Traveling Mercies - Review

I finished my first book in the Spring Reading Thing! I'm so happy to check something off my to-do list! I read Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. I've mentioned before that I've been wanting to read this one - she's very popular. Yall know I love popular. The blurb on the front of the book says "Anne Lamott is walking proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes even in the same breath." (San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle) I feel like that so often - how could I not pick this book up? That about sums it up. This book is both - at the same time. It's funny and it made me cry and it made me think.

She's not your "traditional" Christian writer. She may not even be someone that I want my children to emulate but she's real. Real counts for something. The book is filled with essays that chronicle her walk with God and some of the truths she's learning on the way. I loved that she didn't have it all together when she became a Christian. I love it that she didn't have it all together by the end of the book. Isn't that what the Christian life is about? Aren't we all just walking (or crawling) towards the goal? Can't some of us be at different places on the path?

One of the passages I marked:

It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults has some kind of
inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of
wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that
life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience,
honesty-and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do.
And mostly, against all odds, they're enough.