Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B0011FSS8O | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Cold Tangerines is a collection of stories that celebrate the extraordinary moments hidden in our everyday lives. It is about God, and about life, and about the thousands of daily ways in which an awareness of God changes and infuses everything. It is about spiritual life, and about all the things that we have called nonspiritual life that might be spiritual after all. It is the snapshots of a young woman making peace with herself and her life, and trying to craft a life that captures the energy and exuberance we long for in the midst of the fear and regret and envy we all carry with us. It is both a voice of challenge and song of comfort, calling us upward to the best possible life, and giving us room To breathe, to rest, to break down and break through.
Cold Tangerines offers bright and varied glimpses of hope and redemption, in and among the heartbreak And boredom and broken glass.
Books with free ebook downloads available Download Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 4 hours and 30 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Zondervan
- Audible.com Release Date: November 28, 2007
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0011FSS8O
For me, several criteria must be met before I'll consider the highest review rating for a book, movie, or piece of music. For instance, if reading a collection of words causes me to put a book down, get up from where I'm seated and wander around the room because I don't know what to do with the emotions that have slipped past all the safe guards and invaded my soul, then there is something significant about the one who penned those words.
I did not want to read this book. It seemed to have all the promise of a superficial, feel-good, new-agey amassing of words that guarantee a happiness equal in value to the suggested retail price. And the brief author-bio on the back cover should have clenched the deal: a Christian from Willow Creek -- certainly her words could be nothing more than a focus-group confirmed, market-driven strategy for a thinly veiled excuse to proselytize. However, the subtitle expressed a subject of deep interest to me: finding the sacred in the mundane, so I opened the book and read a random paragraph.
What I read startled me. The paragraph was an admonition to the reader about the great risk of being someone who cares and the author's words had very little to do with a superficial happiness. She writes:
"...I whisper to them, 'be careful.' You will be haunted by what you find there, and you won't be able to wash away what you've seen and heard. You will see things and hear things, and then you will be responsible for them, for telling the truth about who you are and who you discover you are not..." (pg. 141)
Filleted by these words, I checked the book out from my library and began to page through the short chapters in no intentional order. Contrary to all my unfortunate biases, I was quite humbled to discover a human being.
It isn't very often that I find a book that I would recommend to all my friends. In her book Cold Tangerines Shauna Niequist revisits chapters of her life, some humorous, some silly, some reflective, while others somber. Each moment is delicately interwoven with a touch of God. Seeing God in the every day and being able to learn from and/or laugh at what is set before us is truly a gift.
Shauna is able to open up and allow the readers to peek at so many aspects of her life. The chapters read almost like letters from a dear friend, as her struggles become teachable moments, and her humor has you laughing out loud. By the end you feel like you've known her from childhood.
One section of the book that brought goosebumps was on pg. 50 "True friendship is a sacred, important thing, and when it happens when we drop down into that deeper level of who we are, when we cross over into the broken, fragile parts of ourself. We have to give something up in order to get friendships like that. We have to give up our need to be perceived as perfect. We have to give up our ability to control what people think of us. We have to overcome the fear that when they see the depths of who we are, they'll leave. But what we give up is nothing in comparison to what this kind of friendship gives to us. Friendship is about risk. Love is about risk. If we can control it and manage it and manufacture it, then it's something else, but it's really love, really friendship, it's a little scary around the edges."
To have someone in your life to love you and care for you even though they know who you are is such a blessing. Reading that portion of the book caused me to pause and to think about people that have been blessings to me, who have loved me through difficult times.
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