How to Begin When Your World Is Ending

Book excerpt: Moving, witty, and probing, Molly Baskette's practical and spiritual perspective will appeal to readers of Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and Kate Bowler's Everything Happens for a Reason. As a progressive parish minister, Molly Baskette has been a companion during the most vulnerable, traumatized, and unsettled periods of many people's lives. She has also had a front row seat to remarkable human transformation, as many of the ruptures her people lived through turned out to be the way that God got in. But when she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer at age thirty-nine, with two small children, her theology of and relationship to God was tested more profoundly than ever. Instead of becoming despondent, though, she engaged with her faith more deeply--seizing the opportunity to test the seaworthiness of the faith she had been practicing and preaching. In How to Begin When Your World is Ending, Baskette shares the questions that confronted her along the way like: Is it true that prayer changes things? Does God care whether we live or die--and is there a damn thing God can do about it anyway? How can vulnerability, counterintuitively, be a strength? And the million-dollar question: is there life after death, and just what might it be like? Weaving together her own story and the stories of those she encountered in her life of faith, Baskette mines joy from all the hardest parts of being human. In doing so she reminds us that whatever you are going through, someone has been there before you, and found meaning in the madness.