I couldn’t wait to receive Elisa Morgan’s book, The Beauty of Broken. I ordered it and knew it would live up to it’s promise…to “find beauty and hope for the messiness of family life”. I picture Jack Nicholson shouting, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” The fact is the longer we walk with Jesus, the harder, not easier it gets. I am starting to get this, and this book, so well timed for this season of my life reminds me, and you, the reader to be, that it is all grace. That who we are in the end, will not be who we were at the beginning…and yet we will be exactly who we are in His sight.
Elisa takes us on a journey. It is a rather painful, but beautifully real story of her childhood, journey to parenthood-and beyond, into grand-motherhood, through years of leadership with MOPS International. Bold and daring, I admire her as she shares an imperfect upbringing which includes every conceivable nightmare from Christian perspective, and how God revealed to her along the way his love, desire and goodness in it all. Including the ugly, painful, sometimes unexpected, always redemptive moments that began to be slowly, but surely grow her in grace and truth.
This is more than a look behind the scenes of a self-made leader. This is a courageous sharing, of the real messiness surrounding the life of one, that ultimately reflects the lives of us all. Elisa does not shy away from the exposed places, that God draws her to and through. No pat answers here, but something so much more worth our time. How one woman is conformed by grace- the story we all need to know- the one that helps us to know that our messed up lives are more common then we imagined. Elisa gives us hope, that even without all the answers, there is something good to hang on to after all.
“God uses the broken. It’s hard-at first- to understand. Isn’t it? Brokenness doesn’t disqualify us. Brokenness placed in God’s hands to redeem and re-form can actually qualify us for life and love and even leadership.”
Through candid sharing of her own family growing up, as well as her family now, she leads us through some of the very rugged terrain of life many are also walking: A prodigal child, a gay brother, a teen pregnancy, alcoholism and divorce…I think there is none who will not find something to relate in the stories she shares. And none who will not find a safe and gracious place in the pages.
This book is a picture of Christianity today. Broken, poured out, to be shared and beautiful.
“We continue- each of us in unique and stumbling steps- the journey toward Jesus and Christ-likeness Instead of the dreamed for final product of an unbroken family, I find my family and the people in it- myself included-still broken and in need of mending, and somehow likely looking more like we were meant to look all along. I come from a broken family. I still come from a broken family. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.”
I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com® book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
Enthusiastically, Dawn 