Sara Hagerty is a wife to Nate and a mother of five whose arms stretched wide across the ocean to Africa. After almost a decade of Christian life, she was introduced to ain and perplexity and, ultimately, intimacy with Jesus. God met her and moved her when life stopped working for her. His Word and His whisper took on new shape and form to her in the dark. Sara writes regularly about life-delays, motherhood, marriage, adoption, and finding God in the unlikely at EveryBitterThingisSweet.com.
*If you visit the website, you can download the first chapter of Sara's book Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things.
What does it look like to know God's nearness when your world stops working?
What does it mean to receive His life when earthly life remains barren?
How can God turn the bitterness of unmet desire into new flavors of joy?
Sara Hagerty has lived these questions. Masterfully drawing from her experiences of spiritual and physical barrenness, she will help you set afire a new longing for God. This is the story of the beautifully invasive love of God for every person. With exquisite storytelling and reflection, Hagerty guides you to a tender place that God is holding just for you - a place where He shapes the bitterness of loss into deep,new invitations to knowing Him.
"A satisfied soul loathes the honeycomb, but to a hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet."
Proverbs 27:7
Some of my favorite quotes from the book:
"The God behind it was proving Himself to be fundamentally different than what I'd supposed for at least a decade, maybe more. But I was finding Him. In the places I had feared most and spent a lifetime avoiding, He was meeting me. My worst, my very worst, moments were getting rewritten without circumstances changing. I was getting acquainted with the kind of deep satisfaction that bad news can't shake. He was showing me Himself as strong enough. He was letting me hide in Him, letting me find a safe place."
"No part of knowing God is passive...They reached the unreached with a life, not just a message."
"Fear loses oxygen when every moment suspends itself under the purpose of bringing Him glory, of knowing His name and His nature."
"God was working every angle to change our knowledge about who He is. We realized that our lives aren't, in fact, a series of rewards for doing things 'right'. They are strung-together surprises that continue to speak more of who He is than who we aren't."And those are just a few!
Sara uses the transparency of her life to give readers a picture of the wonderfully amazing goodness of God in ALL things - the good, bad and down right ugly. We expect things to be smooth and easy after coming to know God, but Sara helps us understand through her life's example that the greater knowing often comes through the painfully difficult. Against the night, stars shine the brightest.
Included at the end of each chapter is a section I found most helpful titled "For Your Continued Pursuit". In this section, Sara gives a list of Scriptures and gives the reader the opportunity to "trace any spoken declarations back to God's truth and use those as starting points for adoring Him, for making His Word part of their everyday language."
Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet is a book to be read more than once. I know I plan to read it again.
*I was given a complimentary copy of the book for the purpose of giving my honest review.
Blessings Ya'll,
Jennifer
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