i like to read...

one of the greatest tragedies of mothering for me has been the lack of time that i have carved out for reading.  sometimes i even forget how much i enjoy reading.  i talk about how i used to love to read and that person has become so separate from the person that i am now that it is almost like i am talking about someone else.  but recently i fell off the wagon.  i picked up a book and three days later i am still processing what i have read and craving more.  kyle is my pusher.  maybe it is because he is the most darling husband in the world and he likes to see me happy or maybe it is because football is in full swing and he hopes my nose will be buried in a book therefore neglecting any and all housewives shows freeing the tv, but he keeps offering to bring me a book making it painfully aware that even he is struck by the oddity that i read a book.  but it happened. 
i started reading Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers and i fell in love with it all over again.  i read it once before while i was in college.  well, let me clarify.  i read it once while i was in college, going through an unexpected pregnancy and running to the wrong things while running away from the right things.  i aligned myself with sarah.  i aligned kyle with michael hosea.  and i was so blinded by my own situation that i failed to digest all the beautiful parts of the story. 
this time, as a mother, i grieved the devastation of sarah's lost childhood.  the abuse disgusted me.  and i thought about all of the children in the world that are not fiction that live the reality of this prose and i cried.  this time i didn't think of myself as sarah but one of my own children.  somehow it seemed so much more unbearable for me.  even though i have already read the novel in its entirety once before, i had to keep reading just to make sure that things turned out alright. 
at one point sarah acknowledges michael's notion of God by asking him where God was when she was being raped as an 8 year old little girl, or when she watched her mother grieve over the neglect of alex, or any of the other terrible moments of her life and thought how difficult it has to be to reconcile God to a person's life in moments like that.  i have read the poem about sand and footsteps and i appreciate the beauty of knowing that God is constantly present in my life but that is because my faith has already been established.  and even though my faith has been established that does not mean that it has not be shaken.  i have cried out, "oh God, where are you in this moment!?" thinking that he has left me only to realize later that he had not.  but what about the people that have not established a relationship with God yet? my heart is broken for the people that believe that they are facing the world on their own.
at one point sarah tells michael, "i want to be free michael, just for once in my whole life i want to be free." to which he responds, "you are free.  you just don't know it yet." and the more i think about the concept of freedom and God i keep coming back to the reality of sin and consequence.  sarah didn't set initiate the pendulum of terrible events in her life but the fact is that she carried the weight of her mother's sin.  and then her mother's sin turned into her own.  and then she was so deep in the miry clay that it seemed like the only way out was to be suffocated by it. 
we have two choices.  we can either accept the sin and consequently accept death.  or we can accept the consequence and the truth that freedom truly does come at a cost. 
to me it seems like an easy choice but as michael says, "for some of us, one mile can be more to walk than 30".
i wanted to keep reading.  i wanted the story to continue and kyle sweetly suggested finding out if there was a sequel to which i told him that once the main character is dead there are really not any open doors for a sequel.  and truthfully, francine rivers does a tremendous job of tying up all lose ends and offering complete closure for her readers. 
it's just that reading this book was like watching hope.  the last book i read was in 2009.  no joke; i blogged about it too.  The 5 People you Meet in Heaven left me feeling isolated and offered no answer to the question of "where are you God?".  Redeeming Love not only challenged my ideas that God has ever left us but made me fall more in love with Him.  instead of wondering what did i do to deserve any bad thing that has ever happened to me, i am left wondering what did i do to deserve a God like this to love a person like me?