LAURA with the word “SERENDIPITY”!
Congrats, Laura. You’re about to receive an amazing book!
Please email me to send me your mailing address by clicking on the “CONTACT” button on the left.
Thank you all for playing… and if you didn’t win… PLEASE STILL GO BUY CINDY’S BOOK HERE.
Have a great day!!!
The first time my friend, Cindy, guest-posted over here was two years ago in 2009.
All this means is we were friends for longer than that because I don’t just have anyone post here. I trusted her. I believed her words were worth reading. I knew everything she had to say could only add to any readers life. The only thing that was “strange” was Cindy and I had never met in real life. You see, our friendship had grown over sharing our lives with each other in the blogosphere and emails.
That changed in May of this year (2011). We finally got to give each other one of the most epic hugs while we were in Nashville, Tennessee. She was every bit what I expected her to be… but more. More beautiful. More gracious. More funny. More taller. No joke. It took two to three of my little Asian steps to match her one tall German goddess strides.
She’s amazing.
And one of the most amazing things she’s done is write the book below.
I was fortunate enough to get an early copy to review. It’s probably because Brian and I were interviewed by Cindy and featured in a small portion of this book. I don’t know why I get invited to do cool stuff like this, but I’ll humbly accept.
In “Healing Your Marriage When Trust Is Broken“, Cindy brings us back to the day her husband, Chris, came home and confessed his unfaithfulness. Not one, but many. And within the many, one was pregnant. Cindy’s life would never be the same. Cindy doesn’t candy coat her story with Christianese or out of context bible verses, but articulately ushers us into her living room to reveal the greatest loves story of all, God’s redemptive love in the lives of the broken.
Cindy is raw but elegant in her honesty and graciously wise in describing her experience. Here are a few of my favorite excepts:
“If you are battling something, if you find that you are sinning the same areas over and over again, chances are that you believe a lie about who God says you are.”
“So many people don’t deal with their grief adequately. They stuff it down and try to be strong for everyone else, thinking they aren’t allowed to feel sadness or they don’t have time to step away from routine to truly grieve. But I can tell you with full confidence that even when people are depending on you, even when life has to go on you must keep moving forward, there has to be time for grieving.”
“When people go through situations that rock their worlds, that destroy their trust and even their hope in mankind, they want to fix whatever is broken – fast. Unfortunately, trust isn’t a destination we reach; it’s a path we walk. Every single day.”
“When we compare our sin with the sins of others, we turn our standard into a moving target.”
“Take time to examine your heart. It’s amazing – we long to have our significant other know us intimately and truly, and yet many of us have not done the work to uncover our true selves and needs.”
Cindy’s book is FULL of grace, conviction and truth. I have already recommended this book to many people going thru similar experiences of infidelity and will continue to for as long as infidelity happens.
If you have survived, are surviving or fear having to survive infidelity in your marriage, this book is a MUST READ. In fact, I’d even got so far to say that if you’ve ever had your trust broken or felt deceived by ANYONE, not even necessarily in infidelity, this book applies to you.
And I believe this so much, I’m actually giving away one free copy away to one of you (or you can CLICK HERE and just buy it… but play my game anyway, k?).
If you’d like a free copy of Cindy Beall’s “Healing Your Marriage When Trust Is Broken”, all you need to do is comment below. I want to get to know you so enter by telling me what your favorite word is and why. I’ll randomly pick a winner by this Friday.
I’ll start:
“Restored” – because that is what I am. I love it so much, it’s tattooed on the inside of my left wrist as a reminder to myself. Being “restored ” is being seasoned, loved, invested in, better than new and having more character.
And… our winner for a free personalized signed copy of Grace Is For Sinners is…
JAYME S.
Congrats on your new book! I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. I’ll email you to get your address so we can get that out to you soon.
For the rest of you… please help support Serena by buying her book.
Thank you for reading Affair Week.
Thank you for contributing your comments.
Thank you for not judging.
Thank you for praying.
Thank you for choosing to see other sides.
Thank you for helping bring this to light.
Just thank you!
If I read this book 5 years ago, I may have never finished it.
I would have been disgusted.
I would have judged Serena.
I would have said “grace costs more than that”
I would have been completely uncomfortable with how many loose ends her story holds.
However, today is a completely different story. Today, I AM Serena (save a few minor differences). I need grace. I’m completely aware that God may have allowed me to fall as far as I did so that I could understand and accept His grace. Which also leads me to believe that I may have been living as a “Christian” yet fully REJECTING His grace before all this.
So, in a very warped way… I’m thankful for the fall so that I could experience restoration.
In this autobiographical book, Serena writes about her experience navigating through life in search for who Jesus is. In the good and in the bad. As Christians, we are taught to flee from evil. We are supposed to hate sin… but somewhere in all that teaching, we have confused “hating the sin” with “hating the sinner”.
We are supposed to flee from evil, but we end up fleeing from those who trip into it instead. The only problem? In this, we end up abandoning those who need community and the Church the most… the one’s Jesus came for.
In this book, Serena bravely speaks up from the “fallen’s” point of view. Not only does she speak from our side (yes, I said “our”) but she backs it up FULLY with scripture. Most church leaders use scripture to cast out sinners and alienate them… but Serena uses God’s words to remind us of God’s love for the sinner and His desire to restore us.
