What I Love About This Book
I started reading Emily Scott’s “For All Who Hunger” on a Friday evening. I finished it the following Sunday afternoon. Some of you do this kind of thing all the time. Not me. I’m the kind of person who has five or six books piled on my nightstand and reads two pages every night, the first of the two being the second page from the night before, during which I inevitably fell asleep. People ask me what I’m reading and I either can’t remember or feel guilty because I’m not reading anything, or both.
Then once in a while something comes along that grabs me in all the right ways.
When I mentioned how much I was loving the book, about one-third in, someone on social media commented that I should write a little review when I finished. I don’t write book reviews, but I’m so full of joy and hope from reading the book I thought I’d simply let you all know What I Love About This Book. In no particular order:
I love reading the story of Emily’s church. She doesn’t start out to be a church planter; she feels a hunger in herself for something for which she imagines others also hunger. She tries some things. She figures out what the church is to be, and who she is to be, as she goes along. She shares this journey with us in an honest and yet extremely generous, easy-to-read way.
I love that she doesn’t spend a whole lot of time telling us about the things that don’t go so well. At the same time, there’s a self-honesty in her writing that creates the space for us to imagine all those things.
I love Emily’s humility. She’s learning every minute, and writing about what and how she learns, describing all the excruciating awkwardness in ways that are believable and real. As I read, I am rooting for her and also rooting for everyone with a vision of community like hers.
I love all of her explicit, graspable connections between her experiences with the people of St. Lydia’s—the “Lydians”—and our ancestors in faith. Mary, Mother of God, the women at the tomb on Easter morning, Cleopas and his unnamed walking companion on the road to Emmaus. She reminds us that they are us and we are them.
I love the balance between all the threads of her story: the clothesline of the story is St. Lydia’s, but on it she hangs her own search for communion, her formative childhood memories, life as a single woman pastor, the feelings of comfortable white lady trying to dismantle white supremacy…they hang together and hold something expansive and hopeful in their midst.
I love how inspired and energized I am by this story. I came away dreaming about opportunities in my life and in the lives of people I know, ways to seek out those who hunger, invite them in, and create communion.
I could say more. But I won’t. Read the book. Dream some big dreams.