More letters about Embracing the Gray, Fall 2013 edition

My book, Embracing the Gray: A Wing a Prayer, and A Doubter’s Resolve, has elicited a slew of letters and e-mails.  Here are excerpts of some that have come in…

Just finished Embracing the Gray, and there were so many lessons. Thanks Mark for writing it down, I cried more than a couple of times. Great Book!

J.M.

Mark, I am about 1/4 of the way into it and I had to stop be cause my husband wanted to read it. So, we compromised... I started over and am reading it out loud to him. I can't wait till morning so I can pick up where i left off tonight! When you make this a movie... oh and yes you should!! Fantastic stuff Mark!

R.R.

My soul is being fed. Grateful. I finished your book tonight. Wow! There are so many things running through my head. It came at a very important and significant weekend for me. And even the process of getting your book into my hands (well, downloaded to my computer) was God given and ordained . . . and I don't say that lightly.

S.F.

Okay I just finished the book. Thanks for having the last chapter on how you are embracing the gray, it is helpful as I am spent and hurt all over. I think it will help a lot of people understand that they are not the only ones to question God and to suffer with confusion with God. Your words in the last chapter will comfort me, as I am sure I will read them often.

N.S.

Thank you for writing Embracing the Gray.  I downloaded it from your website because it sounded like it would address some problems I am having of understanding my son.  I really liked the last chapter and found it to be encouraging. The Psalms tell us that His Word is a lamp for our steps, a light for our path - not a floodlight to see ahead, but a light to see each step.  That's the encouragement I get from your book.  

B.F.

I have to say I am not sure how anyone can put your book down; maybe they didn't ever have to face the world. It is a tough life and I can relate to your brother and your friend who wanted to kill himself while he is drunk. I never reached that but I understand addiction. Your book is bringing me face to face with these demons and I pray and have been praying I can break away. I am close to 60 and not sure how much longer I will be here.

Your book is full of life-changing thought. A word I never use must be used in reflecting on it: profound. I will be loaning it to several others I know, and I am sure when it comes back to me it will be well worn. Right now a lady who wants to commit suicide will be reading it and I never felt a calling but when I thought about who I would share it with next; I was compelled to share the book. Other people are in mind but they are not suicidal but have faith so I put the books in the hand of the needy. If I never get it back, I will buy others because I believe this is something people should read. As much as I like Chuck Swindoll and Charles Stanley; I don't think they have the experiences to share because they were always surrounded by believers with issues rather than the sinners of the world. Excellent book, everyone should read it.

D.P.

Wow!  Next step is the movie!
D.C. 

I continue to be humbled by the response the book is generating.  If you have read it and wish to correspond with me, I always interact with any communiqués.   You can also read many reader reviews (97% are Five Stars) at:

http://www.amazon.com/Embracing-Gray-Doubters-Resolve-ebook/dp/B004L62CN2/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Embracing the Gray is still available for a limited time as a 99 cent Kindle download at that same link, or as a free PDF download at my website (donations accepted):

http://markahollingsworth.com/Node

My Friend Brennan

I was fortunate to have Brennan Manning a friend over the past 25 years.  With his passing a few days ago at age 78, I've been searching for the right words to help deal with this loss.  I went looking in my library for all my favorite books by him, and realized that I have loaned nearly all of them out to others, who, like me, needed to read “good news for the bedraggled, beat-up, and burnt-out;” fresh cups of grace to many who were tired of fellow Christians’ legalism and judgment. This piece written by Philip Yancey several years ago at the release of Brennan's final book, sums up well my thoughts on this humble, broken, and forgiven man who was much more interested in being a pioneer than a settler.

Brennan Manning has written a memoir titled All Is Grace that will be published this year by David C. Cook Publishing.  I wrote the Foreword, and include excerpts here about my friend.

I first met Brennan Manning at an event called Greenbelt Festival in England, a sort of Christian Woodstock of artists, musicians and speakers that had attracted twenty thousand fans to tents and impromptu venues set up in the muddy infield of a horse-racing track.  Brennan seemed dazzled by the spectacle, and like a color commentator kept trying to explain the subtleties of evangelicalism to his wife Roslyn, a cradle Catholic who lacked Brennan’s experience with the subculture.

We did not see each other often over the years, but each time our paths crossed we went deeper, rather than tilling the same ground of friendship.  When he visited a monastery in Colorado for spiritual retreats, he would sometimes get a temporary dispensation from the rule of silence and meet my wife and me at an ice cream parlor (one addiction he doesn’t disclose in these pages).  Our backgrounds could hardly have been more different— Southern fundamentalism vs. Northeastern Catholic—and yet by different routes we had both stumbled upon an Artesian well of grace and have been gulping it ever since.  One glorious fall afternoon we hiked on a carpet of golden Aspen leaves along a mountain stream and I heard the details of Brennan’s life: his loveless childhood, his marathon search for God, his marriage and divorce, his lies and coverups, his continuing struggles with alcohol addiction.

As you read this memoir you may be tempted, as I am, to think “Oh, what might have been…if Brennan hadn’t given into drink.”  I urge you to reframe the thought to, “Oh, what might have been…if Brennan hadn’t discovered grace.”  More than once I have watched this leprechaun of an Irish Catholic hold spellbound an audience of thousands by telling in a new and personal way the story that all of us want to hear: that the Maker of all things loves and forgives us.  Brennan knows well that love and especially the forgiveness.  Like “Christian,” the everyman character in The Pilgrim’s Progress, he progressed not by always making right decisions but by responding appropriately to wrong ones.  (John Bunyan, after all, titled his own spiritual biography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners).

At one point Brennan likens himself to Samson, that flawed superman whom God somehow found a way to use right up to the day of his death.  Reading such stories in the Old Testament, I’ve come up with a simple principle to explain how God can use the likes of such imperfect men and women: “God uses the talent pool available.”  Again and again, Brennan made himself available.  In the last few years, nearly blind, subject to illness and falls, at an age when he should have been enjoying retirement on a beach in Florida, he kept getting on airplanes and flying places to proclaim a Gospel he believed with all his heart but could not always live.

“All is grace,” Brennan concludes, looking back on a rich but stained life.  He has placed his trust in that foundational truth of the universe, which he has proclaimed faithfully and eloquently.

As a writer, I live in daily awareness of how much easier it is to edit a book than edit a life.  When I write about what I believe and how I should live, it sounds neat and orderly.  When I try to live it out, all hell breaks loose.  Reading Brennan’s memoir, I see something of the reverse pattern.  By focusing on the flaws, he leaves out many of the triumphs.  I keep wanting him to tell the stories that put him in a good light, and there are many.  Choosing full disclosure over a narrative that might burnish his reputation, Brennan presents himself as the Apostle Paul once did, as a “clay jar,” a disposable container made of baked dirt.  We must look to his other books for a full picture of the treasure that lay inside.

A poem by Leonard Cohen says it well:

Ring the bells that still can ring.


Forget your perfect offering.


There is a crack in everything.


That’s how the light gets in.