Serena said it best this way: “Jesus wasn’t the atonement in case you accidentally sin. He was the atonement because you hopelessly sin. The freedom that the Bible is talking about is not something you earn by making the right choices; the freedom is the lack of punishment when you don’t make the right choices.”
Here’s another one of my favorite excerpts from chapter 17:
“Grace, by definition, is undeserved authentication of restoration and sanctification. That is a thesaurus-assisted way of saying that grace is an unfair gift of a new beginning and a clean slate. It’s unfair because it goes to the undeserving. Simply put, grace is for sinners.
A person can follow the rules and busy themselves with the work of ‘furthering the kingdom’ and figuring out more ‘relevant’ ways to ‘spread the good news’ but how can they ”grow in grace”? (2 Peter 3:18) How do you grow in something you are a part of only by failure? If grace exists only as a result of failure, then what good does it do to try to be good and follow a religious formula? When you cease to need grace because you’ve reached a place where you can maintain on your own then that is when you have fallen from grace.”
I could quote her forever… because her book is JUST THAT GOOD. But don’t just take my word for it. It’s a must read.
If you haven’t entered to win GRACE IS FOR SINNERS yet, you can HERE. But seriously… if you don’t win this ONE copy I have to give away… go and buy it HERE or HERE.
The last two weeks have been heavy.
I have received more private emails regarding Affair Week than public comments within the posts. I expected to get SOME due to the sensitivity of this subject… but the amount has been mind-blowing.
There are SO many hurting people out there. So many of you feel you can’t ever talk about it to those around you. So many of you feel alone. So many of you feel like grace is for everyone BUT you. My heart breaks because I KNOW that feeling all too well. I remember feeling that. And if I’m totally honest… I still feel that sometimes.
But the truth is Love hung on a cross for me, then rose again, whether I feel that or not.
Grace is NOT for the unstained.
Grace is for me.
Grace is for SINNERS.
Serena wrote a book titled just that. She was kind enough to send it to me to review and in chapter 11, she wrote:
“… it is God’s for me to know Him more completely and He used my failure to teach me these things. It wouldn’t be possible for me to have the perspective that I have if I hadn’t failed. I would have no reason to question anything if everything was great.”
“When you deny pain, you deny the discovery of God in the pain.”
I believe this speaks to so many of us. The one connecting underlying thought I saw in most of the emails that came in was the self-loathing accompanied by hopelessness. It’s much easier to sit in our failures and stay failures than it is to wade out of the muck, walk away and clean ourselves up. We’re so deep in our own filth, the thought of even HOPING we can be redeemed is unfathomable.
We can’t see hope. It hurts to even THINK about seeing hope in the distance.
“Teach them to wait for the beauty while they’re in the ashes. Show them that their own sin only intensifies the awareness of their need for Jesus. Your sin speaks nothing new about your human condition.” ~ Serena Woods (Grace Is For Sinners, chapter 12)
But that’s exactly what this past week was about.
Every guest blogger had a different angle in how adultery affected them. These are just a few of the many I know… but these, my friends who wrote, can TEACH because they waited for beauty in the ashes… in the muck. They didn’t stay in the muck, because they saw better… in the distance. They got out of it. They cleaned themselves off and they walked towards the beauty. The beauty of redemption.
This beauty is for you too. It really is. I promise.
I hope this past couple of weeks has given you hope in whatever you situation may be. Even if it’s only given you a slight glimpse of hope FOR hope… that’s good. You are not alone. We have resources for you. A great one is marriage coaching through RefineOurMarriage Ministry. CLICK HERE for more information.
Now… I’ve written a little review on “Grace is For Sinners” that will post tomorrow, because TODAY… I have a personally addressed and signed copy from the lovely Serena to give away.
Since it’s been a little serious up in here for the last week plus, I thought I’d lighten it up a bit here in the comments today. Here’s how you enter to win:
1. Fill in all your CORRECT contact information in the comment box below.
2. In the comment box, let me know:
*** (a) how you found my blog.
*** (b) what book you’re currently reading.
*** (c) your favorite song.
*** (d) the last thing you belly-laughed about.
Easy right? Right.
I’ll randomly pick and announce the winner by 5pm PST on Monday, August 30th.
My favorite paragraphs from this weeks read in The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning.
And God answers “That’s what you don’t know. You don’t know how much I love you. The moment you think you understand is the moment you do not understand. I am God not man. You tell others about Me — that I am a loving God. Your words are glib. My words are written in the blood of My only Son. The next time you preach about My love with such obnoxious familiarity, I may come and blow your whole prayer meeting apart. When you come at Me with studied professionalism, I will expose you as a rank amateur. When you try to convince others that you understand what you are talking about, I will tell you to shut up and fall flat on your face. You claim you know I love you.”
“Are you aware that I had to raise Jesus from the dead on Easter morning because My love is everlasting? Are you serenely confident that I will raise you too, My adopted child?”
“Faith means you want God and want to want nothing else.”
“When Scripture, prayer, worship, ministry become routine, they are dead. When I conclude that I can now cope with the awful love of God, I have headed for the shallows to avoid the deeps. I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a tea cup than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God.”
*sigh*
All your financial support is tax-deductible:
