This Is the Main Event
Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
“’This is the main event’ is the kind of phrase I’d like to tattoo on my arm—and my spirit . . . a thoughtful, artful, soulful meditation on life and faith and time and what really matters.” –Shauna Niequist, New York Times bestselling author
A simple mantra to change everything: discover how to encounter God in your everyday, and practice extraordinary presence in an ordinary life.
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 and interruptions that infuse 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 devotional depth and prophetic wisdom, and interspersed with the author's original poetry and blessings, This Is the Main Event is your invitation to awaken to the sacred in your ordinary life. The pathway is through three spiritual practices, as Joshua commends, each proclaiming a transformative truth:
LAMENTATION: you are allowed to name your painCONSECRATION: you are called to let grace change youADORATION: you are invited to live in the wonder of God’s daily presence
It's easy to see the bills, packed lunches, traffic jams, dentist appointments as mundanity, but then again, God comes to you in the shape of your actual life. Joshua Luke Smith writes from the raw materials of his own ordinary life—toddler tuck-ins, recovery meetings, flat tires a mile from home—to speak to yours. As you'll soon discover, every moment becomes meaningful when you recognize the God who meets you in it—a holy encounter accessed in the everyday.
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.