A friend just gave me a book

…and a conversation.

The book is Becoming Bread, by Gunilla Norris. It’s poetry. She inherited it from her grandmother, and gave it to me because of my sermon last week. The sermon came from a place of needing to honor my body, how it has carried me through this year of illness, what it continues to teach me, what it loves, and what it can do. I barely mentioned my own sickness; I taught people how to bake bread. The incarnationality of that—getting everyone into their bodies—touched a lot of people.

The conversation was about who we become, when we are no longer sick. It began with more of my own wondering, what is genuine, and who will I be? Her own medical journey was not cancer—not an illness, per se—but it was about fifteen years ago, was very uncomfortable for her, and took her body five years to work through. So she knows something about where I’ve been, and where I am. And she knows what her own body gave her, back.

She gave me this: “I don’t think you lose your gains. But you do lose your losses.”

Wise friends, I have.