Gifts from Friends We Never Wanted

Book excerpt: Discover how unlikely friends can provide us with gifts beyond measure. Unwelcome guests are not generally greeted with gratitude but occasionally they become unexpected friends bearing gifts we never would have asked for. In Gifts from Friends We Never Wanted, Virginia Herbers introduces a sampling of these types of surprising guests in our lives—failure, disappointment, worry—and the gifts they offer us when they come visiting. Following the same pattern as her first book, Gifts from Friends We’ve Yet to Meet, Herbers chooses a gospel character to accompany us as we engage these uninvited “friends.” Weaving together the stories of Jesus’s contemporaries, his response to their foibles, and stories from her own experiences, Herbers invites us to join her on a journey of discovery, vulnerability, honesty—and hospitality. She asks if we dare to befriend the least appealing truths of ourselves to surrender them to a God who can enlighten even the greatest darkness? If we dare, then we will have truly understood the value of these gifts from friends we never wanted.