The Book I Gave My Mother-in-Law After She Stopped Going to Church

This is the story of a Thomas Nelson edition of Jesus Calling I once gave away, and what came of it. My mother-in-law Darlene stopped going to church about two years after her husband died. She did not announce it or explain it. One Sunday she just was not there, and then another Sunday passed the same way, and then a year went by and nobody had said much about it because what do you say? She was not angry at God, exactly. She was just somewhere that was not quite close to him anymore, and she had gone very quiet about the whole thing.

I thought about her a lot during that season. She was still Darlene. She still brought her green-bean casserole to family dinners. She still called on birthdays. But there was something missing in the way she used to light up when she talked about Sunday mornings, about the hymns she had known since childhood. I wanted to say something. I tried, once or twice. It came out wrong, or she changed the subject, and I did not push. I have learned that grief works on its own schedule, and faith does too.

What changed things was not a conversation. It was a book. And I almost did not give it to her because I thought it might feel like I was saying something I could not say out loud, which I suppose it was.

The book was Thomas Nelson's Jesus Calling by Sarah Young, published by Thomas Nelson,. I had picked it up for myself a few months earlier, the Thomas Nelson padded hardcover edition from Thomas Nelson. It has more than forty thousand reviews on Amazon and a 4.9-star rating, which is the kind of number that makes you slightly suspicious until you open it. The format is devotionals written in first person, as if Jesus is speaking directly to the reader. Each entry is short, a few paragraphs, tied to scripture references you can look up if you want to. It is not preachy. It does not feel like a lecture. It feels, more than anything, like being spoken to quietly by someone who already knows what you are carrying that morning.

Grief works on its own schedule, and faith does too. I had learned not to push. But sometimes the right small thing placed quietly in someone's hands does what no conversation can reach.

I wrapped it simply. No card that said anything meaningful, because I could not figure out how to write what I meant without it sounding like a sermon. I just wrote her name on the tag and left it on her kitchen counter the next time we visited. She thanked me the way you thank someone for a loaf of bread. I did not make a thing of it.

About three weeks later she called me on a Tuesday afternoon. This was unusual. She is not a Tuesday-afternoon caller. She said she had been reading the book every morning. She said she did not know how to explain it, but the entries kept saying things that felt like they were written for exactly where she was, on exactly the morning she was reading them. She said she had cried twice and laughed once, which she admitted with some embarrassment. I said I had done the same thing.

She went back to her church in January. She did not say it was because of the book, and I did not ask. But I noticed that the copy I gave her had a small bookmark in it when I saw it on her nightstand at Christmas, and the spine had the gentle splay of something read and returned to. That is what I call use.

I want to be honest about what this book is and is not, because I think some people pick it up expecting a theology textbook and are surprised by how personal it reads. The first-person voice, Jesus speaking directly to the reader, is not everyone's cup of tea. Some readers with more Reformed or cessationist sensibilities find it theologically awkward. I understand that. If Darlene had been a seminary-trained woman with strong views on how scripture speaks to us, I might have chosen differently. But she was a grieving woman who needed to feel like she was not alone in the room, and this book delivered that.

The entries are grounded in actual scripture passages, listed at the bottom of each page, and they do not stray into anything strange or heretical. Sarah Young has written about her own grief and her own seeking as the origin of the book, and that comes through. It reads like someone who has needed comfort and found it, passing that same comfort along. That is a particular kind of usefulness.

What I Would Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you came to me and said you had someone in your life who had drifted, who was in grief or doubt or just a long season of not quite, and you wanted to give them something that might open a door without forcing anything, I would tell you to consider this book. Not because it fixes anything. Not because it guarantees a return to Sunday mornings. But because it is the kind of daily companion that asks nothing of you except five minutes and a willingness to listen. And sometimes that is the exact shape of the door that needs to be open.

The padded hardcover edition holds up well to daily handling. The format is one entry per day, matched to the calendar date, so there is no commitment to start at the beginning or finish by a certain time. You can pick it up in February and start with February. You can set it down for a week and come back. It is patient that way. I have found that patience is underrated in a devotional.

If you want to read more about how this book holds up over a full year of daily use, I have written a longer piece about that as well. You can find it at Jesus Calling: One Full Year of Daily Readings. And if you are weighing it against another well-loved devotional, my comparison of Jesus Calling vs My Utmost for His Highest might help you land on the right fit for the person you have in mind.

Darlene still has her copy. She told me last spring that she had started buying it for other people. I think that is probably the best review any book can get.