Thin Places

I don't know if you like to read book reviews or not, but please consider reading this one. This is good stuff. Thin Places by Mary DeMuth is about as real as it gets.

I heard Mary speak at a conference and found her to be sincere, intense, and faith-filled.Two years ago, Mary sensed the need to write a memoir. She’d come a long way in her healing journey, enough to write without bitterness, with a view toward God’s intervention.

According to DeMuth, thin places are “snatches of time, moments really, when we sense God intersecting our world in tangible, unmistakable ways.” When she encountered Jesus at a Young Life camp in high school, Mary’s life trajectory changed. God reassembled the pieces of her emotionally fragile self, which initiated true healing and peace.

I was given a complimentary copy to review, but I promise, I wouldn't say I liked something if I didn't.

That said, I loved Thin Places. I cried reading the first chapter. I couldn’t stop reading.

Mary describes Thin Places as, “The story of a little girl who faced sexual abuse, neglect, drug-using parents, fear, death of a parent, and a host of other malevolence. And yet it’s a hope-filled story, where the bright light of God’s climactic redemption outshines the dark places.

It’s a story of God’s nearness when I thought I’d nearly lose my mind and will to live. How grateful I am for the beautiful love of Jesus, how dearly He chose frail me to shame the wise. It’s really His story after all.”

The back cover description says it well,

“Mary DeMuth’s spiritual memoir traces the winding path of thin places in her life, places where she experienced longing and healing more intensely than before. Mary’s story invites you to a deeper understanding of your own story. She calls you to discover new ways to look for God in the past so you might experience him more profoundly in the present…A God ready to break through any ordinary day or extraordinary pain and offer you a glimpse of eternity.”

Mary writes with great courage, sharing painful things that happened to her and things she did or thought that she’s not proud of. The book’s premise is that God was there all through her life, even in the hardest of times. As she explores her painful past, she sees how God held her hand and carried her through.

On the pain of losing her father at a young age, Mary says,

“I am Jacob in times like this. Wrestling with God over my lack of a father. He injures me so I limp. The limp reminds me of God’s God-ness and my frailty—the most humbling thin place. Yet it’s in this daddy-less thin place that reminds me that He is big enough to fill the need I’ve buried inside. Though I ache and will probably always carry a limp, I’m thankful the injury leads me back to Him.”

In trying to make sense of her life, Mary writes,
 
“We try to piece together the picture of our past like master puzzle doers. But some pieces are forever missing, and the remaining picture stares back at us, jagged, unfinished.

“As a storyteller, I love happy endings, plot points tied up neatly, relationships resolved. I’d like to think that heaven’s beauty comes from God finishing our stories there. This world is unraveled; but perhaps in the next world, we’ll finally see a rhyme and a reason for our seemingly chaotic lives. It’s my hope that He will complete my puzzled picture with pieces that suddenly make sense in light of eternity.

“In the past I needed all the fragments of my life place just so, like diamonds set in a tennis bracelet. The older I get, the more I see that Jesus wants me to trust Him for the missing pieces, the broken clasps, the counterfeit baubles—to relax in the unknowing, to be a peace with the tangles, to learn the art of living with the mystery. He is more than capable of handling all my questions, and someday He will make things right.”

God blessed me with this book. I seriously considered using it for a giveaway, but decided not to because I need to read it a couple more times. Sorry, you’ll have to buy your own, which can be done at Amazon.com or Christianbook.com.

To view the Thin Places book trailer click here.

Mary’s other books include Ordinary Mom, Extraordinary God; Building the Christian Family You Never Had; Authentic Parenting in a Postmodern Culture. Mary lives with her husband Patrick and their three children in Texas. For more information on Mary, check out her website.