Booksneeze Book Review: Eileen Button’s The Waiting Place
I love surprises, don’t you?
Thomas Nelson Publishers gave me a surprise when they shipped Eileen Button’s The Waiting Place: Learning to Appreciate Life’s Little Delays through the Booksneeze Blogging Program.
Eileen Button writes a variety of essays about different places in her life where she had to wait. I thought they would be nice lessons that I could walk away feeling encouraged by or tuck her words away for a time I’m in the predicament. I got so much more than that from The Waiting Place.
I found much of The Waiting Place was a mirror of much of my life. I was very familiar with some of the areas Eileen lived in Upstate NY. I nodded my head relating to her remembering loving family members who spent their life preparing to die. Although I’m not a pastor’s wife I have a husband that for a season served in leadership in ministry. Although there was support there were also the comments and commentaries that left me shaking my head and becoming bitter. I’ve sobbed over my own burn out and watching it happen to one I love. I’ve had severe health issues with children. Personal goals that I was certain were a green light in God’s eyes only to come to a red light where I’m still waiting.
This was a book that made me nod my head. I reflected. I bit my lip. I cringed. Waiting is hard. Eileen’s stories are examples of a human, not a superhero. She loves the Lord and wants to serve Him well. Yet her sharing is authentic. I was very moved by each example she shared.
Thomas Nelson Book Description
A collection of essays describing the beauty and humor that can be found in what often feels like a most useless state—The Waiting Place.
We all spend precious time just waiting. We wait in traffic, grocery store lines, and carpool circles. We wait to grow up, for true love, and for our children to be born. We even wait to die. But amazing things can happen if we open our eyes in The Waiting Place and peer into its dusty corners. Sometimes relationships are built, faith is discovered, dreams are (slowly) realized, and our hearts are expanded.
With humor and heart-breaking candor, Eileen Button breathes life into stagnant and, at times, difficult spaces. Throughout this collection of essays she contends that The Waiting Place can be a most miraculous place—a place where beauty can be experienced, the sacred can be realized, and God can be found working in the midst of it all.
Includes stories on waiting for:
the day to end* a place called home *the fish to bite* a baby’s healing* church to be over* a husband’s return* children to grow* a mother’s acceptance* a loved one to die*
As Eileen says, “To wait is human. To find life in The Waiting Place, divine.”
To purchase The Waiting Place by Eileen Button, click here.
I received The Waiting Place from Thomas Nelson Publishers in exchange for an honest review.
