CROSS CULTURE
NEW FROM SALVATION ARMY AUTHORS Better Together How Women and Men Can Heal the Divide and Work Together to Transform the Future BY DANIELLE STRICKLAND In the aftermath of the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, is it possible for men and women to find hope and healing and create a better world together? Well-known speaker and author Danielle Strickland believes we are at a strategic cultural intersection with respect to the relationship between women and men—an opportunity to begin again and create a different future. In Better Together, Strickland offers practical steps toward a real and workable solution that includes two things needed for change: a vision of a better world and an understanding of oppression. “I refuse to believe that all men are bad. I also refuse to believe that all women are victims,” Strickland says. “I don’t want to be just hopeful, I want to be strategically hopeful. I want to work toward a better world with a shared view of the future that looks like equality, freedom and flourishing.” Available alongside the book is a six-session video-based Bible study, intended to amplify the message of the book and guide group discussion.
STAYED The Simple Secret to Discovering and Enjoying Animating Spiritual Contentment and Profoundly Divine Fulfillment Throughout All Your Years and Into Eternity BY PHIL LAEGER AND STEPHEN COURT In an age of anxiety and uncertainty, could there be anything more desirable than perfect peace? In STAYED, Salvationist singer-songwriter Phil Laeger and Major Stephen Court, territorial evangelism consultant, show that such peace is not only possible, but available to all Christians. The title of the book refers to Isaiah 26:3 (TLV): “You keep in perfect peace one whose mind is stayed on you.” In the book, “stayed” is also an acronym that stands for Spend Time Alone with Yahweh Every Day. The authors break down this acronym into four easy-to-understand components, providing insight and practical wisdom. STAYED culminates in a 21-day devotional (seven days, repeated three times), which covers the “seven Ps of perfect peace.” Each day includes suggested devotional music to reinforce the book’s message, available soon on the YouVersion Bible app with Laeger’s original accompaniment.
The Problem of Pain
In new memoir, Canadian author reflects on chronic illness, healing and faith. BY KRISTIN OSTENSEN
S
arah Bessey was driving along the highway after stopping at a Tim Hortons, sipping a double-double and in no particular hurry, when another driver’s splitsecond decision would change her life forever. While not fatal, the car crash would leave her with serious injuries and send her on a difficult journey of healing and not-healing, which is chronicled in Miracles and Other Reasonable Things: A Story of Unlearning and Relearning God. Based in Abbotsford, B.C., Bessey is the author of a number of popular and critically acclaimed books, including Jesus Feminist, and speaks at churches, conferences and universities around the world. In her latest book, she takes a deeply personal approach to the subject of suffering. Miracles and Other Reasonable Things is not a theological treatise but a spiritual memoir, where theology is explored through storytelling. Throughout the book, she addresses her reader like a friend, from the introduction to the closing benediction, where she prays for and with her reader. Miracles is divided into four parts, beginning with the accident and its aftermath, as well as Bessey’s prior experiences and beliefs around healing. In the second part, Bessey takes her readers with her to Rome for Pentecost, where she experiences miraculous healing in her back. Other parts of her body, however, continue to be a source of debilitating chronic pain, eventually leading to a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. The third and final parts of the book explore this part of her journey and conclude with what she has “unlearned and relearned” about God. After the storytelling setup of the first half, the second half of Miracles is where Bessey wrestles with how her condition is changing her understanding of miracles and healing. “Over time,” she writes, “I grew disillusioned with the way we chased after the miraculous, the big movement, instead of after Jesus…. I began to realize that we valued the victory, not the struggle. We wanted the testimony of God’s faithfulness so badly that we didn’t know how to engage in the work of miracles and healing.” Coming to grips with her own suffering, Bessey recognizes that “God was often revealed to me in the darkness rather than in the light.” As the book draws to a close, she shares the new vision of healing given to her through this experience, one rooted in the Easter miracle of resurrection, of life birthed from death. Avoiding platitudes and easy answers, Miracles will resonate with people who have experienced chronic pain, or wish to gain insight into that experience. With her signature down-to-earth style, Bessey offers her fellow believers encouragement—that we would see the “ordinary miracles” in our ordinary lives. Salvationist March 2020 25
