Atlas Girl by Emily Wierenga

Atlas Girl by Emily Wierenga is a superb book, inspiring, interesting and well written. Beautiful prose that makes you sigh and say, I wish I could write like this. It is a tale that takes you with it and carries you tight while you reach out for the characters and feel their stories. It is a story of unspoken, undescribed pain and fear that could not be put in words, of struggle with the life, and destruction of that life. Atlas Girl is chronicle of family dysfunction trough generations, incomprehension between mother and daughter, and a difficult father daughter relationship, of hope and disappointment and impossibility of communication.

A narrative that was almost ended by anorexia before it really started and a story of how God and love can go a long way and bring joy and life back again. This is a journey of self-discovery, search for an identity, a trek through life, relationships and faith, a love story of two people, complete in each other. Emily Wierenga takes us together with her to a mission trip to Lebanon and her parent’s house in Canada, to the University and her little student flat. Through all this she flies, on her wings of faith.

She takes us to a mission in Africa where she lived with her family as a little child, through her grandmother’s suicide and her mother’s brain cancer. The travelling is hard and the map is dark and angry as she leads us to her childhood’s pain and longing and to the happy years of her marriage and the difficult bliss she found with her husband. Their separation when they dated and the way they became a couple again through the mercy of God. The trail takes us through her relationship with her little brother, the mutual love, disappointments, pain and happiness in each other.

In the book, Emily Wierenga says that when you are a child, God is the face of your loved ones. And she tells us how she imagined a God who was always serious and studying unless he was at church where he smiled and laughed with people for hours. That she needed love, someone to wrap her up in their arms and tell her how beautiful she was and to make her laugh. She needed to know that God wasn’t her dad or mom, that he isn’t the face of your loved ones, that they make mistakes but God doesn’t. And because she could not get what she needed, because she could not control her life, she stopped eating and became anorexic.

When the author was thirteen, dying at the hospital, she was finally able to see God for who he was. He was grace, a Savior, and she began to believe with more than her mind, because she wanted to live. She still did not understand God the Father, but Jesus became the grace she spoke but never let get too close.

Emily Wierenga tells us honestly in her book how she brought all of herself to her relationship with her husband, her insecurities and her neglected childhood. Sometimes she would fake it, sometimes she would enjoy and sometimes she would think that she would never look confident and wonder what his husband sees in her.

After High School the author rolled into a Bible College for a year and dreamed of going oversees to work in a mission, away from her family. Then she graduated and went to a mission trip and stopped believing. After flirting with disbelief in brief moments it all piled and knocked her over. She was tired of pretending things were okay when they weren’t, of pat answers and cozy Scripture versus. She wanted to know what was real, even if it meant being heathen.

When she found out that God had woken her mother up every night to pray for her, she found a God who cared about her, a God who was bigger than all of her questions. God will always get it right, says Emily Wierenga. “He is the one who sets burning bushes alight. He is the one who gives us holy ground. No matter where we are, if God is there, the earth is sacred”.

The author tells us about the moment when she understood that the man who was to become her husband was meant for her “I knew because I wasn’t looking at his face of his body… I was looking inside him, and suddenly understood what I needed in a man; someone who would be loyal to me until the end, someone who believed in truth, someone I could trust to be a good father to my children and a good husband to me”.

She tells us how she and her future husband prayed for a week before they decided to become a couple again and how God taught her how He perceives man, and woman, not as two bodies but He sees their souls. And God told her that he was the man He had made for her. To her husband He told that it was his choice. When they got together to talk about their future, he told her that he chose her, that he always had.

God gave her a husband who would be there when she searched who she was and could not find herself. He would be there and tell her who she was, “You are loved, Emily” he would say, while she would cry. Just before her wedding a friend tells her that the “marriage is like prayer. You can choose to enter it in duty, and endure it as an individual, or enter it willing to lose oneself to the Spirit, thus becoming one with the heart of God.”

But there is still something missing, and after returning from her mission trip from Lebanon the author finds herself disappointed, she feels that God has failed her and she was done praying to God, she was praying to anorexia now. Her words are raw when she tells about her mother’s cancer and her pain and doubts. Her questioning of a loving God who watches a grown woman wet her bed. “Watch me take care of you”, God whispers to her. And the author wonders what does it look like, when God takes care of you? Is it at all what her life has become?

