Loving the Bible in Your Actual Life

Tricia Lott Williford can write about any topic in a book, and I know I will love it and learn from it.

Her first book, And Life Comes Back: A Wife’s Story of Love, Loss, and Hope Reclaimed, is one of my all-time favorite memoirs. Her fourth— Just. You. Wait.: Patience, Contentment, and Hope for the Everyday—met me right where I was when it was published two years ago.

But when I signed up to be part of the launch team for her latest offering—This Book is for You, which releases today— I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to get from it.

I already “love God’s words in my actual life,” to paraphrase the subtitle.

I’ve gone through seasons in the wilderness and the valley of the shadow that sent me deep into the pages of scripture, where I’ve discovered more than I thought possible about the sovereign God who numbers my days and collects my tears in His bottle.

I’m not a reluctant Bible reader, in other words. And yet, although I may not be in the primary target audience for This Book is for You, I came away from reading it more encouraged by a book than I have been in a long time.

I think that’s because, in focusing on how she came to fall in love with the Bible, Tricia is really focusing on how she came to know and love the God of the Bible.

Almost 11 years ago, her first husband died in her arms two days before Christmas, leaving her a single mom with two young children. At that point, everything she ever believed about God, the Bible and her own personal faith—including, “Obey God, and he gives you the life you want”—was shaken to the very core.

“I closed the Bible for a while—like an amateur athlete who hangs up her equipment,” Tricia writes. “I felt like it was my right to say, ‘No, thank you.’ If God was going to take my husband and leave my children fatherless, then I was going to silence him for a bit. A long bit. He didn’t keep his end of the deal, so I didn’t intend to keep mine.”

Eventually, though, Tricia realized she had nowhere else to go. She began a process of “unbuilding”—holding all of her questions, presuppositions and bits of possibly questionable theology up to the light of God’s actual words in the Bible.

Over time, this led to the healing of her heart and the “rebuilding” of her faith—not upon a foundation of Christian clichés, cultural wisdom or personal preferences, but on the eternal truths about God and how He works that she found spelled out on the pages of scripture.

“It came from being honest with the Lord, with my family, and with myself, about how I felt and what I was wondering about, hurting over, healing from,” she writes. “The healing came in my willingness to stay the course. To be faithful to the journey.”

Cover to cover, This Book is for You is funny, tender, insightful and practical. My favorite chapter, though, is one called “Even if He Doesn’t.” In it, Tricia discusses prayers for healing, God’s sovereignty and the reality that, while He sometimes says yes, He often says no.

“How do we learn to hold both sides of that equation, the belief that God can, but the understanding that he might not?” she writes. “It’s the greatest tension of all. The Bible doesn’t give us an answer for the tension, but it helps us sit in it. It shows us the heart of God, the deep love and grief and profound power, the mystery of how he thinks and acts and is. The Bible doesn’t give us a reason for suffering. It gives us a God who is over it and with us in it, even as we live in the ache.”

If you want to fall in love with the Bible for the first time or you simply need some encouragement to keep reading (even when it’s the last thing you feel like doing), This Book is for You is, well, the book for you.

Whether she’s talking about helpful ways to study the Bible, how to deal with fear and anxiety, the lifesaving practice of writing verses on index cards or how to understand the Old Testament in light of the New, you can count on Tricia to guide you in the right direction—toward the heart of the God whose words have the power to transform your actual life.

♥ Lois

Note: I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

P.S. I’m linking up this week with #tellhisstory, InstaEncouragements, Recharge Wednesday, Let’s Have Coffee, Inspire Me Monday, #HeartEncouragement and Grace & Truth.