Take What You Need: Life Lessons after Losing Everything
Jen Crow's transformation was triggered, quite literally, by a bolt of lightning. That jolt, which destroyed her home in a subsequent fire, forced her to consider what she really needed as she looked to rebuild her life.
In Take What You Need Crow opens new perspectives for all of us looking to understand our past, our unexpected suffering, our failures, so we too can begin charting a course forward--one drawn from resilience and hope. We see with the immediacy of someone who nearly lost it all that our possessions won't carry us. Our responses to the regrets, losses, separations, addictions, and unexpected twists and turns of our lives are shaped by the spiritual values that sustain us and the people who support us.
Crow invites us to explore the expected and unexpected turns our lives can take--and all the ways we can pay attention to what we truly need to survive the painful moments and live lives of meaning. Survival guide, spiritual companion, and a light in the dark, Take What You Need offers hope, humor, and real-life spiritual tools to meet the hardest moments of our lives.
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"Many books promise a way through our most difficult life passages: grief, addiction, divorce, personal losses--and, yes, fires. Few prove their value. Jen Crow's book enters our own difficult places and emerges through them. We meet the tenacity of hope, the grit of the work, and the surprise of humor. It's all here. Take What You Need is a trustworthy spiritual guide for the difficult, good work ahead." --Amy Frykholm, author of Wild Woman: A Footnote, the Desert, and My Quest for an Elusive Saint
"Jen Crow's story is hilariously, heartbreakingly, authentically her own, and she offers it to us as a map for survival of our own split-second life-changing moments, our own crises, our own shipwrecks. It is grounded and wise companionship for those times when we need it most." --Rev. Meg Riley, co-moderator of the Unitarian Universalist Association and editor of Shelter in This Place: Meditations on 2020
"I am strongly opposed to the idea that things happen for a reason; however, I do believe that many important meanings can be made from things that happen. Jen Crow has given us a great gift with this book: the lesson of how to look at things that happened and choose to find healing and growth from them." --Julica Hermann de la Fuente, director of Transformation and Liberation Ministries at First Universalist Church of Minneapolis
"Crow's is a warm and insistent authorial voice that never deigns to romanticize or discount the depth of our pain yet consistently finds the humor and grace within it all. She has an uncannily adept eye for the metaphorical power of the everyday, weaving the stuff that fills our lives into a narrative arc that reminds us of life's persistent, absurd, and heartbreaking reasons to hope." --Nancy Ladd, minister and author of After the Good News
