My youngest child is three years old, and every day she paints.

She paints lions and footprints. She paints me, and she paints rivers, roads, and bugs. For a while, she painted without giving much attention to the finished product. She would paint until holes appeared in the paper and then move on to the next. I would make a great show of laying the art out to dry, but she hardly noticed. Her focus was always already on the next creation.

Recently, that has changed. When I gather up her morning’s work, she cries out, “Don’t throw them away! I want to keep them!” Sometimes, she hunts for a magnet and tries to hang them on the refrigerator herself.

She recognizes these lions and bugs as the work of her hands, and she no longer lets them go so easily.

*

We all make things. I write stories, and my daughter paints bugs. My husband builds window seats and picket fences out of wood, and my son makes castles with lego bricks.

Making some things feels like wearing our heart on our sleeve or serving it up on a platter. This is true of memoirs. Sometimes this feels true even of our first attempt at sourdough bread when there are new guests at our table.

We are not all artists or writers, but most of us, perhaps all of us, create. We long to know that what we have made is good. Not perfect or ground-breaking, necessarily, but good.

Perhaps it shouldn’t matter what others think of our creations. Sometimes, we succeed in being philosophical. Some people just do not like the taste of sourdough bread, after all. But I do think there is a desire in each of us to hear the words well done.

Hearing those words is far less important than simply doing the work. It may even be that the creating matters more than even the thing we make. Which means that those words, well done, are something special.

They are a gift we give one another.

*

Here are five gifts given to me.

I hope they make you just that much more eager to read the work of my hands when it releases February 2. I hope, too, that you will seek out these creators. Each one has written a book (or more than one!) that means something special to me.

Each one should be confident that what they have done is very well done, indeed.

“When it comes to finding God in ordinary places, no one does it better than Christie Purifoy.

Her words in Roots and Sky met me when I was unable to connect with any other books.

Somehow her personal journey to find home turned into a spiritually informative pilgrimage for

my own soul. This book is hope for the weary and wandering, and Christie Purifoy’s smart,

grounding voice is a new favorite.”

—Emily P. Freeman, author of Simply Tuesday

 

“I have been terrified of hope. Because if hope disappoints, does that mean God is also a

disappointment? Christie reminds us that hope, like dreams, is made of stronger stuff. She invites

us into a year of her life lived in real time in an old Pennsylvania farmhouse, chock-full of hope

and decay, promise and weeds, work and wonder.”

—Lisa-Jo Baker, author of Surprised by Motherhood and community manager for

(in)courage

 

“In Roots and Sky, Christie Purifoy paints an elegant expression of the church calendar—Advent,

Lent, and Ordinary Time—with great depth of thought, expression, and insight. Planted in the

rich soil of everyday liturgy, Roots and Sky is an astonishing, rhythmic work of unmatched

artistry. There is no doubt: this book is a must-read for the lover of the quiet, contemplative, and

beautiful.

—Seth Haines, author of Coming Clean

 

“This is not a book. This is a sanctuary. I met God here, in the hushed and unrushed space that

Christie Purifoy has so exquisitely created for us. With a lyrical pen, Christie lights the candles,

prepares the altar, and helps us see the sacredness of our everyday moments. Step inside and

breathe again.”

—Jennifer Dukes Lee, author of Love Idol

 

“Roots and Sky is the best kind of read: it reached me, passively and deeply, as I got lost in the

pages. Christie ushered me into my own heart, through the back door, as she invited me across

the foyer and into the rooms and out onto the sprawling green lawn of her one hundred-year-old

farmhouse. God met me at Maplehurst, too.”

—Sara Hagerty, author of Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in

All Things