This is a book about alcohol; you can practically smell the gin coming off the pages, the lime, hear the ice clinking, the crack of the new bottle opening. But it’s not a book about alcohol. It’s about whatever thing you use to cover over the pain—sex, food, shopping, perfectionism, cleaning, drugs—whatever you hold out like an armor to protect yourself instead of allowing yourself and your broken heart to be fully seen and fully tended to by God.
For me, the armor is motion. Activity. Busyness. More, more, more. Faster, faster, faster. If I can keep going fast enough, I can, for a little while at least, outrun the fear and the anxiety and the pain. And so I go and go and go, working and writing and grocery shopping, cooking and reading and folding laundry. Silence is my enemy.
But I’m learning to walk into the arms of that enemy. And to my great surprise, I’m finding a friend there, not an enemy at all. I’m finding a healer—the Healer. The Good Physician, the Great Friend. And when I walk toward him, I can lay down my addictions for a while. I can lay down my frantic running. I can rest, and that feeling is utterly transformational.
We all have those armors. Some we’ve chosen; some have been handed down through the generations. About my propensity toward constant motion, my husband reminds me lovingly that I come by it honestly. I’m my father’s daughter in a thousand ways, many of them good. And also this one: we’re both bent on outrunning things. We’re both good at it.
And now that he is sixty-three and I am thirty-eight, we’re getting good at another thing: reminding one another to put on the brakes. At Christmas last year, we were away—my mom and dad, my brother, my husband, our boys. My dad waited for the right moment, several days into the trip. We looked out at the water together, and he told me my engines were running too hot. I was burning people, burning myself out.
It takes one to know one. And he was right. The tears rolled down my face because I knew he was right. And so I began again, toward sobriety, toward silence, toward that inner emptiness that I always think can be filled up with endless activity.
This beautiful, challenging, evocative book is an invitation toward the deepest kind of sobriety: the kind that lays us bare to Christ, which is the only place where the wounds we’ve suffered—many at our own hand—can finally be healed. And along the way, we find that the scars become holy places, reminders of the Healer himself.
Seth writes with a distinctly southern sensibility—elegant, evocative, lyrical—and his wisdom and honesty shine through every page, gently illuminating our own fears and secret hearts along the way.
—SHAUNA NIEQUIST, AUTHOR OF
BREAD AND WINE AND SAVOR