This is the Main Event
Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 30 Jul 2026
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
What if the life we long for isn’t elsewhere but rather right here, waiting to be discovered?
Joshua Luke Smith believes the greatest lie facing our generation is that the life we long for lies beyond the life that we have. We so easily learn to disdain the inconveniences, interruptions and messy mundane that infuses our everyday. But the real transformation happens when we look at our life as it is and dare to announce: This is the main event.
With depth, wisdom and storytelling, This Is the Main Event is your invitation to awaken to the sacred in your ordinary life. As Joshua claims, the extraordinary life is simply the one in which we practice presence – to ourselves, to others, to God. Every moment becomes meaningful when you recognise the God who meets you in it – a holy encounter accessed in the everyday.
Whether you’re packing lunches, paying bills, headed to the office, a hospital or a recovery meeting, this is a book to help you receive the greatest gift you already have and to practice your own aliveness in your actual life.
Ebury Vine: The Home Of Christian Living. Drawing on the deep roots of Christianity to cultivate curious minds and inspire faith-informed growth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Smith (Poems for the People) explores in this deeply felt essay collection what it means to appreciate life in all its imperfection and heartbreak. He organizes the book into three practices that have guided his "journey toward discovering the life I long for, hidden in the life I have." The first is lamentation, a wading into "the stream of... sorrow" and an invitation to feel instead of go numb. The next is consecration, an offering of the broken "pieces—our hearts, our lives, whatever is left—to the Lord" in an act of "surrender and devotion" that the author parallels to his recovery from addiction to "alcohol, drugs, porn, food, media work." (Readers, meanwhile, can practice consecration via habits like prayer and fasting.) Perhaps most moving are the meditations on adoration, the unabashed "beholding the holiness of God within your actual life," which the author experiences as a father, writing of how he admires "the freckles on my daughter's right arm as if constellations." The author's poetry, which is interspersed between chapters, can be hit or miss, but his musings on what it has meant to "slowly fall back in love with my life and the world around me" are resonant and affecting. The result is an earnest invitation to savor the moment.