Emily Wierenga takes us to a journey from a near death to anorexia to new health and a search for a future. A trip with a bend and twist to a relapse and her starving herself in fear of losing the control of her life. A travelling together that leads us to her pregnancy and the miracle of birth, that the doctors said would never be possible. She takes us to a miracle a healing, of becoming whole and trusting your life in God’s hands, of letting go and receiving everything.

A quote from Emily Wierenga: “I’m learning to live in community and to create, because for me, that makes life meaningful. We are born to create. We are creators in his image. The world may not be perfect, but he can make it seem perfect for the people we love. Home is where the heart and heaven reside, collide, and inscribe themselves on us.”

I loved the book, I love the book and I loved reading it. If you enjoy beautifully written prose, words that flow like water and have the force and rawness of hurricane wind, then this book is for you. If you want to read an inspiring story of a woman who faced incredible odds in her life and found a way to overcome them, then this book is for you. If you want to read an excellent book, and enjoy doing it, then this book is for you. If you enjoy reading books, I recommend this book to you, and even if you don’t enjoy reading them, I recommend you try this one, because it just might change your mind about books in general!

About the Author

Emily T. Wierenga is an award-winning journalist, artist, and the author of five books. Her first novel, A Promise in Pieces, is releasing Spring of 2014, and her memoir, Atlas Girl: Finding Home in the Last Place I thought to Look (Baker Books) is releasing July 1, 2014.
She is a columnist for The Christian Courier, a bi-weekly contributor to MOPS International, a monthly contributor to The Better Mom, and a paid contributor to The High Calling. In addition to being associate editor, ghostwriter, copy editor, and staff writer, Wierenga has written for Adbusters, Prodigal Magazine, Today’s Christian Woman, Radix, Christian Week, Faith Today, Geez, The Anglican Planet, Focus on the Family, Christian Courier, and In Touch.
Emily is also a blogger with World Help, and in January of 2014 traveled to Rwanda and Uganda on a bloggers’ trip.
Emily speaks at women’s retreats, universities, churches and conferences, about her journey with anorexia nervosa, and was one of the keynote speakers at the premiere Christian eating disorders conference, Hungry for Hope 2013, where she shared the platform with Kirsten Haglund, Miss America 2008.
Emily serves as an Official Ambassador for FINDINGbalance and is a Navigator with the National Eating Disorders Association.
She has appeared multiple times on 100 Huntley Street, The Drew Marshall Show and Chris Fabry Live!,as well as on Breakfast Television Edmonton.
Each week Emily hosts an online meme called Imperfect Prose. On July 29th, 2013, Emily wrote a letter on her blog to Kate Middleton on the postpartum body. It went viral, receiving over half a million views in one week, and was shared by Dove.
She is represented by Sandra Bishop of MacGregor Literary.

Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or LinkedIn.

Atlas Girl from Amazon 

Atlas Girl in Christianbook.com 

Official page for Atlas Girl 

Disclosure: I was provided with a e-copy of this book for review purposes.  All opinions expressed in this post are my own. 

What we Christians believe

One thing you do not need to believe, if you are a Christian, that all the other religions are simply wrong all the time.

If you are an atheist, you do need to believe, that all the religions, through all the time, everywhere, have always been wrong.

And that all the faith people profess and have professed through the history has been simple one huge mistake.

In C. S. Lewis’s word “If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth”.

But being Christian means thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong.

We, the Christians, can see how people around the world have always sought the truth.

There is something in people that makes them to look for something higher and bigger than themselves.

Something that cannot be calmed down, that tells us that there is something more, that we are missing an integral part of who we are.

“These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in”.

C. S. Lewis – Mere Christianity

Do you think there is a Natural law that we all can feel in our hearts?

And, as Christians, we believe that the men, and women, were made to be in communion with God.

We were made to need God and seek the truth.

As Christians, we can see that the religions stem from this need to find God.

And we can see that some of them are closer to finding the truth than others.

But at the same time, like in mathematics, there can be only one right answer.

Even though some wrong answers are closer to the truth than others.

Do you believe in a Moral law?

"When you say there's too much evil in this world you assume there's good. When you assume there's good, you assume there's such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil. But if you assume a moral law, you must posit a moral Law Giver, but that's Who you're trying to disprove and not prove. Because if there's no moral Law Giver, there's no moral law. If there's no moral law, there's no good. If there's no good, there's no evil. What is your question?"

—Ravi Zacharias

The first big division

The first big division of humanity comes from believing or not in some kind of deity.

Here Christianity goes with the vast majority of people throughout the history.

Christians stand together with ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Muslims, Hindus, New Age, and every other religion, in the belief that there is some kind of God or gods.

Against all these religions stand the modern Western European materialists who have come to believe that all religion is a myth, a non-true myth, and a lie.

And thus deny the existence of God.

They believe that people have developed enough to grow up and leave religion behind.

But are people really that different from what we were five hundreds, or a thousand, or even two or three thousand years ago?

People were inventing, living, thriving or suffering, and all the time seeking the truth, trying to fill the hole in their being.

Trying to fill the void with religion and gods.

Trying to find out the truth.

Just like we do today.

“When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most”, C. S. Lewis.

Which moral law should we choose?

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back the soonest is the most progressive man”.

C. S. Lewis – Mere Christianity

The second big division

Being a Christian means believing in God, believing in existence of a god.

But it also means thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong.

Being a Christian means that you believe that you have found the Truth, and that truth is Jesus.

That is what being a Christian is about.

People who believe in a kind of god can be divided according to the sort of god or gods they believe in.

Do you think We needGod?

“It's God that's worrying me. That's the only thing that's worrying me. What if He doesn't exist? What if Rakitin's right -that it's an idea made up by men? Then, if He doesn't exist, man is the king of the earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is he going to be good without God? That's the question. I always come back to that. Who is man going to love then? To whom will he be thankful? To whom will he sing the hymn? Rakitin laughs. Rakitin says that one can love humanity instead of God. Well, only an idiot can maintain that. I can't understand it. Life's easy for Rakitin. 'You'd better think about the extension of civic rights, or of keeping down the price of meat. You will show your love for humanity more simply and directly by that, than by philosophy.' I answered him: 'Well, but you, without a God, are more likely to raise the price of meat if it suits you, and make a rouble on every penny.' He lost his temper. But after all, what is goodness? Answer that, Alyosha. Goodness is one thing with me and another with a Chinaman, so it's relative. Or isn't it? Is it not relative? A treacherous question! You won't laugh if I tell you it's kept me awake for two nights. I only wonder now how people can live and think nothing about it. Vanity!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

There are people, called Pantheist, like most modern Hindus, that believe that god is beyond good and evil.

They believe that god animates the universe, the universe is, in a way, god, and we are all part of god.

Christianity, Jews and Islam, have a quite different view on things.

The three religions are also called religions of a book.

For Christians this book is the Bible, for Islam the Koran and for the Jews, the Tanakh, where Christian Old Testament stems from.

All these three religions believe that “God invented and made the universe – like a man making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed. You may say, “He’s put a lot of himself into it”, but you only mean that all its beauty and interest has come out of his head. His skill is not in the picture in the same way that it is in his head, or even in his hand”, C. S. Lewis.

Pantheism believes that everything you find in this world is a part of God.

But if you think that God is really good, that God is goodness, nothing that is evil can be part of Him.

To believe that God is good, to believe in Christian God, you need to believe that God is separate from the world.

That some of the things we see in the world, what we perceive as unjust and evil, are contrary to His will.

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back the soonest is the most progressive man”.

C. S. Lewis – Mere Christianity

What is sin?

“For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world – that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God “made up out of His head” as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again”, C. S. Lewis.

This is part of on-going series that I write every Sunday.

The links in the text are to previous posts.

Give me an undivided heart

I started this year with an ambitious goal of writings a blog post every day.

Not a New Year’s Resolution but a monthly challenge to see if I could do it and build my blog at the same time.

I was able to do it in January and I learned a lot.

Philippians 4:19 “And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”

I met a lot of bloggers, I read a lot of blog posts and understood much better who I wanted to be as a blogger myself.

There are so many blogs out there, some of them are amazing, some of them are attractive and interesting, and some of them I wish were mine.

Some of them make a lot of money and some of them just don’t have an idea who they are and what they want to write.

It can be quite sad and disturbing to try to read some of the posts.

PSALM 86:11-13 “Teach me your way, O Lord, and I will walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name. I will praise you, O Lord my God, with all my heart; I will glorify your name forever. For great is your love toward me; you have delivered me from the depths of the grave.” (NIV)

During the January I read books, I had my morning devotionals, and even learned new things about my faith and prayer life.

The best thing about the whole month was how my relationship with God grew and got stronger.

I also found new friends and advice for my life that I want to follow.

I managed to do my daily work, be with my son and help him to get through his exam period with relatively good grades, actually very good grades for him considering his ADHD.

It was even possible to attend all the extra meetings for the last years report and plan for February's teacher trainings.

“Spiritual people are not those who engage in certain spiritual practices; they are those who draw their life from a conversational relationship with God.”- Dallas Willard

At the end of the January my friends came visiting from Finland on their way to their mission in Peru.

I got to spend time with them and relax but I still managed to keep writing and posting.

Admittedly, I was sleeping five or four hours at night, sometimes even less.

Then came the February, my boss came from Finland, and a very good friend of mine from Alaska.

Romans 12:1 “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.”

The teacher training started and at the same time we had a huge amount of meetings about the last years report, this year’s work, and the future three year project we want to start next year.

My friend was doing the in-services for inclusive and special education.

She is a special education teacher and has so much to offer, especially about teaching reading and writing skills and adapting the teaching for learning disability students.

But she cannot speak Spanish and I had to be there to translate.

Also Kichwa culture isn’t the same as the States, Ecuador doesn’t have the same possibilities, and I had to interpret it for the culture and place we are in.

PSALM 27:1 “The LORD is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The LORD is the strength of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid?”

I noticed that in order to keep doing everything I could only sleep three or four hours a night.

I just could not keep it up anymore.

I wasn’t able to dedicate time to my devotionals or reading the Bible.

I was feeling that I have absolutely nothing to give.

I started to wonder if the blog was a distraction.

It had seemed such a good idea, a wonderful way to reach out to people and share God and my passion for Him with them.

“My heart goes out to you, and I long to see you all coming constantly to God for a fresh supply of love.” - D.L. Moody

I knew that February was going to be hard.

I had seen the plans; I was the one who made most of the plans for the February at work.

And I had been praying in advance, for God to show if this was what He meant for me.

If blogging is from Him, then He will show me the way.

If it is not, then the blog can be done with.

PSALM 13:5-6 "But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me." (NIV)

Last week I was too tired to even open the computer.

I had some posts prepared, Blogger conveniently posted them for me on schedule but I was just not able to promote them.

When I had a chance to visit the blog, I could see how the readership swindled down.

Was the blog becoming a distraction?

"Something of God... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself." -- C. S. Lewis in Scraps', St. James' Magazine

What should I do when I only have so much time and I need to choose between reading the Bible and doing a blog post?

On Sunday I could finally think straight, after sleeping most of the Saturday.

It was wonderful to find myself, in front of God, without distractions.

Isaiah 12:2 - "Behold, God is my salvation, I will trust, and not be afraid: for the LORD JEHOVAH is my strenght and my song; he also has become my salvation."

Anything good can be bad, anything beautiful and excellent we do without giving it God and concentrating on His will first, can be damaging to us and other people.

And the distractions might be opportunities or God talking to us, nudging us to pay Him attention.

If I am silent enough to listen to His words, I can be sure He will find the way.

If I pay attention and heed to His will, He will succeed.

There is only one golden rule, only one way, only one God and the joy is only found in Him.

"Don't bother to give God instructions; just report for duty." - Corrie Ten Boom

This post is featured in:

Fellowship Fridays

Missional Women - Faith Filled Friday