A Book I Cannot Put Down!

I have a book in my possession right now that I cannot seem to put down. Most of the time when I get a book, I will read a couple of pages and then skip through a whole chapter to get to the parts that I like. I very rarely read an entire book cover to cover unless I really like it and it grabs me in a certain way. This one is WAY overdue to the library and I really do not care. :)



Despite the title of this book, I cannot seem to get enough of it. It's called, "This is not the Life I ordered". It sounds like a cheesy self-help book but, it's more a story of courage.

It's a collaboration of ways four women have gotten over difficult times in life. And I mean serious serious hard times. One woman talks about having her husband die on her when she was 3 months pregnant due to a horrific car crash, another talks about years of abuse as a child by her own father, another about having to recover after being shot. In every story is a lot of pain and a lot of hope. These four women have become fast friends, meeting at each others homes over the past several years and finding ways to cope with loss and change. The book is about that.
Combined with the stories in the book are inspirational quotes the women have come to rely on when times are tough. The bottom line, anyone can survive anything and find a way to move on. Sometimes it really doesn't seem like it. Sometimes you seem so stuck in a bad situation that you feel like you will never get out of it. The book presses you forward, talking about all the hope in the world and the ways that you can move forward from loss and change. If these women can move forward from such horrible things..why do problems that are much smaller seem so insurmountable? It's hard when you are in a situation to look forward but, forward is really the only way you can look.

Here are some of the quotes from the book

What I like most about change is it is a synonym for hope--Linda Ellerbee

INVENT A SECRET LANGUAGE FOR CHANGE

--Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it-this is a kind of death.

CREATING ANSWERS FOR THE DREADED QUESTIONS

--All change even the most longed for has this melancholy. For what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves, we must die to one life before we can enter into another.

KNOW THAT OLD HABITS HATE BEING ABANDONED
--The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainly, not knowing what comes next.

This book holds a lot of peace in it's pages for people going through several different kinds of things. I would highly, highly recommend it!