Life-affirming memoirs make perfect Christmas gifts

“This year I need Christmas, but not Christmas as usual. I need a miracle somewhat smaller than God becoming a baby and somewhat bigger than the promises of the Duke doctor who keeps using the word palliative.”

Kate Bowler’s honest and unflinching memoir considers fairness and what makes things fair in life, making sense when there is none to be made, and on how in ‘everything, there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.’ Her book meditates on the importance of faith, the experience of personal trauma, and the importance of living in the midst of utmost uncertainty.

Christmas is a time to be grateful for many things: family, health, and the gift of life.

While we take into consideration these good things that have happened and consider that we have so much to be grateful for, Kate tries to make sense of divine intervention in her failing health. She writes how her personal experience of cancer affects her spouse, family, church community, and friends. She asks very tough questions: “Why do some people get healed and some people don’t?” Kate’s story is a punch in the gut about the preciousness of life.

“The horror of cancer has made everything seem like it is painted in bright colours. I think the same thoughts again and again: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.”

Kate writes about how two of her happiest memories act as anchor points in her life story. Her first is marrying her teenage sweetheart and the second is having her baby boy Zach. The birth of her child was a turning point in her life, particularly since she’d struggled to conceive a child and had dealt with not only cancer, but other health concerns that demanded so much of her, physically and emotionally.

Kate elicits enormous empathy as she shares her frustration, pain, joy, and hope. Her story is simultaneously uplifting and heartbreaking.

Everything Happens For A Reason is impossible to read without making a shift in perspective. It will transform the way you look at your own life and the world around you, and there couldn’t be a better Christmas gift to take you into the new year filled with optimism and hope.