It’s What We’re Reading Wednesday, a book talk linkup hosted by Jessica over at Housewifespice.com!

Just off the bookshelf, we have Grieving:  Inviting God Into My Pain by J. Catherine Sherman, PhD.

This book gave me completely new insights into the experience of grieving, so much so that calling grieving an “experience” no longer feels precise enough.  Grieving:  Inviting God Into My Pain gave me the permission to see the withdrawal that is so common to grieving not as a bad thing but as a regrouping, a preparation for facing a future that now must be restructured.  In fact, I once saw grieving as an agonizing task of mourning the past, but this book invites the reader to consider grief as the embracing of a whole new future.  The spirituality of the book was approached with a hand that was at once very, very gentle and a bit on the mystical side.  If you’re looking for handy horizontally-minded checklists or coldly related case studies, you won’t find them in this book; instead you’ll find quotes from saints and poetic verses that invite your heart, mind and soul to think less on things of this earth and more on what lies beyond.  I will definitely be revisiting Grieving:  Inviting God Into My Pain.