Summary: The story of four women and their search for God and community.
Good Christian fiction is hard. I am a very skeptical Christian fiction reader. I don’t like books that are too preachy, or that are not realistic, or that wrap things up too nicely at the end. I don’t like books like that because as much as fiction can be fantasy, good Christian fiction should be presenting a realistic picture of faith.
Generally I like my fiction to be much more subtle than this series is. But I honestly don’t know how you would write a subtle story of spiritual formation. And so I really do recommend this series because I think it presents a fairly realistic view of spiritual formation. As I have said before, the main problem of the book is that the growth is too compressed. It is not that people do not have breakthroughs and do a significant amount of growth in a short period of time. But those breakthroughs are the result of a much longer period of preparation for growth.
This series of four books covers roughly a year of time. Four different women, a young newly married PhD student, a stay at home mom in a bad marriage, a widow in her 50s and a (single) pastor in her 40s on a sabbatical, met at a class about spiritual formation in the early fall. This fourth book covers spring through early summer. A lot has happened and even mentioning the plot points will be spoilers for the early books.
These are not perfect women, they are not magically healed of their past and their particular temptations and personalities that can be strengths in one area, are not strengths all the time. In part, what comes out through the series is that we need community in part because different people have different strengths (and weaknesses). And as is common in the series, we can harm people when we make assumptions about what people want based on our own preferences.
I just finished reading a very different fiction book and some of the realities of trauma and harm and I think there could have been additional development of discernment around trauma and harm. In life there will always be a bit of suffering. The problem is that submission to suffering in one case does not mean that submission to suffering in another case is right. This book (and the series) does explore that some. And I do think there are characters that make the wrong decisions are times, which does require reconciliation and forgiveness. No one is perfect at discernment. No one can perfectly understand all the ramifications of any one decision because they can’t perfectly predict how others will react or how unknown realities will enter into a situation.
We can’t do more than operate under the best we we can and seek both God’s guidance and the guidance of those around us as well as identify our own internal emotions, needs and desires and evaluate them. Generally, things end up with growth in this book. But there can be long periods of time where we do not always seem to be growing. Or we are growing and that growth leads to greater awareness of our weaknesses so that it feels like we are not growing.
One of the problems of the spiritual formation movement isn’t the desire for spiritual growth, but that we can think about spiritual growth as a type of self help or personal empowerment project that will inevitably lead to a “better life.” It is easy to mix meritocracy and middle class biases into spiritual formation so that we evaluate others or ourselves in ways that are not particularly faithful to God’s measurements. It is precisely this type of problem that is hard to deal with in fiction because the reader can only evaluate based on the actual plot and characters in front of them, the real world is just more complex than any fictional reality can reveal.
We are also always Christian within a culture. This book, and all books, are written in a cultural context. Christianity is not limited to a single cultural context. No book can be expected to present all cultural contexts in a single book. So it would be unfair to evaluate a book on what isn’t shown. But it is precisely this point that people can assume that a fiction book is prescriptive and the only way something could have gone.
Fiction can create a view of the world that allows the reader to see one way forward. I was very engaged throughout the series. I stayed up later than I should have several nights. I look forward to reading additional books by Sharon Garlough Brown.
An Extra Mile by Sharon Garlough Brown (Sensible Shoes #4) Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook