Dear Lauren:

I have never in my life been this heart broken to finish a nonfiction book. Normally it’s the fiction ones, the ones where I want the story to continue, where I want to see where the characters go AFTER the final sentences have long passed. I want an epilogue to everything I read.

I started reading your book “Girl Meets God” about 2.5 months ago. I have savored it. Not reading more than 20 pages at a time or less. I haven’t wanted it to end. A friend had recommended it to me after I came across your words on foreshadowing and said I should read it.

She’s a good friend who knows what she is talking about.

Here’s the thing: The last two years I had been in a spiritual maze. I started in the labyrinth when I went on an 11 month mission trip and when I came home I didn’t realize that I was still in it. Then I went to Spain and had 6 months that rocked my core. I call it a maze because I was lost, but I didn’t realize that was ok. I didn’t realize I didn’t need to know where I was going at the time. But the thing about this maze is that suddenly it opened up without me knowing it.

It’s not like I was changing religions or denominations or something like that but I was finding a faith that was my own, that was free from living by rules and putting myself in a box.

“Oh,” said the wife. “Now I see. You’ve come to see us because you’re trying to figure out how to put your life back together.”

I wish I could tell you how many times I’ve quoted this. How much this one sentence described what I feel like I’ve been trying to do the last six months. How I’ve been trying to put together not only what I knew about the last 16 years of being a christian but what my mind has seen, heard and felt over the last two years.

I wish I could describe to you how much I was trying so hard to combine the church I knew and the church I had seen and come to love. How much I wanted the church I knew to see the Christ I had found.

I wish I could go back and show you how many quotes I’ve instagrammed or text to friends. Or the fact that I too talk to my books and this one is highlighted and written in as if I have to take an exam or write a paper.

I wish I could fully show you how much your book has reminded me that I’m not alone in a shifting of something that was so grounded in me.

“Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along.”

I want you to know how much hope and joy your words gave me. How many times I laughed out loud because of the way the wrecking ball hit me.

How much peace your journey gave mine.

That’s all I want to say.

Thank you for allow others a moment, a glimpse, a photograph of who you are and what you went through and the words God gave you.

Sincerely,

Meg