Following is a book review I wrote for MTW Europe’s membercare website.  I used some of it in our Christmas letter but added some to it as well.  This is probably the most helpful book I read this  year.

A Sacred Sorrow by Michael Card

We lost two grandchildren this year—one through a miscarriage and one almost-adoption. Grief is hard, especially when you are far from those you long to be grieving with. There was so much sorrow in my heart and I didn’t know how to deal with it. As God opened the book, A Sacred Sorrow, to me I learned that what I really wanted for me and our children was to answer the questions “God, where are you?” and “God, if you love us, then why?”  In other words, I wanted us to know that God is present with us always and that He is full of loving kindness always.  Through speaking with God these words of lament I was able to gain a sense of the Lord’s presence with me and my children and also have a language that would express the hopelessness and doubt I so needed to lay before the Lord.  My prayers of complaint, whether then or now, are really prayers of faith because God longs for our honesty before Him and He is more than trustworthy to act.   As Card puts it “They represent the last refusal to let go of the God who may seem to be absent or worse—uncaring…It is supreme honesty before a God…I can trust.” 

Card begins the book in the Garden of Eden where, because of Adam and Eve’s denial and doubting of God's loving kindness and a "misbelief that God was only the sum of His gifts and no more"  they were turned out of the Garden and into the heartbreaking sorrow that we experience alongside of them.  This sorrow leads us all to the language of lament.  Card goes on and talks of David as the “ultimate composer” of lament, Job as our “mentor” of lament, and Jeremiah as the “incarnation of lament—in-fleshed and lived out”.  And, of course, of Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, who invites us to weep with Him, “holding together both truth and tears through lament”. We have faced some hard and unexpected turns in our family the last few years and this book has given me a language to use as I talk to the Lord about them. Once again I am brought back to the realization that my perceptions of what God is doing are so far from His character defined by His loving kindness.  I realize that I need to cry out not for Him to change the situation but for Him to just be present with me through what is happening.  This book is definitely at the top of most valued books I’ve read this year.