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A review by nrichtsmeier
The Ministry of Ordinary Places: Waking Up to God's Goodness Around You by Shannan Martin
4.0
The danger of leaving a book in your "to-read" list for too long is I develop a bit of a complex about it. Particularly if I engage that author in other places (like Twitter) then I start to fill in the gaps of what I think the book will be, write it in my mind, and come to it with less than the openness it requires.
I fear this happened to me a little bit with The Ministry of Ordinary Places. I was ready for the prophetic word, game-changing realizations from Shannan about how useless our suburban acquisitiveness is and how social justice is the work we must be doing. I perhaps projected onto her a piece of my self-shaming of my own situation, wanting her to agree that I was wasting my life on frivolous things. I needed to move to the city and learn how to be a real boy.
Disappointingly--and stunningly--Shannan instead rushed me to her kitchen table and told me stories of soup (there's lots of references to soup in this book), the recently incarcerated, small church normalcy, and the struggles of maintaining relational faithfulness in a world collapsing under disappointment.
She told me how we need not to go looking for another life, but to find the Spirit of Life in the one we are in. To stumble into our next things rather than strategically planning them, and to savor a sense of calling in every moment. Shannan will do nothing for your sense of self-importance or your demand for life-worth-living. She instead will remind you that being a Gospel person means that every life is worth living, and therein lies both the rub and the resurrection.
The book is wondrously ordinary. Simple in its prose, deeply mundane in its prophetic wisdom. It is the prosperity gospel printed in inverse. Instead of promising a world of greatness and earned blessing for the faithful, it shows the real world of unearned suffering for the faithful and faithless alike, and the beauty of God inexplicably shining through the dark cracks. Where other writers claim that God's light shines brightest in the dark places, Shannan takes winsome escapism out of that phrase and simply plants us in the dark and serves us soup, with a laugh and tightly held hand.
Sometimes books aren't what we expect, but they are what we need. Shannan's deeply grounded insight and benevolence is the heroism we need right now. I'll be looking for more of it in myself and in others, right where I am.
I fear this happened to me a little bit with The Ministry of Ordinary Places. I was ready for the prophetic word, game-changing realizations from Shannan about how useless our suburban acquisitiveness is and how social justice is the work we must be doing. I perhaps projected onto her a piece of my self-shaming of my own situation, wanting her to agree that I was wasting my life on frivolous things. I needed to move to the city and learn how to be a real boy.
Disappointingly--and stunningly--Shannan instead rushed me to her kitchen table and told me stories of soup (there's lots of references to soup in this book), the recently incarcerated, small church normalcy, and the struggles of maintaining relational faithfulness in a world collapsing under disappointment.
She told me how we need not to go looking for another life, but to find the Spirit of Life in the one we are in. To stumble into our next things rather than strategically planning them, and to savor a sense of calling in every moment. Shannan will do nothing for your sense of self-importance or your demand for life-worth-living. She instead will remind you that being a Gospel person means that every life is worth living, and therein lies both the rub and the resurrection.
The book is wondrously ordinary. Simple in its prose, deeply mundane in its prophetic wisdom. It is the prosperity gospel printed in inverse. Instead of promising a world of greatness and earned blessing for the faithful, it shows the real world of unearned suffering for the faithful and faithless alike, and the beauty of God inexplicably shining through the dark cracks. Where other writers claim that God's light shines brightest in the dark places, Shannan takes winsome escapism out of that phrase and simply plants us in the dark and serves us soup, with a laugh and tightly held hand.
Sometimes books aren't what we expect, but they are what we need. Shannan's deeply grounded insight and benevolence is the heroism we need right now. I'll be looking for more of it in myself and in others, right where I am.