BOOKS
Prepare Him Room
Advent Reflections on What Happens When God Shows Up
Christmas can be about stress and parties and consumption. But it can also be about love and peace. It can be about waiting with longing for all to be well. It can be about waiting with eager expectation for joy.
I want to invite you to walk with me through the season of Advent with this devotional. Each day you’ll read a short passage from the Bible telling the story that leads up to Jesus’ birth followed by a short reflection about how this story connects to our lives here and now, to our own hopes and fears, doubts and dreams.
To Be Made Well
An Invitation to Wholeness, Healing, and Hope
From hurting bodies and souls to hurting relationships and communities, it’s clear that things are not as they should be. In To Be Made Well, Amy Julia Becker weaves together her own story with reflections on biblical accounts of Jesus’ healing work, providing fresh insight into both the nature of healing and the pathway to healing, then and now.
For anyone struggling with pain or loss, for anyone concerned about the things that divide us, this book goes beyond wellness and beyond miraculous physical transformations to explore how we can—personally and collectively—be made well.
White Picket Fences
Turning Toward Hope in a World Divided by Privilege
White Picket Fences is a memoir about acknowledging the harm of privilege and responding to that harm with love. Beginning with her childhood in North Carolina and tracing her life through studying at Princeton to raising her children, Amy Julia explores her role in a culture that constructs dividing walls around racial identity, ability, and economic status. She invites readers “to consider the reality of privilege, the benefits and wounds that come from it, and whether we can respond to it with generosity, humility, and hope.”
A Good and Perfect Gift
Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny
Recognized as one of the top ten Best Books of 2011 by Publishers Weekly, religion category A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny is a spiritual memoir about coming to understand that every human life is a gift. A Princeton grad and seminary student pregnant with her first child, Amy Julia confronts her own prejudices and privilege when her daughter Penny is diagnosed with Down syndrome at birth. She invites readers into a journey of letting go of perfectionism and embracing wholeness. Through the gift of this child, Amy Julia discovers that love is stronger than fear.
Small Talk
Learning from my Children About What Matters Most
The early years of parenting young children just about undo Amy Julia. In Small Talk: Learning from my Children about What Matters Most, she invites readers to join her in a journey of spiritual and personal transformation. This book of short chapters contains reflections prompted from her young children’s curiosity and comments about everyday life. As she confronts her own limits and her own brokenness as an imperfect mom, Becker learns that limitations, properly understood, lead to love.
On the Way
Walking With Jesus Through the Season of Lent
Lent is a time of somber self-examination (punctuated, beautifully, by feasting on Sundays). It’s a time in which we engage with suffering and hardship and grief and injustice. A time for lament and turning to God with our frail humanity and our very mortal selves. It’s a time for turning towards the love and hope and goodness of God.
Lenten Devotional Overview:
Daily Scripture verse(s) and reflection on themes like prayer, peace, suffering, and justice
Weekly questions that correspond to that week’s theme and a selected Psalm
Penelope Ayers
A Memoir
In Penelope Ayers, Amy Julia’s first book, she invites readers into a family story about hope and healing in the midst of a cancer diagnosis. Amy Julia and her husband, Peter, become caregivers for Peter’s mom, Penny, a colorful, sad, single woman who has been seeking peace throughout her life. When she receives news of the cancer, Penny reaches out to family and friends for support and reconciliation, and a beautiful journey of healing begins. This is a story about a young couple learning to love one another, confronting the big questions of faith and grief, and experiencing the beautiful fragility of hope.
