by Christie Purifoy | Apr 4, 2017 | Books, These Farmhouse Bookshelves, Uncategorized
You probably know that I love to share about the books I’m reading just as often as I can, but it’s a rare day when I can tell you about a wonderful new book on friendship written by one of my oldest and dearest, real-life friends.
Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships by Lisa-Jo Baker
I want to tell you that Lisa-Jo was the perfect person to write this book because she is a perfect friend. I want to say this because she has always been such a very good friend to me. When we said goodbye many years ago, just before she and her husband left Chicago for Ukraine, I assumed our friendship would fade. But Lisa-Jo held on. And I will forever be grateful to her for that.
But I will not in fact tell you that Lisa-Jo wrote this book out of a place of perfection. I will not even tell you that she wrote it out of a place of personal strength. I know her well enough to know that she feels her own failures as a friend keenly, and that she has also felt the deep wounds only a friend can inflict.
Like most precious things, this book is the fruit of suffering and struggle. When Lisa-Jo reminds me that I am free to become a friend to others because I have found the most perfect friendship in Jesus, I listen.
I listen, because she knows this for herself, and because she tells the story so persuasively and so well.
One: Unity in a Divided World is the just-released book by Deidra Riggs. I don’t know Deidra nearly as well as I know Lisa-Jo (we are facebook friends who have never met in person), and yet, I know enough of Deidra, and of her wisdom and experience and passion, to know that this timely book should be embraced and widely read.
If you are troubled by the rancor and divisions that seem so prevalent today, here is a book to inspire you and challenge you to pursue the reconciling way of Jesus.
Whether you’ve never heard of the Enneagram or have read every book about it you can get your hands on, I highly recommend this new book by Ian Morgan Cron (the author of one of my favorite memoirs!) and Suzanne Stabile.
The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery is probably the most user-friendly introduction to the Enneagram I have read. Not only that, it is wonderfully written (in fact, this book is proof that instructive nonfiction can feature insanely good writing).
The Enneagram is an ancient personality typing system with roots in Christian monasticism. I have personally found it to be a powerful tool for gaining self understanding and, perhaps most importantly, compassion and even gratitude for those who are very different from me.
I am slowly reading my way through Anne Fadiman’s book At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays. I am reading slowly only because I am making myself read slowly. I want to devour these delightful, witty, intelligent essays like a bowl of ice cream (and Fadiman even has an essay on ice cream!), but I also want this treat to last as long as possible.
Tell me, do you read nonfiction?
by Christie Purifoy | Jan 13, 2016 | Art, Books, children, Grateful, Roots and Sky, Uncategorized, Writing
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
by Christie Purifoy | Feb 14, 2014 | children, Community, Gardening, motherhood, Uncategorized
It’s Valentine’s Day, and I’m sharing a story of friendship. Really, though, I’m telling you that carrots are the new roses, and I want to give 250 South African orphans and vulnerable children a garden. A garden! Of course, I can’t do it on my own. But Valentine’s Day is just the day for acknowledging that I am not alone, and you are not alone, and those children? Not alone. Not forgotten. Join me?
When I first met Lisa-Jo, she was an attorney at a powerful Chicago law firm and I was a PhD candidate at an elite university. We were both pursuing Big Plans, and we were both very far from home. Though, admittedly, Lisa-Jo’s family in South Africa were just a wee bit farther away than my own in Texas.
Recently, she and I talked about those long ago young women and what they would think of our current lives. We agreed they would be horrified.
Which is only one more reason why I’m glad I don’t have final control over my life. Left to my own devices, I would never even have discovered my dreams, let alone seen them realized.
(photos courtesy of Lisa-Jo Baker)
Back then Lisa-Jo was determined never to be a mother. I was desperate for kids but couldn’t get pregnant. We got to know one another in a church small group for young married couples. Over the course of only a few weeks, most of those couples, two by two, announced unexpected pregnancies. Lisa-Jo and I became like storm-tossed survivors clinging to the same life preserver.
I will always be grateful for the wreck of those days, for the way unhappiness tossed us together. And I will always be grateful for the many ways in which Lisa-Jo held on to me, and to our friendship, despite the travels and adventures, the heartaches and the joys to come.
Today, she is not an attorney and I am not a professor, and when we spend time together, there are seven children tugging at our elbows. I don’t think either one of us will ever stop feeling surprised at the way things have turned out. I know we will never stop being grateful.
In fact, surprise and gratitude are at the heart of Lisa-Jo’s new book. You can pre-order a copy of Surprised by Motherhood: Everything I Never Expected about Being a Mom
, and I highly recommend that you do. I am lucky enough to have read an early copy, and it is a powerful story, beautifully told.
It is a memoir of motherhood, and there is a lot of pink on the cover, but I hope that many men will find this book as well. Lisa-Jo’s is a story that speaks especially to mothers, but, like all good stories, it is for everyone.
Today is Valentine’s Day, and I can’t think of a better way to mark that holiday on this blog than by telling you about the great big love flash mob being organized by my friend Lisa-Jo. Thanks to her vision and hard work, you and I have the opportunity to send – not roses – but an entire garden. And we get to send that garden to a community in South Africa eager to plant and cultivate and harvest.
We want to give a garden to the orphans and vulnerable children of the Maubane Community Center. The cost is $5000. We want to do this in one day.
It’s happening here.
