.
“You may sit by the trail and cry over the poisonous, lovely things being left behind. You’ll wonder why you’re still holding on this thing or that thing. You’ll find that some things you were ready to toss have become dear, so precious, that you’ll carry them in your lap to keep them safe.”
Encouraging, prophetic and challenging. A must-read if the faith tradition in which you were raised seems in conflict with the faith tradition you have now.